Good morning and welcome to the First Tin PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time using 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 received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Bill Scotting. Good morning to you.
Thank you, Alex, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to this presentation of our interim results for the six months to the end of December 2024. As usual, I'm joined by Antony Truelove, who's our chief geologist and chief technical officer. Tony is sitting in Brisbane in Australia at the moment. So good evening to you, Tony.
Good evening.
The page one here, that's the usual disclaimer, which I just draw your attention to. The agenda for this morning, we'll start with just some highlights for the period and an overview of the macro outlook as it relates to tin. Tony will then provide an update on progress at our two assets before I provide a quick overview of the finances. We'll finish by outlining our priorities going forward before opening for any questions. Over the reporting period, we continued to make strong progress and achieve significant milestones at both our assets. Importantly, there were no accidents or environmental incidents reported. At Taronga, the New South Wales permitting process as a State Significant Development formally kicked off when we lodged the scoping report with a request for the New South Wales Planning Secretary's environmental assessment requirements, known as SEARs.
The scoping report outlined the key components of the Taronga project and is used by the various New South Wales government departments and regulatory agencies to specify the range of assessment requirements for inclusion in our environmental impact statement. The essential SEARs notification informs what specialist studies to finalize for inclusion in the EIS. That was received in September, enabling the work on the EIS to progress. We required additional studies related to the anticipated disturbance footprint for the proposed mine camp and access road to be done. We now expect the EIS to be completed and submitted in late March, April this year. A successful outcome will be a major milestone for this project, unlocking significant value for the company, and we are pleased with the progress currently being made.
Over the period, we also continued mineral processing test work and found high recoveries coming out of the coarse gravity circuit work, which will be good for the economics. Tony will describe shortly in more detail the successful trial blast. At Tellerhäuser, permitting-related work progressed with the completion of a redesign of the product area, product depot area, and a completion of a baseline study for underground and above ground power requirements. We also kicked off analysis of historic drilling data for the Gottesberg area, following the same process with the successful work done earlier last year for Tellerhäuser. As a junior miner undertaking exploration and development, there's not so much to report on the finances. The results reflect the continued investment by the company in progressing our assets through their permitting and feasibility study work.
The highlight of the finances was a successful raising of GBP 10 million in equity, which has provided us with the cash to drive forward our development and value enhancement program. Turning to the macro, we can see that tin prices have been relatively resilient given the volatile macroeconomic environment over the past few months. From a peak of over $34,000 in early October, tin prices dropped back to range around $29,000-$30,000 per ton over most of December, primarily related to the potential impact of the new Trump administration's tariff and trade policies. Underlying demand drivers for tin remained positive. The electronic sector continues to grow with record global semiconductor sales in 2024 and China's electronic manufacturing sector, PV capacity and new EV sales and production all growing in 2024.
Supply constraints remain in Myanmar and Indonesia, but are now compounded by increasing uncertainty over the upsurge in conflict in the DRC, the region which is source of around 7% of tin supply today. With demand growing, inventories low, tin prices have again increased post period end. They moved above $32,000 per ton in February before tailing off a bit again over the last couple of weeks. The structural story remains positive. Supply side developments, sentiment, and the impact of evolving tariff policies that'll continue to drive tin prices in the short term. The longer term structural need for tin for new tin supply remains, which is really the key for junior explorers and developers. Demand drivers from the energy transition and the digital transformation remains strong with a multiplicity of growing uses of tin.
Tin was the best performer across base metals over the last year. Primary tin production continues to stagnate and the pipeline for new tin projects is slim, as you can see on the chart on the bottom left here. Only a couple of the projects have a DFS with the majority at concept PEA or PFS study level. Even if all these projects were delivered, it would fall well short of the anticipated medium-term demand growth. It is hard to argue against a coming supply deficit and knock-on impact on tin pricing. The main consumers of tin are China, the U.S., EU, and Japan, highlighted in blue circles here. As the map here shows, they are also by quirk of geology, short of tin resources. Their advanced manufacturing sectors are reliant on tin imports. Unfortunately, the key tin exporting regions are prone to instability.
We have ongoing regulatory changes continuing to create uncertainty for exports from Indonesia, with the exports reportedly down 33% year-on-year in 2024. Similarly, despite periodic rumors, the ban on Myanmar mining remains in place and even when lifted will take time to recover. Reduction in Chinese imports from Myanmar was offset by higher imports from Africa. However, as already mentioned, the recent escalation of conflict in the DRC region with insurgents gaining control of key cities has raised concerns for supply disruptions going forward. South America periodically experiences supply disruptions due to social situations. Given the billions of dollars and euros invested in advanced manufacturing, an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment requires secure, traceable and compliant supply chains. There are two developments located in Australia and Germany. First Tin is well-placed to provide that sustainable supply.
