Morning everyone, thank you for joining the Resolute quarterly activities update. I'm joined here in Perth by David Kelly and James Virgo. I'm also joined with our COO, Terry Holohan, who's currently sitting at Syama at the moment. Welcome to everyone and thanks for your attendance on this call. Terry and I will run through a brief overview of the quarterly report this morning, and then we'll throw it open for some Q&A, which you will be able to provide your questions with through the Teams app there. I'll just kick things off straight away and start with safety. Look, from a Resolute perspective, we're really pleased with our safety performance for the quarter. It was very similar to where we were at in the previous quarter, and it is clearly a strong focus for the company.
Particularly with these times in COVID, focus on maintaining our safety effort is really important and that's what we're seeing the teams doing. From a people perspective, there was also a significant change in the quarter and really also over the last six months. That's right across the board, starting at our director level. There we saw Peter Sullivan, who's been a long-term servant of Resolute, both as an executive and also as a non-executive director, retire. Adrian Reynolds also joined our board. For those of you who may know Adrian, he brings a very strong skill set and technical background in geology. In fact, was a Randgold employee at Syama at certain points in time during his career.
He no doubt will add a lot of value to Resolute over his time on the board. Clearly, there were some executive changes as well, and they were all publicized. What I do just want to point out is that there was also a number of site-based changes in personnel. We've seen quite a few significant changes over the last six months. We've brought in some new expertise, and they're adding value to our operations as we speak. There's still a number of technical positions which are outstanding, both at site and also in Perth. We're making progress on filling those. What it's all about for us is improving that overall technical capacity. That's moving along pretty well at the moment.
One other point which I think is really pleasing is the COVID vaccine program that was rolled out during the quarter in partnership with the Malian and the Senegalese government. Really, fantastic. I think we were able to get over 1,000 of our people vaccinated through the period. That just helps to support our overall workforce health and well-being, as well as the communities in which they work. That obviously is really important for the sustainability of our operations more broadly. I'll just briefly touch on our operations, and then hand over to Terry to get into that in a little bit more detail. As we look at the quarter, it's fair to say it was a mixed bag.
We certainly don't shy away from the fact that we're here to produce gold, and our gold production during the course of the June quarter wasn't up to our own expectations. We're certainly seeing some improvements though, and in certain areas as you work through the quarter, we can see some very positive momentum that's being gathered. Importantly, from the Syama underground perspective, we had the highest levels of mining, of processing and of roaster throughput during the June quarter. That's a really positive outcome. Unfortunately, that was offset by some extended maintenance downtime, scheduled maintenance downtime. As well as that, we probably had some lower grades that were processed, relative to our expectation. Now, that's not something that we're concerned about. Certainly, in the longer term, it might persist for a short period of time.
We're looking and reviewing all of our modeling and draw point management. The good thing is that the caves are propagating well. It's moving along well, but it just feels like potentially there's a little bit of dilution flowing through as we're taking material from those draw points. It's certainly not a long-term issue. We're expecting that we'll see some improvement in that in the near term. It's not something that we have too many concerns about at all. It obviously has impacted our production during the quarter, and it's probably going to have some flow through effects in the second half. From an oxide perspective, again, processing went very, very well and we achieved our highest processing tonnages. Again, the grade unfortunately was a little bit lower.
We had the Cashew material that we were blending with some of our lower grade stocks, which enabled us to get that throughput, which is obviously a good thing. The grades were a little bit lower. We're now getting into the Tabakoroni splay and gap areas, so we're expecting that we'll start to see some improved grades from those operations in the near term. Of course, Mako, terrific. It keeps on keeping on, and it keeps delivering to its budget and our expectations. The guys and girls there are doing a terrific job from a production, processing, and gold delivery perspective. We should congratulate them. Finally, pleasingly, we also completed the power station construction with Aggreko. We're now fully powered up with that. There's a little bit of work which is going on with regards to the battery, but that's moving along.
We experienced a few little cut-over issues in relation to the power station, but it's in and up and running. Why don't I pause there and hand over to Terry, to give you all a perspective of his first couple of months in the operation. He spent a lot of time in fact on site during that period. Also just to give an overview of the ops in more detail. Over to you, Terry.
Thanks, Stuart, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As Stuart mentioned, I'm a recent hire. I've been on board now 73 days, of which 45 I've spent actually on the sites here, majority at Syama. I'm still in the fact-finding mode, obviously. People that know me know that I'm getting my fingernails dirty here. I'm supporting the teams to identify the priorities. They certainly understand a lot of the priorities already, and we're in a process here of prioritizing and systematically improving the operation. I think over the last two years, everybody across the industry has faced a lot of problems with turnover of people deciding that this isn't the life for them anymore. We brought in, as Stuart said, some new people. They're having an immediate impact. I just see that we need one or two key more people to come in.
