Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the First Tin PLC half-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just 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 will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so, and these will be available via your InvestorMeetCompany dashboard. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from First Tin PLC. Thomas, Tony, good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning. Thanks a lot for the invite. Good morning to everybody. Happy to be here and happy to present jointly with Tony our first half year presentation. Most probably you have read that very carefully. Let's dive into the most important topics we have done during the course of this year. First Tin represents two flagship projects with 100% ownership, one in Australia, one in Germany. The Australian project, both of them are under development. The feasibility studies are nearing the end of work during the course of the first half year. For instance, we finished the confirmatory drilling program at Taronga in Australia, and we quite recently published the update of the resource statement.
We have started the definitive feasibility studies in Australia and Germany last year, and we proceeded with all the activity during the first half year, looking forward to finalize the DFS for our Australian project, Taronga, until Q2 next year. We have developed a very cost sensitive flowchart for our Australian project. We just recently published that in a press release that we were able to with only mechanical crushing and upgrading steps at the very beginning to produce a decent concentrate with good recovery rates. Details will come later. Both of the projects show a robust economic at the actual tin price of around $25,000, which has seen a lot of volatility during the last months.
Tin is still the most forgotten enabler of energy transition and digital revolution, even though it has been declared in a few more countries as a strategic and critical raw material. I'm happy that I and First Tin has such an experienced management team leading the company and bringing the two projects towards investment ready. We quite recently Ross Aingworth is the new board member, so he joined just a few days ago and replaced Seamus, who we thanked for all his contribution because he moved to another role. Let's have a look into the market environment and how it looks like. Tin, which its major application being soldering, is the critical enabler and most often overseen metal of the energy transition.
Looking into the major applications, we have seen weakening in electronics production. First half year was down by 25% year-over-year, while during the last two months we have seen a slight recovery coming up 12%. This is most probably the well-known cyclicality in the microelectronic industry, and we are looking forward, and we expect market forecast companies expect a recovery of that because it's of utmost importance to have enough electronic chips for all the topics, be it computers, be it electromobility or energy transition. What has developed very good was the solar industry.
We have seen a 40% growth rate year-on-year for photovoltaic panels, so a major contributor to the energy transition and as well a major demand driver for tin. Tin has been a critical raw material in the U.S. and Germany already since a number of years. While Indonesia quite recently declared it a critical raw material in parallel to its attempt that they declared that they will restrict the export of tin in the coming years, aiming to extend the value chain of tin within Indonesia. What major topics have been arisen on the scene of the tin market? The Myanmar Wa province, Wa State, has declared at the beginning of the year that they intend to suspend all tin mining operations starting from August 1, 2023.
This has really happened, so all tin mining closed down in the Wa province. Only a few stockpiles have been treated and shipped to its customers. That means that its customers, the major receiver of all of this tin concentrate is China. The Chinese reacted to the first announcement, they have built up inventory stock, and they published that they expect that the shutdown will take three months. They have built up tin inventory for about three months. Nevertheless, all the major smelters in China reacted and either reduced their throughput or entered into maintenance shutdowns in order to deal with the lower availability of raw material.
Indonesia, as another substantial contributor to tin supply in the world, showed that its tin supply has fallen during 2023 as well, leading as well to the situation that the regulator, which is required to renew smelter licenses on a regular basis, has not done that for 8 out of the 33 private smelters in Indonesia. As I said already, it has declared tin as a critical raw material just a few weeks ago in August. If we look the long-term history and the price development of tin, then one can see that we have a number of patterns that mirror from time to time.
Means nothing else that after a substantial price decrease, which we have seen, remembering that in April 2022, we have seen a price peak of nearly $50,000 per ton of tin. Afterwards, it declined down to $17,000, so down to the long-term average over the last 15 years, roughly. It recovered slightly now up to $25,000, and it looks like that $25,000 might represent the new floor. While it looks like that $30,000 might be the major price level that will attract new project developments, remembering that our project is shovel-ready already at $25,000 per ton of tin. A quite recent resource statement update for our Taronga project. Our Taronga project became the eighth largest resource globally.
We represent with our two flagship projects a substantial size in the undeveloped tin reserves globally. Over now to Tony guiding us through.
Yes, thanks, Thomas. Let me run you through Taronga first, which I'm most closely involved with. We've got the fifth largest undeveloped tin resource and reserve globally. We've recently announced an updated resource, as you can see in the table on the top right-hand side, of 138,300 tons of tin. That's due to several reasons. One is we've discovered quite a lot of extra tin to the south of the known mineralization, and we've also remodeled it geologically and lowered the cutoff grade. The cutoff grade that our consultant has recommended we use is 0.05% tin.
