Welcome to all of you. First of all, apologies. We would probably have aimed to have had this call a few days earlier, i.e., closer to the announcement. Unfortunately, we were traveling in Zimbabwe with no reliable internet or telecommunications, so we had to wait until we got to Johannesburg. That's why it's about a week after we put the announcement out. We've got a presentation to run through. It's about 23, 24 pages. Builds largely on the information in the press release, but with some additional information. That's kind of a segue, then open it to the Q&As. Maurice, can you just move on? Then if we could go through the disclaimer again. Right.
The acquisition of Bilboes is one aspect of our sort of four-pronged strategy. As you know, Central Shaft, near-term growth, increasing production this year, and a commitment to return money to shareholders. This falls into that bucket of looking at attractive new investment opportunities. I hope that towards the end of this presentation, you will see to what extent this opportunity really is very attractive for us. This is entirely consistent and congruent with our stated strategy. Should we move on? Okay, just some highlights on the transaction.
As you know, we've signed an agreement to purchase Bilboes for consideration of just over 5.1 million shares, which will give the vendors of the project 28.5% of our fully diluted equity. In addition, one of the vendors is taking half of its consideration as a 1% royalty on the project. Bilboes has a substantial resource base of 43-101 compliant reserve base of just under 2 million ounces at 2.29 grams a ton. M&I at over 2.5 million ounces at 2.26 grams a ton. In addition, there's inferred mineral resource of about just over 0.5 million ounces.
It's fair to say as well, there is some considerable further exploration potential, but we'll save that for another day. The vendors did a feasibility study, which indicates the potential for an open pit operation with a ten-year life of mine, producing about 168,000 ounces a year on average. It has a post-tax net present value of $323 million at $1,650 gold and a 10% discount rate with an internal rate of return of 33% at a very competitive all-in sustaining cost of $826 an ounce. A CapEx requirement of $250 million.
Now, in addition to that, and this is maybe some, an unusual sort of twist outside Zimbabwe, is we're gonna enter into a tribute arrangement to kickstart early production from the oxides. I'll come on to a bit more detail in that later. It may be unusual outside Zimbabwe, but it's pretty standard inside Zimbabwe, so I'll come back to that later. The transaction is subject to several conditions precedent, again, which I'll come onto in a moment. Okay, next slide. Just a little bit about Bilboes. It was formerly an Anglo American project in Zimbabwe until they exited. As Anglo exited Zimbabwe and sold the assets to its managers, led by a chap called Victor Gapare.
A little bit more about him later. It's about 75 kilometers north of Bulawayo, which means that Bulawayo is sort of, would sort of become a hub for our operations in Zimbabwe. Blanket is about 180 kilometers south of Bulawayo. Bilboes is 75 kilometers north of Bulawayo. There's no scope for any operating synergies between the two. Bulawayo would become a convenient hub for us. It's fair to say that, it's got a very substantial land package. It's got mining claims over 6,870 hectares and exploration claims over another 992,000 hectares. The current shareholders of Bilboes is a company called Toziyana Resources.
Behind that, there is actually a character called Mr. Victor Gapare, who I've known for 12 years now. I used to sit with him on the executive committee of the Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe, where he was president for a couple of years. He's formerly an executive from Anglo American. Toziyana will end up with about 13.5% of the enlarged capital count down here. The other major shareholder is Baker Steel Resources Trust. Those of you based in the U.K. will have heard of Baker Steel. Those of you who aren't in the U.K., Baker Steel is a prominent London-based resource specialist institutional investor.
The third vendor is a Chinese investor group called Infinite Treasure, and they'll end up with, I think, about 10.5% of the enlarged equity. Let's move on. A feasibility study was done by the existing vendors, is dated middle of December last year. It is available on our website. The first thing we'll do on completion is we will commission our own feasibility study. The world today is a little bit different from the world that was in place late last year for obvious reasons. In addition, it's important for us that we actually implement a feasibility study and a development plan that we have ownership of, rather than implement somebody else's plan.
The salient numbers for the reserve and resources are there, I've already mentioned them. Shall we move on? It's very slow turning the pages, eh? The feasibility study conjectures a large scale, low cost, long life asset. As I said, we'll do our own feasibility study to update it for the current situation. We'll do the feasibility study on two bases. One will be that if funding is available to fund the entire project in one single leap, that's about $250 million, but could be more in this environment.
