2020 quarterly conference call and investor webinar. All investors are in listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a Q&A. If you would like to ask a question please enter it in the Q&A panel within Zoom. Alternatively, for those who have joined via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand, you'll be unmuted when it is your turn to ask a question. I'll now hand over to Perseus Mining Managing Director and CEO, Jeff Quartermaine, who is joined by Group General Manager of Technical Services, Paul Thompson. Thank you, Jeff.
Thanks very much, Nathan. May I also say, welcome to this conference call to discuss our quarterly report that was released to the market earlier today. As Nathan said, I'm joined on the line by Paul Thompson. Paul is our Head of Technical Services and will be heading up our business growth function as we move forward, and I'll be discussing that particular matter towards the end of this presentation. Well, 2020 has been and gone, and thank goodness for that I can hear many of you saying. It has been a very tough year in many ways for a lot of people, with tremendous financial and human costs being incurred as a result of COVID right around the globe.
There's been some fairly worrying shifts in geopolitical relationships and a steady weakening of the institutions that some of us have come to rely on for many years for security and leadership. Now, depressing as all that sounds, and it does sound depressing, looking backwards from Perseus' perspective, 2020, and the fourth quarter in particular, was not so bad, and in many respects, it was a period of very high achievement for the company, notwithstanding everything that was going on around us. Not only have our first two gold mining operations at Edikan in Ghana and Sissingué in Côte d'Ivoire performed very well, delivering yet another strong quarter of gold production. That, with the help of a buoyant gold prices, allowed us to generate a material amount of cash.
In spite of COVID-19 and a volatile presidential election campaign in Côte d'Ivoire, we also managed to complete the development of our third gold mine, Yaouré. In the process of doing this, we've put Perseus firmly into a position where we now have the production base that will enable us to deliver on our corporate objective of producing more than 500,000 oz of gold per year at a cash margin of more than $400 per ounce. In summary, Perseus has come through 2020 reasonably well and is now in a very good place. As I've said before this is the result of a lot of hard work by our very dedicated and professional team of employees over a number of years. May I say credit where credit's due, the team at all levels is doing very well, and long may that continue.
For those of you who haven't had an opportunity to read the quarterly as yet, let me summarize it for you before drilling down onto a couple of important issues. Firstly, this quarter, as I said, our Edikan and Sissingué mines continued to perform very strongly. Combined, the two mines, together with a small contribution from Yaouré, produced 68,614 oz of gold at a production cost of $915 an ounce or a weighted average cost of $1,036 per ounce. Our average cash margin on each ounce of gold produced from Edikan and Sissingué was $651 an ounce, which exceeded our stated strategic target of $400 an ounce by more than 50% and generated notional cash flow from the operations of $45 million for the quarter. On a full year basis, that worked out at around $150 million of notional cash flow.
As you see, it's generating quite a lot of cash at the moment. Production for the quarter was about in line with the previous quarter. In fact, I think it was like 100 oz less, and our all-in site costs were $72 an ounce higher than the prior quarter, but this was offset by a $92 per ounce increase in the weighted average sales price achieved during the period. That meant an increase in our margin of $20 per ounce during the quarter. Now, at the same time, our implementation of our strategy for value creation through developing in-house new projects continued at pace, largely funded from internal cash resources and cash flows. We managed to complete the development of Yaouré ahead of time and under budget.
In fact, it was quite a thrill to announce on the 17th of December that we'd achieved our stretch target of pouring first gold in December 2020, five weeks ahead of the contracted date. Since then, we've been gradually winding up both mining and processing activities at Yaouré, and by the time we make our next quarterly report in April, I expect that we'll be talking about three fully operational mines instead of two, and all of which will hopefully, at that stage, be producing very significant quantities of gold. Looking to the future, the production and cost guidance for the market for the next six months is as follows. We believe in terms of, or we're forecasting in terms of production, producing in the range of 175,000 oz - 190,000 oz.
