Everyone attending this Mining Forum Americas. I am Wayne Bramwell, I am the Managing Director and CEO of Westgold Resources. Today's presentation really only has three objectives. For those of you taking notes in the audience, please write down three bullet points. WGX, the code. Westgold 4-5-6, which encapsulates our three-year plan. The last word, opportunity. Let us try and unpack this. Before I start, Westgold is an unhedged ASX 100 mid-tier gold producer. This is what we look like today.
Four operating hubs across Western Australia, a portfolio of long life assets, and an organic growth plan, which we have recently announced to the market. Today's market cap just shy of $4 billion, and we are sitting on 4 million ounces of resource. The three-year outlook, is what I will speak to in this presentation, shows a fully funded plan taking our current production from just shy of 400,000 ounces to over 500,000 by FY 2029. The platform for growth. The platform for growth in this company is already in place.
Westgold has really transitioned in its journey, and the company today is 10 years old. In the last three years or four years, it has really transitioned from a turnaround story, starting in FY 2022, to a growth story. You can see the dip in production in FY 2024, where we had to slow the business down to go faster. Post the acquisition of the Beta Hunt assets from Karora, you have seen the production lift to 387,000 ounces delivered in FY 2026. With that production came significant growth in our treasury, with the business closing at June 30th with over $600 million in cash and liquids.
Something which is not well understood about this little company is the quality of the assets. We have worked hard over the last four years with the drill bit, and currently sit with a group of very productive mines with a 10-year reserve life. We have a mixture of assets, seven undergrounds operating today with mine lives from two to 16 years. Across the whole group, a 10-year reserve life is something we have worked hard to deliver and continue to do so with 26 rigs running across this portfolio today.
The next milestone for the business is 500,000 ounces of production. This is not an aspiration. This is the next stop on the journey. The building blocks are already there. Four operating processing hubs across Western Australia, 4 million ounces of reserve, and a commitment to spend over $100 million in drilling over the next three years. The key point in our strategy, which I will outline shortly, is this plan is fully funded. Westgold 4-5-6. What is it? It is not a postcode or the password to my email account.
It really captures the three-year outlook that we released to the market in September this year. It is an organic growth plan which we can touch. 4-5-6. Four. Four operating hubs. We have four processing plants running across the Murchison and the Southern Goldfields. Five. Five is the next stop on our production journey. Half a million ounces by FY 2029. It is not just production for production's sake. It sets Westgold up to lower its All-In Sustaining Cost. Six. Six is the pathway to generating more than 600,000 ounces of production from these assets.
The chart on the right-hand side really shows the journey. 385,000 ounces in FY 2026, stepping up to over 400,000 in FY 2027, moving up to half a million ounces by FY 2029. The Murchison is where the transition is happening the fastest. Bigger mines need bigger mills, and this is a point not well understood by the market or not well enunciated by myself in terms of the transition in the business. Westgold today transitioned last year from a business which had too much milling capacity and not enough mine output.
Where we sit today is a business with more mine output than we can mill, and that has underpinned an expansion of two of our processing hubs at Cue and Meekatharra. This is an important part of our journey, and these are both small brownfields expansions. Low technical risk and low capital, adding 1.4 million tonnes of additional capacity to the business over the next two years. Defined milestones support the delivery through FY 2029.
What you are seeing now in this chart is effectively the key growth projects within the business, and the bulk of these are brownfields expansions of existing mills or brownfields expansions of existing mines. I will speak in a little more detail to the Fletcher Zone as we go forward. Before I jump into the 4-5-6 Strategy in detail, I really want to pause for those investors in the room on this slide. This is something we are quite proud of, and it has taken some time for us to get here.
Shareholder returns is something we are driven by, and last year we returned $83 million in shareholder returns to our shareholders. That was via dividends and share buybacks. I am very happy to say that this is a model which we see as sustainable, and already for this financial year, we have bought $40 million of the stock back this month. The business now has a horsepower and capacity to continue these shareholder returns, and we are very confident about being able to deliver another strong result for our shareholders in FY 2027.
The upside. The 4-5-6 Strategy, which we outlined in our three-year outlook, also spoke briefly to the things not in the outlook, and they are as equally as important to the things which are. We have got a range of initiatives running across the business, and you can see from this slide, which I will not speak to in detail, how many levers we can pull within the Murchison to outperform the 4-5-6 Strategy. What I will speak to going forward is the one we are most excited about, and that is the Fletcher opportunity in the Southern Goldfields.
We acquired these assets from a Canadian company two years ago, and within two years of ownership of the Beta Hunt mine, we have added 3 million ounces of resource and a 1.1 million ounce of maiden reserve to a thing called Fletcher. Fletcher is the initiative and the lever we have that will drive this business through 600,000 ounces of production. Fletcher is big. We know that. We are currently mining two zones within Beta Hunt, the A Zone and Western Flanks, and we are approaching 2 million tons of output from those two mining opportunities by themselves.
Fletcher could be equally as big. Another 2 million tons of output. What are the questions which we're working on, or the key questions we have to answer within Westgold now is, what's the right way to develop Fletcher? The two questions are this: How big can Fletcher be? The existing mine, the one we're operating today, is doing nearly 2 million tons of output. Fletcher by itself could be another 2 million tons. The second question is: Where is the best place to process more than 4 million tons of ore from this mine?
