Good morning, and welcome to the First Tin PLC Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Bill Scotting, CEO. Good morning, sir.
Thank you very much, Lily. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you or extend my welcome as well to this presentation of our results for the last twelve months to the end of June 2025. As you can see, I'm also joined by Tony Truelove, who's our Chief Geologist and Chief Technical Officer. He's sitting in Australia. If we go to the next page here. I've gone too far. That's the usual acknowledgment, which I draw your attention to. I'm just gonna go off camera so that you can see the slides in full. The agenda today, we'll start with highlights for the period and an overview of the macro outlook as it relates to tin, followed by an update on the great progress we're making at our two assets.
We'll finish with a simple update of the finances and our current areas of focus before we open for questions. I'm pleased to report that the past year has been one of significant progress at First Tin. Following the successful equity raise at the back end of 2024, we've advanced on multiple fronts for permitting and value enhancement. Importantly, there were no accidents or environmental incidents reported over the 12 months. At Taronga, the completion and submission of the EIS in September 2025 is a major step forward towards securing developmental approval. Tony will shortly provide an update on the infill and extension drilling program, which is now complete, as well as an update on the metallurgical test work program, which is ongoing. I'm very pleased to report that we've recruited an experienced projects leader to join the team in Taronga.
Peter Miers, very experienced, he'll support the work going forward as we prepare to move into detailed engineering and construction. As with Taronga, our team in Germany has made significant steps towards permitting, with the life of mine plan for Tellerhäuser being submitted to the mines authority in the past week. Very importantly, given the imperative for the EU to build security in its critical mineral supply chain, our exploration work has identified potential for multiple critical minerals across our tenure in Germany. As a junior miner undertaking exploration and development, there's not a lot to report on the financial side. The audited results reflect the continued investment by the company in progressing our assets through their permitting and study work. We remain debt-free with a cash balance of GBP 6.37 million at the end of the reporting period.
Turning to page four, following the increase in the resource estimate for Gottesberg, First Tin now has the largest undeveloped tin resource base in the OECD. This is incredibly important for security of supply in a world facing increased geopolitical conflict and trade disruptions. On the map, the blue circles show the regions where the majority of tin is consumed, so North America, Europe, East Asia. Notably, except for China, which itself is an importer, the key consuming countries of the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and Germany are reliant on tin imports to feed their multi-billion dollar high-tech manufacturing industries. As you can see, key supply regions are in emerging and developing countries experiencing disruptions due to conflict, environmental, social, or regulatory issues. Australia is today the main source of OECD tin.
First Tin projects in Australia and Germany will offer traceable, conflict-free, and secure tin supply to industrial tin consumers. While supply-side developments, sentiment, and the impact of evolving tariff policies will continue to drive tin prices in the short term, the longer-term structural need for new tin supply remains. Tin has previously been identified as the metal most impacted by the energy transition and digital transformation, and this is playing out. The fundamentals for tin demand remain strong with record semiconductor sales, China driving growth in solar and growing global EV sales. Tin remains the glue in electronics, and that connects all these sectors. While the demand outlook remains positive, tin supply has not been growing, with primary production estimated to have fallen around 8% in 2024.
This is due to a combination of historical factors with a long-term lack of new exploration and development, as well as continued supply chain disruptions with the instability in key tin exporting regions. Ongoing regulatory changes continue to create uncertainty for exports from Indonesia, where exports were reportedly down 30% year-over-year in 2024. Similarly, the ban in Wa State in Myanmar remained in place until recently, and it will now take some time to recover. Reduction in Chinese imports from Myanmar was offset by higher imports from the DRC. As we saw in March, renewed conflicts or mining in Bisie shut down for around a month, which temporarily took 6% of global supply out. South America periodically experiences supply disruptions, mainly due to social unrest.
While primary tin production continues to stagnate, the pipeline for new tin projects outside China, Russia and CIS is slim, as you can see here on page seven. There are only a couple of projects that have a DFS. There's a few at concept PEA or PFS study level, and there's more at early exploration stages. As mentioned earlier, I believe First Tin has the largest undeveloped tin resource base in the OECD. This is reflected in the chart at the top of the page. Equally, our projects are competitive on cost. Our scale, location, competitiveness, well positions us to be a long-term, sustainable and reliable supplier of tin into the main consuming regions of Europe, North America and East Asia. The previously mentioned supply disruptions have translated into a reduction of inventory as the black line on the left-hand chart on page 8 shows.
