Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, those of you here and those of you online. Thank you for joining us today for the Annual General Meeting. This meeting today is being held on the lands of the Turrbal and the Jagera people, and we'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners, and also pay our respects to the Ankamuthi people who are the traditional owners of the land on which we undertake our mining operations. I've been advised by our company secretary that a quorum of members is present, and I'd like to declare the meeting open. Just a couple of housekeeping matters, before we move on to the body of the meeting. First, if everyone could turn off mobile phones to silent, please.
Secondly, in the event of an emergency, and if we are required to vacate the building, please proceed to the emergency exit located outside of the room, and to the right, proceed down the stairs to the street and then make your way to the assembly area located on the corner of Astor Terrace and Constance Street. I'd like to now take the opportunity to introduce you to our directors who are all here today. Firstly, Simon Wensley, Managing Director. Jo-Anne Scarini, who is the Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee as well. Andrew Lloyd, who's also Chair of the ESG Committee. The Honorable Paul Lucas, who's Chair of the Remuneration and Nominations Committee. Our newest member of the board, Dr. Jennifer Purdie. Our executive leadership team are also here, as well as a number of other Metro employees.
If you haven't had a chance to meet them, if they could just stand up as I introduce them. Nathan Quinlan, who is our Chief Financial Officer. Robin Bates, General Counsel and Company Secretary. Paul Green, who's not with us at the moment, who's actually up at Skardon River, who's the Executive General Manager of Operations. But Paul, I believe, is participating in this on the video. Troy McMillan, General Manager of People and Culture. Matt Graham, who's the General Manager of Mining, Technical Service and Projects, and Vincenzo De Falco, who is the General Manager of Marine and Technical Services. I'd also like to welcome Andy Carrick and Steve Rowe, both of our audit partners from Ernst & Young. Lewis Brimelow and Sam Schwartz from Computershare, our share registry, also in attendance.
Now, with regard to the conduct of the meeting, I'll begin by providing my chair's address, and then Simon will provide an update on the company's operations. After he finishes that, I'd like you to, if you wouldn't mind, just hold any questions until we've been through the formal part, formal business of the meeting. And if you could just keep your questions until those resolutions have been formalized. This is published on the ASX, but I will go through it with you. 2025 was a year of very strong financial and operational performance for Metro, with our people and contractor partners, some of whom are here, working together to achieve another record year of production, delivering quality bauxite to customers and value for the investors.
Total revenue received for 2025 was AUD 378 million, a 23% increase on the year prior, and a net profit after tax of AUD 142 million. This obviously represents a significant turnaround from 2024. We produced and shipped 6.2 million wet metric tons of bauxite, up 9% year- on- year. This result reflects both the improved production performance as well as the benefits of investments that we have made over the past three years in expanding the infrastructure and the assets to increase targeted production rate for Bauxite Hills Mine to seven million tons per annum. Importantly, we have continued to refine our operating model while respecting the environment and the communities, and reinforcing the safety culture for all who work and visit our sites. Despite the positive overall results that were achieved, the year was not without its challenges.
Given the location of the mine in the far north of Cape York, it means that our team contends with a variety of weather conditions. A severe tropical storm in April caused damage to the barging channel in the Skardon River and reduced our barge loading capacity for most of the second quarter, until a bed-leveling campaign was completed. System reliability was another aspect that contributed to reduced shipments with an unplanned four-day breakdown of the barge loading facility in October. In response, management undertook a comprehensive review of system variability and has implemented a series of considered initiatives to further improve reliance, reliability, and performance. This, combined with the recently completed dry dock of the Ikamba in Indonesia to further enhance her reliability and throughput rates, provides the board with confidence that the company will deliver more consistent outcomes going forward.
The Ikamba dry dock included mandatory structural and safety inspections as well as several major refurbishment activities. We've also taken the opportunity, while offshore, to fuel the Ikamba's fuel tanks with diesel to provide additional fuel security for our marine operations. Our long-term shareholders are familiar with the financial challenges, Greg, I'm looking at you in particular, financial challenges that Metro's experienced over the years. As such, the board continues to have a very strong focus on financial discipline and balance sheet strength. During the year, we reduced borrowings, we strengthened our cash position, and we implemented a prudent foreign exchange hedging program. These measures enhance our ability to manage market volatility while at the same time supporting our growth ambitions. The company's achievements, both operationally and financially, have been well-received by our shareholders, with an uplift in our share price over the course of the year.
Our market capitalization at the end of December was AUD 464 million, a 27% year-on-year increase. Sustainability is central to our long-term success. During 2025, we continued to improve our environmental performance to reduce environmental incidents and to advance our ESG strategy and roadmap. We also made meaningful contributions to local communities with increased procurement spend with indigenous businesses and investment in community programs. Our commitment to ensuring that our operations deliver tangible and enduring benefit in the regions have been recognized nationally on several occasions by the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies. In 2024, we were the recipient of the AMEC Environmental Award for Rehabilitation. Most recently, in 2025, we received the National Community Award for Empowering Cape York Students, which is a program delivered in partnership with the Johnathan Thurston Academy.
This is a tremendous achievement and one that the board is extremely proud to share with all of you. I'd also like to express our thanks to the community engagement and development team for their hard work and dedication in developing this very successful program, which sets a very strong benchmark for the whole of the mining industry. With reducing debt levels and increased cash flow, capital management has become an important aspect of the board consideration. In 2025, we published a capital management policy. With increased confidence in the company's financial position, operational performance, and forward valuations based, balanced with market and geopolitical environment. Last month, the board announced an on-market share buyback program to acquire a minimum 5% of the ordinary shares on issue.
All shares acquired under the share buyback program will be canceled, thereby reducing the total number of shares on issue, which we believe will enhance shareholder returns in 2026. As per the policy, in the future, we intend to return appropriate excess cash flow from the Bauxite Hills project to investors via dividends. Turning to our people, the board thanks each and every one of our employees and contractors for their commitment, their resilience, and their contributions throughout the year. Our success is obviously driven by our people, and their efforts have been fundamental to delivering the very strong outcomes that I've shared with you today. Looking ahead, despite the current global uncertainties and tensions, the board remains confident in the company's long-term outlook.
Metro remains uniquely positioned as the only pure-play bauxite producer on the Australian Stock Exchange, supplying a commodity that is critical to global aluminum production and increasingly to the energy transition. Simon will talk more about this in his presentation. Our strategy does remain clear. That is to deliver safe and reliable operations, to maintain competitive performance, and to expand our production capacity through organic and inorganic growth opportunities. With our strong asset base, disciplined capital management, and a clear strategic focus, the board considers that the company is well-positioned to leverage our strengths and progress suitable opportunities to expand the business and to create sustainable value for shareholders. In closing, I would like to thank our shareholders for your continued support and confidence in Metro Mining. We look forward to building on the momentum of 2025 as we move into the next phase of the company's growth. Thank you.