If that funding is available on competitive terms, that means the transaction, the deal is earnings-accretive, NPV per share enhancing for shareholders, we will take that money and build a project in a single leap. If, however, the money is not available on satisfactory terms, we will fall back onto a more cautious approach, which would be to fund a Phase I using our internal cash generation from Blanket, which should allow us to build out a Phase I project of about 60,000 ounces, and then thereafter redeploy the cash from Blanket plus Phase I to build further phases. By no means are we beholden to the markets, both debt markets and equity markets to fund this.
It's fair to say that the ore at Bilboes is refractory, which means it will require specialist metallurgical processing. The DRA feasibility study conjectures the use of a BIOX technology. Again, we have reviewed the work, and we're comfortable that BIOX will work on this ore body. Should we move on? Here's the production profile extracted from the feasibility study. You can see how it, if you're doing the sort of the big bang approach, you can see how it increases and peaks at just under 200,000 ounces in 2029. On the right-hand side, we've aggregated the production from Blanket plus the production from Bilboes.
You can see 2026, you do get quite a significant increase in our attributable production. It is a deal, it's an asset that will transform Caledonia's market position. Let's move on, Maurice. What we see here is the estimated production cost. You've got the all-in sustaining cost hovers at around sort of $700-$750, and then increases as the stripping ratio increases in 2032. It's still a very competitive all-in sustaining cost, so a highly profitable business. Let's just have a few words on the transaction structure. You can see here the existing shareholder base at Caledonia is 12.8 million shares.
The vendors, the Bilboes vendors, received 5.12 million shares, and that will be split between Toziyana Resources, that's 2.4, in pro rata to the Chinese group, 1.9, and Baker Steel with the balance. In addition, Baker Steel get the 1% royalty. It should also be pointed out that Victor Gapare will become an executive director of the group and will also be a major shareholder in the group. To avoid any funny business, he will enter into what's called a relationship agreement, which is a fairly standard document for AIM-listed companies, which regulates the behavior of large shareholders in a listed company who are also directors.
Effectively it avoids those directors who are major shareholders from running the company as a personal fiefdom. Those sort of controls and protections we've put in place to protect the other shareholders of the company must be run for the benefit of all shareholders, not just one shareholder. Should we move on? Right. There are several important conditions precedent to the transaction. The first one is that we require to get satisfaction from the Zimbabwean authorities that Bilboes will be able to export its gold directly. Will not be obliged to sell to Fidelity Printers and Refiners, which is a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. It will be able to export its gold directly and will be able to retain 100% of the sale proceeds in US dollars.
Now, that cuts right through what we've picked up over many years as being one of the single biggest obstacles for investors when they consider looking at Caledonia as an investment opportunity. The fact that we sell our gold to the government effectively, and the risk, the concern with investors is that we are then dependent on the goodwill of the government to pay for the gold that we sell them. Now, you know, I might sound sort of slightly skeptical about this because frankly, this government hadn't paid us for the gold we delivered, we wouldn't be sitting here today. I personally think it's a perception issue, but it's an important perception issue.
When we get this condition precedent satisfied, I think that should go a long way towards addressing the single biggest concern that's been expressed to us over many years by investors. I met the governor of the Reserve Bank on Tuesday in Harare. Also, we met with the Ministry of Finance in Harare on Tuesday. We see no impediment to getting this condition precedent satisfied. That will be a substantial step forward for us. The other main CP relates to the only significant operating difficulty in Zimbabwe, which relates to electricity.
Those of you who follow the company will know that we consistently talk about difficulties with the electricity supply in Zimbabwe, both out-and-out outages because there's not enough local generation to meet demand, and then also the very poor quality of the power supply that we receive at Blanket. What the CP in respect of electricity is that we will need to enter into a power purchase agreement with an independent power producer so that we can get comfortable that there is sufficient power available for the project. Secondly, that that power can be delivered to the project through the grid.
Now, it's fair to say that there is actually, even though Zimbabwe doesn't currently has power outages, that's because the state-owned electricity company is not creditworthy, and therefore anybody in the region who has surplus power isn't prepared to sell it to ZESA because of the credit risk. For a dollar- earning, creditworthy organization such as Caledonia, there actually is power available right now, and going forwards. We're confident that we will be able to get a PPA. Also we're now engaging with ZESA, which is the state-owned utility, to ensure that any PPA that we sign up to can be delivered to the project. Again, that would address the main operating difficulty that we've always identified in Zimbabwe.
