Good afternoon and welcome to the Atalaya Mining Q1 Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. 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. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Alberto Lavandeira, CEO. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for being here. We are going to be going through the presentations of the related to the first quarter of the year. I would like to take the opportunity to also comment a little bit about our growth plans. Of course, we will be very happy to answer as many questions as possible within our time limitations. With me, I have César Sánchez, which is the CFO of the company. Just a second, because otherwise I cannot read. I will start with a small summary of what happened in the first quarter. It was a tough quarter. It was a quarter where we had a strike in Spain due to the high diesel prices that created some issues with the transport supply chain of lime.
We had to stop, so we produced less copper than we had planned. 11,000–11,500 tonnes . As a result of that, higher costs due to reduced volumes, but also specifically due to the high, extremely high energy prices, electricity prices, plus also diesel and explosives. Overall, we are seeing some softening in these conditions during the end of the year, and we believe that the copper, the production is going to be recovered. We are maintaining the full year guidance. Very likely going to be in the lower range of the guidance from production point of view, but so far we think we can still, we still have time to recover it. EBITDA was around EUR 27 million.
Important to mention that most of this EBITDA went to free cash flow of EUR 20.7 million. That tells you a little bit that our cost structure really makes us flow all the costs directly from the EBITDA to the balance sheet because we don't have too many other overheads or similar things. Our balance sheet continued to strengthen, close to EUR 87 million at the end of the year. Liquidity improved a lot because we had one of the historic shareholders, XGC Melter, run into some trouble with its parent company, was distressed and had to sell their position. That created a big opportunity that has been taken by lots of institutions and individuals, and our liquidity has improved dramatically.
Right now, only one big shareholder has 22% of the shares of the company, and the rest is all institutions, which is helping the liquidity quite a lot. We are strengthening for the future, so we are starting to build our E-LIX plant, phase one. We are starting the construction of the solar, a big solar plant. We have been continuing exploration. Exploration is going to be a very important aspect of this company in the near future. At the Masa Valverde satellite, it's around 20-something kilometers from Riotinto, and we have already started announcing the resource, significant resources that we have both in Masa Valverde and in the satellite deposits of San Dionisio and San Antonio that are immediately beside our current open pit. No issues with the COVID.
We could try to continue to improve the efficiencies at Riotinto. A very important point is that we published our first sustainability report, which is on our web page. We have just hired a non-executive director, which is highly specialized in ESG matters with a broad experience in the industry, which we believe is going to be a huge addition to this company. As I said, this sustainability report is published on our web page, and I encourage you to take a look at it because not only it's nice, but it gives all kinds of data. For us, transparency is a key ingredient of a mining company, especially when you are looking at the future.
This has been prepared by ERM, which is a worldwide recognized expert, and has been audited by Ernst & Young. Looking at our production results, you will see what I mentioned before. The first part is that we produce a bit less tonnes of copper, but as you can see, most of it is due to the lower throughput that was due to the 10-day strike in basically the whole Spain of the transport sector that prompted us to stop the mill because we didn't have any line. Recovery was better than previous quarters and a little bit compensated the lower throughput. Of course, as a result of that, revenues, sales were lower than previous quarters. EBITDA was significantly lower, obviously, due to the two factors. One is lower production and the
Another important point is the incredibly high electricity prices, and I'm happy to speak about that in a second. Having said that, you can see in the last graph it's extremely important that that graph is how our net cash position has always been negative while we were constructing. It means we were looking at sending all the cash flows generated by the operations into the project without diluting our shareholders. As soon as we started production with the expansion, our cash position started going up. We gave a EUR 50 million, almost EUR 50 million dividend. That's why you see in the second bar from the right that it was lower, otherwise it would have been fantastically high.
Important is that even after that, our net cash position continued improving because as I said before, our EBITDA reflects immediately to the cash flow. Right now we have EUR 120 million working capital surplus, which is quite a contrast of what we used to have of even up to -EUR 40 million just a couple of years ago. Let's talk a little bit. I'm sure you would like to hear about the electricity supplies in Spain. See, it's Spain is a kind of island in Europe. Incredibly enough, we only produce electricity from gas and coal for less than 10% and going down. The rest is coming from nuclear, from wind, big time, solar and other 10% hydro.