We've currently got two options. An expansion of our Higginsville mill, which is 90 km away. Or we're starting to look at another opportunity, which we own, called Spargos. Spargos is a tenement package 30 km from Beta Hunt and provides a different opportunity, a more optimized opportunity, for long-distance or long-term haulage of the output from this growing mine. The last part of the presentation really speaks to the word opportunity and the value gap that we see in the current market, and an opportunity for investors when they start to look at Westgold.
Our 4-5-6 Strategy, we believe, is materially mispriced in the market. Every CEO will stand up here and say their company is undervalued, but I think we can point to this slide and show that the business we have now, a 4-5-6 Strategy, fully funded, that can take this business to half a million ounces of production, seems to be mispriced on any metric. This is the work that we're doing now to better explain what this business can do. When I see the business, I see a business that is fully funded, can fund its own growth, and return capital to its shareholders. To me, that's a pretty compelling investment opportunity.
Why own Westgold? I think I've already said it, and I'll say it again. As an investor, not as the CEO, I look for businesses which can fund their own growth and return capital to the shareholders. The business now is at a point of its evolution where it can do both and can do so sustainably. The 4-5-6 Strategy is really easy to remember. I'm getting close to the end of this presentation, and if you are looking at the 4-5-6 Strategy, simple and easy to remember. Four processing hubs, 500,000 ounces of production by FY 2029, and a very clear pathway to more than 600,000.
Hayden, in less than the minutes that I thought I'd take, I think I've identified and reached all my targets. I've left you with three things. Hopefully, a compelling investment opportunity and the opportunity we see within the company. I've explained Westgold 4-5-6, and most importantly, hopefully, I've left you with full recall of our code, WGX.
Brilliant, Wayne. Certainly was as quick as you said, even though your clock is not working, but I can tell you that was just over 10 minutes, so well done.
Thank you.
Any questions from the floor? While we wait for the microphone, I will just ask a couple myself. Just touching on Fletcher and Beta Hunt, that opportunity and the mill question. I mean, obviously, the mine at Beta Hunt is probably now ahead of, or will get ahead of the Higginsville capacity. So how do you balance the decision to build a new mill, which obviously takes a few more years, versus just a quick expansion at Higginsville t o maximize the return cash flow?
It's a great question. Certainly, this year we'll build stockpiles in the Southern Goldfields, and that gives us an opportunity. That de-risks whatever we do. Whether we build a stockpile in front of Higginsville or we do an incremental expansion, I don't see any downside to that. Very quickly, I think we'll get to a point whereby if Fletcher keeps growing as we think it is, currently seven rigs running within Beta Hunt, it's going to push a standalone mill equation. It'll make a decision about a standalone mill closer to that mine, quite simple.
What it'll effectively do, it could catalyze much greater production out of the Southern Goldfields. We see Fletcher is, by itself, doing another 140,000 ounces. If we have a standalone mill of 4 million tons and Higginsville at 1.6, it actually takes our group milling capacity up towards 10 million tons of output.
Yeah, okay. Probably the other unique thing for Westgold is your asset sale program
which you've sort of left yourself exposed to all those assets through equity ownership but also toll treating agreements. It's worked really well with New Murchison, but managing maybe three of them in the next couple of years. How do you think you manage the risk around their delivery versus what you have to mine yourselves?
To be clear, we don't do any toll treating. How do I think we will manage it? I think we'll manage it quite well. I mean, having additional ore coming to our mills that we don't have any mining risk on. That's a first-world problem. As we see it here today, the case study really has been New Murchison. New Murchison, we have zero exposure to the mining risk, and that ore has certainly been beneficial at Meekatharra. Valiant, our spin-out from last year, we expect to see ore from Valiant in the calendar year, and sitting behind that there's Great Boulder.
If third parties can provide ore to our mills to help us leverage that sunk capital, we think that's a win.
The other big mine outside of Beta Hunt is Bluebird. South Junction, Polar Star. Lock them all together. What do you see the pathway for developing that and ramping that up?
Bluebird is the star of Meekatharra, and we're starting to call it now Megatharra as against Meekatharra because that asset, now doing 1.2 million tons per annum, Aaron's convinced it can do 2 million tons. What do we have to do? Unlike a lot of our other mines, Bluebird South Junction was a new development. We put the infrastructure in the right place. Everything is well set there. It's just more of the same. We're currently mining two mining fronts within that mine, Bluebird and the South Junction lode. Polar Star is the third.
When people start to do the work on Westgold, they can start to see parallels between Bluebird South Junction and Beta Hunt. Both of these mines are the growth engines in the business. Both we're mining two mining fronts and developing a third. This is a business with some momentum and some capacity, and we just have to get better at explaining it.
Oh, brilliant. We do have some time for some further questions from the floor if there are any. Just on your exploration plan, Wayne. Obviously, it is a much bigger spend over the next three years. Is it largely just mine extensions and drilling out Fletcher and things like that? Or is there some greenfields as well?
No, both, Hayden. Very keen to keep doing greenfields exploration. But really this year there is a lot more reserve conversion from the existing 40 million ounce resource. But certainly the exploration team has a group of greenfield targets which they are working on. So we need to be able to do both, and this is a transition in the business now where greenfields exploration, res dev, are very much key to how we keep growing this business and growing the reserve base above 4 million ounces.
All right. Brilliant. We are just about out of time, Wayne, so thanks very much for the presentation. 4-5-6. I can certainly remember that. Please, if you go to 6-7, my kids will start cringing, I think. So we will stick with that one for now. But thanks very much for the presentation.
I have made this simple for analysts.
Thanks, Wayne.