We're expecting to do that at all-in site costs in the range of $ 950-$ 1,150 an ounce. Of the production for this current period, we're saying about 50% of that will come from Edikan, 27% from Yaouré, and 23% from Sissingué. I do expect that these proportions will change as the year unfolds, as Yaouré's mill feed becomes 100% high-grade fresh ore from the CMA pit. For the next six months, this is the way that we do expect it to work out at this particular point in time. We still have a long way to go, and plenty can go wrong. Given our performance to date so far this quarter, so up to the 18th, I guess it is, I've got the data. We're very confident of achieving the guidance that we've provided to the market, and doing quite well.
I mean, certainly rolling out on a daily basis, we're well and truly, in fact, we're towards the top end of that range. I should say this, it'd be quite remiss of me not to add a caveat to these forecasts and say that our forecast performance is, of course, subject to what happens with COVID. We got through the first wave of COVID relatively unscathed. What we are starting to see now is the early stages of what looks like a second wave of COVID. Infection rates in both Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire are steadily climbing according to the official numbers. We have, of course, adapted our plans to suit this new wave. Whether this is sufficient for us to remain unaffected as we were previously does remain to be seen.
It is a real issue, and anyone who believes that we're beyond that risk or that threat is not looking carefully at the situation. Finally, in terms of finance, throughout the December quarter, Perseus managed to maintain its balance sheet strength through strong cash flows and prudent financial management. The cash margin of $651 per ounce achieved this quarter that I referred to earlier, gave us the ability to generate notional cash flow from operations of $ 44.6 million, or it's about $ 1.5 million more than last quarter. As I said, on an annualized basis, about $150 million for the full calendar year. Taking this into account and allowing for the fact that during the quarter, we invested about $62 million in the development of Yaouré. We funded exploration at all three sites. We paid income tax in Ghana. We paid corporate overheads.
We paid a maiden dividend in Côte d'Ivoire and withholding tax associated with that. We retired $ 20 million of corporate debt. That left our cash and bullion balance at the end of December of $118 million. Given that we had paid down our debt to $130 million, that meant we had a net cash balance of $11.9 million at the end of the quarter, which was about $9 million more than it was at the end of September. Not a bad position to be in given that we have largely funded the development of that mine and ended up relatively debt-free. To date at Yaouré, we have paid about $237 million in cash or 89% of the total $265 million development cost budget. That means that there's about or up to $28 million remains to be paid.
I mean, we believe it'll be less than that. That's what will take us up to the budgeted amount. Given that we had $119 million of cash and bullion on hand at the end of the year, obviously the cost to complete the development is fully covered. That doesn't even take into account the future cash flow from operations over the next three or four months, which, as I said, we believe are going to be extremely strong. That pretty much sums up the December quarter. As I mentioned at the outset, it's been a reasonably solid performance by the company. One that has set Perseus up very well for the future. As usual, the quarterly report does contain an enormous amount of detail on all aspects of our business. It is reasonably self-explanatory if you wish to look through the detail.
I can't do justice to all of the details in that report on this call, I'm not even going to try. What I would like to do is to focus in on two subjects that I think will be interesting to shareholders before opening up for Q&A. These subjects are firstly, the progress at the Yaouré mine development. I'll go into a bit more detail on that. Then I'd like to talk in more detail about our plans for future growth of the business. Turning first to the development of Yaouré. This quarter, we entered the home stretch of the development of Yaouré, and like all good thoroughbreds, we really powered home. Much so that we were able to achieve that stretch target of ours of pouring gold in December, 17th of December, as I said earlier.
Five weeks ahead of schedule, that was a very pleasing situation. For those of you who have been following our progress by watching the drone video footage that we've been posting on our website each month, you won't be surprised by the achievement. Things have been moving along very smartly on that site for some time now. In fact, excellent progress has been achieved consistently since the start of construction. It's not just in the last quarter. Not only that, I'm very proud to say that it's been carried out in a very safe manner with minimal costs in terms of injury to our workforce. We passed a total of 5 million man-hours on the project during the quarter. We recorded over that time a single lost time incident, which unfortunately occurred in July.
