Next on stage is Luke Creagh. Luke is the Managing Director of Ora Banda Limited , where he's steering the company through a dynamic phase of growth and operational transformation. Prior to joining Ora Banda, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Northern Star Resources and has over 20 years of experience in the mining sector.
Thanks, Tim. Good morning, everyone. Shout out to Canaccord as a major sponsor, and once again, a massive thanks to Diggers & Dealers for the opportunity to present because the Ora Banda story, it's been a pretty fun one for the last three years. It's been stressful at times as well, no doubt. The next phase of growth is what we're really excited for. That's the theme of this presentation, we're getting to the start of our journey. We've done a lot of work to get to a critical mass stage where we can start growing the company. This next stage is going to be where we really have a lot of fun and create a lot of value. Before we get into the detail, though, what does it look like from a macro perspective?
This is the land package that's always sort of sat in Ora Banda, but it has had a checkered history over the past 20 years. The critical, I guess, issue that it's always had has been massively undercapitalized. When you look at the belts that we've got, this is a 140 km kind of radius through there. These belts through here, you've got the Zuleika Shear, the Ida Fault. They are huge regional deep- tapping structures known to host high-grade gold. From all the way down here, Frog's Legs up this belt, that's about a 10- million- ounce system. These are not small systems. Because of the undercapitalized nature and the focus on open-pit mining, everyone's only ever looked for surface gold. When we changed the strategy three years ago to go to look for underground, you fast forward with very little capital, very little drilling.
We've found two undergrounds, got them up and running. There are whole trends that we have to unlock here. We've got seven major mineralized trends. The top 100 meters has been peppered and shown a lot of gold. Below that 100 m, there's less than 5% of the drill holes. That's really the next phase of what we're doing. It's not just from, I guess, the size perspective, like the corporate capability that we've been working on. We've got a great board set up now, all the disciplines covered. We've got a great management team, fully engaged. From a people perspective, we're really starting to get all sort of bases covered. We've got the ability to leverage. We've got a corporate team now that cannot just run one or two operations. We can start building off this without really adding to corporate costs.
From a balance sheet perspective, we've never actually been stronger as a company. If I think back 12 months ago, it was actually pretty stressful. We had one underground going. We started off with $26 million in cash, as you can see. We had to start Sand King, which we did in August. It was a self-funded ramp-up of our second underground. Plus, we wanted to do some drilling. When you think back there, it's hard to remember even 12 months ago, $3,500 gold price. That seemed pretty bloody good back then. Over the year, obviously in the back of gold price and executing on that plan, we actually grew cash to $84.2 million.
The exciting thing about that was we actually did that after spending $124 million back into the business, both in capital and ramping up that second underground, as well as the exploration, getting our eye in on different deposits. In addition to that, we put in a $50 million revolving credit facility just to start right-sizing the balance sheet. Really getting this balance sheet and critical mass capability is what I talk about getting to the start because finally we have the ability to deploy resources and funds into that next phase. We haven't been idle over this period. We haven't had a lot of money spent on additional things, but we have got our eye in on these other systems. We've done a lot of drill testing, a lot of boots-on-ground geology work.
The second half of the presentation is about accelerating that from what we know now to really getting a lot more information. From a guidance perspective, when you look back over the three years, we've grown nearly 40% year-on-year for two years. This year represents a 60% jump. That's all organically growing. That's done as rapidly as you can get, probably because we had to more than what we wanted to. It points to the prospectivity of the belt. When you start drilling these deposits, start trying to understand them on a bigger scale, you can start seeing what it actually means. When you're talking about numbers, that's 48,000 oz. That's about $140 million revenue at the gold price there. When you're talking here, we're talking $750 million revenue. That's what I talk about right-sizing the balance sheet.
