Great. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending OM Holdings' webinar this morning. My name is Jenny from the IR Department of OM Holdings, and together with me is Rui Qi and Adrian. We will be hosting the webinar together. OM Holdings is a manganese and silicon smelting company with vertical exposure in mining and trading, and we have just released our June 2024 quarterly production and market update on Tuesday. I am delighted to have OM's Managing Director Adrian Low with me today. He will run through the key points followed by a Q&A session. If you would like to submit a question during the webinar, please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. If you are unable to present your question to Adrian, we will attempt to address the query post the webinar.
Without any further ado, I'm pleased to hand over to Adrian for the presentation. Adrian, over to you.
Thank you. Excuse me. Thanks, Jenny. Thank you, everyone, for dialing in to our second quarter presentation for 2024. So I think, you know, we'll just jump straight into the details. But the last slide on manganese pricing is perhaps the most interesting for this particular webinar. So in the last three months, OM Holdings was listed or ranked in the inaugural Fortune 500 Southeast Asia list that was just launched a few months ago. And, you know, I think this is really a great validation to the strategy of pivoting into non-China smelting, which is what we're doing today. So, you know, I just had this conversation with some colleagues a couple of days ago, and really what we're doing today, the assets that we have, the trade flows that we're doing, are vastly different from how the company was 10 years ago, right? We have different assets.
We've cleaned up, you know, the portfolio of production assets. And, although we're doing the same thing with the same products, we're doing that in different places with different strengths and different competencies. So that's, that's, you know, a great validation for us. In the last quarter, we also repaid project finance lenders a total of $12.3 million on schedule. And so you'll see this, well, you've seen this for a couple of quarters now, and you'll see for the next couple of quarters as well. And we also spoke about starting the commissioning of the silicon metal furnace, or the preparation for that, last quarter. So that has begun exactly a month ago. And, you know, I think we expect that this will take a few months, but the preliminary assessment of output, efficiencies, and so on look promising. I think everything is going as per schedule, and that's planned.
Having said that, I think the decision to do a full commercial ramp-up, with two silicon metal furnaces is still contingent on a strategic review. And really, you know, that will take into considerations, market prices, selling prices, raw material prices, and our view of demand and where we might place the material. And ultimately, I think, because the furnaces have been designed to produce silicon metal and ferrosilicon, we have to compare, the unit, efficiency of, you know, running a furnace on silicon metal per day versus, ferrosilicon, per day. And given their sort of different, differing, power intensities, you know, that calculation and planning, has to be fairly robust. Having said that, you know, I think, besides the silicon metal furnace commissioning, everything else is running as per normal.
I think all the furnaces are in operation as they were at the start of, sorry, at the end of Q1. And you will see that the four-year guidance for both ferrosilicon and manganese alloys hasn't changed. I think if you look at these numbers, you know, you will notice that we are aiming to go for the highest production volume in the last five years. And obviously that comes with a lot of benefits in terms of efficiencies as well as cost reduction overall. On the exploration and mining front, really, I think we are now focusing on restarting the UFP, or the TRP, as some of the older shareholders might know it.
And to remind everyone again, this is processing all the tailings that we have left at Bootu Creek, and then sort of recycling that into a useful product that can be sintered or can be sold. So that's it in terms of operational production and sort of key updates. I'll just spend the next two slides talking through the markets and perhaps more time on the last one. But starting with ferrosilicon, I think, you know, prices have been fairly range-bound. And as we said, you know, a few months ago, that's really due to the floor, price floor kind of set in place, given the Chinese cost of production. And, you know, I think you can notice it from the chart as well.