I'll now pass over to Simon to provide an update on the business and some insights into the market.
Thank you, Doug. Can everyone hear me okay? Look, I think it was interesting when I was reflecting on last year's AGM presentation and going through that and thinking about what I was going to say. I think it was pleasing to see that while not everything we've done has gone to plan as you would expect, that a lot of things have. We've sort of certainly, I think, described the market environment well, and I'll update you on that. We outlined our capital management policy and Doug has touched on that already. We also talked more about growth and growth strategy, and I'll develop that a bit more today. It was pleasing that I saw a strong line in terms of last year versus this year. This is on the ASX announcements, and I'll encourage you to read the disclosures.
Again, I'll reiterate Doug's acknowledgment of country. We're very privileged to work in the Ankamuthi people's region of northern Cape York on the western shores there. They're very good partners with us and also the local Mapoon Aboriginal Council is also an extremely good partner for us. It's very pleasing that cooperation continues. It's a beautiful area. There's a lightness when you get there, which I think is hard to beat the combination of the ocean and the river and the bush. It's something that we treasure, that we know that we're only a temporary resident on those lands, and we continue to take good care of them. I also acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we're meeting on today. Doug's introduced, I think, the management team and the board already. The one other person to acknowledge is our head of sales and marketing in Hong Kong.
Norman Ting, who's an extremely experienced commodity trader, marketing expert, continues to be with us and to facilitate our sales and marketing. As most commodities go through their cycle, we have to adapt our marketing strategy and sales and Norman is an extremely important advisor to me and to the team to understand what's going on in the market. I'll just also acknowledge that there's been a bit of a change here, and certainly, Paul Green, who's come in as the GM of Bauxite Hills Operations, there's been a change not only in the personnel, but in the way in which we're managing the business, and Paul is taking over as the overarching leader of that whole supply chain up in Skardon River, right the way from the exploration side through to the loading of ships.
That is really all about the short-term execution and optimizing the productivity that we have in the operation. Nathan, as the CFO, is taking a greater oversight in the integrated planning and the technical aspects of the business, effectively providing the medium and long-term context within which that operation functions. What joins those two things together is a management operating system. We've worked really hard over the last 12 months to gather data about our operation, installing sensors, installing weightometers, analyzing the performance of every part of our business, and that's flowing through into a cadence of reporting. From an hourly through to shift, through to daily, through to weekly, through to monthly reporting that we are now utilizing to manage our performance.
Paul and Nathan are effectively driving that and the rest of the team are really supporting all of what's going on there. It's early days for that new transition, and it's been a bit of a challenging start to the year with probably the biggest and longest wet season that we've had, certainly since I've been with Metro. What I understand from some of the old-timers up there, it's been a bit of a doozy for us. Given that, I'm really quite happy about how those new systems are being implemented, and being developed within that framework. I think Doug's touched on most of this and the share price performance, and it was interesting.
I sort of had a look at the charts over that sort of 12-month period to today and even through the last couple of months where we've seen a lot of volatility here. I think Metro's been a very solid investment, and I will certainly talk a bit more about our plans with respect to capital allocation in the future. I think kudos also goes, obviously, 6.2 million tons was a record and obviously a big improvement on last year. Probably didn't quite hit, from a management's perspective, our standards that we wanted to hit for last year. But all of those, I guess, improvements that we can take into account have been factored in to this year's plan, and the guidance is for 6.6-7.1 million tons for the year.
The other aspect, I think, the underlying EBITDA, I guess, is a really good indication of the margin and profit-generating potential of the business. Of course, we intend to grow that. Over and above that, obviously, profit is affected by other aspects. Again, it's a real team effort, and I take again kudos to Nathan and the team from a foreign exchange management perspective in driving some prudent timing of hedges there. I think you don't often see a reversal in impairment in a business, and I think that's also a signal as to the forward-looking strength of the business as recognized by the auditors.
Look, I've used this slide before, but for those of you who are a little bit new to the aluminum value chain, aluminum is the second-most used metal after steel and therefore a really important part of many sectors of our economy. Some of those are growing very strongly. While construction has been, I guess, the foundation of aluminum's demand over the last sort of 40 or 50 years, what's driving this at the moment is transportation and electrical sector. I guess that's the underlying trend in the economy. When you look at copper, for example, a similar driving force with significant growth. That chart, it's a 10-year view between 2020 and 2030. I know we're halfway through that already, but you can see the sorts of growth, the percentage growth that's going on in those economies.
When you also then layer in things like AI, which are driving certainly electricity demand and also infrastructure growth, renewables playing their part as well. There's an enormous demand, and I use this stat, I know often, but there is more aluminum in the electricity grid than there is copper, right? If you're looking for an exposure to the energy transition, or if you're looking exposure to AI, or you're looking exposure to even growth in lightweighting and the efficiency of the economy, then aluminum is where you want to be. If you backward integrate that right the way through, bauxite is the only way of making primary aluminum. While aluminum is infinitely recyclable, the recycled aluminum is often not quite suitable for the higher grade application.
It's definitely a recyclable metal, but there's still going to be a very strong demand for the primary metal. I'll talk a bit now about, I guess, the two other aspects of the downstream of our business. From an aluminum perspective, I guess this time last year, we were all worried about the tariffs, right? I guess Donald Trump plays a big role in our lives every single day, and we're all kind of waking up to what's occurred the night before on Truth Social. The tariffs, while initially thought to be quite impactful, the strong growth in the aluminum sector almost immediately kind of overwhelmed that short-term impact. It's created a disturbance in the market, right? There's certainly dissonance in the market creating irregularities and changing flows of aluminum around.
What that's doing is lifting the costs, unfortunately, to aluminum users. It's no different to copper or to any of the other metals that are being affected as well. China basically said, well, look, during COVID, China pumped their electric vehicle industry. That was their way of getting through the COVID period. This time, they've been really pumping the renewables. If you go to China and you're a regular visitor there, which I am, you can see the enormous amount of solar panels and wind turbines, et cetera, that have gone in over the last sort of 12 months. There are some maybe not so good things, but a centrally managed economy can certainly drive those sorts of initiatives very quickly.
That's what you saw in China, where they were able to sort of overwhelm the tariff impact on their industry via that pump priming of the renewables. Copper prices obviously continue to go, and as I said earlier, as copper goes, then aluminium will come with it, and it's a substitute for copper. There is a demand there. As I said, prices for aluminium have obviously been up even prior to the Gulf, this Gulf conflict, as you can see on that chart. What that chart's also showing is that there's also regional premiums.