As you can see, renewables and non CO₂ related. Due to the system that we have, which is a marginal production system, which means the higher cost producer sets the price for everybody, we have been exposed to these high, incredibly high prices. In the last 10 years, the electricity prices, the base case has been around between EUR 50–70 per MWh . Actually going down, as you can see the trend due to the high input of wind in Spain. Since last year, prices of gas started spiking up and reached certain points, with the war of Ukraine of around EUR 300 per MWh , which is, as you can see, 6x , 600% higher than what we had historically. What's affecting us?
The fact is that until now, until last year, the cost of electricity was representing only around 10% of our costs, and this year has gone up to almost 30% of the costs. Actually, in the first quarter, the cost of electricity at the plant was higher than all other costs together that we had in the last year. That tells you how important it is. We have been trying to do our best optimization at the plant, but we have a consumption of around 24 kWh per tonne of production, and it's not much we can do. Prices have eased a little bit, both in gas and electricity, and around EUR 200 per MWh as we speak, but lower in the weekends.
Spanish government has been given the okay, although not finally settled, but given the okay to limit the gas prices, Spain and Portugal for at around EUR EUR 40–50 per MWh , which means prices for electricity would be around EUR 120–130, roughly half of what we have right now. This is going to have a huge impact. This is only going to happen during the second part of this year. Going forward, we are in a much better position. We signed during the first quarter a long-term agreement with our main supplier, Endesa, at around EUR 52 per MWh for around 33% of the needs.
33% of the need combined with construction of the solar plant, it means that from 2023, 53% of our electricity costs are going to go back to normal, actually to even under what has been normal during the last 10 years. Hopefully this situation of the gas is going to be disappearing. Other inflation points like diesel, which have basically has doubled, although there is a small help from the Spanish government of EUR 0.2 per liter. Explosives, they have an important effect, but maybe 10%- 15% of the global costs of mining. It's not that significant as the 500% increase in the electricity prices.
With that, we had a guidance that we are maintaining, and we'll show you a little bit why. We had the guidance is composed. The guidance of production and costs are composed basically by ore that you get through the plant, grade that has that ore, the recovery of that copper, and that gives you the production. Depends on the production and your costs. You have your cash costs and your all-in sustaining costs. Well, we believe we are going to be in the high end of the ore process, so we'll be able to catch up a little bit what we lost in the first quarter. The copper grade is also expected to be improving. The recovery rate is higher. Right now it's around 86% accumulated.
Very likely, even with a slow start during the first quarter, we will be probably in the lower part of the guidance and production, but we will be there. Cash costs depend a lot on the assumptions for electricity, and that's why we gave such a wide guidance. We're basically talking about $0.50 variation, which is basically what it means having a EUR 100 per MWh variation. As I said before, we expect that the second part of the year is going to be closer to the 120, so half of what we had in the first quarter. The guidance will be. Cash costs and also all-in sustaining costs are expected to be lower, substantially lower than we had in the first quarter due to the higher production and due to the lower expected costs.
As I said before, important factors to reduce the electricity are the construction of a solar plant in an old dump close to the plant. The plant is seen in the slide 11 in the center. All the civil on the right side is finished. It's been completed in the north side. All the equipment has been ordered. In addition to that, we have signed this power purchase agreement with Endesa, and we are looking at some additional other initiatives. A specialized company has made a study of four wind turbines sitting between Corta Atalaya, San Dionisio in our tailings, in a hill. There are measurements. There is a measurement station with 20 years measurements that we have used.
I mean, they are not high altitude measurements, but based on the studies, it looks like it would be economic. It will be four windmills at 6 MWh for 6 MW each. We'll be studying this in the next few months and if it's positive, and we believe it may be positive, we will pass it to the board. This has the special advantage of being self-consumption, and you can use the wind also at night. Not only will be economic from a long-term point of view, but it will all be in our land, but it will also be very important from the sustainability end. I believe we will be one of these companies that has most of the power self-generated and from sources that are renewable.
