And where alumina and bauxite is a critical mineral. I am very happy to be here. I am going to unfortunately use the pronunciation of aluminum. I do not think I am going to be able to manage to keep that in check through the whole presentation, so please excuse me in advance. Slightly unusual starting slide, I think for Americans. Just wanting to emphasize that, and you will see why as we go through the presentation about where we operate. Acknowledgement of the country in which we operate, the traditional owners of the land.
We are very far north of Queensland, and we take our relationship with the local communities extremely seriously, and we have an excellent working relationship with those groups and provide long-term jobs and benefits into that community. It is a great win-win for our business and for the local communities, and we pay respects to those traditional owners. So quick background, just about Bauxite Hills Mine and Metro Mining. We in the very northern tip, you can see the black star on the very northern tip of Queensland there. Very well located for the markets. It is a very remote site. We are about two hours flight north of Cairns, which is one of the largest cities in North Queensland.
So it is a very remote operation. We exist on what is called the Weipa Bauxite Plateau. It is probably one of the top two bauxite provinces in the world, the other being in West Africa. And that area has been mined by Rio Tinto for over 60 years. We commenced operations in 2018. It is a coastal location, so excellent logistics. And we operate a low-cost and scalable mine and transshipping operation, which I will show you a bit more later. We are now up to almost 500 employees.
So fairly labor-intensive given the location, and it is a fully fly-in, fly-out operation given the remoteness. So quick snapshot. We have got a current market cap of AUD 400 million. Breakout year was last year where we had a profit of over AUD 140 million, with an underlying EBITDA of over AUD 70 million. And a pretty broad spread of shareholders. Ascend Capital out of Singapore is our largest shareholder, with Fidelity Investments out of the U.K., number two. We are covered by three analysts for research.
They are all independent, not paid. We have got a current share price of around AUD 1.30. Their target prices for us range between AUD 2 and AUD 3 per share. We have expanded capacity, doubled capacity over the last couple of years. This is the first year where we are running at a full flow sheet. Strong balance sheet, and we are into cash generation mode. So what am I going to talk to you today about? Firstly, Metro is really the only way you can get pure upstream exposure to bauxite in this very strongly growing aluminum value chain.
Bauxite is not a particularly well-known bulk commodity, so I am going to talk a bit about industry structure, and we have got an excellent and improving industry structure in the Asia-Pacific region, which we can participate in. We have got a quality resource, simple, scalable, low-cost operation. The expansion that we have just delivered is delivering margin, and we are now entering capital management, and a further growth phase. And we have got a good, stable, high-quality board and management team. So what Metro is all about is now sustainable cash margins at scale.
Aluminum, and with the deference to Intel here, bauxite is inside almost everything that you see, that you use today in your buildings, obviously, but now very much more into your cars, into your batteries, renewable energy. There is more aluminum than copper in the electricity transmission network. Indeed, if you like copper, you should also love aluminum. It is a strongly growing commodity. You need about six tons of bauxite to make one ton of aluminum via the intermediate of alumina. This has gone. Sorry, I think that skipped. There we go. The two biggest producers of bauxite are Guinea in West Africa and Australia. That is feeding into the primary production growth of aluminum. It is a global industry.
China has been the largest growing part of that over the last 15 years or so. That is going to come to an end as they have capped aluminum production, and the rest of the world is going to have to take over that mantle, and we are seeing now growth in smelting in other parts of Asia, particularly in Indonesia, in India. I expect Malaysia, and I expect the Middle East to also be adding more capacity. So you have got about a 3%, roughly a 3% growth profile for top-line aluminum. This is not. Resources and reserves. Coming into this year, we had roughly a 70 million ton reserve, so that is about a 10-year life at current production rates. That was also around our existing mine.
We also have another 50 million tons of in-situ bauxite in a resource status. We have been working hard on upgrading that. So we are putting that from a resource into a reserve category. We have a similar sort of size lease just 30 km to the southeast of where we are operating at the moment on Pisolite Hills EPM 15278, and we are looking at how we might bring that into the resource base. Then we have got a further five exploration leases, which are at various stages of development from a drilling point of view.