Notwithstanding this incident, it's a very credible safety record in any jurisdiction, let alone in West Africa. It's a credit to the site leadership and their teams, including our contractors and subcontractors. All of whom have been working under fairly testing conditions, thanks to the COVID virus. I won't go through all the details of the progress on the site chapter and verse. The results speak pretty much for themselves. It is fair to say that strong progress happened across all work fronts during the quarter. On the 3rd of November, we achieved practical completion on the tailings storage facility. This was the thing that we were a little bit concerned about, because clearly you're vulnerable to wet weather there. On the 12th, we had first ore to the crusher. 22nd of November, we got first power, first 90 kV power into the Yaouré substation.
We were able to establish permanent supply by the 27th and put first ore into the mill on that day. On the 17th, as I said, we poured our first gold. Across the quarter, we recovered about 2,700 oz of gold, 2,687, and poured 550 oz by month-end. For me to say that the commissioning process has been faultless is simply not the case. We have had the usual sorts of teething challenges that happen when you're commissioning an industrial facility like this. Nothing has occurred to date that couldn't be solved fairly quickly, and progressively, we're seeing the plant performance incrementally improve in all key areas, including runtime throughput rate, gold recovery, and of course, head grade of the mill feed. We do expect this improvement to continue during the course of this quarter.
Whether we declare commercial production this quarter or not, or whether we wait to check performance feeding fresh ore at the mill in the June quarter remains to be seen. We are certainly expecting to see excellent performance from the plant, which has been very well designed, fabricated, and constructed, and we look forward to keeping the market informed on progress as we go forward. I just mentioned the possibility of us commissioning the plant using fresh ore. Let me just explain that situation a little more clearly. Our mining contractor, EPSA Internacional, has been on site now for quite a while. They started up around August. In this time they've done a very good job. All the necessary equipment, so trucks, diggers, drills, loaders, et cetera, are on site, and they're working reliably.
They recruited and trained their workforce. The progress that they've been making in removing waste from the CMA pit and moving material from the decommissioned heap leach pads to the run of mine stockpile has been very impressive. Much so that at current rates of operation, it looks very much that we will actually start mining fresh ore in the CMA pit quite a bit earlier than the originally targeted date of July this year. We think it could come a bit earlier than that.
I'm not willing at this particular point to put an exact date on when this will occur, but if it makes sense, what we would consider doing is rather than completing commissioning using oxide ore only, we'll delay the declaration of commercial production, which after all is largely an accounting milestone in any event, to enable commissioning using fresh ore as well. By doing so, we'll gain further assurance that our plant will operate to spec under any, or under all conditions of operation. Something that is very important given our optimism about materially extending the life of Yaouré, but more about that in a moment. As we now move into full scale operations, we're very confident that the final cost of the development will come in under the $265 million budget. I mentioned that before.
We expect that all of the accounts associated with construction will have been paid or at least agreed by the end of March. We should have a very good idea on that, where that's landed by the next time we report to the market. Certainly my view, my expectation is that we'll come in under the budgeted amount. All in all, Yaouré's been terrific actually and has moved forward very nicely under reasonably trying circumstances with the effects of COVID in the background. The next issue that I'd like to highlight before going to Q&A is very important. It's a very important matter for Perseus, and this is our strategy for continuing the growth of the company and building on the very solid start that we've made to date in building an international gold company of some substance.
With the commissioning and progressive ramp-up at Yaouré generally running to plan, we are fairly comfortable that we are at a level where we can produce, or we will be at a level later this year of producing at a rate of 500,000 oz a year. What we need to do now is to actively work to incrementally increase our inventory of Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves by either inorganic or organic means. In the short term, what that means is that Perseus' main focus is going to be on simply replacing mining depletions through organic growth while setting ourselves up for longer term organic growth. To achieve this, the emphasis over the next six months will be placed on looking at near mine deposits and working to incrementally increase Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves. We've got some very interesting projects underway there.