An important point that I wanted to highlight today is the growth. I mean, I think people are starting to realize that this is not only Cerro Colorado that we are mining, where we will have, let's say, mine for another 10 years, but we have a pipeline of projects that are real. Not only Touro that's been permitted, but also our San Dionisio, which is near to Cerro Colorado and Masa Valverde , plus exploration that we are going around. For those of you who are not familiar with it, we are mining in the central part at Cerro Colorado. We have another place called San Dionisio just west of Cerro Colorado and around the deposits in San Antonio.
Why we believe this is very important. Well, the grades of the overall reserves of Cerro Colorado, when you look at $4 per pound prices are 0.38%. We'll be mining around 0.41%–0.42% and leaving the stockpile to the very end. This will give us around 12 years life. What we have in San Dionisio on the open pit side is around 0.9% copper. It's very evident that if you could substitute some of these tonnes of San Dionisio and blend them with Cerro Colorado, you would have a much higher grade with the same installation. Through the same mill, you would be able to produce much more copper. The open pit section of San Dionisio contains two zones.
The upper zone contains much higher copper and the lower zone contains copper and zinc. If I show you in a graph how it looks like, this is the old Atalaya pit. San Dionisio deposit is basically what has been mined in the past. It's in the center of the pit. It was a very high-grade zone that was mined in the last century. They left what they call lower grade, but it has basically around 1% close to the stopes and another for around 0.8% average. You can see in the section on the right side of the Slide 16 that the center core has been mined out, but they have left all the right side with only copper.
In the bottom part, you start getting massive sulfides that also contain lead and zinc, mainly zinc. You can see it's not an aggressive pit. We are using slopes that's similar to what there are right now in Cerro Colorado in Corta Atalaya. The mineralization starts basically from surface. The San Antonio deposit is underground lens located immediately west from Cerro Colorado. We can access it with an underground ramp. Very simple. It contains copper and zinc. It's quite high grade. It starts at 200 meters from surface to 500 meters, more or less. It's quite easy to mine. It's flattish, and it's open to the right, which means the east. It's just north of the Nerva village.
In San Dionisio, as mentioned before, it contains two zones. One is copper with around 0.8. Another one contains copper and zinc, which quite significant high grade, and also contains certain zones of underground that can be mined underground with 1% copper and 2.5% zinc, plus some lead. There are some indications in the presentation, I'm not going to read, page 18, of how this can be mined, but the idea is to blend one-third of the capacity of our current mill with this open pit from San Dionisio, so we can increase the grade of the existing feed, and produce more copper with the same installation.
Once we get into the zinc, we'll have to add a flotation circuit to recover the zinc or the E-LIX . This will give us an additional production of zinc and lead for which basically is a by-product, so the copper equivalent production will be much higher. We will be doing preliminary economic assessment this year. Actually, hopefully starting this next quarter, and we'll have it certainly before the end of the year. Masa Valverde is another deposit which is located 25 kilometers southwest of Riotinto . We gave some preliminary estimates based on independent engineering specialized company. It's a substantially big massive deposit, almost 90 million tonnes, open in certain directions. It's a combined copper lead zinc.
In some areas is high grade, some areas is low grade. The importance of this is that it contains some very high-grade intercepts of copper that can be put directly into our plant. How is this going to be developed? It's going to be basically ramps starting from surface to the shallow area of Majadales, which is high grade and shallow and small. That ramp will continue to be able to drill the lower part of Masa Valverde as well as as developed and be able to strike through these ramps, either through a belt or trucks directly from surface. The importance of these two deposits is that it can be mined. They can be mined directly without having a plant, and that's why you can get special higher revenues from this deposit early on.
We could start mining the higher portions of the copper and feed them into our existing mill without any significant investments in constructing a new mill. The deposit is quite well-defined but still wide open because in some areas the intercepts are very wide but contains some clear high-grade zones, including the presence of gold which still needs to be assessed, and we are not considering at this stage. The importance is it contains some zones that has copper only, which can be fed into the plant without any problem. We are also starting the completion of a preliminary economic study as soon as possible. Very important to be able to recover this.