When we look at the economics of the deposit, the engineers who are doing the engineering study for us are suggesting that a realistic cutoff for this mine is probably going to be in the order of between 0.06% and 0.08% tin. Using 0.05 is quite realistic. If you want to compare it with the previous estimates, you can look at the table below, which shows the same resource at a 0.1 cutoff. You can see that we've kept the grade approximately the same. We've increased tons of tin metal by about 40%. The current resource at that cutoff is about 80,000 tons of tin. Our forecast production is around about 3,000-4,000 tons per annum of tin in about 55%-60% concentrate.
What makes Taronga interesting? We've spent roughly AUD 4 million buying all the land that the deposit sits on. There is only one small block of Crown land that we now need to get hold of. Essentially we have freehold land ownership, which takes a lot of risk out of the permitting process. It's got a very low strip ratio. We're currently looking in the order of 0.9 tons of waste for every ton of ore. That's extremely low in terms of most open pit deposits. We've got very simple metallurgy. That's due largely to the deportment of the tin, which occurs almost exclusively as cassiterite within fractures, sub-vertical fractures that are filled with quartz, cassiterite, and mica. The rock strength of the veins is much less than the host rock.
When you break it breaks open on the veins and liberates the cassiterite at a very early stage, which I'll go into a bit more detail on shortly. We are looking at solar power. We've got grid power is readily available. We've done some studies and connection cost to the grid is in the order of AUD 3 million. That's a fairly easy way to have our core power. But we've also got very good wind and solar characteristics in the area, and we own a lot of land, as I said. We're doing studies on both solar and wind power at the moment. Water rights, we've purchased an allocation of 636 megaliters a year. That currently looks like it will supply all our needs.
We're actually starting drilling on Monday next week for water into an old paleo channel. We think we've got our waters tied up. We've got very good relationship with the local town and which has a long history of mining, which gives us a social license to operate. Again, going back, the main difference between Taronga and any other tin deposit I've seen is the very simple mineralization style and the mineral processing characteristics associated with that. People often ask, you know, "How can you make such a low-grade deposit work?" It's basically down to this fact of having all our mineralization in veins as cassiterite and having a very, very low strip ratio.
The liberation of the cassiterite, when we crush the rock, as I said, it tends to break on the veins. By simply crushing to 12 mm and then screening out all the minus 2.8-mm material, we immediately upgrade the grade by a factor of 2-3. The plus 2.8-mm material, we're currently looking at doing one more crush for a vertical impact crusher. That liberates slightly more tin, and then that's it as far as crushing goes. You can see here our high-grade sample, what we call a high-grade sample, which is still very low in terms of grades as in the tin world, is 0.18% tin.
By crushing it and throwing away everything above 0.28, 2.8 mm, we capture 85% of the tin in 45% of the mass, and we upgrade the grade from 0.18 to 0.3. The plus 2.8 mm fraction is an immediate throw away product. We did that work, and then we thought, "Well, yeah, does this work for the lower end of grades we're looking at?" We've taken another sample of 0.1% tin, and essentially gave us almost identical results with 84% of the tin and 58% of the mass, and upgraded it by a factor of 150%. Based on this very simple and easy upgrading, what we have is a very, very simple flow sheet.
We mine it, we put it through simple conventional three-stage crushing. We end up with a stockpile of the minus 12 millimeter material, which we then feed into a vertical shaft impact crusher to scavenge a little bit more of the tin. We end up with an immediate reject, and that gets rid of 50%-60% of the mass at that stage. Following that, we screen the material at 0.4 of a millimeter, with the plus 0.4 millimeter going to jigs and the minus to spirals. It looks like it's fairly complicated here, but it's not really. It's essentially going through spirals and then being cleaned up by a shaking table. The oversize material that's recirculating in the middlings going into a ball mill.
By the time it gets to this ball mill, we're down to approximately 20% of our initial feed volume, so a very low cost for grinding rather. At that stage, we're only taking it down from approximately 0.4 millimeter, sorry, from two, maximum 2.8 millimeter down to about 0.3 millimeter. Very short residence time and power consumption in these ball mills. Once it's gone through the spirals and tables, we basically into a batch dressing. We clean it up via floating off the sulfides that remain and a little bit further upgrading. That takes us to around about a 56% tin concentrate.
We have done work on trying to improve that, and we can get the concentrate up to 73%. That does lose more tin, so we will get it to the concentrate grade that we think we can make the most value out of at this stage. Again, I mentioned briefly that currently power costs in Australia are estimated at about AUD 0.28 per kWh Australian. We, by using solar and wind, we can probably get that down to AUD 0.05-AUD 0.10 per kWh. We're using grid power as our baseline and looking at doing all the crushing. Sorry, let me go back to the previous slide. The crushing here is only done in daylight hours.