If you look at the U.S., for example, and if you think that the aluminum price that users in the U.S. are paying is sort of $3,500, well, you got a big shock because they're paying about $7,000 a ton because of the regional premiums for getting aluminum into those regions. Whilst the LME represents a sort of a global balance, there are very, very strong regional differences in the price of aluminum. This cap in production in China, people have been worried about that. I think the industry has honestly been sleepwalking into that, and as we entered 2026, there was about a two million ton aluminum deficit from a demand supply. The CRU projecting that the demand for aluminum was going to be not met to the tune of two million tons.
Now, of course, since that's happened, the Gulf conflict has occurred, and there are six million tons of smelting capacity, annual smelting capacity. Depending on who you read, there could be a two to three million ton impact if things continue for another couple of months on that. Aluminum hot lines are not easy to, once you shut them down, they're not quick to bring back and, obviously there's also been damage to energy infrastructure and also to the refinery infrastructure there. Demand is strong. Indonesia is building more capacity, but it won't be enough to meet even that two million ton deficit and if there's going to be another two or three. I'm certainly thinking price for aluminum could go to around about $4,000 a ton. I think that will be too much for the Chinese industry to resist.
If you can sell, if you can bring an extra pot online or an old smelting line back on, then they will do that to try to make the most of this sort of deficit. You can see in the monthly production figures from China over the last four months, other than February, which obviously is a short month, if you analyze those months, they're averaging between 46 and 47 million tons of aluminum production there in China. There will be an elastic reaction here, and I think China is best placed to do that. It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, vis-a-vis the government controls. Let's come up one more step to alumina, which is obviously where some of our customers are integrated producers. They produce the wheels and batteries and bumpers and cans, et cetera.
Also we have pure alumina producers. That story is a bit less positive. There's been a price spike, so prior to the beginning of this price series, you saw prices in China go to about RMB 6,000. The top of that chart is 3,100. That obviously incentivized new capacity. New capacity has come in and we're seeing some oversupply, and also Indonesia banned exports of bauxite a few years ago, and they've been looking to try and build their own alumina refining and smelting capacity there, which has started to come online through 2025. As prices were coming down, you also saw production coming in with China and Indonesia bringing new refineries online. Now, on balance, that's a good thing. Once you've got capacity there to consume bauxite, that's what you want.
Ideally, I would like my customers to be making some money, but at the current prices around $20—prior to the Gulf War, around $24, $2,500, a lot of them were not making a lot of money. Some of the older refineries do need to close, as we talked about, the moving of refinery capacity from the inland to the coast, that has been happening. All the new refining capacity is happening on the coast. Almost all of the new refining capacity has a flexible high temperature technology, which can treat Metro bauxite really, really easily and really effectively. That's been a really good thing to get that capacity in. We just now need to see a bit of a shakeout in that capacity in that industry in order to get to rebalance, I think, the supply and demand of alumina in the Asia Pacific region.
Now, China breaching its cap will help that a little bit. There'll be maybe two, three, four million tons more demand for alumina coming out of that additional production in China this year, but there still does need to be a bit of a shakeout. Prices have risen to about 2,600 or so over the last few weeks as the Gulf War has happened. I think that's mainly an uncertainty premium rather than any fundamental change in the dynamic. I think overall, alumina that obviously was going into the Middle East, it can now not go there. To supply that six million tons per annum of smelting, and so that will wash around the market and I think will continue to undermine pricing.
I can see alumina sort of bouncing between roughly 2,500-2,900 for the rest of this year, while we see that sort of shakeout happening. There's also been a bit of, I think, some scare tactics around, okay, well, what does Indonesia do? I think, they were producing about 30-35 million tons of bauxite before they banned the export. That's probably about what their economic production capacity is. That underpins about 10-15 million tons of alumina, and that underpins about seven to eigth million tons of smelting. I think that's broadly where the Indonesian market is going to go, and then probably stop because otherwise they'll run out of bauxite pretty quickly there. That's already being mooted by the players in the market and by the government. Okay. What happens to bauxite?
Well, like I said, 2025, with those new refineries coming online, even though it was probably a little bit more capacity than was needed, that obviously then all of those refineries were based upon, in China, were all based on imported bauxite. 100% of all the refinery capacity that was coming online was based on imports. You saw in 2025 another record demand, so this 200 million tons being imported into China. That's up even from 2021, 2022, when I came into Metro. That's almost now doubled in terms of the traded bauxite market. As I said, while we might go through some short term, I guess, fluctuations as most commodities do, that rise in demand, that exponential rise in demand is going to be good for this sector.
As you can see there, this price chart does go back to the back end of 2024, and you can see the price spike that came with the alumina spike back at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. We saw Guinea prices going up towards $130 per ton, and the Australian price is breaching 100. Well, given those prices, obviously these new entries sort of came in and we saw some supply reaction to that. We have seen prices sort of drop through 2025, and they hit a bottom in February of this year, roughly Guinea, around $62 per ton. If you remember from last year, and I'll show the cost curves again here, and it's really important for investors to understand the cost curve dynamics of this commodity market. We did see some reaction to that.
Some producers in Guinea said, "Look, we can't make money at $62. We're going to curtail production." That's a really important signal for the market to understand where that bottom hit. Between $65 and $60, and that's what the cost curve. That's the economics of the market coming into play. That was in roughly in about February this year. I'll bring the cost curves up in a minute. What's happened then in the Gulf War, so obviously there's lots of stuff going on, primary, secondary, tertiary impacts around the war in the Middle East. One of the things that's happened, of course, is oil price has gone up a lot.
If you translate that, and there's a chart here you can see, when you look at the freight price from Guinea to China, prior to the war, that was roughly at about $26-$28 per dry ton. That was the rough mark. Now, if you look at the current forward, so this chart's a couple of days old, but if you look at the current forward price for the next couple of months, you're talking about $37-$38 per ton. Whatever you thought the costs were of producing bauxite in Guinea were in January and February, when those price signals started to occur, well, it's $10 or more higher than it was then because they have to ship their bauxite for two months from Guinea, halfway around the world to China. Now, of course, there's been an impact on Australian bauxite.
We've mapped the Rio Tinto Weipa to China Panamax route, and also the Skardon River Cape route. That's jumped obviously. We were looking at spot rates in January of roughly around $9.50-$10 for Cape and around $11-$12 for Panamax from the Weipa, from Western Cape York. They've obviously jumped a bit and the Cape rates have gone up about $4 or $5 , and the Panamax rate's about $7 or $8 . There is an effect on Australian shipments, and if you're exposed to that market, certainly just that's the fuel aspect without the time charter rate. Sorry, that's the time charter and the fuel altogether. These are actual freight rates. I just want to emphasize that about 80% of our Cape freight is locked under long-term contracts.