We're parachuting them in as we speak, really to complement the team and focus on the areas that we're lacking in a bit of expertise. If you look at Syama, as Stuart said, I think the major project, major capital project that we've undertook is the 30-MW power plant. Three units of 10 MW each with a 10-MW lithium battery backup. The keys have been handed over to the ops guys, and we're doing the commissioning. The gremlins we're finding there are software issues, it's a case of just hunting for those and ticking them off. As Stuart said, we've had a few fail-safe situations because of what we call ghosting in the SCADA system. Now we're actually getting to the point where those incidences are reducing. I think that, going forward, is going to significantly reduce our power bills in the future.
In terms of the sulfide, the cave, as Stuart said, it's actually caving. There were some critics out there that thought the hanging wall wouldn't cave. Over the last year, it has started to cave properly, which is great, so we don't have to force it. It's working well in terms of tonnage now. If you look at the last three years, we've processed 1.62 million, and this year we're already at an annualized rate of 2.2 million. In terms of let's just review the performance of that cave. We produced 63,000 oz. We doubled it to about 124,000 oz last year. At the moment, we're on the rate of 140,000 oz, but we're not expecting that because of the roaster shut that we've got scheduled for later this year.
As Stuart mentioned, we have hit record tonnages in mining and in process on the sulfide circuit, and that has given us the opportunity to see where the real bottlenecks are. At the moment, we're in that mode of actually fixing those bottlenecks. I would suggest that some of those will last towards the end of the year. However, it's given us enough work that we won't get rid of all the engineers. We'll actually keep them on next year and carry on de-bottlenecking this operation because we all understand it's a units game as far as we're concerned. The underground mining, that's way ahead of target, and it's made the transition to full owner operator very, very easy. That happened over the last month. Again, that's going to have a significant impact on our costs going forward.
As a result, some 40 expats left site, so we've got a whole wing of the camp here now empty. Perfect for the shutdown that's coming up in October. Everything's going reasonably well from that point of view. In the underground itself, we now have 80 draw points, which is starting to make it flexible from an underground point of view. As a result, we are reorganizing our ROM pad to put in several levels of grade so we can obviously highlight and give preference to the higher-grade materials. We will therefore stockpile the intermediary and medium-grade materials that we can process when we've actually de-bottlenecked the plant over the next 18 months. I think in summary on that side of the operation, we're continuing with the enhancement projects.
There's several projects in the plant as well going ahead the rest of this year, and these are all aimed at improving tonnages and recoveries of the operation there. I'll move over to the oxide circuit. You will remember that at one stage a couple of years ago, we decided not to proceed with much more oxides, look at maybe swinging that mill across to the sulfide circuit. Over the last year, we found a lot more metal, a lot more in satellite pits. We're on track for a 1.5 million annualized rate this year in terms of tonnages. That compares to 1.4 over the last two years. Cashew did catch us out. Because the orientation of the ore body, we were taking far greater dilution than we originally expected, and the grades came down.
We swung across to Tabakoroni, which has higher grades. The swing, however, did take us three months because of mobilizing more equipment and doing the strip, et c. That's caused us to regroup and rethink our strategy, given that we've got several pits in front of us over the next two years. The strategy has changed now to have two to three pits ready at all times. When I say ready, that means in terms of strip, equipment around, and grade control, we've got the ultimate flexibility in front of us. This, I know Gerald Whittle will be very proud of us with that change in philosophy. In terms of Mako, as Stuart said, Mako's ticking along really well. The cut back has gone well this year. It's still ticking around the 2+ million tonnage rates.
The ounce profile, we expected the grades to come down. They have significantly come down. Although this year, they're about 10% of where we expected. We think that's going to be on track or just slightly above. What we're doing as we speak now, we took the mill off in June. We're installing the optimizer equipment. The last piece of equipment arrived on site in July. That'll be able to give us better information from the mill. We don't have to stop it to check the liners anymore, and it'll improve the productivity significantly. We did inspect the mill. I was very fortunate that I was here in June when we stopped that, so we climbed inside and had a look at the liners and the plates.
I'd like to report that that mill is in excellent condition, given it's had four years of some of the hardest rock, some of the hardest basalts that it's had to treat. What's the future of Mako? As we see it, again, it's just a units game. We're running the mill about 6.9 MW for various reasons, and most of those are because the ancillary equipment, the cheaper capital items are not operating, are not capable of pushing more. We're systematically looking at that. We're looking at opening that mill. It does have a capacity of 8 MW, and I won't be happy until we get to 8 MW. I think everybody understands that. In terms of the longer term, I'm looking for consolidation here with a lot of projects that we've already put in place. It's a numbers game.