There are other CPs which are more of a sort of a procedural basis. We need to get Competition and Tariff Commission approval in Zimbabwe, just to make sure that putting together Caledonia plus Bilboes means that we can't rig the international gold market, which is clearly fanciful, and we just need to get Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe approval for the transaction. Those other CPs are very much sort of procedural. The two big commercial CPs are the ability to export the gold and the CP relating to electricity. Shall we move on, Maurice? Okay. Let's just look a little bit at the quality of the Bilboes asset compared to other assets in the region.
What you see here is the recovered grade for Bilboes. That's the 2.2-2.3 grams a ton I was talking about with the 84%-85% recovery. That means the recovered grade is just less than 2 grams a ton. Compare that to some of the other larger opportunities in Zimbabwe, and you can see quite clearly that Bilboes is a leader in terms of grade. Okay. Moving on. We can look at the size of the project. Okay, there are some substantially bigger projects out there, but in terms of overall size, the Bilboes project compares very favorably to, again, some of the other projects that are available. The next one. How much do we pay for it?
What you see here is how much we paid dollars per ounce, and you can see that we've paid $30. At $30 an ounce, we've paid a lot less than other comparable other similar projects. It's high grade, it's relatively big, and we bought it relatively cheaply. Okay, let me just talk about the tributes. For many years now, Bilboes has been, I'd say, mining. It's been exploiting the thinner oxide layer on the surface using a heap leach to produce gold. It's been producing about 20,000 ounces of gold a year using that methodology, which is very straightforward and quite basic.
Unfortunately, it's now run out of accessible oxide material, and therefore, the existing oxide plant is on care and maintenance. Now the problem for that, for us, is that it means that Bilboes is currently hemorrhaging cash on a monthly basis 'cause it's got no revenue coming in. Also we believe that Bilboes has quite a high quality workforce. There certainly the senior people there are people we would very much like to use in the bigger project, and we would hate to lose them. The Zimbabwe mining industry is picking up. Their skills are at a premium, and we would hate to lose these people.
We're entering into this tribute arrangement whereby we will inject pre-completion about $5 million to restart the oxide activities, which means that effectively it's a pre-strip going down to about 40 meters in depth. That is work we would have to do anyway to do the bigger sulfide project. What we're doing is it sort of brings forward the cash generation, so it maintains the operational integrity of the business, gets some cash and gets some cash going through the till very quickly. It's somewhat unusual to do that sort of thing in the international context, but tribute arrangements are relatively common, albeit that in Zimbabwe, typically the tribute arrangement is given by a larger mining company to a much smaller operator.
At Blanket, we have sort of very small parcels of land, which rather than leave those as parcels of land, uncared for, we have sort of effectively large scale artisanal miners who work that for us on a tribute arrangement. It is pretty unusual to sort of reverse that and have a much larger mining company that is a tributee for a smaller company. Commercially it makes sense. We'll be putting about $5 million in terms of CapEx, upfront costs and in the early months, operating expenses. We'd expect all of that $5 million to be recouped within 5-6 months, and thereafter, it would become a healthy revenue stream, profit stream, net cash stream for us.
That works for us quite nicely. Should we move forward? The dividend, clearly we will have a few CapEx obligation in the future. As I've outlined our approach to this, which is that if markets are conducive and debt is available, we will go the big bang approach. If neither of those things are the case, we will adopt a much more conservative approach. In any event, it does mean that we will have to put our hands in our pockets to fund an incremental CapEx program. Having said that, we do not at this stage believe that should jeopardize the existing dividend, which is $0.14 per quarter, $0.56 for the year.
The dividend is a very important component of delivering shareholder value, and it would have to take something extraordinary for us to have to revisit the dividend downwards. Okay, let's talk a few words about Zimbabwe. Since Mugabe left in 2017 and then the Mnangagwa became the president, he's tried to do quite a lot to improve Zimbabwe as an investment destination. As you may be aware, the 51% local ownership requirement was scrapped in March 2019, and thereafter, we took advantage of that to increase our shareholding in Blanket from 49% to 64%.
More recently, exporters such as ourselves who are listed on the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange, we can retain a hundred percent of the forex that we earn on incremental production, which for us is everything over 57,000 ounces. Clearly, all of the production coming out of Bilboes will be incremental, and so we will be able to retain a hundred percent of the earnings from Bilboes in U.S. dollars. The tax rate is by no means onerous, including a 5% government royalty. The total effective tax rate is just under 30%. It's also worth noting that Zimbabwe is one of the very few countries where you get a hundred percent capital allowances for capital expenditure in the year that you incur that CapEx.