Very important to recover these polymetallics is the development of this E-LIX system, which has been working for two years in a pilot plant that some of the pictures are shown here. We have just started the construction of an industrial plant, which we should be ready at the end of the year. This slide, excuse me, let me jump this slide because this slide should not be here. With these initiatives that I just mentioned about production, without even considering E-LIX, what is going to happen is that we expect to have a production uplift from our existing deposits of between 70,000–75,000 tonnes of copper.
I see ourselves, we are in 2022, mid-2022. I see ourselves in 2024 producing from Riotinto 70,000-75,000 tonnes of copper, in addition to what we can get in from Touro, around 30,000 tonnes. Why we can do that is because if we add around 5 million tonnes of high-grade material, of open pit from San Dionisio, basically we are blending 5 million tonnes at 0.78%. We can get 16,000 tonnes of copper more. And if we can mine from San Antonio 1 million tonnes at 1.32%, we are getting another 8,000 tonnes. There is potential to increase the production from Cerro Colorado without any significant investment. Those are the key initiatives for the year. Solar plant, PEA Masa Valverde, PEA San Dionisio, Touro continue to permit. Exploration.
Big exploration is spent in Ossa-Morena and Touro. Let me go back to the slide. This slide that was should be at the end. This is slide of our progress of the initiatives to improve the water quality at Touro. In Touro, we got two years ago a negative environmental impact declaration. That was due to the anti-mining groups making a lot of noise and stating things that were not true. The main one was that the mine was going to be polluting the area. We had assumed that we were going to be taking care of the liabilities, and this was going to be done after we got the permits.
After lots of dialogue with all the involved parties, including associations from the area, fishermen, they said, "Look, show us that this can be done and this would be very positive." We engaged and more approval approved to construct a water treatment plant to treat the water that's coming from operations that were finished 37 years ago, which are not that relevant, but they make a very bad picture like you can see in the center part of the picture where it says before. A small creek of around one meter wide that contains some acid water. We started immediately the treatment, and right now, only a few, a couple of weeks after starting our operations, the creek is starting to turn green again and the waters are clear.
In addition to that, we are building a water treatment plant for all the other rivers or small creeks in the area. The water treatment is almost finished. You can see some of the pictures in Slide 24. This will be shown to the community, and it will be an important step of credibility before we submit all the paperwork for the permit. As I said, we are doing this in theory unrelated to the permitting process itself, but certainly will add credibility to our proposals. That's in a nutshell the plan that we have, and of course there are some few other data in our presentation that I will use as needed depending on the questions.
Alberto, César, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. I'd like to remind all investors on this call 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. Alberto, César, we received a number of pre-submitted questions from investors, and I want to start off the Q&A session with these. The first one reads as follows: When will the Spanish government implement the gas price cap? Will the Spanish electricity cap be passed on to the businesses or only to customers? Is Atalaya Mining planning to revise its cost guidance range once the cap has been implemented?
According to the news and what has been published in the official gazette, this thing is going to be affecting everybody because it will affect directly the electric companies. What the electric companies are doing or have the system that we have is that the marginal price, which means the higher cost producer, sets the price for everybody. For everybody that doesn't have a fixed price. That's our case. By setting the maximum the gas price, which is always the higher cost producer, it is believed it's going to be set initially at EUR 40. And the electricity price means that's basically 2.2x the gas price. It means that the electricity is going to range EUR 120-130 . Roughly half. This is expected to be start to implemented in.
It was expected to be started, implemented in May. Yesterday, I'm out of the country, but I read in the newspaper that they still needed some approvals from the EU, although it had been approved already. We expect this, let's say, starting in June. It will affect everybody, including us. It will be a strong change. We'll be updating the guidance. Probably yes, but we have already given a guidance dependent on the electricity cost between EUR 100–200 per MWh . We have already assumed that this was a very wide range and we will be, let's say, in the lower part of the range. Roughly speaking around EUR 100 per kWh, change means, I think it was like $0.40 per pound change. It's quite significant in our case.