We now need to take on board all these enhancement projects and continue debottlenecking all our three mainstreams over the next year. I think Stuart will touch on the exploration side. I know we've got plenty of materials coming up in the pipeline, so I think we've got a reasonable future. In terms of reasonable, I think we've got a great future. My apologies. In summary, I've been here a short time, but I know my way around these types of operations. I'm getting to the crux of all the issues here, all the technicalities and some of it's people, but very little of it is people. I think most of it is actually now having the expertise, the engineers, to drive the process a little bit harder. I got here, the people were a little bit tired, but I think they're all re-energized now.
We've got some great people here. We're parachuting some experts that understand these types of operations. I certainly think the projects that we've got in the pipeline already are going to give us benefits, certainly at the end of, in the Q4 this year and certainly next year. In terms of de-bottlenecking, we've just got to prioritize now and make those improvements. We're not looking at this stage at major capital items.
As I say, they're mostly ancillaries. I think we'll see the improvement, as I say, over the next 18 months. I think as an operations CEO, it's my job not to be happy. I'm certainly encouraged by all the opportunities in short, medium, and longer term, and I expect to be able to give good news progress as we hit all these key milestones over the next at least two years. In summary, as I see, good asset, good people, good future. Thank you, Stuart.
Great. Thanks very much, Terry. Appreciate those words. Look, I'll just touch on a couple of the other points in the quarterly now before we head over to questions. Specifically looking at Bibiani. People are obviously very aware of the process we went through with Bibiani in terms of the sale and the termination of the sale agreement. What's been particularly encouraging there is that we've had a number of people who were previously engaged in the process, continue to express their interest. We continue to work through the process. We'll keep you all posted if and when there is something to let you all know about on that front. From an exploration perspective, as Terry mentioned, our focus is on near mine exploration activity. The exploration team throughout Syama has had a number of drills that are going particularly around Tabakoroni and the underground there.
We're seeing some really positive indicators come through from Tabakoroni underground, even since the update that we provided to the reserve and resource earlier in this year. We're also getting some positive oxide hits, particularly up to the north. In the older areas of A21, which we will move back to towards the end of this year or early next year. The Beta pits and areas around there look pretty good from an oxide perspective. Again, that's just part of that overall oxide strategy that we've deployed since we completed the main Tabakoroni pits, which has been to look at those smaller satellite type areas. Areas that we can get in and out of within sort of a 12-month period, and where we can keep reasonable grades up to the oxide plant.
That way we can capture as much oxide benefit as we possibly can. That's moving along well. We're also having a bit of a focus at Mako as well around securing some additional areas that might, or that look a bit prospective and might be able to extend the mine life at Mako. Guinea exploration is also moving along really well, but obviously that's more greenfields. Look, we'll be looking to provide an update, particularly around Tabakoroni, fairly shortly. Just turning to the balance sheet and the cash flow. We've incorporated our usual cash flow graph there on page six, which just sets out the movements in cash during the course of the quarter. Very clearly, we made a debt repayment of $20 million in May, and that's the first step in terms of our de-gearing profile.
One thing that I would highlight is that there was quite a balance of bullion on hand at the end of the year. Nothing untoward there other than the timing of the gold pools at the 30th of June. That's the only reason you see that bullion balance just stick up there, a little bit more proud than what it has done previously. At the end of the quarter, we finished with a cash bullion of AUD 89 million. Our gross debt was AUD 309 million, and that gives us a net debt position of AUD 280 odd million, which was about AUD 3 million lower than what it was in the prior quarter. We continue to make positive inroads into our hedging balance. Again, you can just see our hedging position there on page seven.
I guess it's reflected in the average realized price that we were able to achieve for our gold, which was $1,714 relative to an $1,815 spot price. The differential there relates to some of those older contracts which are well and truly out of the money. We still have a few $1,600 hedges or, sorry, contracts that sit within that profile. They'll be rolling off sort of within the next three to four months. One thing you'll also notice that we've just taken the opportunity to put some contracts in place in Euros. The Euro and the West African CFA are pegged, so that just gives us a natural hedge that flows through there. We are putting hedges in Euro these days as well. We continue to work with the tax authorities in Mali.
We have nothing to update the market on that front at this point in time. I guess it's to be a little expected given the political challenges that they've had there over, certainly during the last quarter with the coup. Obviously, we'll keep you posted. Our people are making good progress in terms of the relationships and putting our position forwards. We are also offsetting our royalty and other tax payments from Syama against those VAT balances. That is one way that as we've discussed, being able to capitalize on the VAT which we'd paid. Finally, I'll just turn to the guidance. Look, from a guidance perspective, clearly, we have downgraded our full-year guidance. The downgrade is reflective of the shortfall in the first half of this year.