In spite of a very, very stable, relatively stable price, with the blue line, you see these, very, very, violent, almost violent sort of zigzag patterns, in Chinese ferrosilicon production, oscillating, you know, plus or minus 50,000-70,000 tons, per month. And so that's really, a response to their cost. And I think, where we are today, again, compared to where we were pre-COVID is, is very, very different because our cost structure has not really changed materially, pre- and post-COVID. Obviously, in the years 2021, 2022, and maybe the first half of 2023, that cost might have been higher because of higher raw material prices. But today, you know, I think we're more or less in the same environment as we were, pre-COVID. But obviously that floor in, in prices, has been raised, much higher.
In the last couple of weeks as well, I think, ferrosilicon prices have started inching upwards, due to a Chinese customs crackdown on tax evasion. So, as I understand it, this is a fairly robust process. And, I think the authorities are actually trying to reach back and claw back transgressions made, before, you know, this, this, activity, before this crackdown started. So off the back of that, the amount of supply, the amount of offers in the market has started to dry up. And just in the last 2-3 weeks' time, I think, we've seen prices, flip from below 1,300 to above 1,300. So that's all kind of near-term action. I think, you know, further out, really, the elephant in the room is, the absence of Russian ferrosilicon, especially in this part of the world.
I think, the nationalization of, that asset, the key ferrosilicon production asset in Russia, will and must eventually catalyze some kind of price recovery because the reduction in volume, from those exports is fairly substantial, in this part of the world. So that's it for ferrosilicon. I'll just move on now to the manganese space. I think this is where we've seen a lot of volatility, a lot of uncertainty in the last couple of months. You know, shareholders and analysts will note, this all started around March when South32 announced a force majeure at its Australian operations. That led to the high-grade benchmark price really surging all the way, I think, close to $9. So I think, you know, we are more or less at the 10-year high, not so dissimilar from the end of 2016.
What's different this time compared to the last is that if you look at the shaded yellow area, orange yellow area, in the background, that's the amount of manganese alloy in stock in China. And so the trigger point for December 2016 was really an absence of inventory in China. And so we saw a rise in manganese ore prices across the board, right? From low-grade, medium-grade, high-iron, you name it, all the way through to high-grade, which reached $9 today. It's actually a fairly different scenario where this price increase was really led to, was really caused by, sorry, a single mine disruption. And so all the shortage has only occurred on high-grade ores. And so when you look at the chart, what we're not showing is, you know, all the other prices of grades of manganese ore.
Notably, what some people call the medium-grade or, you know, what we like to call the semi-carbonate, South African ore price, has actually diverged. So historically, when you look at the chart, you know, we've never put the semi-carbonate price on this chart because it's historically been at a spread of between $0.40-$0.60. But today, the high-grade ore price has almost doubled that of the semi-carbonate price. So what does that mean? I think, you know, a lot of alloy producers, and I'm sure our shareholders, are also wondering what the path here on out looks like. And I think just looking at the spread and pricing offers a glimpse at what the solution might be.
So, we're always trying to optimize our costs and balance what we're bringing into the plant because the alchemy of smelting, if you will, is such that as long as you present the right elements to the furnace, you'll be able to make the product. So we're not wedded to any sort of formula where, you know, we have to use, say, 40% high-grade ore, but that's something that's, you know, being dynamically changed and optimized on sort of a monthly basis. And so I think, you know, that's what we're trying to do, you know, faced with very high and elevated high-grade ore prices.
Obviously, the reason why I'm saying all of this is, we look at the blue line, the selling price, of silicomanganese, the benchmark alloy, if you will, for this part of the world, that tracked the increase in manganese ore, for the better part of a month, to, to say, 5-6 weeks, before really sharply diverging. And so, you know, I think this is the situation where, you know, all the shortage is on the mine side, the bottlenecks there, and there's no shortage of smelting capacity, right? This is very, very different from what happened in 2021, where there was a bottleneck on smelting capacity because of power limitation, coal prices, so on. But there was no bottleneck in mining. And so, you know, the blue line remained above the red line for a substantial period of time.