Alberto, thank you very much. The next question is around Touro and asks: Has the new project proposal been submitted yet? And if not, what's the catalyst the company is waiting for?
We have not submitted it yet because we believe that one to three months, whatever, is not relevant. What we wanted to do is to be sure it's going to be a yes. We're in constant dialogue with the different departments of the administration, the communities, the affected communities of the coast, the municipalities, and we believe we are seeing the wave of positive news coming in. What we said is, "Look, we're going to show you that the water problem is not a problem. Actually, with an investment, with somebody putting money in, it will not cost money. It will not cost any euro to the taxpayers of Galicia, and this thing is going to be fixed forever at our cost.
It was something that we had already assumed we were going to be doing as part of the CapEx, so the only thing we are doing is advancing it at our own risk. We will submit the papers when everybody is agreeing verbally that these things are being done in the right way. I think the credibility that we are gaining is huge, and the problems or the potential issues that were raised in the past, assuming that this thing would not be fixed, will be demonstrated that they are being fixed and that they have solution. Of course, they have solution. That argument of the question mark will not be had. We want to make sure that everybody understands that this is a good project in the right metal, in the right place.
Long-term quality mining that can be made like it's done in any other modern country. Only when we are 100% sure that this will go ahead and everyone is happy with it, we'll submit all the paperwork. The paperwork is basically ready almost 10 months ago with a new project, which is an enhanced project with highest factor of safety without any water on top of the tailings, which means there's no possibility to a catastrophic event with zero- discharge system. Now we are adding a few other things. We are adding the use of sewage water from cow farms from the area to our process. We will be we're also adding a solar plant. It will be a project that will be a model for the generations . We are showing that slowly.
When we have it very likely soon, very likely one to two months, not longer than that, we'll present all the papers with the proof of what we have done. We want to make sure this time is a yes.
Thank you very much for that, Alberto. The next two questions are really around M&A, and the first one reads as follows: According to the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain has an estimated 70,000 tonnes of rare earths. Is this a commodity group that Atalaya Mining would consider? If not, which commodities would you consider besides copper and zinc?
We'll consider any commodity in general. Of course, we wouldn't mind going to rare earths. We don't have any rare earths in our portfolio, but if we had, we would be very happy to look at them because it has a lot of future. So far, the only reason why we have not gone into that is that within the concessions or exploration permits that we have, we don't see potential for those. You're right, there are a couple of deposits that are known, one in Galicia and one in the central part of Spain that are very well known. Of course, we would be very happy to participate on them if it was possible, but right now, it's just not in our plans.
We're looking at obviously copper, lead, zinc and gold, silver, simply because that's what we have in our investigation and exploration permits.
Thank you very much, Alberto. The second question around M&A reads as follows: Have you considered investments in select African countries such as Morocco as a first step into the African continent?
We have looked at things in Morocco that have been offered to us, but so far nothing was interesting. We looked at things in Botswana and actually even submitted an official bid to an acquisition at a certain time. We were happy with that. From my team, part of my team has been involved in the construction of the Tasiast project in Mauritania back in 2005- 2007, which is a world-class gold deposit in the middle of the desert. We are not shy of that. The former chief operating officer of the company was the general manager of that project during construction. We're not unhappy with that. Morocco specifically, we wouldn't mind, but we have not had the opportunities.
As a way to come in, for example, we started in Mauritania simply because we liked the project. At that time, it was another company, wasn't it? Because it was quite close to get through Canary Islands, which was a way to do it that was very successful, and it was followed by Kinross later. Morocco itself, happy to look at it, but we have not found any good opportunities so far.
Thanks for providing a bit more color there. Next question is really around share schemes and asks: Have you considered implementing an employee share scheme to help productivity and loyalty?
We do have some stock options to key people. Not only the, let's say, the executives, but also all the general managers from the company or managers from departments have an option scheme. Certainly, with the past shareholders that we had in our company were four big private shareholders that were not very keen in those type of incentives. I think it was a mistake because I believe like whoever has asked this question that this is a very interesting system to incentivize performance and align with shareholders. Yep. I think, yes, we have considered it. Now it's a bit more than it used to be in the past. By the way, with independence of that, we have a very loyal team.