We've discussed the first half, there was some operational type issues from a maintenance perspective in terms of unscheduled, and we had a few issues in the first quarter. Also, it's a grade matter that we've spoken about as well. Not a lot of opportunity to catch up in the second half of this year. We have the roaster shutdown, which is a 36-day shut in October and November. We're obviously swinging across to Tabakoroni, and we're doing a bit more stripping activity as we get into that satellite oxide strategy that Terry mentioned. There's just not that much opportunity to pick up through the course of the second half. As I also mentioned around the grades at the Syama underground, we're probably expecting a continuation of that for the next little period of time as well before we come out of that.
Look, very much the unit cost, the all-in sustaining cost is impacted by the production. Our overall cost base is broadly the same. If you look at our total costs, not a significant change to our expectations on that front. It's really denominator driven through there. Look, I think with that, I might pause and open up the questions. We have one question that has gone onto the platform. Please, in fact, we have three questions that have gone on the platform. If you do have any questions, please feel free to type them into the live event Q&A. What we'll do is, I'll just summarize the questions, and then Terry or myself will respond to those. We'll get cracking on this first one, which is, can we comment on the cave and is overdrawing causing the dilution?
Look, I think at the outset it looks like that we're still working through some of those points. The cave is working. Everything is working well. We just got to figure out where some of that grade's gone. We are working through some pretty complex cave flow models to ensure that we get a really full understanding of that. Terry, did you have anything else that you wanted to add to that?
Yes, I just have a comment that the Snowden Geotech always said that the hanging wall would cave, but what tended to happen is it took a bit of time to get moving. We did pick up a little bit of rubbish at the initial first two years coming in from the footwall, which is a lot more friable material. We think some of that did creep into the system. However, it's not confirmed. The hanging wall has certainly taken over now, and so we think it's a temporary issue. We are modeling it. There are some areas that could have been overdrawn, but I'd suggest that given that now we have that flexibility, we can actually control that to a far better extent going forward.
Yep. We're not expecting any change to the overall grades or life of mine production profile from there. Second part of the question, VAT receivable and broader situation in Mali update. I think I just touched on that. VAT receivable, we continue to pay VAT, but we are offsetting our royalties and other taxes against that VAT. Sometimes it's a positive, sometimes it's a negative balance, obviously, depending on what we're paying and the gold that's produced. We are making inroads to a degree into that. We'll come out with our half year results in one month or so's time, and that VAT balance will be identifiable there. Really things haven't changed too much.
In terms of the broader situation in Mali, obviously, we went through, I guess, a second phase of the coup, which saw the President and the Vice President and the Prime Minister replaced. That, again, caused obviously some very high-level disruption. As we look at it from our operations, there was some disruption that was occurring prior to the actual event occurring. We were prepared in terms of the fuel, the explosives and the other consumable types of things that we need to operate our mine. We had pretty reasonable stocks of all of that available to us. Fuel trucks kept coming in. We didn't really see any changes at the borders or anything like that. In terms of the political situation, again, we really haven't seen any specific disruptors to our operations.
Where we are seeing some slowness is just in the mechanics around resolving our tax position, resolving our convention at Abidjan, that's the amendment convention. Some of those sorts of things are just not moving as we would hope they would move because of, I guess, the instability within the government at this stage. We're still hearing that elections will roll out in February next year. There hasn't been any change to that. I guess, we'll just have to watch this space, and we'll just have to be prepared for those eventualities in terms of making sure we have all of those consumables available to us. How comfortable are we with the balance sheet? What potential is there to free up working capital? I think maybe I've just answered that in the prior question, we need to maintain those consumable stocks.
Really hard to release things like fuel or explosives or other reagents and consumable type things at this one point in time, just because we are in a fairly remote place. It's a truck in for all of those sorts of things, either generally from Dakar or from Abidjan. We've got borders to cross and those sorts of things. We do need to be pretty self-sufficient in the way that we operate. We're going to have to manage that. I think from a working cap perspective, when I look at our accounts payable, they're broadly there. Our other inventories of materials, gold, that sort of stuff, there's no particular issues with any of that. I think our balance sheet's reasonably well set. Clearly from a balance sheet strength perspective, our focus is around debt repayment.
Debt repayment comes from operational performance and cash flow generation for us. That's really important. If we are able to resolve something with Bibiani, then the proceeds will be directly applied to reduce debt. I would say that, but we'll have to wait and see what happens with Bibiani. Things are moving, though, with that. As we all know, we have a number of other listed investments in some African explorers. They're liquid investments. They're all tradable. Potentially there's other opportunities there.
Again, we're watching that space. Hopefully that's answered those three questions. Well, with that, everyone, I would thank you all for your attendance at the call today. Thank you, Terry, for your overview on everything, and Tavistock for organizing. If anyone does have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to me at any stage, and very happy to either set up a call or we can get into a bit of an email exchange. I think with that, we'll wrap the call up. Thanks again.