With that introduction, I'll hand over to Tony, who will take you through the progress we're making in bringing our projects to fruition. Tony.
Yeah. Thanks, Phil. I think you've clearly shown there that the world needs new tin projects and First Tin is here to help fill that gap. We've got a very large resource base. We believe it's the fourth largest outside of China. We're looking at a total of nearly 310,000 tons of contained tin. Interestingly, about the same amount in Tellerhäuser as in Taronga, both with about 138,000 tons and a smaller resource at Gottesberg, which we're currently doing some work on and hope to increase that significantly. We also have about 52,000 tons of tin metal in reserve and we believe that's probably the biggest undeveloped reserve in the world as well.
That's located entirely at Taronga. Taronga is a quite unique project. It's well advanced. We've bought all the freehold land, which has significantly lowered the risk. We've got open pits with a very low strip ratio and very simple mineralogy and mineral processing. Those factors make this deposit quite unique in the world. We currently looking at putting in a solar power system into the project and crushing during daylight hours. That has two effects. One is that it reduces the cost for running the crusher during the daylight hours, and it reduces noise during nighttime hours. We've come a fair way over the last few years. We've completed the DFS.
We've lodged the MLA and had native title clearance associated with that. We lodged the scoping report and requested SEARs. We received SEARs, and we're currently very close to finalizing and submitting the environmental impact statement. The economics are very attractive for the project. At the current tin price, at a $30,000 USD tin price, we have an NPV of about AUD 243 million. We're currently in the process of doing some additional drilling and some more advanced metallurgical test work. Factoring that in we've very close to getting the NPV to about AUD 400 million, and there's very good upside on top of that with additional resources and the upside in the tin price.
Taronga is our flagship ore body. As I mentioned previously, it has two unique characteristics. One is that it's a very broad system, which means that it has very low strip ratio. For every tonne of ore we mine, we only have to mine one tonne of waste. The strip ratio is 1 to 1. That means that our mining costs are very low. Just for comparison, I've done a lot of work in the goldfields of Western Australia, and an average pit there would have a strip ratio of between 5 and 10 to 1. The second point, which I've already noted, is that the mineralogy is very good. You can see on the bottom pictures there that the material tends to break along the veins that host the tin.
By crushing to a relatively coarse size, we can liberate most of the tin. Those two factors mean that we can produce tin at a quite low cost of about $12,000 per tonne, with an all-in sustaining cost of under $16,000 per tonne. At the current price of over $30,000, that gives us a very good margin. The other price you can see there, the full cost includes the cost of the build. The processing is very simple. We mine the ore, we crush it down to about 12 millimeters, which is road gravel size. At that stage, we screen it, and anything above 2.8 millimeters we throw away. The rest goes through into a very simple gravity circuit.
We screen at 0.4 of a millimeter, with the oversize going straight to jigs. The tails from that are a direct tail with very low grades. After that, we recombine it with the 0.4 from the screen, and then it's very simple cyclone spirals and tables, which get us down to about 20,000 tonnes per annum of pre-concentrate, which is then very simply upgraded to 60% by a tin dressing circuit. There's two takeaways, I guess, from this. One is that we have a very rapid reduction in mass, which reduces the back-end cost significantly. Because of that, our processing costs are very competitive. We recently undertook some trial blasts. We did three blasts using different powder factors.
Now, a powder factor is simply an estimate of how much explosives you need to use at each blast. We used what we had put in the DFS, which was 0.5. We also did a 0.8 and a 0.3. All of them gave very, very good results. They're all usable. At the moment, we will stick with the 0.5, but we think there's a very good chance that we can use 0.3 once we start mining. Recently, we've compiled all the previous exploration results over the past 50 years in the district. As we suspected and as we knew, we've got a lot of targets within a 30-kilometer radius of the Taronga processing facility. You can see the two circles there.
The inside one is a 15-km radius, and the outside one is 30. Within that, we have a whole heap of prospects, which we call a prospect pipeline. There are some at resource drilling stage, others at conceptual stage. For every one we advance, we have another one coming in at the bottom. A lot of work to do. We see this as being a long-term tin district rather than a simple tin project. Currently, we're about to start a significant drilling program of about 10,000 m, designed largely to convert inferred resources to indicated and also to define mineralization to the north of the two pits.