Both the time charter and the fuel rate is locked in at around AUD 10 per ton for this year and for next year. We are obviously exposed to the oil price at our operation. In terms of our freight, which is the much larger exposure, then we are going to be only lightly affected for 2026 and 2027. What's the outlook? Well, look, I think, the Guinea government is now effectively the OPEC of the bauxite market. Last year, they created a bit of havoc by canceling a lot of leases, exploration, and operating leases in bauxite and other commodities. Some of those they've taken over themselves, so Guinea government is now a producer of bauxite and a developer of bauxite in Guinea. That makes them not just worried about tax rates and royalty rates, they're worried about profits that are made from Guinea mining.
Once you worry about profits made from mining, then you kind of want the price to go up. They've declared that they're going to institute. They think there's been a bit of oversupply out of Guinea. I would agree with that. They're going to institute a quota system to reduce the exports out of Guinea to, what they call, a sustainable level. Now, commentators in the market have suggested that might be around a 40 million tons per year reduction in the exports, so the run rate that was occurring over the end of this year and last year. I think, they've stated that they'd like to get the price back to around about $100 a ton for Guinea bauxite. OPEC never quite get their oil targets right either, but I think, there'll definitely be a price impact and a price increase coming from that.
It may not happen next month or the month after, but, again, over the long run. Let me talk to you, and I've updated these cost curves. It's a bit hard to see on the screen here, the very light gray. What I've got here is the 2022 cost curve, so we've had that on our charts for a long time. There's a picture of the 2025 cost curve, which is the middle gray line, and then a forecast by CRU Group of the 2030 cost curve.
The way cost curves work is that you plot all of the producers on the curve, you look at their cost of production, including freight and shipping and an allocation of some interest to pay for capital, and you put that all on a cost curve and you then say, "Right, well, where the demand goes, that will broadly set the price." In 2022, you can see the light gray chart there. The demand was just under 150 million tons, about 140 million tons, and the pricing was just under $50. You can see that they have some success here.
Last year, the demand was, as I said, around about 200 million tons, and when you plot that against the cost curve, you can see why at around $62, almost exactly, the Guinea producers started to moan about the price and say, "We can't keep producing at that number." If that's true, and I think we've seen some proof of concept over the last few years, what does that mean if we see the producers that are coming on over the next few months, years, et cetera, et cetera, until 2030, the projection of demand there is going to be somewhere around 215-225 million tons of bauxite imported into China. What does that mean? Well, if you use the cost curve, that's probably a $70-$75 price for Guinea. Now, this is all before, or doesn't include, any impact on freight from the Gulf War.
If you think that long-term oil prices will be higher than they have been in the past, this represents a historical long-run view of oil price. If you think those prices are going to be higher, you just add that on to the cost curve there. Like I said, the current impact on the freight from Guinea with the current prices is roughly $10-$12 if you think that could be $5 or $4 or $3 in the long run, you just add that to the $70, that's $70-$72. The industry structure here is working in Metro's favor because what's happening with Metro is that we're moving down the other way. With the scale that we're putting in, seven million tons, the projection for this year's budget is around $30 .
That's before, I guess this was what we were projecting back in January, before the Gulf War impacting the fuel rates, and of course, diesel will be affected on our site. Before, I guess, the Cyclone Narelle, I guess, forced us to shut down for a week or so, and so on. Look, irrespective of that, if we can meet our budget, then we're going to be roughly around that $30-$31 per ton delivered into China. As this cost curve keeps pushing out this way and growing up, then Metro is heading the other way. What that does is, and of course this is just cost, so you do need to have a bit of a quality differential.
The difference between $30 and $70 is a lot, $40, and certainly, any discounts on our product would certainly not get eaten up by that. Look, again, more for the newbies around just to emphasize what our supply chain is. A very simple flow sheet that we have on site. It's simple. Technically, we do have to manage things like weather and seasons and being a very remote site. From a technical mining perspective, it's a relatively straightforward flow sheet. It's shallow. We've got high-grade material. We've got bauxite that roughly around 50% alumina, which is high grade compared to, say, Guinea, which is around 43% to 47% alumina, et cetera. We've got a high-grade product that the customers want. We don't need to upgrade it, so currently we're just mining it and sizing it, removing organic tree roots and branches, et cetera.
Effectively, almost everything we mine goes onto the ship. We've still got 10 years of reserve left, a new reserve and resource statement with about another four or five years of resources, and I'll touch on that in a minute. Those resources are around Skardon River. Low strip ratio, which means the amount of waste we have to move before we get to the ore is very low, about less than half a meter pretty much across the board. Our long-run haul distances are around 9 km. Whilst our furthest pit is about 22 km away, we also have some pits that are about 5 or 6 km from the port. Simple mining, surface mining, resilience screening circuit. We did invest quite a lot in that during the expansion for the wobbler system. The key thing is that it's low cost and scalable.
We're able to scale up and scale down as we need to, and our cost of operation is, as I said earlier, very low. This is what I think most of us who've been in the mining industry for a while call, all of the boxes are ticked here for a low-cost bulk commodity operation. I guess from a strategy point of view, I won't spend too long on this slide, but we've really been trying to be clear, keep things simple, reposition ourselves from a quality perspective into the market, de-risk our supply chain, increase resilience. I'll come back again and again to this about what we've done in our flow sheet to increase resilience, lifting roads off the surface, going to bigger mining equipment, going to bigger transhipping equipment, working on bed leveling, having these sorts of assets in our system increases resilience.
At this point, even as Doug touched on the fuel side of things, having fuel storage on site, having contracts in place, having hedging in place, these are the sort of risk management things that we've been putting in place over the last few years, which we hope see us through some of these times of volatility. We saw margins go up again last year. At the end of the day, our cost performance relies very much on volume. We had set ourselves up for a higher volume last year. The cost outcomes were not as low as we had wanted them to be. At the same time, we were still driving through on margins and making sure that we were trying to hit the higher price contracts that were available to us, particularly in the middle of the year.
We probably threw a bit more money at the operation to keep those volumes up than we wanted to at the time. Overall, with these new systems and processes that we've put in place, we're certainly driving our costs into a lower place. From a capital allocation point of view, we touched on this last year. I'm probably just going to draw out a couple of items. I'll touch on reserve and resource life in a minute. Look, we further strengthened the balance sheet during last year, paying AUD 23 million of debt. We got really, really close to net cash. I was hoping that we could offset our debt by the end of last year with cash. We got within AUD 1 million, AUD 1.5 million of that. Our debt was around AUD 59 million, and our cash was about AUD 58 million.