The other thing that we start noticing is this was single asset, single asset, single asset. We're finally into two undergrounds this year. What we've done is we've capped out our mill capacity. We've been doing upgrades to the mill to get it as best we can. We're seeing sort of natural limits to what that mill is. Really, it's about this next phase, going through the next sort of looking at the next growth option of expanding the mill capacity to 3 million tons. That's what we're really starting to see: the ability to overmine the mill, but then the ability to bring in additional resources on top of that. It is exciting going from single asset to double asset. It doesn't just have to risk. It's a huge, huge benefit to the business.
The other side corporately, which is something I feel can get overlooked, especially in the smaller companies, is the sustainability piece. Just the investment we're putting back into that to improve safety, improve standards, reinvest into the business to make that right size. Getting sustainability and environmental management, we're starting the progressive rehab, putting a lot of funds into that, which was previously ignored. It's not an optional extra for us. It's actually embedded in the business. Really, what our focus has been on is culture, culture, and capability of the team. Not just at the corporate and executive level, right into the team level. Right now, we've seen turnover drop 50% over the year. We're sitting at below 20%, which is outstanding for the mining industry. Importantly, we've just got highly capable, high-caliber teams on site.
You put the teams, I put the teams against any other teams I've worked with. They're as good as you get in the industry. While we've been building the business, we've actually been building everything from the ground up: systems, processes, people. Now we're kind of ready to move into that next phase of growth. When we talk about the operations and what we're doing, this next chart kind of covers what we've been talking about. This was the year we had just open pits, and then we started bringing in Riverina as an underground. We ramped that up over the year. This was the year we fell a bit short of guidance, targeting the 100,000. It was still an outstanding year for what we achieved.
You sort of see Sand King start to come in just at the tail end of the year, and that forms the backbone of what the next year looks like. It's an order of magnitude shift happening in FY 2026, going from single asset open-pit mining to then single asset underground to dual-underground asset model. We hit critical mass. Obviously, cash flows and everything go up. Suddenly, the risk of the business starts dropping. We build stockpiles, and we get access to upside of two major mineralized systems. The thing to note here is this 3 million ton per annum plant. We've got a small high-cost plant. When you're talking sort of 1.1 million ton, 1.2 million ton, the costs sit between $50 and $60 a ton, and that's relatively stock standard. It's hard to get them lower at that scale.
When you build a 3 million ton per annum plant, it actually runs almost the same total spend as what the 1.1 million ton, 1.2 million ton per annum plant does. What that means is you can get a bigger plant operating, but you don't add any operating costs to the business. When I talk about what corporately we've got, we don't add any corporate costs to the business. When you've got site all set up, two camps, everything going well, you don't add any admin costs. If you can bring in bigger infrastructure, this is when you really start right-sizing the business. You basically are bringing in just mining and just haulage costs as your next phase of growth, and you start getting proper economies of scale.
That's why I talk about 150 being the starting point because really, it's justifying that next phase of growth that is super exciting for us. When you're looking at the operations in isolation, Riverina sits about 50 km north of the plant. It's a pretty stock standard ramp-up. It's a pretty stock standard narrow vein, but it is quite prolific in terms of the strike length. We've got stack loads that go for over a kilometer, and that ramp-up, like we've seen the development tons there and the stoping tons contribute. The grades are consoling pretty well. What we really did last year, which was the exciting part, when we first started Riverina, our deepest hole was this one here, and most of our drilling was about there. That's all we could afford at the time. This year, as we've got in there, we've got the operations up and going.
We've actually, this is down to a kilometer now. We've proven sort of what we'd call typical Riverina style mineralization down to a kilometer, and that corridor there is about 700 m, 800 m of strike, just for scale. Just that piece alone, this has been the surface drilling we've done this year. Now we've got some drill drives coming in to start infilling the gap through there. Riverina started off as sort of a short life, but when your mineralization extended, if you mine 80 vertical meters a year, which is pretty good, it'll take 10 years to get down to that point. We're starting to view Riverina as kind of, you know, just a base source or a source of feed between 80,000 oz- 100,000 oz for 7 years- 10 years. The drilling we do this year will start infilling that, pushing it into resource and reserve positions.