Preliminary pit optimization suggests that we can increase our mine life up to around about 15 years if that drilling is successful. A very high return for a small amount of drilling. Just briefly touching on our other project in Germany. It's a very good deposit in its own right. Quite different to Taronga because it will be an underground mine. Our aim there is to not have any waste at surface at all. All our rejects and tailings will remain underground. The deposit is significantly higher grade than Taronga by a factor of between 5 and 10. We're looking at somewhere between 0.8% and 1% tin.
Interestingly, it also has significant credits of critical raw materials, in particular indium, which we already have a resource for. More recently, we've realized there's also quite significant gallium in this deposit. Just finishing off, Tellerhäuser is located in the heart of Germany's Silicon Saxony. Germany's long been an advanced manufacturing powerhouse. Tellerhäuser is located very near to the Silicon Saxony Semiconductor Belt, which is quite difficult to say. That's the EU's largest hub and close to Germany's largest EV auto hub and also a significant OEM supplier base. Development of Tellerhäuser will provide increased supply chain security for these essential manufacturing centers and also reduce reliance on long-distance supply chains. With that, I'll hand you back to Bill.
Thanks, Tony. A lot of progress made on the ground, and a lot of developmental opportunity in our project pipeline and value enhancement opportunity that we're going after there. Turning, briefly to the financials. As a junior mining company, we currently have no income, and the company meets its working capital requirements through raising developmental finance. Therefore, the support we received from our shareholders, at the back end of last year for the GBP 10 million equity raises was very, very important. This provides us with the, financial runway to deliver on our program through the course of this year. The results for the six months period to the end of December reflect the continued investment by the company in progressing the two assets through permitting and the various required studies.
Expenditure during the period was primarily focused on progressing the EIS and DFS enhancement opportunities at Taronga. In Germany, lesser expenditure on progressing the permitting and the desktop archive work for the Gottesberg MRE update that Tony referred to. We posted a loss of $0.9 million for the period, and we ended the period with a cash balance of $8.36 million following the equity raise. Here we have the priorities for the next 12 months. They're a steady development on what we've been communicating before. The majority of the funding we've raised will be allocated to driving forward the Taronga project.
It'll be directed towards the, what we believe the compelling value enhancement opportunities identified in the DFS, with the goal of increasing the project's NPV to around AUD 400 million, and also on finalizing the permitting requirements. Key activities will include the drilling program that Tony described, which has, you know, for relatively low cost, a lot of upside potential, and also our continued metallurgical testing program to improve recoveries. Funds will also support the activities to complete the EIS statement. It'll also support the early site works and preparing the project for future development and construction phases. With the majority of the funds going to Australia, the funds allocated to Germany are used primarily on internal resources, internal activities related to progressing the permitting, and also community engagement there.
There will be some minimal field work to ensure we retain the exploration licenses at Gottesberg and Auersberg. To conclude, significant progress has been made under the period under review. The outlook for the tin market remains very positive due to the structural shifts underway, with tin increasingly recognized as a critical and strategic metal for the energy transition and digital revolution. It's absolutely essential for advanced manufacturing. Overlaid with increased supply-side uncertainties, these conditions of increasing demand and constrained supply, they present significant opportunities for First Tin with our two projects, which are strategically located in the safe, compliant jurisdictions of Australia and Germany. Taronga is well advanced. The DFS has been published, which shows an attractive low CapEx, low risk, high-margin tin mine, and we've found significant low-hanging fruit opportunities to further enhance the value.
We're now in the final stretches of preparing the environmental impact statement, and that'll be a major step forward for the project, leading to permitting. The graph on the right-hand side of this page illustrates the value we're building in our portfolio. We have significant resource base, and beyond Taronga, there is further potential to come from the satellite deposits that Tony illustrated and also from Tellerhäuser in Germany. In the long term, we've got the foundations of Taronga and Gottesberg. With that, thank you for your attention. I'll hand it back to Alex, and I believe we'll have some time for questions.
Fantastic. Bill, Tony, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would 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 Investor Dashboard. Bill, Tony, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Bill, if I may now hand back to you to chair the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Alex. Yeah, there's a few questions coming through, so appreciate that. There's one here. It doesn't have a name. The question posed is: When is it reasonable to expect you to begin raising revenues and the typical lead times we're looking at here? A good question, because we're increasingly turning our attention to preparing for construction, financing and leading into operational readiness. The key criteria will be the permitting, how long it takes to get the permit. We believe we'll be permitted before the end of this year. The second driver will then be the project financing, which allows you to then get into the final engineering design into the procurement, fabrication, and construction. It's a relatively simple project.