We were pretty close to getting to the net cash position at the end of last year, which I think is a good sign. I think that underpinned when we talk about from an allocation position, what we went through. Approving a buyback in February at the February board meeting, I think was a signal that, one, we had gotten that balance sheet into a position of relative strength versus the past and also had strong confidence about the resilience of the business moving forward. I think the combination of those things is really important. I'll talk again about growth as we move forward, but I think that's certainly a good summary of what our allocation framework looks like going forward. If this is last year's slide, I thought I'd just tick off some of the
These were the sort of maximizing of value, and value, I guess, starts at home. We're really still focused a lot on Bauxite Hills optimization. Here are the things that we were running through and some of the targets that we wanted to put in place for 2026. Well, sort of the budget, as I said, has been set at that $30 per ton. If we can meet our targets, absent some of the flex that we might have to put in for diesel, and maybe some extreme issues, that certainly remains the budget as of now. We're not in a position to hit the eight million tons this year for 2026. I think all the work we've done suggests that that capacity is there. We've just got to basically work with our teams, with our contractors and continually improve.
It's really more about. This is not about any major change to our infrastructure or to our assets or to the people numbers. It's about a productivity focus and a reliability focus, removing the variance from our systems and processes and our output will get us to that point. Also, I think touching on that last point, it's also about shipping in Q1. Our target is about 500,000 tons, and that's been impossible to do this year with, I guess, the weather. But we'd certainly, I guess, put ourselves in a position that we could have done that had the weather been in our favor. We had stockpiles, we had assets. It gave us the confidence to restart our operations, even with the wet that we'd had.
Started operations the earliest we've ever started, so around the 11th of March, we had teams on site ready to produce. We put our first barge out on the 11th of March, and that was based upon all of the work we've been doing over the last few years to get ourselves in a position to be able to meet, try and get ourselves about cash positive. That's about 500,000 or 600,000 tons of product so it can be shipped. Look, I think we're on track. We were certainly budgeting that. Haven't quite got to that eight million ton, I guess, but that's certainly something we'll look at 2027 and 2028. Increased mine life, I'll tell you about that in a second. We got within 1.5 million of that zero net debt. Dividend, not a dividend, but a buyback underway.
I can give that, I think, a green, roughly a green mark. As I said, not really achieved yet that Q1, but I think all of the building blocks are in place to be able to do that. Okay. 10 years of reserve at around 70 million tons. What else is there? That's in wet tons, so what we produce. That's about 10 years at seven million tons. What are we doing? Look, the first thing is that we've got to look around Skardon River, and around Skardon River, we've got an additional just over 50 million wet tons of resource that's currently not in that reserve. We're also looking at what are kind of near lease exploration opportunities, and one of those biggest ones is the former Pisolite Hills project.
That project, under the Cape Alumina, got to a full DFS mining lease application at the point which they were stymied by a declaration of a national park on some of that lease. That meant that a stand-alone greenfield project was just not viable at that point. Now we've established a Skardon River hub that opens up a satellite mining and transhipping opportunity out of that resource. Look, work to do there. It's not included in our reserve and resource statement at the moment, so we need to do some more work on just to bring that back to current JORC standard. Do some work on what that scale might look like. It's almost certainly a beneficiated resource, and so we're going to need to prove up the beneficiation side of our business, as well.
We're looking to refresh that DFS and work and look at what the stakeholder interactions might be. We're also looking at what we might call earlier stage exploration, and that is numbered sort of one to five on that list, starting at the north of Vrilya Point, north of the river, what I might call Skardon Fringe, even further out than the resources we've got. Then also down south around the Rio Tinto's Amrun deposit and the Aurukun township. They're in varying stages of exploration or trying to get access to those properties. Okay. Look, quality is an important aspect from a competent person's assessment of reserves and resources. We understand, obviously, at the moment, the market is accepting of our current reserve base. One of the things we're doing is to look at our ore body in a different way.
In the past, so we're going now one layer of technical understanding of alumina refining, but for those of you who are interested, it's not just the absolute amount of alumina and the absolute amount of silica that make a difference to our customers. It's actually then the mineralogical makeup of that, and so the reactive silica or the silica that reacts at 150 degrees and also the alumina that's available to them to extract from the total alumina. We're looking now even deeper into our ore body.
Matt and his team, with the exploration geologists and the resource and the mining engineers, are looking much more deeply into our ore body and going, "Well, look, we might contract on a total silica basis, but our customers are really interested in that reactive silica and available alumina." We have an advantage at Skardon River, which is sort of luck of the draw, I suppose, compared to the other parts of the Weipa ore body. As our silica increases, our reactive silica doesn't increase much. The reactive silica, we're looking at now focusing on that reactive silica. The rest of that silica is quartz. Quartz doesn't go into the dissolution in the refinery until around 220, 230 degrees.
That means that if the refiner can optimize its flow sheet by managing residence time, grinding and temperature, they can minimize the amount of quartz that actually dissolves into the alumina liquor. That's a technology that we've been developing in-house at Metro and working with our customers on, and that's being rolled out. We have now proof of concept with at least three refineries where they have managed that combination, of course, of grind size, residence time, and temperature. They're seeing results where 20%-30% only of that quartz goes into the liquor. That's a really important comparator, I suppose, with things like the Rio Tinto product or the Guinea product, so that we can work with those customers to optimize that. That's certainly one area in order to bring resources into reserves and explore for new resources.
The ability to understand how reactive silica and total silica and available alumina work with our customers has been a really core part of what we've been doing in the market for the last couple of years. The second aspect, which is a well-proven kind of methodology for improving the value and use of a Weipa-style bauxite, is washing. Washing has been occurring at Weipa since the early 1960s. There's a very well sort of trodden pathway here to understand how the different ore bodies that make up the Weipa, the Weipa Peninsula, Weipa Ore , the Weipa Plateau, beneficiate. We've done some test work where engineering and materials handling crossover is roughly about 1 mm. 1 mm - 1.2 mm of screening can be managed in a relatively simple way.
If you go below 1 mm, you're really into a different set of physical separation, things like cyclones and decantation tanks and things like that. You're talking about a lot more capital you have to deploy if you want to separate out fine material below 1 mm. 1 mm, 1.2 mm has been the cut point for a lot of the work that the washing that's been done at Rio and on the trials that have occurred. We've been following that framework. These are the impacts that it has. In the lab on the right, you can see Pit 2 north and south in the lab beneficiate below 1.2 mmm. We get about a 1.5 to two percentage point reduction in the silica through that separation, that sizing. We've now done pilot screening on site.
We've done dry screening, so we've been using the scalper there with putting different screen decks in. We've now got proof of concept around a dry screen in those areas that we can get between one and 1.5. Now you say, "Well, look, that's not quite as good as two, is it?" If the simplicity of that, the cost of that, the ability to implement the dry screening, is much, much more straightforward than a wet screening process. Now, that's been our proof of concept there. We've also been developing a wet screening option. Now, we haven't gone the Rio Tinto route of a big bang, high capitals, big wash plant. What we're looking here is more like a mobile or flexible, more agile wash plant that we could maybe move around to pits. We can then also optimize the mining operation. We can optimize the fines management.