If we go south to Sand King, which is about 40 km southeast of the plant, this is our second mine that we ramped up over the years. We cut the portal in August last year and got it to steady state basically, end of June into July. This is 12 months behind because when we drilled Sand King, we only focused on this area. This here is a five-kilometer system, and it goes over on the other side of that ultramafic through there. It once again shows our ability. When you think of Riverina, the first drill hole went in. Within 12 months, we cut the portal. Within 12 months, we got to steady state. We got payback within 18 months. The same thing's happening at Sand King, just slightly quicker on the back of a stronger gold price.
Our ability to find these mines and turn them on quickly is pretty outstanding. It also, once again, points to the prospectivity of the belt because these are only the first two we've drilled. These aren't the best two; they're just the first two. It's unlikely they'll be the best two as we go forward. With Sand King, our focus has been just getting it up and unpacking it structurally. The top case here, you can see, is the FID case, and it really focused on what we call the BD Lode here. That's down to about 300 m because that's where the drilling capped out. Fast forward 12 months after we started, this is what it's looking like. We had a drill drive put in here to start drilling this area, and you can see that that's extended as a second decline to the south.
The north stuff is starting to extend down as well. Over the course of this next year, we're starting to drill at depth. We're starting to drill laterally. We're pretty excited about what Sand King can do going forward and just acknowledging it's very early days and not a lot of drilling in this system. The other thing, like Riverina, you get stacked loads per level. It's not just the decline going down and accessing one load. You actually get multiple loads. This is that BD Lode I spoke about that covers through there. What we're seeing is other shear veins and tension veins coming into play that behave pretty well. We can sit on them and get some good grade. We get some really nice grade runs. These will come out. As we start sort of opening up these mines, they become drives as well.
Same thing happening to the north. We see those lateral extents increasing. We actually also see blowout zones where they intersect. They can call both grade and volume blowouts. This is exciting through here. We're sort of looking forward. We've got two underground rigs on here at the moment. By the end of this month, we'll have three. By the end of the year, we'll have four underground rigs starting to unlock that. We'll also have two surface rigs starting to pin it at depth. We start to advance it pretty quick. Now moving on to, I guess, covering operations and getting us the base case. This is really the value driver. It's why I joined the company. It's why many others have joined the company. Finally, we can deploy resources. When I say resources, drilling power into these deposits.
What we're going to do is spend nearly $73 million, drill about 330 km in this next 12 months. It's almost double the previous three years combined. When you think of what that did in the previous three years, it found two undergrounds, extended one to a kilometer, extended a potential third one down to 400 m, and got our eye in on a few others. You can kind of see and get the feel for what 330 km can do because we're not just sort of walking up to greenfields here. We're walking up to pretty advanced targets. We're going to get a hell of a lot of data out of them. The four ones we've got really at play, we've obviously got Sand King as we spoke about, but Little Gem, which is south of Riverina, Waihi, and Round Dam. These are the ones that we're excited about.
Between those four, that'll attract about 80% of the spend, subject to sort of drilling results as we go through the year. If we look at Little Gem, this is just south of Riverina. The section I showed you before was that section through Riverina, but that's, you know, 8 km through there. The scale of the fluid flow of this system can't be understated. We've just drilled it out over eight kilometers on really wide space drilling. We didn't replicate, you know, high grade and high widths that we saw initially at Little Gem, but what we're seeing is structure and grade on a very wide scale. As a system, as a region, it just says there's a lot to unpack there. What we're really focusing on now is this Little Gem one.
We got the initial hole here, which we announced earlier in the year, 22 at 5, and then 40 m away, 11 at 6.4. That's pretty exciting. We just got this hole here, which is 400 m to the north, and that was 8.8 at 6.3. When you zoom up on this, and that still doesn't give it really the credit it deserves, that's 1.6 kilometers through there. You've got two lodes, this lode here, which is what we're focused on, so the diamond lode and the ruby lode, they're about 40 m apart. This hole is the 22 at 5, and this is the 11 at 6. We're starting to see that, you know, permeate down to 400 m. This window here taps into a 38-hole program that'll cover nearly a kilometer of strike down to about 500 m. It's data poor, but the potential is high.