You'll notice in the top left-hand corner, we've got 10-hour operation, and the rest of it is 24-hour operation. Most of the power we use is in the crushing. If we only crush during daytime, we can use solar for a fair proportion of that crushing, and that really saves us a lot for our power costs. I will now talk briefly about Germany. Our Tellerhäuser deposit in Germany has around 5.3 million tons of resource at 1% tin. You can see it's 5-10 times higher grade than Taronga. And it still gives a significant amount of tin metal. If you look, remember the previous table on the resource, a significant portion of that resource is inferred.
What we've been attempting to do over the last 6 to 12 months is to convert more of that inferred resource to indicated. Unfortunately, that's a very expensive task when you consider that we have to drill 800-meter diamond holes to reach the better part of the ore body. However, we did manage to hit it four times, and in each case, we proved that there is significant thickness of the skarn host rock with +1% tin and +2% tin in places in each of those. We certainly proved the concept that the mineralization is continuous and good grade. We had an exploration program at the Gottesberg deposit, which is about 25 kilometers away from Tellerhäuser.
We've always considered that to be a potential satellite deposit, and we had some very surprising high grade and wide intercepts there in our exploration. You can see 73 meters at 0.5% tin from 91 meters and nearly seven meters at 1.5% tin from 143 meters. These still need to be followed up because this is very early stage compared with our Tellerhäuser deposit. I'll now hand you back to Thomas, who will tell you a little bit more on the corporate side.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Tony. We have not only promised to develop the two flagship projects further towards investment ready, which we expect during the course of the next year. We as well promised that we develop our resources that are our projects that are located in Tier 1 jurisdictions, a very rare case in the tin world, remembering that about 80%-85% of the tin today mined tin is mined in developing countries. Naming a few of them, Myanmar, I already mentioned, Indonesia, China, but as well, Congo and Bolivia. Those are the major players in the tin mining world today. About 40%-45% of the total mined tin is mined by artisanal mining, where we see two tendencies.
The one is that the artisanally mined resources are depleting. Second, unfortunately, in that kind of business, usually you can see child labor. We committed ourselves to a conflict-free production of our future tin concentrate. Therefore, we achieved last year an ESG rating by Digbee, and we as well implemented a number of policies. According to those, we are acting, for instance, how to cooperate with the local communities, looking as well for local employment and to develop our project as environmentally sound as possible.
To give you an example, for instance, our German project, we are trying to minimize the footprint, and by selling as well the waste rock to a large extent, and using the remaining materials, so the processing residues from the ore processing to use that as backfill to bring the material, the unusable material back into the mine. First of all, to stabilize the overburden in order to enable us to mine as well the remaining pillars that previously stabilized the overburden.
Tony already elaborated a little bit on our attempts to get to manage renewable energy supplies because he talked about our project to check what is the cost and what is the CapEx for the installation of solar panels or windmills in order to supply our Australian future Australian mine with renewable and second cheap energy, where we, for instance, foresee a oversizing of the crushing parts to run that during the day as the major energy consumer. Our share price hasn't developed very good since our IPO. What you can see here more or less is the tin price development that happened during the last 1.5 years, and our share price unfortunately followed that.
It was not mirroring our attempts and our successes in developing and delivering our promises to develop those projects towards investment ready. Neither the operative successes that we have published during the course of the last year, to name a few of them, updated resource statement with Taronga and achieving a 240% increase in resource, neither the achieving the eligibility of a full-blown Environmental Impact Assessment in Germany and being eligible to the fast-track permitting process, that has not been mirrored in and not valued in our share price development. What has not changed a lot over the last since the IPO are the total shares of the significant shareholders.
Clara Resources, the former Aus Tin, the former owner of our Australian project, is still at nearly 23%. With Baker Steel remained at nearly 14%. Directors as well own close to 10%. You see there is a lot of skin in the game. We as well feel jointly with our investors in regards to the share price development. If we compare ourselves to the competition, Elementos and Stellar Resources are a good comparison.
That shows that there is substantial upside potential in our share price once the market will recognize our successes and as well that we represent most probably the two most advanced projects in the tin world that are able to contribute in the second half of the twenties to the then expected fast-growing demand for tin. Let me summarize what we have done during the last half year. We have the two DFS underway and well advanced, so we expect to finalize the DFS for Taronga until end of the year. That one for Tellerhäuser, for the German project, until end of Q2. Coming years, for both projects, we have started the permitting procedures and we expect to achieve the permits in the second half of the coming year.
Having definitive feasibility studies finalized and enhanced, and as well the permits, achieving an investment ready status. We delivered according to our hypothesis and promises that we with simple mechanical crushing and spiraling and jig steps we are in a position to produce a high-grade tin concentrate with good recovery rates for Taronga. Let's say it in a nutshell, we cracked the code of the low-grade Taronga asset to translate that into good concentrate with good economics. We did some further developments for the German project as well there. Some further processing improvements, investigations are underway as well.