There happens to be a very similar to what we've been thinking. There's a quarry in North Queensland that has almost exactly the right technology that we would be implementing. We've taken our bauxite there in bulk, and we have run trials through that screening operation. You can see all of that happening there. It's a bit different. The orange bauxite you can see physically coming out of the different parts of that plant, a bit different from the quarrying products that they were mining. That's been implemented, and again, we've seen basically proof of concept through the wet trial that we can achieve what we achieved in the lab from a separation point of view. This is on track. It's been a high priority for the team.
I expect that we can move to demonstration certainly on dry and hopefully on wet screening at Skardon River in 2026. That will be part of the pathways to recognizing more resources into the operation and more resource to reserve conversion. Okay, growth. We put this chart up last year talking about inorganic growth and we haven't changed that. We still believe that that's a good way of summarizing it. We've spent a bit more time now focusing on rather than where to play, but how to play, and we've developed some internal systems and processes. We built the team up internally. We've got some external consultants and contractors on board that are helping us understand some of these external growth options.
I think the key thing to say is, we're sticking by the guidelines that we gave you last year, which is we're going to focus on bauxite initially. We're going to look at bauxite. But we've got to recognize that there aren't that many bauxite opportunities in jurisdictions in which we feel comfortable in operating. That means that if we're going to play the numbers game on growth, we've got to have more opportunities there. We're going to have to move, and that's about looking at maybe adjacent commodities where we can deploy Metro's core competencies, and so we're looking at those now in a very selective way and sort of a disciplined way. We're giving ourselves a limit of about 20% of our market cap as the initial consideration for getting into these projects. We're not going to bet the farm on an adjacent opportunity.
Selective entry, looking at the quality and scalability of the resource. We're going to try and replicate what we see at Skardon River, which is a scale of resource that's suited to a company like ours. It's got quality, it's got scalability, it's got bulk orientation, got low processing complexity. It's aligned with what we do well, particularly around logistics, et cetera. A mining process where we can get productivity, and hopefully we can then differentiate also away from the sort of Cape York seasonality. If we can find something that has maybe a different seasonality to what we've got and maybe also a different customer, I guess customer mix in terms of, at the moment we're pretty much allocated to China. We've set up a more disciplined stage gate process. We're working with the board.
We've just had a very good sort of strategy couple of days where we've talked a lot about growth and about how we're going to manage that and process that. I think that's really positive. We talked about the different ways in, particularly around partnering, and I think, when we look at, I guess the core competencies that we want to execute on, this has been developed a bit since last year, being disciplined, giving some certainty, really focusing on what we do well at Skardon River that we can execute elsewhere, being very open to partnerships, and I guess I've been involved in different mining companies that have been sort of against partnerships and wanting to run things themselves. I think for Metro, I think we're working well with our existing contract partners.
It's a way of managing capital intensity, a way of managing scale and skill and technical competence. I think that's something we need to be able to build on and work forward with. I think, I guess when it all comes back to it, if I want to summarize my particular philosophy is about how do you derive maximum margin from an ore body? I don't really care what it is, bauxite, or another bulk commodity, but how do you look at that ore body and extract the maximum margin from it? That's what I think investors need and shareholders. It's all very well being a technical expert in one thing or another and making the highest grade product or whatever. That really doesn't matter. It's about how you can generate as much margin as you can from that ore body.
The skills I think we've been developing and the competencies, the management team that have been developing here at Metro, I think are well positioned to be able to do that. Okay, look, we introduced our model of ESG last year and the focus. This is out of the annual report. We've got three major aspects. It's what we call the sustainable mine and supply chain. So everything that sort of exists around our current mining operation and the delivery of that product to customers. So what's in our supply chain and how do we make that as sustainable as possible. We're also very aware of our regional presence. It's not like we're sitting in a city or even in a mining district like the Bowen Basin. Yes, we have a strong neighbor to the south of us, but we really are in a remote area.
The regional impact that we have as a remote mining operation is critical to our license to operate. It's our ability to gain support from our communities to continue to operate, to provide those benefits back in, and eventually the stakeholders around government, regulators, et cetera, are a really, really important part of that group. It's a really important part of how we operate, how we think. In terms of what we're looking for in the future is what's going to come and what are these black swan events, or what are these things that can impact us as an operation from a regulatory or environment point of view? Really important stuff here in terms of driving a sustainable outcome. It all starts at home, and it all starts about being a company that we all want to work for.
That's the company that I want to work for, it's the company that I hope the board wants to govern and the employees want to be part of, and that's where we all start, I think as from an ESG perspective is doing the right thing, right? Doing the right thing even when no one's looking, right? That's the kind of philosophy that we try to put into our business. We've got a lot of successes to leverage. I really encourage you to look at the annual report. There's some really great case studies in there, on what we've been doing. Doug already called out Mark and the environment and community team. I think it's a really strong team, one that's been with us for a long time, and I think we've got a lot of runs on the board there as well.
Look, we're also from a governance perspective, there are things out there which we just have to manage from an environmental, I don't mean the physical environment, but things like cybersecurity, et cetera. I think the reporting side always becomes more onerous every year. Complying with emerging legislation is a big task for Robin and the co-sec and legal team. It's really important. Part of our business to stay ahead of that, even as a small company, albeit now we're getting bigger and growing. Here are some examples. Again, that left-hand chart is out of the annual report. Some great. This is better probably told in pictures than with bullet points and building on, I think, from a workforce perspective around local employment.
As part of our growth, we probably have not been as attentive to that in some areas as we should have been, and I think that's something that I reflect on personally. We've put in place. Probably the most important initiative this year is our indigenous engagement and local employment strategy to rebuild those levels up there. We're working really hard between the people and culture team and the community teams to drive that hard. I think some of the successes that Doug touched on already in terms of the Johnathan Thurston Academy and so on, the seed pickers, the local employees who do a lot of our work on site, really important part of what we do, and we're looking to grow that. Quick update, finally, on Ikamba. Look, she is a strategic asset, a game-changer asset, frankly, for Metro.
We worked really hard to get her into the business a couple of years ago and went through a lot of pain and effort and financial, contracting, legal, physical, towing, Chinese shipyards, but she made it, and she's made a huge difference since coming here. There's a video we're going to show later which sort of gives you a bit more of a sense of, I think, of what she's like and how she operates, and she's already demonstrated a huge impact. Her resilience in terms of swell, wave, and wind action has already doubled what we had before with geared vessels than with a single floating crane. Her potential, if we can get the right amount of bauxite onto barges, ever more bigger barges, I hope, that she's got the potential to unload at 3,000 tons an hour.