We're super, super excited about what this can be. We'll know, we'll have a good idea after this program, which we'll finish in the next three months. We've got three drill rigs on there at the moment. The next target is probably slightly the other end of the scale, a lot more data, but probably less potential than Little Gem, but still looking like it'd be a good deposit in its own right. Waihi, which is right next to the mill, this drilling, you can kind of see highlights how all the drilling has been done in the past, just drilling for cutbacks on the open pits. It's pretty well understood down to about 200 vertical meters, sorry. You get these high-grade chutes sort of forming through there. It's a bit more structurally complex. What we're doing now is just drilling it down here.
We got this grade here, which is sort of 8.7 at 9.3. That's at 330 m below surface. What it's showing is that this system is alive and well. Rather than do open pits, we might do smaller cutbacks, but you can easily put a decline down there and start accessing sort of all the strike there. We've got a diamond rig and an RC rig on this now, and we're starting to drill it. The other thing we're looking at is this golden pole through here. That was mined in the 1930s at downstert, and it was quite a small window. It's got potential to deliver a lot of high grade. What we're looking for is stacked loads through here as well. That's another exciting prospect to see how that plays out. The other one that we're really starting to unpack is just south of the mill.
That's the mill. This whole Round Dam trend, when we sort of appointed a couple of geos on this, they did an outstanding job just redoing the entire geological package. What became apparent is just it's fundamentally misunderstood. That's more of a symptom, I think, of capital and what they're looking for. Because of the small mill, everyone was only looking for high-grade open pits. They weren't trying to drill out these big systems. When you look at this system that goes for, you know, north of 20 km, our focus here is on this 7 km stretch. You've got a mineralized load there, there, there against sort of a sediment, ultramafic, and then a basalt. You can kind of see one of the pits actually goes down on this one, and all the drilling stops within five meters of that potential main load.
Another of the pits comes down on this one, and then they actually put the ramp in that, and then they try to grab that as well. Another one sort of bends around and picks up this load. No one has sort of sat back here and drilled all the loads for big bulk high grade. We're starting to just, on wide space, drilling that 7 km trend. Unpacking this could make a material difference. You do that in parallel with doing the mill upgrade studies, the 3 million ton. You can start to see we're getting, you know, potential, potential from all fronts. Probably the last one to talk about, there's still multiple other trends that we haven't really got into, but we'll start deploying a bit of resources to this year. Malon, which is west of Riverina, that's 10 km. 5% of the holes below 100.
What is there is, you know, outrageously good. Like when you're seeing sort of ounce dirt, two-ounce dirt, you know, nearly eight-ounce dirt that just didn't get followed up on that system that's, you know, littered with old workings from the 1900s. This is going to be one that we're pretty excited about unpacking, but it'll be more of a medium-term thing. We just got to do our drill testing to work that up. That's what we talk about, FY 2026. It's actually the start of where we actually wanted to get to. The catalyst coming out of the business now, we can deploy meaningful resources. We're getting meaningful data. Not just production, cash flow is growing. It's getting access to two mineralized systems, two undergrounds, getting a study up for the 3 million-ton print of mill.
It's really about how do we fill it and what's the best and getting really good competition for capital in the business. Super excited about what we're doing. It's been a hell of a lot of hard work by the team to get to where we are, but we've put the business in a really strong position. The next few years should be a hell of a lot of fun. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Luke. Any questions from the stage or from the floor? Maybe just.
Yeah, so the question was how's the $73 million going? 80% will be split between sort of 20% Sand King, 20% Waihi, 20% Little Gem, 20% Round Dam, then 10% on Malon, and then 10% will be tenement maintenance.
Excellent. Thank you, Luke.