At Yaouré, initial resource drilling has recently been completed at the CMA South, Govisou, Angovia 2, and Sayikro deposits. All of these deposits are within 10 km of the processing plant, and if I'm not mistaken, all of them have been discovered by Perseus since we took over this property. Maybe Angovia 2 might have been known in the past, but certainly the work that we've done in the last couple of years have identified these targets. Resource potential will be assessed, particularly at CMA South, Govisou, and Angovia 2 in the March quarter. Depending on results, further drilling will be completed, and if successful, then we'd expect that Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves could be added to the inventory before the end of June 2021. At Sissingué, or near Sissingué, drilling has been completed at the Antoinette, Véronique, and Juliette deposits located on the Bagoé exploration permit, which we acquired last year.
A DFS for the development of these deposits is scheduled to be completed by the end of this March quarter, with the expectation that additional resources and reserves could be added to the inventory at Sissingué and materially extend the life of the mine operation there. I have to say that the delivery of resources and reserves in the DFS by the end of March is contingent on the turnaround time of the assays that are currently at the laboratory. Things are moving fairly slowly in Côte d'Ivoire at the moment, that could put those target dates at risk. Nevertheless, all the drilling's been done, we have received quite a few results and certainly we're pretty interested in what we received. That'll be put into a full study as this quarter unfolds.
Now at Edikan, a drilling program completed on the Esuajah South deposit, is expected to convert a modest amount of the Inferred Mineral Resource into Ore Reserve, and thereby improving the economic viability of the proposed underground project there. Drilling's also been completed recently at Mampong South, evaluation of the resource potential and requirements for further drilling to convert to Ore Reserves will be assessed in the coming quarter. If that stacks up the way we hope, then we will be looking to implement that program during the June quarter. In the short term, there's quite a lot to get on with. In the medium term, beyond the June quarter, we've got several fairly large targets that have been identified for conversion to Mineral Resources and possibly into Ore Reserves.
Each of these targets are also close to our operating sites, but will take a little bit more work to mature. The preferred target for organic growth at Yaouré is clearly the CMA Underground, which we've talked about in the past, as well as a number of other targets that have come as a result of initial interpretation of the 3D seismic work that was completed on the site late last year or in the second half of last year. Those targets are looking very interesting indeed. At Edikan, subject to gaining access for drilling, a program's planned at the Breman prospect, which is on the Agyakusu permit, where very significant mineralization has been identified on surface in artisanal mine workings. That mineralization is very reminiscent of the granite ore bodies that we've been mining at Edikan now for almost 10 years.
Getting access to that area is something that has eluded us for the best part of 2020. We are in competition with artisanal miners in the area. With the completion of the electoral process in early December in Ghana, we think that going forward, we may be more successful in getting access to that land that we are entitled to do. Now at Sissingué, we also believe that, aside from Véronique, Juliette, and Antoinette, we believe that there is fairly significant potential on that Bagoé area that hasn't really been followed up at all at this particular point. As well as proving up those currently known Mineral Resources, we'll certainly be pushing out and we have some very interesting thoughts around what might come from that ground as well.
If we look further into the future, in addition to the near mine organic growth, we believe that medium to longer -term organic growth involves us identifying new exploration opportunities, not only in Côte d'Ivoire and in Ghana, but also elsewhere in West Africa and potentially beyond. We've established a team very capable of working in this way to identify prospective areas, particularly in areas which have got little or no exploration history and have been underexplored. Believe it or not, there are some such areas in our neighborhood. The potential at Dompoase and the DML permits in Ghana, for instance, and also Minignan in Côte d'Ivoire, they're the first results of the implementation of our grassroots exploration strategy. The time horizon on this is clearly 7 - 10 years.