As Antony said, a simple open pit mine and not a lot of mobile equipment. The processing plant is all what I call basic equipment, basic crushers, basic gravity processing plant, and a small sulfide flotation. We expect the fabrication and preparation of that will be relatively fast in comparison to other mining projects we're seeing. In theory, we could be or should be, assuming it goes to plan, having revenues in 2027. As I said, the critical requirement will be the timing of permitting and the raising of the project financing. There's a follow-up question along the same vein from George about the permitting, expecting the first production.
If we're permitted this year and raising the finance, we'll be into the pre-stripping and the early mining, the back end of next year. As I said, we'll be into 2027, commissioning the plant and generating revenues. You know, that developmental program I still believe is very, very realistic. We do not see at this stage any specific issues that would cause us concerns over the permitting. There's another question here from Ben. What is your long-term outlook for tin demand, and what sectors do you see driving most growth? How are you positioned to benefit? Yeah, very good question, Ben. This is the crux of why tin is very attractive.
Look, tin demand is being driven by the energy transition and being driven by the digital transformation. Just over half of tin goes into solder. Solder is the connector which links all electronic devices. Everything from your mobile phones, your PCs, TVs, the EVs, the connections in the energy grids, robotics, AI, semiconductors, all these things require tin. There's quite a broad base of demand drivers. Solar energy is another one. These are all growing, and you don't have to have heroic assumptions on those. Solar growth continues to exceed expectations. Nothing grows at that rate forever, but it's very healthy. We will benefit from all of that. As I point out in the presentation, most of the demand for tin is in North America, EU, Japan, Korea, China.
With the exception of China, there's not much tin in any of those places. They require new tin mines. Existing supply can't keep up, and that's how we'll benefit from that. We get our project up and running. We participate in that, and it's long-term demand growth as well. Another question from Ben: How are you controlling costs across projects in Australia and Germany with rising inflation in the mining sector? Yeah, good question again, Ben. Look, inflationary effects have always been a problem in mining. How are we dealing with that? There's two things. There's inflationary effects on the CapEx, which whereas we haven't started purchasing that. One of the things we've done there is we're doing self-perform works to the extent we can already, which means the groundwork is prepared on site.
Things for the solar, the areas for where the infrastructure will be built and so on. This reduces our costs. We're constantly looking at opportunities to improve. Going off-grid with the solar is a cheaper alternative for the energy compared to going on grid and other options. The other thing with the plant, this is a low, as I said before, a low tech facility. We're buying standardized equipment, almost you could say off the shelf. We're not buying any leading-edge technology here, which is more prone to the inflation impacts. Operationally, various things going off-grid with the energy is very beneficial because solar, once it's in on-site, is very cheap. As Tony said, we've designed the plant, oversize the crusher to operate during daylight hours to maximize the cheap solar energy.
That's one thing. All the work on recoveries. The recoveries gives us not just more tin units to sell in the market to grow our margin, but it also helps on the cost side as well because it amortizes the fixed costs over a larger volume. The self-perform I talked about, you know, that's all part of ongoing review challenge with the team. When we get project financing, as we go into development, you get into operational readiness in parallel. Planning for commissioning and ramp up. There's a lot of work that goes into trying to control that. Trevor's put a question here: When do you hope to receive the mining license for Taronga? We believe we'll have the license, the developmental approval before the end of this year.
It's hard to be specific on that because it depends on how long the authorities take to review the environmental impact statement. We go on public exhibition, and then it goes into the final approval process. We do not see a reason why it can't be permitted by the end of this year, and that's what we're working towards. Francis has sent in a cracking question. You mentioned an increase of the NPV to $400 million due to technical progress. When will you be releasing an updated feasibility study? Yeah, Francis, this is the part of the work that we're doing. Part of that is the drilling program which Tony outlined.
When we do that drilling program, which will take a few months to do, let's say, and get the results, we look at that. That will go into updating the pit designs, the pit shells, looking at the mine life. We'll, in parallel with doing the metallurgical testing work. Once that work is done, we will then publish an updated document on the NPV, which for a $30,000 tin price, we believe these improvements will lead to around AUD 400 million NPV. That'll be some time, I would say, the back half of this year that should be ready for release. Albert's asked: What are the milestones we can monitor that indicate we're on the right path to the environmental permit? Yeah, a good question.