This is a slide about our low-cost, scalable flow sheet, b ut I might ask for us to show a quick two-minute video, because I think that will be easier for me to explain. So if we could run the video, please. Okay. Can I still have. Thanks. Yeah. Bauxite is about 0.5 m below the surface. We use quite traditional mining equipment. Once we have cleared the topsoil, there is about a 1 to 3-m bauxite horizon. We stockpile the overburden, and then using a pioneered technology that we have taken on roads, road trains, and we have converted them to off-road. We run 250 ton payload road trains on our roads at about 80 km an hour.
We take that about between 5 km and 20 km from the pits to the port, where we run a screening process. We have got two screens that we screen, and then we put it into an overland conveyor and onto barges. You can see there, the sort of pisolitic nature, little round balls. That is the high-grade bauxite that we get out of the Weipa Plateau. Grade control. We are using a neutron scanner, and we take physical samples every three minutes and we are loading barges. We have a fleet of six 90-m barges which take up to 7,000 tons per barge. Those six barges get cycled in and out every day, roughly for a 30,000 tons per day capacity.
A fleet of seven tugs tow those barges out to an offshore anchorage where we have two transshippers, one floating crane and one very large transshipper. Her name is Ikamba. You can see there, two high capacity electric cranes which unload the bauxite and feed a conveyor system that goes into a ship loader. We load the largest Capesize vessels up to 220,000 ton vessels, and that takes us through to our customers in Asia. I hope that gives you a sense of that. Pretty simple, straightforward mining operation. That's what we like to do, keep it simple and low cost is exactly where we need to be. I'm going to indulge you mineral economists a little bit with some cost curve explanation.
I think this is the best way to explain what's going on in our industry. You can see the gray line at the bottom there was the cost curve in 2022. As time has moved forward, that cost curve has steepened and risen and extended. Indonesia exited between 2022 and 2025. They were a large producer in Asia. They have now stopped exporting and we've had a large influx of bauxite from West Africa, mainly from Guinea. The result of that is that you've seen the cost curve rise up. I've got Australia there on the left-hand side, and then you've got mostly West African supply on the middle and right-hand side. You can see as demand has increased, so you can see here demand plotted into. This is China as the largest importer in the Asia-Pacific as a proxy.
You can see as demand has gone out, then the equilibrium price for bauxite has gone up. So from around $50 U.S. delivered in 2022, we saw proof of concept around this cost curve in 2025, early 2026 of around low 60s, 60- 65 and the projected cost curve as more supply comes on from West Africa supplying into the Asia-Pacific is that in a sense, that equilibrium price is going to rise towards $70 in 2030. These cost curves, I want to emphasize, and I'll come back to this, assume no lasting impact from the Gulf War on freight and logistics, and that there has been a massive impact on freight from the Gulf War. What's Metro doing?
Well, in 2022, we were sort of sitting in that second quartile and we've now expanded, as I said, doubled our production and the budget for this year projected us at just over $30 delivered into the market, and so the lowest cost producer into that Asia-Pacific market. So that's a good place to be when you've got protection from a cost curve that looks like this. Okay. Bauxite pricing there on the right-hand side, you can see a steady increase in prices over the last few years since the end of COVID. There was a big spike at the end of 2024, due to a number of reasons. It was not a very liquid spike. What you can see then, that caused a bit of oversupply coming back in.
You can see that there was effectively a low part of the cycle at the beginning of this year. That has then started to rise again as we go forward into the rest of 2026. The reason that has been rising is because that cost curve is coming into play. You can see freight, which was the basis of that cost curve, was around $25-$27 a ton from Guinea to China before the start of the Gulf War. That has gone up to over $50 per ton on a dry ton basis. Obviously, that has affected Australia too, but by a much lesser effect. So you can see there that the tyranny of distance really does protect us. That is obviously driven partly by the freight charter rates, but it has been also driven obviously a lot by the oil price.