It is going to take some time, and it is going to take some investment, but we do believe that in the longer term, we can continue to fill our pipeline of development opportunities through the drill bit. When it comes to potential inorganic business growth, opportunities involving either mergers or acquisitions, we've also regularly assessed these using our in-house technical and commercial teams. Given the challenges of implementing value-accretive M&A and applying strict financial discipline when we're assessing opportunities in the current strong gold price environment, we're not pinning our hopes on this activity for delivering growth in the immediate future. Preferring instead to focus on near mine and early-stage exploration growth opportunities.
It should, however, be noted that in the last five years, Perseus has executed two strategic acquisitions in the form of Amara Mining PLC that yielded the Yaouré project. More recently, the acquisition of Exore Resources that delivered the Bagoé project to the company. Both of these acquisitions have materially added to the value of Perseus and are indicative of the fact that we do have the capacity to successfully transact when the right opportunity presents. Therein lies the key, when the opportunity presents and when it's transactable. It's not that we don't look at opportunities, but they have to fit a fairly tight set of criteria for us to execute. The point is that, having now got Yaouré up and running, we're not rocking back on our heels and wondering what's next.
We're actively involved in shaping the future of this company and doing it in a way that will be value accretive for shareholders. News flow over the next few quarters will reveal progress, and I do expect that there will be a steady stream of positive news to share with you as we push forward. In conclusion, as I said at the start of the call, the December quarter has been yet another solid quarter for Perseus, as we promised it would be. We expect to push on from here, and in successive quarters, we expect to report steadily increasing production from our three mines. With that steadily increasing production will come steadily increasing cash flow, earnings per share, cash flow per share. The March quarter, as I mentioned, has started very, very well at Edikan and Sissingué.
As I said, Yaouré is steadily building on all key parameters, definitely trending in the right direction. Financially, we're getting stronger by the day as a result of that solid production, containment of costs, and of course, the strong gold price, which I noticed this morning has had a very nice little bounce. Exploration-wise, it's clear that from what I've said that we have a clear plan ahead of us. We have a budget, and we're getting on with the task of organically growing our business and creating value for shareholders. In our opinion, it's really only a matter of time now before the quality of Perseus's performance, and earning capacity, not to mention the asset base, is recognized by the broader market.
I sincerely hope that all existing shareholders and all prospective shareholders listening to this teleconference will be on board for the journey because it should be fun. Thanks very much for listening, and now very happy to take any questions that you might have. Thank you.
Thank you, Jeff. Just to reiterate, if you would like to ask a question, please enter it in the Q&A panel within Zoom. For those of you who have joined via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. You will be unmuted briefly when it is your turn to ask a question. Jeff, your first two questions are from Nick Herbert at Credit Suisse. The first question is: Can you comment on Yaouré mined grade reconciliation versus block model?
On that particular thing, at this particular, like today, the answer is no. We're putting through the oxide material coming from the heap leach. As anyone who has processed heap leach, old heap leach material knows is that from one day to the next, the grade bounces around a fair bit, but overall, it's generally in line. We haven't completed a full formal reconciliation. We do track it day to day, and it is reasonably in line with our expectations, which is pleasing. Some days we get spectacularly good grade, other days it's not as good, but overall, it's generally tracking properly.
Thank you. Just the second one from Nick. Can you talk to the program of works at Exore's ground beyond March quarter? How are you thinking about first conceivable contribution from that ground subject to DFS results? Is that at the end of Sissingué's current mine plan or concurrently?
Yeah. What we're looking at there, the process going forward for those three deposits is that, as I said, we've done the drilling, we're waiting for results right now. We're waiting for the full set of results. As soon as those are all together, we'll finish the resource estimate and do an optimized mine plan. We expect that all of that will be done by the end of March. As I said, the results are driven through. We're also running concurrently, a group of consultants are preparing our environmental and social impact assessment. That'll be completed in the next couple of weeks, I would expect. All of this together will then be put together into the feasibility study, which will be submitted to the Minerals Commission, hopefully by the end of March.