A lot of work has already been done. The environmental work has been ongoing for a couple of years now. A lot of the studies are basically completed. The key milestones were submitting the scoping report, which was done last August, and then a month later, receiving the Planning Secretary's Environmental Assessment Requirements. Those Environmental Assessment Requirements outlined what we have to submit in the environmental impact statement. That allows us then to go away and pull together all the threads of all the different work from, you know, heritage, from biodiversity, from transportation, logistics, noise, water, visibility, all these things.
The additional work we had to do, coming out of permitting of other mines last year, we had to do the work for our mine camp, which is somewhat remote from the mine itself and the road corridor into the mine. We had to look at the full disturbance footprint for those areas. We had to prepare the studies on environmental, traffic, heritage, and biodiversity for those areas. Those things have now been completed, and the whole report is now being pulled together. The different models are being made to talk to each other, and that's why I say the back end of March, sometime in April is when we will be finished and ready to submit the environmental impact statement. After that, it goes on public exhibition for about a month.
After that there's, let's say, 1-2 months to hear the feedback and for the authorities to review before they determine the permitting. Another question from Albert. When can we hope to get the results of the drilling program? The drilling program, we hope to start in the next month or so. We're waiting on the permit to do the drilling program. That's a different permit, which has been submitted. We anticipate getting that soon. The drilling. Antony, do you want to just provide a bit of detail on the timing of the drilling?
Yes, sure. Yeah, as you said, we're still waiting to get the approval to drill. You have to go through a lot of hoops these days to get permission to do such a significant drill program at 10,000 meters. I expect that we will be given approval sometime within the next 4 weeks. Then, probably another 2-4 weeks to get the drillers on site. Maybe drilling in towards the end of April, with first results released in May. The entire program is about 6 weeks work. We should be releasing the final results in July.
Okay. Thanks, Tony. That'll feed then into the update of the feasibility study that we'll do. A question from Trevor. With tin increasingly seen as a critical strategic mineral, are there likely to be any project finance funds available from government agency sources? Yeah, it's a good question, Trevor. We have in the past received some financing. For example, it benefited us for the solar studies in Australia. This is relatively small financing. We received some funding in Germany, again, on R&D basis. We keep talking to various government agencies about project financing, and support for that. Other things at different times governments look at is royalty holidays and the like. It's hard to be more specific at this stage. It's something we keep following, monitoring and engaging on. Another question from Terry.
Although the tin price was $40,000 when you IPO'd at 30p, it is still over $31,000 and you've made massive progress. What do you think it'll take to get the share price from 0.1p? Yeah, very good question, Terry. Get the share price up from the all-time lows. Yeah. I always say, you know, IPO'ing at the time was a two-edged sword. On one hand, it had a high tin price and enabled the capital to be raised. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian situation with the invasion there and the knock on impact on all metals saw that all unwind, and that's what happened in the last couple of years.
Not just for us, but the industry, the broader tin juniors in tin in general, but other metals all had a massive unwinding. The tin price has recovered a little bit from that. For us, getting our share price up, I think there are two catalysts. One, the catalysts on getting our permitting done and getting the developmental approval and then getting the project financing so that the line of sight to that first production becomes very clear. The second thing is, of course, the tin price. Metal prices can be volatile. At the moment, I would say metals are a little bit out of fashion in the markets given the macroeconomic risks, but that changes. When that changes, you get momentum, and that sort of momentum will bring it back again. We wait on those.
The macro's out of our control. What is in our control is getting the permitting done and getting the developmental approval and financing, which is what we focus on internally. Production in 2027 displays the various milestones. In the presentation, there was a chart there which shows the milestones to the current status in terms of getting the EIS submitted by March, April. Then the DPE submissions report. DPE, which is the Department of Planning and Environment, by the end of Q2, and then the project approval sometime in H2 2025. We show that in the DFS. We did show, in effect, a 2-year timeline to build the project. The roadmap of 2027 depends on those milestones we show on page 8 today. Then on the timing of project financing. It's hard to give any more detail beyond that because it depends on those two items.
That's great.
That's everything else.
Yeah. I believe you have addressed all those questions from investors today, so thank you very much indeed. Bill, before we redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which one is particularly important to the company? Could I please ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah. Again, thank you to everyone for attending and specifically for the questions that have been raised. Look, the progress on the ground is apparent. It's been strong. We're very positive, remain very positive on the outlook for the tin market. Time will bring the demand, the pricing will come back. We're focused internally now on getting the environmental approval in and getting the project approval. We're very positive on the outlook for tin and the requirement for tin from a safe jurisdictions like Australia and Germany. Thank you for your attention.
Fantastic. Bill, Tony, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of First Tin PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.
Thank you, Alex.