In response, you can see the steady increase in the tin price, the green line, over the past years. This resilience in the tin price, especially given the volatile macroeconomic environment of the past few months, shows why tin has been the best performer across the base metals complex for the past couple of years. The peaks were over $38,000 per ton early this year after the Bisie shutdown, which shows the potential for fly-ups in the price when supply shocks hit. You can see this on the right-hand chart. The tin price typically follows the ninetieth percentile or higher on the cash cost curve. We've already seen the increase in price as inventories have declined, demand has grown, and more expensive marginal supply has been dragged in.
In such a tight demand supply situation with stagnant supply, higher prices beyond the cash cost curve are required to induce the capital for new capacity, which given the thin pipeline, will take time to come in. In the meantime, there will remain periodic risks of price fly ups. The world clearly needs new tin projects, and as mentioned, following the increase in the Gottesberg MRE, we've got the largest undeveloped tin resource base in the OECD and one of the largest globally. A combined 367,000 tons of contained tin. At Taronga in Northern New South Wales, we have a 138,000 tons of contained tin resources, which includes 52,000 tons of proven and probable reserves. In Saxony, Germany, we've got another 138,000 tons of contained tin at Tellerhäuser.
That's a polymetallic resource that includes or contains magnetite, zinc, silver and indium credits. At the nearby Gottesberg deposit, we've got a further 91,000 tons of contained tin. It's not shown here, but in Germany, our exploration targets for a range of other critical minerals including copper, tungsten, bismuth, silver and gallium have also been identified. As with tin, all these elements are essential for various advanced manufacturing industries, and their presence as byproducts further enhances the strategic importance of our projects within the EU. Taronga project's been referred to by some as the world's next new tin mine for good reasons, and in the past year, we've made significant progress against various milestones.
It's already regarded as a low-risk asset in a low-risk jurisdiction, and we've further de-risked it by completing a compensation agreement with Crown Lands for potential impacts on the Crown land and roads on our site. We've also reached an agreement with the Glen Innes Council to place our mine site on council-owned land adjacent to Glen Innes Airport. This location provides many benefits for transport and traffic management, and its existing infrastructure helps with CapEx costs. The support of the council is also important from a social license perspective. The completion and submission to the authorities of the EIS in September 2025 represents a major step forward towards securing developmental approval for Taronga. This was the culmination of about three years work, numerous specialist studies and extensive engagement with the local community, the council and other stakeholders.
We now await the DPE submissions report, with the expectation of project approval coming sometime in the first half of 2026. This slide was first presented when we published the DFS in May 2024. It shows the pre-tax NPV of AUD 243 million at a tin price of $30,000. At that time, we identified potential value enhancement opportunities from improving recoveries and conversion of inferred resources to extend the mine life, which could bring the NPV close to AUD 400 million at that $30,000 tin price. On top of that, of course, there's upside from any potential increase in the tin price. Proving up these opportunities has been the focus of our efforts over the past year.
With that, I'll hand it over to Tony, who's gonna take you through some of the detail on Taronga. Tony?
Yeah. Thanks, Bill Scotting. Sixth slide really tells the story of Taronga. There are two things that make the project very economic. One is that we've got very wide mineralization with a very low strip ratio, mineable by an open pit. The strip ratio is actually as low as 1-to-1. The second is that the mineralization tends to break along the veins, exposing the cassiterite and making it very simple to process. The average cost of mining underground is in the order of AUD 100 a ton. In our case, we can mine for less than AUD 10 per ton. Although we might be 10 times lower grade than other deposits, our costs are gonna be 10 times lower as well.
You can see that on the chart on the right, where you can see our all-in sustaining cost is going to be just under $16,000, which puts us right up there with the existing producers, and we'll be very competitive at those rates. As you can see, the tin spot price there was $33,000. I think today it's nearly $36,000, so it gives us an even bigger margin than you can see there. The simple mineralogy means we've got a very simple low-tech flow sheet. We start off with 5 million tons at about 0.13% tin. We crush that, and we immediately lose a large volume, putting only approximately half of that through to the next stage, which is essentially jigs.