That is an enormous amount of capacity that's sitting. As Doug mentioned, she also happens to be a floating fuel dump as well, and we've taken advantage of that in our latest swing by Singapore and back. That's good news. Look, she's on her way back. We've spent a fair bit of time, and Vincenzo's here, so if you can grab him if you want more detail about Ikamba, you can pigeonhole, get Vincenzo. He's just come back from Darwin this morning where we've just gone through the biosecurity, customs, and survey, and so she's departing today and arriving back at Skardon River to commence operations around the end of the month. We've spent a fair bit of time on both maintenance, improving performance. The boom loader was actually sort of static up until this year.
We've now sort of freed that up and able to move the boom loader faster and quicker and in and out. We've put more stainless steel linings into the chutes to give us faster throughput. We've upgraded the accommodation, and we've done a lot of work on electrical and safety aspects, so things like snap-back zones for cables. When the crew are managing cables, they can step into a safe zone if there is, for example, a broken cable that swings back, they're in a safe location to manage that. We're trying to increase the safety. This asset's been working in international waters until two years ago. We've started to learn about her and the issues, the good things, the things that we need to fix over the last couple of years, and we've used this dry dock to deal with those sorts of things. Okay.
Well, look, that's the last slide. I'm sorry that's gone on for a fair amount of time, but I hope you've got a bit of a sense of the operation and where we're going. I'd just like to emphasize, I think that we're on strategy. Management's trying extremely hard to deliver on that from a cost perspective, from a throughput perspective, et cetera. We're seeing gains. Management have high expectations, and we've been, I guess, aggressive in what we've been trying to achieve. I have a philosophy, if you don't shoot high, you'll still achieve better by shooting high and not quite making that than not doing so, and I think that's something that we've all adopted within Metro to have high expectations. The returns are coming. We've really, from a cost balance sheet, sales perspective, really changed the profile of the business.
I think coming back to one of Doug's main points is, I think, at times like this where cyclones, Gulf War, we've now built resilience into the business through a whole bunch of physical and corporate processes and systems. With the exchange rate at AUD 0.72 now, I think the hedging policy looks like a good idea, and I know we copped a bit of flak on that in the past. When we're protecting the downside rather than trying to make money out of it, I think that's when things really come home to roost. The resilience of the business, the fuel, the ability to bunker fuel, to store that, to do all of those sorts of things are really important from sustaining the operation. Thank you for your time in listening and appreciate you as investors and supporters of the business always.
Thank you very much.
Simon, I think that was, you would appreciate, a very detailed and a very informative presentation that Simon's given. There will be plenty of opportunities for questions afterwards if you've got them. After the most interesting part of the meeting's over, we've unfortunately now got to go through the formal part of the meeting. Sometimes someone in corporate Australia might like to make sure that this moves with the times, but it hasn't. Please bear with me as I go through it. A number of procedural matters that I need to bring to your attention. There was a notice of meeting dated the 20th of March that's been released to the ASX, and it's been dispatched to all shareholders, and I'll take that notice of meeting as read.
In accordance with the company's constitution and as set out in the notice of meeting, we have determined that voting on each of the resolutions shall be conducted by a poll. The results of the polls will be declared and released to the ASX as soon as the results are available. Only shareholders present, persons holding valid proxies, and validly appointed corporate representatives are eligible to ask questions and to vote at this meeting. If a shareholder has appointed a proxy but is present at the meeting, the proxyholder is not entitled to ask questions or vote. Only shareholders who are entitled to vote on a resolution may cast a vote on that resolution. Shareholders who are entitled to vote can cast a vote using the voting card that they would have received upon validating their registration.
As Chair of the meeting and as detailed in the Notice of Meeting, I will vote where authorized all undirected proxies in favor of each resolution. The attendance register that you saw at the entry to the room, and you will have all registered and received a voting card upon entry if you are entitled to vote at this meeting. If you have any questions, please approach Robin, our Company Secretary, or speak to one of the Computershare representatives. You would have been given an attendance card when you registered on arrival. If you have a blue voting card, you are a voting shareholder, proxyholder, or corporate representative, and have chosen to vote using paper voting card. You are also entitled to speak at this meeting. If you received a yellow card, you are a non-voting shareholder.
While you are entitled to ask questions and make comments, you are not entitled to vote at this meeting. If you have received a white card, then you are a visitor and are not entitled to speak or vote at this meeting. I'd like to inform the meeting that proxy votes for approximately 34% of the shares on issue, and I thank you for your vote. A further breakdown of the proxies will be detailed prior to the voting on each resolution. The first item of business is to receive and consider the financial statements for 2025, and in that regard, and in accordance with the Corporations Act and Metro Mining's constitution, I table for discussion the financial statements, the directors' report, and the auditors' report for the financial year ended 31st of December 2025. Are there any questions in respect to the audited financial statements?
Are there any questions of the auditor in respect of the auditor's report or the conduct of the audit? I note again that Andy and Steve from EY are available to answer questions relating to the conduct of the audit, if there are any. I will now turn to the resolutions to be put to the meeting. Thank you. First one is the adoption of the remuneration report. It's an ordinary resolution and relates to the adoption of the report. The resolution is put to members under Section 250R of the Corporations Act. The resolution is advisory only and does not bind the directors of the company. The resolution reads that the remuneration report for the financial year ended 31st of December 2025 be adopted.
As you may know from the meeting materials, there is a voting exclusion which specifically applies to this resolution, excluding the votes of directors, management, their families, and related entities. Are there any questions in relation to resolution one? Thank you. The proxies received are set out on the screen. I note that all discretionary proxies have been directed in favor of the resolution. Based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Please now indicate for, against, or abstain next to resolution one on your voting card. Those cards will be collected at the end of formal business of the meeting, with the final result declared after the meeting, having regard to any votes cast at this meeting. Thank you. Resolution two is an ordinary resolution, and it reads as follows.
That Dr Jennifer Purdie, who retires in accordance with Rules 36.2 and 38.1B of Metro's constitution and the ASX Listing Rule 14.4, and being eligible, be elected as a director of Metro." As this is Jenny's first meeting, I just thought she might like to make a few comments to the meeting. Thanks, Jen.
Thanks, Doug, and thanks for the opportunity to speak. Just introducing myself, Jenny Purdie. I've worked for a number of years in the mining and resources industry, as an executive, and many of those have been for majors including Rio, BHP, and also Alcoa. Much of that time has been spent downstream of the bauxite and, in fact, downstream of alumina in the aluminum smelting industry. I've got a good understanding of the, I guess, the end use in the smelting process, for the products that we are proud to mine. I've also served for a number of years on the board of the listed company Neometals, Perth-based, innovative mining and minerals processing developer, alongside Doug, actually. That was up until the end of 2025. I was really honored to have the opportunity to join the board of Metro last August.
Amongst the people that I mix with, and from what I know in the market, Metro has got a really strong reputation of being a capable, agile, can-do sort of company, working, obviously, in a sector that is growing with the energy transition and other factors as Simon's explained. Also a company that has really strong values, and I think you've heard that in the presentations that Doug and also Simon have made. I was delighted to have the opportunity to join the board, a capable, experienced management team and also, I believe, a very strong board. What I can say that I've observed of the way that things work in Metro since I've joined has really borne out what I'd heard about the company before I joined.