The two projects show at the actual status a robust economy, a robust profitability at the actual tin price of $25,000 per ton of tin, with those of them with significant leverage to higher tin prices and for the German project for sure, because this is a multi-metal project with significant leverage to higher zinc and indium prices as well, because those are the two by-products that Tellerhäuser will produce in the future as well. Tin is the enabler of the energy transition and the digital transformation. Unfortunately, it's very often overlooked. Nevertheless, without tin, no electrical connection, so that's not substitutable. Last but not least, we have a very experienced management team that delivered exactly what we have promised during the course of the last half year. Thanks a lot.
Now I would like to finish the presentation.
Thomas, Tony, thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. If I may just jump back in there before we move to the questions. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, 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 your investor dashboard. Tony, Thomas, as you can see there in the Q&A tab, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning. Thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.
Thomas, Tony, if I could just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks a lot. I would like to combine two questions, if you don't mind. There are two questions that mirror that our share price has been going down since the IPO and is not mirroring our successes. In both times the question, what are we doing to improve? We will proceed to finalize the DFS for both projects as well to run through the permitting procedures to bring both projects into investment-ready status.
That might potentially is the next status where the market then will really value our success, because if I take a look into how the share prices of other tin developers has been developed during the course of the last months, it's more or less one and the same like ours like the First Tin share price. I expect that the market will recognize and value First Tin higher once then the DFS is delivered and we are closer to the achievement of the two permitting for Taronga as well as for Germany. An additional question is taking on this on the valuation of the company, will that make funding negotiations harder and will make us more vulnerable to acquirers?
Actually, I have talked to potential project financing companies in early stage because we are far away from entering into that negotiation because the first question they always raise is, "Can I have a look into the DFS?" That's the earliest stage to enter into a substantial discussion. Nevertheless, the early discussion shows that there are promising expectations that once the project achieve an investment-ready status, then project investment might become feasible. On top of that, for sure, we hope that during the course of the next month, the world economy will return back into a growth rate, in particular the electronics industry.
That potentially will drive the tin price and most probably First Tin will benefit from that as well. Maybe one for you, Tony, with regard to the capital requirements.
Yes. The question is, what are the capital requirements to take the projects to production? And what is the strategy here as the markets are not that buoyant? Well, we're well into our feasibility studies. The answer to that question will come out of those. However, I can tell you that we're aiming for around $70 million for funding for Taronga. It's just over AUD 100 million. For Tellerhäuser, our previous estimate was around $50 million. They're both relatively low CapEx projects. The strategy there, I think, is to try and make both of the projects bankable so that if we want to, we can obtain bank finance.
Both of the feasibility studies we're doing at the moment, you could call Bankable Feasibility Studies. Do you want me to take the next question as well, Thomas?
Yeah. Yeah, great.
The question is, based on the two-year low price of $17,000 per ton tin, what are the economics of the projects based on the worst-case price scenarios? In answer to that question, we think that the break-even price for both projects and our cost of production will be around about that level. At that price, I'd say we probably break even at best, and essentially not economic to build at this stage.
Maybe I can add a little bit background to that question, so not in particular to the 17K, but or to our CapEx requirement. I have seen publications that talked about PT Timah, the Indonesian mining giant in the tin world. In that publication, it was claimed that PT Timah might have a requirement of $30,000 per ton of tin to operate profitable. Looking onto that and the sheer size of the company that might indicate that $30,000 is maybe the new floor price that potentially will motivate further tin projects developers to develop their projects into production, into operating units. Looking onto that and our robust economic figures at $25,000.
In the long term, most probably in the future, in the long term, the former $17,000 tin price is most probably not anymore the floor, but this will end up substantially higher, bringing us into a well profitable region for our two projects.
Thomas, Tony, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time then addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended, just for you to review to then add any additional responses of course, where it's appropriate to do so, and we'll publish all those responses out on the InvestorMeetCompany platform. But Thomas, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call, to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.
Yeah. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Looking forward to your feedback and, I hope that we, Tony and I, could show you that we have achieved a lot of milestones in the project development of our two flagship projects, Taronga and Tellerhäuser, and with the most important milestone, so to mention two, the 240% increase in resource for our Taronga project, as well as the success to crack the code of the low-grade Taronga project to process that into a high-grade tin product with good recovery rates. I guess those are the two most important milestones of the last half year, and we're looking forward to finalize the DFS for Taronga until end of the year.
I believe we have delivered exactly to our promises. We invested the money exactly in the development of the project and didn't spend much for other activities. Looking forward to the end of the year to deliver the DFS. Thanks a lot.
Thomas, Tony, that's great. Thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This may take a few moments to complete, but 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. That now concludes today's session. Good morning to you all.