After the jigs, we regrind the con and recombine that with undersize and put it through cyclones and spirals. That's all very cheap off-the-shelf machinery. At that stage, we're less than 100,000 tons of material, and it's grading about 10%-20% tin. Then we have a very small dressing circuit consisting of a sulfide flotation, possibly regrind and bagging. Another very interesting slide that shows how we are very leveraged to an increase in tin price. We did our original DFS at a tin price of $26,000 US dollars per ton. That was the pit optimizations and the technical work. Then we looked at that technical review using $30,000, which gives an NPV of about AUD 243 million.
You can see that rise up to a current spot price which is $35,900, gives us an NPV of about £400 million. Very, very rapid increase in value with the rise in tin price. As part of the optimization work, we decided that we could convert existing inferred resources within the pit outline, which totaled about 3.5 million tons to measured and indicated resources by a drilling program. Most of that inferred resource is in the yellow zone you can see on the northern edge of both pits. The drilling in there has certainly been very successful, as you can see from some of the intercepts there in converting, in extending the mineralization in those areas.
That will certainly end result in an increased amount of ore and reduced waste within the current pit outlines. It will also result in us being able to pull those pits deeper and wider for a stage two project. At this stage, we're permitting only the stage one, so we'll be reporting the increase in indicated and measured resources which will convert to reserves within the existing pits. We'll be giving some indication of what that might look like for a stage two pit down the track. At the same time, we've been working on the mineral processing. We've currently been able to show that we can get up to 89.7% of the tin into the fine fraction after crushing by using conventional crush and 3 passes through a vertical shaft impact crusher.
More recently, we've also looked at using high-pressure grinding rolls, which is giving us at least as good and potentially better results. This is the reason we don't need to use an ore sorter for this deposit. Ore sorting's quite high CapEx and also significant OpEx. If we can get away with just crushing and screening, which we believe we can at this stage, that will be very good for the eventual economics of the mine. Just finally, I'll just run through a little bit of the regional story. We're looking at Taronga as being the hub in a hub-and-spoke approach.
We've got a lot of satellite deposits, and some of those have got very good drill intercepts in them, although none have drilled resources at this stage. During the year, we picked up 2 additional licenses, which you can see in the shaded blue and green, and that's also extended our coverage and given us about 752 sq km in which to search for these satellite deposits. There is one other area, as you can see in the middle plan, down to the south of Emmaville. It's about 75 km away, and it's been historically, it's produced about the same amount of tin as the Emmaville District. It's been mainly from alluvial sources, and we're currently looking at the hard rock potential there.
I'm quite excited about the potential for this area. It could be another standalone operation. I'll now hand you back to Bill. Thanks.
Okay. Thanks, Tony. Thanks for that summary. You can see we're really hitting the milestones at Taronga. The EIS submitted, the drilling, the met testing progressing, and also building out the portfolio for the long run. Just turning to Germany, Taronga have made great progress in Germany, progressing the permitting activities and confirming the critical minerals potential in our neighboring Auersberg and Gottesberg tenures. In contrast to Taronga, Tellerhäuser on the left will be an underground mine, but the zinc, the indium, the magnetite byproducts help offset the high costs and complexity of underground mining. As shown on the right, you can see the neighboring licenses in Auersberg and Gottesberg. The whole region is part of a very historic tin district in Saxony. Sorry. Jump there.
Germany, as we all know, for a long time has been an advanced manufacturing powerhouse. As shown by the recent announcement of the German Raw Material Fund, in the current volatile geopolitical and trade environment, increased supply chain security and a reduced reliance on long-distance supply chains is important. Our Tellerhäuser project is located very near to the Silicon Saxony semiconductor belt, which is the EU's largest hub and is also close to Germany's largest EV auto hub, which has a significant OEM supply base. With our Tellerhäuser project, with the opportunity to provide a secure mine to OEM supply chain for Germany's advanced manufacturing sector. We've continued to progress the work for permitting at Tellerhäuser, including a redesign of the product depot. We developed a forest compensation agreement and progressed the water permitting.
As I mentioned earlier, last week, we submitted the life of mine plan application to the mining authority. We await on them, and hopefully we'll have a decision in the first half of next year with the permitting for Tellerhäuser. Tony, do you wanna just run through this one on the geology?