Most countries force you to spread it over future years. Historically, Zimbabwe has been very short of foreign exchange. That seems to have changed now, though. There seems to be much less of a foreign exchange shortage in Zimbabwe. Net forex inflows into Zimbabwe last year were a record of just under $10 billion. We see that pretty much every week in our interactions with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in terms of getting access to externalizing money from Zimbabwe. It's actually become much easier.
As I mentioned, one of the conditions precedent to the transaction is that we will not be required to sell our gold to the Reserve Bank, which again addresses one of the key investor concerns about Zimbabwe as an investment destination for gold. Just to wrap it up, the Bilboes transaction is entirely compatible and consistent with the strategy that we'd outlined. In short- term, we're focused on getting Blanket up to 80,000 ounces a year. You'll see from the press release we put out a couple of weeks ago that we're now running at a quarterly rate of just over 20,000 ounces. We pretty much achieved that.
We've still got a clear commitment to return money to shareholders, but whilst continuing to invest in the company's growth. We continue to evaluate investment opportunities in Zimbabwe to de-risk our business from being a single- asset producer. It's fair to say that with Malig reen, which we're still optimistic about, we're still doing work on that, we still think it's a good asset, plus Bilboes, it's fair to say that we will be somewhat circumspect when we're looking at new opportunities having regard to our funding capacity and our management capacity. Our aim is still very much to becoming a multi-asset Zimbabwe-focused gold producer, with achieving that over the next five to seven years. I believe that is the end of the presentation.
Is that correct, Camilla?
Yes, that's the end of the presentation.
Good. Okay. We'll open it to questions at that point.
There are a few questions written down below. Would Phase I alone cost $150 million initially?
We've indicated 100, but that is a little more than a guess on our part. I just thought 150 is pretty heavy.
Okay. Another question is, why does Baker Steel receive 1% NSR?
Because they wouldn't sell if they didn't get it.
Okay.
Just to clarify, they receive a smaller portion of shares than the other shareholders as a pro rata amount. Yeah, just to clarify.
It's fair to say, had we said, "No, there's no royalty, then you must take Caledonia shares," they wouldn't have been sellers at that point. We did consider saying, "Okay, well, in that case, you don't want to accept the offer, you can stay in the asset as a minority investor." We thought that looked, that would've been practically somewhat cumbersome. They said, "Okay, well, we'll accept the offer if we can convert 50% of our consideration into the NSR." It was something we had to do to get the deal.
Okay. $30 an ounce of reserves and circa $11-$12 an ounce of resources.
That's a comment, not a question, but, yeah. Thanks, Howie.
Another question is, how is this the security of a new mine? Are there artisanal miners on the mine site?
No, there aren't. Security is not a general, widespread problem in Zimbabwe. It's not something we encounter. There is infrastructure there. There are people on the property. You know, existing Bilboes employees, so security is not a problem. It's not, generally speaking, something that we don't encounter the same sort of security issues in Zimbabwe that we would elsewhere in Africa.
Has the condition precedent relating to Forex and gold been achieved by any other gold producer in Zim?
No other gold producer is investing what we're proposing to invest. Everything we're asking for, you know, the 100, the ability to export incremental gold production, the ability to hold the proceeds of those gold sales in U.S. dollars, that is all within the existing regulations. We're not asking for something that's not already on the table. You know, when we met with the authorities on Tuesday, they recognized that very clearly. All we're asking for is that those existing so-called concessions, although frankly, I don't think it is a concession to be able to sell your own gold. Those existing rules are simply codified and given more sort of strength and more longevity. That's all we're asking for.
There's another question here. In the event that you get a guarantee, what form are you expecting?
Well, that's interesting. It has to be a letter from the relevant authorities, which in our opinion is sufficiently binding. That's always gonna be a degree of subjectivity. That's an interesting question. We're not looking for an act of parliament.
There's a question there also, Mark, on whether we would look for a special mining lease as part of this. I don't know if you wanna deal with that. I mean, we thought about it.
We thought about it. We don't believe we need a special mining lease to achieve what we want to achieve. We are aware that other companies do have special mining leases. We don't believe that necessarily we need to get a special mining lease to achieve certainly the ability to export the gold. We're asking for something that's already on the table. It's something we've considered. We don't feel we need it.
There's another question here around power and whether we're likely to add solar.