I'd also comment that something you don't see until you are part of the company is really the way that the management and board work together. I guess I'd like to assure you that your company is led by a CEO and a board that collaborate well and work in a very respectful, inclusive way, with values at the center of what they do in the interests of the company, delivering for all stakeholders and absolutely delivering for investors. I'm delighted to have the chance to stand for formal election and, if I am elected, I will be really proud to be part of the continuing progress of this company in delivering for all stakeholders. Thank you.
Thank you, Jenny. Are there any questions in relation to resolution two? The proxies received for resolution two are set out on the screen, and based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Please now mark your voting cards accordingly. Resolution three is an ordinary resolution and reads as follows. "That Mr. Andrew Lloyd, who retires by rotation in accordance with rule 38.1C of Metro's constitution, and being eligible, be re-elected as a director of Metro." I'd just like to invite Andy if he would like to address the meeting.
Thanks, Doug. Good morning, everybody. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to be on this board. The Metro board, I think it's a pleasure and a privilege to be on the board. It's a very effective board. I think we share the load and are very diligent in our approach. We have a really first-class management team, so I absolutely echo Jenny's comments that this is a pleasure and a privilege, and it's great to be working with a company that's really kicking some goals. Thank you for the opportunity. I chair the ESG committee, and I think Simon's given a very good overview of it. There's been quite a lot of speculation in the press around ESG generally and our efforts on sustainability as an industry.
I think the importance of our approach is that we don't do anything that doesn't have a very strong business case. In that way, we keep ourselves out of trouble. It's grounded on providing value that is going to be achievable to the business. From that point of view, we can stand behind the very extensive report we've put into the annual report with a great sense of pride that what we are doing is very beneficial to the business. There are three major strands to that. The environmental program, that we have an absolutely first-class team on site and an approach on site around minimizing our impacts that I think is very thorough, well-founded, and a transparency in how we deal with the regulator that gives them a comfort that we're doing the right thing. On the community side, we have a strong community program.
The greatest indicator that we are making a difference to Cape York is that our traditional owners are prepared to be employees, and they work with us on site. I have worked on sites, other mining operations where that's not the case, and so that is a very strong indicator of the acceptance of our operations, the quality of the operations, and the sense that we are doing the right thing, and that's something I think the company should be very proud of. The third strand is around the governance piece. The three strands of our ESG program create a very strong social license to operate, and that brings opportunity, it brings resilience, it adds enormous value, and it does translate into, I think, shareholder value as well. Our program is well-balanced, it's pragmatic, and I think one to be proud of.
There's great value in this company. Its potential for future value is very strong, and so I certainly echo the impressive presentation from Doug and Simon this morning. It's a pleasure to be here, and so thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Andy, for those comments and words. Are there any questions in relation to this third resolution? No. Okay. The proxies received are as set out on the screen, and based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Would you please mark your voting cards accordingly? The next resolution is resolution four. It relates to me, and as such, I'd like to invite Jo-Anne to address the meeting.
Thanks, Doug. Resolution four, the grant of performance rights to Mr. Douglas Ritchie, Chairman. Resolution four is an ordinary resolution and reads as follows: That for the purposes of Listing Rule 10.11 and for all other purposes, the grant of 2,362,274 performance rights to Mr. Douglas Ritchie or his nominee in lieu of 100% of his director's fees in respect of the period set out in the explanatory memorandum, and otherwise on the terms and conditions described in the explanatory memorandum, be approved. Are there any questions in relation to resolution four? The proxies received are set out on the screen. Based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Please vote now. Please now indicate for, against, or abstain next to resolution four on your voting card, and I will hand the meeting back to Doug.
Thank you. Resolution five is an ordinary resolution and reads as follows: That for the purposes of Listing Rule 10.11 and for all other purposes, the grant of 301,828 performance rights to Mr. Paul Lucas or his nominee in lieu of 20% of his director's fees in respect of the period set out in the explanatory memorandum or otherwise on the terms and conditions described in the explanatory memorandum, be approved. Are there any questions in relation to resolution five? The proxies received are set out on the screen. Based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Can you please mark your voting cards accordingly? Thank you. Now move to resolution six.
It's an ordinary resolution and reads as follows: That for the purposes of Listing Rule 10.11 and for all other purposes, the grant of 220,543 performance rights to Mrs. Jo-Anne Scarini or her nominee in lieu of 20% of her director's fees in respect of the period set out in the explanatory memorandum or otherwise on the terms and conditions described in the explanatory memorandum, be approved. Are there any questions in relation to resolution six? The proxies received are as set out on the screen, and based upon those proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Please now mark your voting card accordingly.
Resolution seven is an ordinary resolution and reads as follows. That for the purposes of listing rule 10.14 and for all other purposes, the grant of the following performance rights to Mr. Simon Wensley or his nominee under the company's employee incentive scheme titled "2020 Employee Incentive Scheme" incentive plan, and otherwise on the terms and conditions described in the explanatory memorandum, be approved. A, 6,992,930 performance rights for the 2026 short-term incentive, 2026 short-term incentive scheme, and 9,989,900 performance rights for the 2026 to 2028 long-term incentive scheme. Are there any questions in relation to resolution seven? Thank you. The proxies received are as set out on the screen, and based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Please mark your voting cards accordingly. Resolution eight is an ordinary resolution and reads as follows.
That for the purposes of Section 254H of the Corporations Act 2001, and for all other purposes, the company be authorized to undertake a consolidation of its issued share capital on a one for 20 basis, such that the total number of Metro shares is reduced by a factor of 20, subject to rounding, and the performance rights on issue are adjusted in accordance with the applicable listing rules, with any fractional entitlements to be rounded down to the nearest whole number on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory memorandum. Are there any questions in relation to resolution eight? The proxies received are set out on the screen, and based on the proxy votes received, the resolution should be carried. Please now indicate accordingly on your voting card.
As that is now the last resolution, a member of Computershare will now collect your voting cards, and the result will be announced to the ASX as soon as possible upon completion. Ladies and gentlemen, that sort of concludes the formal part of the meeting. As we indicated earlier, if you'd like now to take an opportunity to ask Simon or any of us any particular questions in relation to the business, please do so. Of course, there will be opportunities after this meeting to interact with all of us as well. Questions? All right. Well, we'll catch up with a cup of tea and a refreshment afterwards. Is there any other business that anybody wishes to raise? There being no further business then, I now declare the poll for all of the business closed, and I thank you most sincerely for your attendance.
Of course, please stay, and let's join each other in some light refreshments afterwards. Thank you very much for your attendance.