Yeah, sure, Bill. The mineralization at Tellerhäuser, which you can see in those colors on the right, is hosted in a skarn unit, which has been overprinted by hydrothermal alteration. You can see it's in the gray units there. The pink is a granite, and there's a trend that stretches from our Gottesberg deposit, which is in the bottom left-hand corner with white writing there. It goes from there to Ploessberg, to St. Michaelis, to Gabe Gottes. All along that trend, there are lots of ancient workings with visible cassiterite. You can see we've taken quite a few rock chips and got really good values for gold there.
There's also a lot of other elements that are anomalous, in particular gallium and indium, and they seem to be very common in this granitic terrain. We've already got the world's largest indium deposit at Tellerhäuser itself. We see this whole district now as being a real center for, in particular, gallium and indium.
Okay. Thanks, Tony. Just briefly, the financial statements. As mentioned before, we're a junior mining company. We've got no income currently. The company meets its working capital requirements through raising developmental finance. Therefore, the support we got from our shareholders for the GBP 10 million equity raise in the latter half of last year was very important. The results reflect the continued investment of the company in progressing those assets, so delivering on the work plan that we articulated last year, which was around the value enhancement coming from drilling and metallurgical testing at Taronga and the exploration work. We posted a comprehensive loss after tax for the period at GBP 1.5 million. We have cash balance of GBP 6.37 million at the end of the period.
The current work plan, while we're awaiting the permitting outcomes in Germany and Australia, the focus at Taronga remains towards confirming those very compelling value enhancement opportunities which we identified during the DFS. That was all with the goal of increasing the NPV to AUD 400 million at a $30,000 tin price. As well as we're doing now preparatory work to move into the future development and construction phases. With the majority of the funds allocated in Australia, the funds going to Germany mainly used to support internal activities related to community engagements and exploration work, and progressing small amounts of studies and questions on the permitting. In parallel, we're now advancing various discussions for the project financing.
To conclude, we've made significant strides forward at both our assets over the period under review. The outlook for the tin market remains positive due to the structural shifts underway. Tin's increasingly recognized as a critical and strategic metal for the energy transition and the digital transformation. The price of tin's been climbing as inventory runs down and the supply constraints become more apparent. First Tin has the largest undeveloped tin resource base in the OECD, and the conditions present externally, they present significant opportunities for us to offer secure and sustainable tin supply from strategic locations in the safe, compliant jurisdictions of Australia and Germany. Taronga is well advanced with the DFS published, and it's an attractive, low CapEx, low risk, high margin tin mine, and there's significant potential to enhance its value. With the EIS now submitted, developmental approval is materially closer.
The graph on the right-hand side illustrates the value we're building in our portfolio. We have significant resources, and beyond Taronga, there's the potential to come from Tellerhäuser, from the various satellite deposits we have. In the longer term, we've got the foundations being built for Tingha that Tony mentioned in Gottesberg. As we progress, as we receive permits, build and enter production, there's a substantial potential for a share price rerating. With that, thank you for your attention. We'll have time for some questions now. I'll hand it back to you, Lily.
Thank you, Bill. Tony, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Please ask me to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Okay. Thank you, Lily. Yep, we've got a question, a pre-submitted question here. Could you please explain to us, since last investors call, how the money was spent in new drilling campaigns and metallurgical tests and how the higher tin price in general impacts the NPV of Taronga? Yeah. As we've articulated during this presentation, and as we indeed communicated when we raised the capital, about 80% of the money raised is going towards Taronga. That is primarily the drilling campaign, the metallurgical testing, but also the completion of the studies for the EIS. By the end of the financial year, June thirtieth, the EIS expenses have mainly been done, metallurgical testing was well advanced, and the drilling at that stage had relatively minimal expenditure.
The tin price, in general, as Tony showed, is very positive for our NPV. Very crudely, I think of every $1,000 in tin price represents around AUD 25 million of incremental NPV. Next question I've got here is from James. A good follow on from the previous question, actually. Aside from the tin price, can you talk through what you consider as any valuation catalysts for the shares? Yeah, good question, James. Look, clearly, I believe, or we believe we're significantly undervalued at this point in time. I think that in terms of catalysts for rerating, I think the first thing is permitting. As we discussed, we've now submitted the EIS in Australia. We've submitted the life of mine plan in Germany.
In both cases, when you get a permit, it de-risks the project, so that takes away one of the headwinds from the share price. The next catalyst, I think, relates to access to project financing, and what that means in terms of timing then to come into production. You get the project financing. There's more clarity there. The roadmap becomes more clearer that de-risk the project. Finally, as you build and communicate the development of the project, and then you get into commissioning first production, that ramps up, and then you're suddenly a producing asset and people look at you differently in terms of valuation. I think those are the catalysts, permitting, financing, and hitting production. Another question here from James again. Thank you, James.