That being said, you know, I'd also like to share, offer this to shareholders that, these prices must converge, as they will. There's a sort of a mean-reverting nature to, the relationship between ore and alloy price because ultimately you need the ore to produce the alloy. And, that's just how, this market functions. And so I think, you know, looking at the, the, blip in, alloy prices, you know, most of that, most of those sales, would have been booked in June, July, I think, a bit into August. And, looking at actual pricing, I think, we report, that the index's S&P Platts, has printed 1,165, at the end of June. And, I think today, you know, it's, it's probably closer to the high 900s. So not so far away from where we started, before all of this happened, just slightly better.
So I think, you know, all in all, while the six months 2024 average is still -10% compared to 2023, we are seeing that trend reverse slowly and gradually. With that, I will end the presentation and just leave time for questions. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Adrian, for the presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. The first question relates to profit projection. Is that on target for this year?
I think as a policy, the company doesn't share or provide any sort of earnings guidance, but I'll just point to, you know, a few factors. So first of all, as I shared earlier, you know, I think this year will be the highest volume that, you know, we'll look to achieve in the last five years. And so that will bring down costs and also, you know, increase earnings. Secondly, I think if you look at prices, if you look at the volatility and how we've been trying to manage that, I think there are opportunities there that we have managed to seize in a couple of months. So obviously that's not going to be all in the first half or all in the second half, but sort of spread out across, say, June, July, August.
And so, you know, I think there are bright spots there, right? So overall, 2024, from just the overall market environment, is looking a lot better than 2023 because, in 2023, we saw a net destocking of all products, you know, both in the silicon space and in the manganese space, although we also recorded a couple of one-off gains in 2023. So perhaps, I'll answer this way.
Right. Yes. Thank you, Adrian. The second question, and also actually the last question, what are OMH doing to raise the profile of the business? Trading volume is minimal and the dual listing that was supposed to bring value to the market cap has not had the desired effect.
Yep, that's a recurring question. Thanks, Jenny. And thanks, you know, whoever who's asked the question. Look, I think the dual listing, the secondary listing, you know, was supposed to increase trading liquidity and increase interest. And I think, you know, from all the sort of investing engagements, analyst engagement sessions we've done, we have seen those interests come in, right? I think the issue, perhaps is that it's in a sense, it's kind of a mixed situation where liquidity is a hurdle for liquidity, if you could put it that way. And, you know, as always, what we've been continuing to do is to reach out to more investors, reach out to more analysts and, you know, really educate people about smelting, about manganese, about silicon, because this is a very niche industry.
I think, you know, in this part of the world, I think we're probably the only comp, only listed company, that's operating in this space. So, you know, I think it will take time. And so thank you for bearing with us. And, you know, we'll continue to work on unlocking pockets of liquidity and, you know, we're confident that once that starts, you know, that will trigger a virtual cycle, instead of the situation we're stuck in today.
I think, you know, sort of silver lining to the situation though is that, we have a lot of shareholders who have been very loyal and, I think we've stuck around for, you know, say the last 5-10 years and, in our engagement sessions as and when, you know, we're in places where we meet them, we're always very comforted by the fact that, you know, they really see value in the company and they see the cash generating, potential, of the company. I think if you look at how we've been managing our debt situation and how we've, you know, paid down debt, you know, even with the furnace conversion projects, CapEx spend, even with the acquisition of, the minority interest from, Cahya Mata Sarawak, you know, we have been managing, all of that.
So all of that is cash generation and, that must go somewhere eventually. So, yeah, I hope that's, that's a satisfactory answer to the question.
Thank you, Adrian. Yeah, I think you wrap it all, very well. Actually, that appears to cover all the questions from our audience today, but if you do have any further questions, please forward them to investor.relations@ommaterials.com. We will make a recording of this webinar available via OM Holdings' LinkedIn page in the coming days. This concludes our webinar for today. Thank you everyone for attending and thank you, Adrian, for the comprehensive update.
Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Jenny.
Thanks.