We think that from that point forward, it'll probably take about 12 months or so to go through the approval process of the government. That's what we're working to, a timeline like that. While that's occurring, we'll be finishing the mining at the Sissingué deposits and moving over to Fimbiasso, which is a satellite deposit that's located within trucking distance of Sissingué. That has about, in total, about 18 months or more to go from now. We would think that it's quite possible we'll extend that beyond that. What we would ideally like to do is to finish mining in Fimbiasso, having proven up our ability to truck ore back to the Sissingué processing facility.
Then when that's done, move the trucking operation down to the Véronique, Antoinette, Juliette deposits, et cetera, et cetera, and just simply continue to move material back to the processing facility. That's the plan as far as the three known deposits are concerned. As I mentioned when talking about organic growth, we'll, during that entire period, be working on exploring around those deposits and just seeing what sorts of extensions we can find there. Also too, stepping out a little bit further and maybe replicating those deposits further away on the Bagoé tenement. I think, the work is set out ahead of us. We are very excited about that, actually. I mean, the Sissingué mine is, the operation there is extremely efficient. We've got a great team of people who've got good relationships in the community.
Having the opportunity to extend the life of that project significantly is actually, it's quite a bonus for Perseus because whilst Sissingué is relatively small in terms of ounce contribution, it does generate a lot of cash because the costs are relatively low. It's something that we would like to continue doing for as long as we possibly can.
Thank you. Your next questions are from Reg Spencer at Canaccord. He said, for the first one: Is there a risk the Fimbiasso permit may not be granted when expected? Is there a risk of a production gap?
Okay. Well, let me just address that first. Yeah, look, there is a risk. However, we do expect that that license will be issued, if not this week, then next week, because there's the CIM, Conseil des Ministres meetings regularly scheduled. Sorry, this week or two weeks from now when they have the next one. They're meeting every two weeks now in Côte d'Ivoire. We're expecting it at any moment. We were expecting to get that license late last year. However, the presidential election got in the way of it and things were put on the back burner while they all went out and did their electioneering. The government's got back to work since then, and we will be on the agenda either at this current meeting or the next, we believe. We're not anticipating a big delay.
If you look at it from the government's perspective, if there was a delay in the licensing being granted and a gap in our mining, I mean, the potential would be that Sissingué would come to an end. With that would be the 500 or so people who are employed directly or indirectly around the Sissingué mine would no longer have work. The benefits that flow freely to the local trust fund to build infrastructure, and support livelihood, et cetera, would come to an immediate halt. I would think that the community would be very unhappy with the government if that was to happen. Certainly we have the support of the community. I believe we have the support of the elected officials and the bureaucracy, and it's really just a matter of time to allow processes to follow their course.
To answer your question directly, is there a risk? Yes, there is a risk. We believe that that's fairly minimal.
Thank you. The next question is regarding resource drilling at Bagoé. Are you seeing any major delays with assay turnaround? Is there a risk of this on timelines for the project?
Yeah. As I mentioned, it has been a little bit slow coming through the lab. Certainly since the start of the new year. That is something that I did mention earlier on as a risk. We would like to think that things will spark up now, as January is unfolding and that we'll get those back fairly quickly. If the DFS isn't completed in March, it will be completed fairly shortly thereafter. I think, we'll be in reasonable shape. I'm not sure, Paul was having some audio challenges, I think.
I'm online now, Jeff.
You're online, Paul. I think that's correct, isn't it? If we don't get finished at the end of March, it won't take hugely long after that to finish that work.
Yeah. Turnaround times are about five weeks at the moment in assays, and the last ones went off last week. It'll be sort of the end of March, some time in April probably when we finish based on that.