Of the directors, only Charles Cannon-Brookes hold a material stake in the business and Bill Scotting, a decent position. Thank you for that. None of the other directors hold any stock. Any chance we'll be, they will be buying some shares or demonstrate confidence? Just to clarify, yes, indeed, I've bought shares. I have a small stake as CEO. Charlie has his shares through Arlington Group, who is one of our biggest shareholders. They hold around 11% of the company. Another two directors, Peter and Brett, are also on the board, at MLX. MLX are our biggest shareholder with 29.9% of the shares. The vast majority of the directors, through their roles, through personal investments, have a stake in the company.
You know, the future will tell that we are Charles, certainly through Arlington Group, has been a buyer throughout this year. I expect we'll continue to look at opportunities to buy going forward, given our view on the prospects. Another question here from Hilda. Please provide a very rough outline for the first production of both projects and the plateau production level for each asset. Good question, Hilda. Tony, can you maybe give your view on the production ramp up for Taronga year by year?
Sure. The timing we're currently working towards is to be in first production towards the end of 2027, possibly early 2028. That assumes that we get permitted in the middle of next year, raise the finance and start building towards the end of next year. We see it as being a bit over a 12 months build. That takes us up to the end of 2027. The ramp up should be very quick once we start production. It's a very simple plant. I think we've allowed 3 months to ramp up to pretty well full production. At that stage, we should be producing between 3.5 and 4,000 tons of tin metal per year.
Yeah. I think the other thing I'd add, Tony, because of the production plan, we probably expect in the second, third years will be potentially peak production. It'll ramp up a little bit higher than that.
Yeah.
In those early years, which is also good from a valuation perspective or getting return on investment earlier.
Yeah.
Another question from James. What are you doing by way of drilling presently, and what is planned on that front, please? Number of rigs, etc . That's another one for you, Tony.
Yes. Yeah, we've just completed a fairly significant drilling program, around about nearly 8,000 meters. We, at this stage, don't have any immediate plans to get the rig back because that will give us all the information we need around the pit. We will be doing some regional exploration work, whether that gets us to drilling stage or not, next year, not 100% sure. But I would certainly like to be doing some drilling into some of our satellite targets, by sometime the second half of next year, once we arrive at the hump with the revised DFS and permitting.
Thanks, Tony. A question from Ian. What input do you get from Metals X? I think the first input we received from Metals X is as an investor, and they were very supportive of the capital raise last year when we raised GBP 10 million. They not only supported that raise, but they took their initial stake from 23% up to 29.9%, which is the maximum they can do on the LSE at this stage. The financial support is very much there.
They have two highly experienced directors, Peter, who's chairman of Metals X, and Brett, who's the CEO, sit on the board, and they're very constructive in providing input to the board as we think about, as we thought about permitting in Australia, as we think about, moving from permitting into project development. How to think about the engineering design phases. And of course they have their view, which they can share on the macro of the tin. Very supportive, very constructive relationship on the board with Metals X. Last question by the look of it. Another one from James. "Is there a sense of what the free cash flow per annum could look like at current tin prices for Taronga?" Yeah, good question, James.
We have the free cash flow, EBITDA free cash flow, which we published at the time of the DFS. That was of a lower tin price. If you're looking at these sort of tin prices, very crudely I would be estimating AUD 50 million, AUD 60 million, that order of magnitude per year of free cash flow. I'd have to run the numbers again with this higher tin price to see what it looks like. But when we published the DFS, you could see what it was at that time. I think that's all the questions, Lily.
Bill, Tony, thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Bill, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah. Thanks very much, Lily. Again, thanks everyone for attending and listening and posing the questions. Look, tin, I often say tin's the best performer in base metals. It's got a structural supply deficit arriving. We've got great projects, significant JORC tin resource, which can supply secure, sustainable tin for the long term. We're making real progress on the ground in both countries. The value enhancement opportunities are coming through. Permitting is well progressed. Development approval is materially closer for our projects. I look forward, therefore, to updating you again in due course. Once again, thanks for your participation. Thank you.
Bill, Tony, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of First Tin PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.