Some of the people that are working on our team, I know for over 25 years, with companies linked with where I've been working. We have a very low turnover. It's a company that really people are happy to work, and they work very hard. I'm extremely happy with the existing team.
Thanks, Alberto. The final pre-submitted question asks, "What proportion of your costs are denominated in euros?
Well, I would say all the operating costs that are site costs. All that's plant, mine, and G&A. From the offsite costs, which are the transport, TCs, RCs, only the transport to the coast and the loading at the port are denominated in euros. For example, roughly speaking, offsite costs are around 50, used to be $0.50 per pound, now they're around $0.60 per pound due to the diesel prices. Those are treatment charges, refining charges, smelters, and sea freights. Most of them are denominated in dollars. Only around EUR 20 per tonne of concentrate are denominated in euros. All of the rest is in euros.
Thank you.
I would say, to put it in a simple way, 25%-30% of the costs are in dollars, the rest are in euros.
Thank you very much for that. That concludes the pre-submitted questions. As you can see, we've received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Thank you to all the investors for submitting those. Alberto, could I just ask you to read out the questions and give responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up with you at the end.
Excellent. Yeah. I have one question here from Sat. It says, "Is a strong dollar against euro a positive or a negative for profitability of the company?" It's a positive for us because we sell in dollars, and most of our costs, as I just explained, are in euros. Actually, one of the reasons that will also help our guidance from the cost point of view is that initially this year the predictions were going around $1.15 per euro. Right now we are in around $1.05 per euro. That, let's say around 10%, it translates into, let's say 65%–70% of that saving goes into our cash costs in dollars per pound. It's better for us. We are exporting in dollars, and we are paying in euros. We have another question here.
For the remainder of this calendar year, what can you do to lower our production costs?" Well, we are doing initiatives like the first thing is to try to increase the grade. Second is to try to modify the plan, increase the grade. Increasing the grade of the mine, what it does, we're basically doing a much stricter grade control. What it does is you produce more, your denominator is higher, then your costs are lower. Another thing we can do is lower the distance of transport to dumps because diesel is a very important factor. Modify the plan a little bit instead of a very normalized mine plan, try to minimize the distance from the loading point to the discharge point. That lowers the mining cost a little bit in the diesel.
Other than that, at the plant, we have been implementing things like the recovery of water to reduce energy and to reduce the lime consumption, which is also an important factor. Other than that, the rest of the costs are very variable. Not much you can do there. Of course, increasing the recovery also helps. I have another question from Paul, which it says, "Any progress yet to retreat your legacy gold operation tailings at Riotinto?" We have done lots of tests even recently of leaching those gold tailings. So far, the initial results have not been very good. The gold recoveries were around 40%-50%, and the silver were quite low in the range of 10%-15% recovery with the standard leaching.
So far, the grades were around 0.3%—0.3 grams per tonne gold and around 35-40 grams of silver. In total, we had around 29 million tonnes, if I remember well, around 30 million tonnes. The operation was just marginal. In order to be better, I think we would need better copper and more important, silver prices. We will also need some sort of technology that we will be able to unlock that value to increase the recovery, which so far we don't know. We don't know about it. There has been some media speculation that they were going to be using some novel technique. Well, this was probably something that somebody put there, but it was not us, certainly. Why do you think that the share price does reflect the...
Why do you think the share price does reflect the excellent progress that the company is making? Well, Mark says, "I don't know if it does not reflect." I think slowly it's reflecting it. I think we have seen a slowdown in the share price due to several things. One is the sale of the Chinese shareholder at a discount created big volumes. Very likely this was sold at a discount. Very likely some of these institutions, maybe hedge funds came in, are probably realizing some profits. So we had a kind of slowdown there. But on the other hand, most of the copper names have seen their share price going down similar to us due to the slowdown in the copper price and the reflection or perception of a slowdown in activity in China due to the COVID restrictions.