Thank you. The next question from Reg is, can you please repeat those asset splits you mentioned at the start of the call for the second half 2021 guidance?
Sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand that question.
He asked if you could repeat the asset splits you mentioned.
Right.
At the start of the call for the second half of 2021 guidance.
Well, we haven't given the assets. Well, not surely assets, what I said was this. The guidance for the first half of the year, up to June, is 175,000 oz-190,000 oz. That'll be split 50% Edikan, 27%, 23%. I haven't given guidance for the second half of the year, at this particular point in time. I can say this without going too far offline here, that the second half will produce quite a bit more gold than the first half of the year. The reason being is that the second half of the year will, for the entire six-month period, be processing ore from the CMA deposit, which is the high-grade deposit at Yaouré. The contribution from Yaouré will increase quite significantly in that period of time.
As a result of that, Edikan's relative proportion will drop, and as will Sissingué. I might say that actually Edikan's got a fairly strong second half coming up as well. We haven't put that data into the market as yet. As we firm that up and as we get more confidence in the way the plants are running, et cetera, we'll share that with the market.
Thank you. The last one, is Esuajah South underground still achievable in 2022?
Esuajah South underground is certainly achievable. Where we sit right now, is that, as Paul will confirm, we have finished the extra drilling we did. We've just recently completed further conversations with prospective mining contractors and have received revised pricing on the underground mining. In the next week or so, that new data will be fed back into our models and we'll look at the economic viability of the project. If it stacks up, then there's no reason why we couldn't go forward straight away, because all the design has been done. People have been moved from the area, the area is fenced, et cetera. We are ready to move forward. Look, it comes down to a question of capital allocation and, where can Perseus best deploy its funds to generate the best outcomes for shareholders.
If the economics at Esuajah South are marginal, we may take the view that we're better served putting our money into another venture rather than going there. I don't want to preempt that decision one way or the other. We want to look at the facts first before we can make a decision. The reason why it has been delayed from the original schedule is that there have been some changes in terms of labor regulations in Ghana, in terms of the use of local labor in underground mining operations. We want to make sure that our mining contractor, whoever that may be, has properly allowed for all of those regulatory changes in the pricing that they've given us.
There is absolutely no upside whatsoever for anybody in making a mistake on that and then getting into the operation, then finding out that it's costing more from a labor point of view. At the end of the day, someone's got to pay the costs, it's either us or it's the contractor. We'd prefer that we not be saddled with that particular incremental cost. It is important that we check this out and that we have a very clear understanding, contractual relationship with the contractor, so that there's no misapprehension as to the allocation of costs as we go forward. If we can achieve that, then we'd be delighted to get on with Esuajah South.
Not only because it adds obviously to our production and cash flow in the immediate term, but also what it does as a company is that it gives us a relatively low cost, low risk on track to underground mining. All of our pits so far have been open pit. We do know that the prospects of having a significant underground mine at Yaouré are quite large. What we would like to do, I guess, is to make sure that we as a company are up to the task of running a large underground mine or a prolific underground mine before we actually get to that particular point. In some sense, this is an opportunity for us to cut our teeth just as developing Sissingué was an opportunity for us to cut our teeth in Côte d'Ivoire, and we followed that on with the Yaouré development.
Esuajah South we see as an opportunity for us to get familiar with the running underground mines as Perseus. I must say that we've got a lot of people in our staff who have got absolutely wealth of underground mining experience individually. We as a corporation haven't done it before. From that point of view, it is something we would like to do. As I said, we want to make absolute sure that we know what we're doing before we move down in that direction.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Jeff for closing remarks.
Okay. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks very much for listening to this call today. As I said, it has been a good quarter for us. We are in a very good place. We're very excited about the future. We would certainly encourage you to continue supporting the company and those who aren't shareholders, taking a very good look at it because I think this represents extraordinarily good value where we're currently positioned and where we're going. Thank you very much, and we'll speak again at the end of the March quarter.