So if you are looking for a bit of a hedge on the oil price, then Metro is not a bad place to look given the cost curve protection that we get from the West African supply into Asia. The Guinea government is also looking to. They are now effectively like the OPEC of the bauxite world, and they are looking to put in some protection for pricing for their local producers and for their own tax and royalty regime. We are expecting some quotas to come out legislated by the end of this year. Okay. So fairly simple strategy. We recapitalized the business in 2021. New management team, myself coming in in 2021, built a new team around the company.
We have taken the run rate up from around 2 million tons, and this year's guidance is 6.6-7.1 million tons. We are on track at the moment to deliver within that guidance. That has also been about a repositioning in the market, really getting hold of our logistics chain, increasing resilience to weather up in that northern part of Queensland, and fast-tracking that expansion to deliver the economies of scale. You can see the economies of scale coming through there with nominal cost reductions and margins increasing through that period. So where are we at the moment?
Well, we have secured the balance sheet. There is a AUD 23 million debt repaid last year. We should be around about AUD 30 million of debt by the end of this year. We were close to net cash, as I said earlier, at the end of last year, so we should be strongly net cash this year. We are looking to generate over AUD 300 million of cash available for allocation, net of debt servicing through the next five years. We are also looking, as I said earlier, to maintain and increase our reserve and resource life. So we are prioritizing the organic growth. As I said, the target prices represent our internal valuation of around about a AUD 1 billion project to NPV. We are progressing to debottleneck our capacity towards that 8 million tons.
So we should be able to continue the real cost reductions that we have been achieving over the last couple of years. We are into a growth phase, too, so we have talked to the market about identifying some synergistic M&A, looking for high IRR, obviously, and we are going to be very disciplined about that. So we have said to the market that initially we are going to limit that to the consideration for any M&A activity to less than 20% of our market cap. We are going to be targeting Australian projects delivering that to benefits to shareholders. We have a dividend policy out there of at least 20% of free cash net of servicing from the end of this year. We have a buyback program in place, and we successfully delivered on a share consolidation this year.
In summary, we are the only way to access on any share market a pure bauxite producer. We are targeting the lowest cost delivery into the Asia-Pacific, which continues to be the largest growing market for aluminum and for bauxite. What that will deliver is sustainable cash margins at a scale. Every AUD 10 a ton of price delivers about AUD 100 million of EBITDA into our business. We have an extremely solid future of cash generation, and certainly as we expand our reserves and resources, that should continue to be over more than 10 years. Look, that is the end of the formal presentation. Lawson, is there anything?
Yeah. Thank you very much, Simon. That was fantastic. I think we have time for a question or two. I wanted to ask about the low mining cost. Could you maybe help crystallize for us why the mining costs are so low for you guys relative to peers?
Yeah, sure. Look, it is really about keeping things really simple. As I said, firstly, we have a high-grade resource, so this means that we can ship on a direct shipping ore basis, so we do not need to process this ore in any serious way. The physicals work in our favor, so we have a very low strip ratio. As I said, only about 0.5 m of overburden and topsoil has to come off the product. Then we have very short haul distances to the mine site. Keeping that mining process very simple. As I said, we have pioneered some quite interesting technology. Those road trains, a normal dump truck in the mining space, AUD 3 million-AUD 4 million. The tires alone can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We are using fairly standard on-road technology. We have converted that to off-road.
And so, that consists there of a prime mover and four trailers would be about AUD 1 million rather than the AUD 3 million or AUD 4 million, and the maintenance of that would be very straightforward. So keeping things very simple. The transshipping part is at around that 7 million ton scale. We're maximizing those tugs and barges at this point, and having a single large transshipper also allows us to keep our labor costs down. So, in that sense, we're just keeping things extremely simple, and that's roundabout that 7 million- 8 million ton capacity is where we can keep those costs optimized.
Okay, fantastic. Thank you very much for your presentation, Simon.
All right. Thanks, Lawson. Thanks, everybody.