Which we believe is temporary, and we believe, I personally believe that the copper price is going to see huge increases, even this year, but certainly next year. Another question from Roy: Does the company intend to increase the plant size to raise the production from the current levels to increase profit and offset a drop in the copper price? The increase in the size of the plant is difficult due to the restrictions or limitations in electricity supply and water supply. What we can do is to pass better tons, higher grade tons through the same installation. That's what we are proposing to do.
We will be producing more copper, but without having to go through the plant size increase, which is actually better because you don't need to have huge capital expansions and it can be done immediately. We will see an important increase in the next year or two years. We'll see an important increase in production of copper without having to raise the plant size, and we will see a subsequent reduction in costs and of course increase of profits. Walter is saying, "By how much should all-in sustaining costs drop by 2024 due to the new pits incorporated?" Well, let me put you a few numbers.
With a grade of 0.42% copper, assume all things are the same, assuming costs of power at EUR 100 per MWh and happy to go into the detail if you want. You have my private email. If we assume that with 0.42% We were getting with high costs of energy, let's say EUR 250 all-in sustaining costs. If I just made the blend of 0.55%, and I'm doing right now in the computer. 0.55, which means blending a little bit of this copper in, the net effect will go from EUR 255 to EUR 208. Just this increase from going of grades at 0.42% copper to 0.55% copper.
That small thing, keeping all the things the same, means almost 50 cents, 40-something cents lower all-in sustaining costs, as a result, higher production. That would take our production levels at 72,000 tonnes of copper. It's a huge effect. That's the reason why we are quite comfortable that we are going to be seeing production levels of around 70,000 tonnes. If anyone wants to get more details on this, I'm happy to. People have our contacts, and we can organize a call to look through that. Paolo is asking, "Does the company use any hedge policy for the copper price or just take the spot value of the market things?" No, we have been using only spot. There are some.
Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to correlate production with what we get simply because the way this works is that you submit certain shipments and the buyer agrees when is the price going to be settled. Declares a quotational period. It means, "Okay, I'm shipping now in May, but the price we will pay you for this shipment will be June or July." We say in July, they say month plus two. In July, the average price of LME will multiply by your production here. Sometimes it goes out lower, sometimes it goes higher. Overall, around the year is more or less flat. It's the same thing. Doesn't really matter too much.
We cannot predict the future, but the buyers may have some use, and that's why they use it. It's not exactly coincidence with the direct average. We are not using hedging, and we thought of that due to the extreme volatility that the low stocks that were available just a few months ago, we didn't want things to happen like it happened with nickel, where suddenly there's no stocks and the price explodes, and then you are subject to margin calls if you are selling in the future. Hedging is a double-edged sword. We have to be a little bit careful. We believe that our shareholders are buying our stocks of our company because the exposure to copper and that's what we are doing.
It wouldn't be good also to have hedged when it was at $3.60 and everybody was saying it was a fantastic price, and then we saw it going to $4.50. For the same reasons, we prefer to be exposed, and we are strong believers in the long-term price. Good long-term price. I believe there is no more questions here.
Thank you very much for that. I think you actually managed to address all those questions from investors. Of course, the company will review all questions submitted today and will publish their responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Alberto, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Well, I would say thanks. Thanks to all the supporters, all the shareholders for being with us all these years. It's been a tough quarter. I would say the toughest quarter that we got through because it came very suddenly. It came. It was not foreseen. It was coming in a period where copper price were going up, and we saw this inflation really like a wave. I think it's important, and we really appreciate the support that we are seeing in our shareholders. Besides that, we strongly believe that the future of this company is very, very strong. Recently had a site visit by six institutions that cover our stock about two weeks ago. All of them have published their notes.
I encourage those interested in this company to read them because I think during a year they in the field we are able to show them what were our plans with more detail. I think I've seen some notes saying that this company has a great future, let's say, and it's in a growing mode. Thanks very much for being in the good times and in the bad times. That's all.
Alberto, César, thank you very much for updating investors today. Could 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 will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Atalaya Mining PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.
Thank you. Thanks.