It depends. The power that appears to be available from projects outside Zimbabwe is hydropower. So that is clean and green, so there would be no requirement for us to try and go solar to improve our ESG credentials. However, if we were to find that even if we're getting power coming from, say, a Zambian hydro project, and we were incurring some intermittent interruptions because of the grid, which is pretty much where we are at Blanket, that's the situation we have at Blanket, well, then we would put in some solar.
The fallback model that we've worked up is that we're perfectly comfortable with a situation where we get about 70% of the project power through a PPA. The balance, most of the balance coming from a solar project, a captive solar project with a very small amount as diesel. We have sort of gained and strategized a sort of fallback, which approximates the situation that is sort of slightly worse than currently exists at Blanket. It's fair to say that a lot of the power problems that Blanket experiences are because of Blanket's geographical position at the end of a particularly poorly maintained line.
The Bilboes project is sort of more fortuitously located close to a newer line, which is not overused. I think using Blanket as a reference point and then making it a little bit worse than that is somewhat conservative. Maybe we use solar, we may not. It depends. We could do.
There's another question here that says, if Bilboes is currently losing cash, what were its other options if Caledonia hadn't been around?
Close down. It doesn't have access to funding to keep going, so it would've closed down. I have seen some comments saying, "Well, if we're buying a loss-making business," we're not buying a business, we're buying a resource base of 2, nearly 2.5 million ounces. The fact it's loss-making is frankly neither here nor there. We can address that very quickly through the tribute structure. It's very difficult I think for people who don't operate in Zimbabwe to appreciate that for a business like Bilboes, raising $5 million or so to kickstart an oxide project, even though it is.
There's just no banking capacity to be able to sort of accommodate that, which is just an unfortunate reflection of the you know the difficult sort of straitened banking circumstances in Zimbabwe. Look, it plays into our hands because it focused the vendor's minds and meant that we had to get moving, we had to sort of draw a line under these negotiations and get going.
The low acquisition price suggests that there were no competitive bids for the asset.
Well, I'm sure if Baker Steel and the vendors would've got a higher price on the table. I think that is, I think that's pretty self-evidently true.
Please clarify your investment cost benefit, and expected IRR, including the tribute and potential $75 million Baker Steel royalty.
Maurice, do you wanna talk about how we evaluate these projects?
Yeah, happy to do that. I mean, for regulatory reasons, there is not an independent feasibility study being conducted on the oxides itself. If that question is referring specifically to the tribute arrangement, we're obviously limited in what we can say there. It suffices to say that, you know, it's $5 million, we think it will get us to do the pre-stripping and a small amount of equipment required to get the oxide processing plant, it's a heap leach oxide processing facility, to get that back up and running. And we think we'll get our money back there in about six months at current gold prices. It's a very good return on the initial $5 million investment.
It's a deal that works for both parties. The same question relates to the $75 million Baker Steel royalty. That's a cap that's put in for reverse takeover protection purposes on the AIM exchange. We don't think the royalty will ever pay out $75 million, and if it ever does, the project will have to mine $7.5 billion worth of gold, which would be very healthy indeed for a business our size.
Maurice, could you know, explain the methodology that we go through when we?
Yeah, sure. Sorry.
Evaluate the purchase of an asset, and then the funding of the asset.
Yeah. The acquisition, if we do dilute our shareholders to buy something, that it's gotta be NPV per share enhancing, and it's gotta be Free Cash Flow per share enhancing, and quite substantially by those metrics. You know, even though we are diluting our shareholders by 28%, the portion that the shareholders are left over with, we believe will be substantially more valuable in our hands. We value this project at a conservative gold price and we think that in terms of both NPV per share and Free Cash Flow per share, the numbers are quite positive.
There's another question here. Will you export 100% of the gold or will some be sold still to the government for good relations?
No, we'd intend to sell every ounce of incremental gold as we are allowed to. Now, it may be refined at Fidelity, and then we would export it from Fidelity. If Fidelity refines it for us, then we export it. We'll be doing it under our own power, so to speak. That would address the government's concern about in-country beneficiation. It would also address the government's concern about having full visibility as to what's being exported. We would only sell to government what we have to sell to government.
Okay. There's another question about Blanket, whether it can go over 80,000 ounces a year.
Maybe, maybe not. It's too early to say. We give guidance at 80,000 and when we're comfortable that, based on future exploration, it may be able to exceed 80, we'll make the appropriate announcement in the ordinary course of events. But at this stage we're guiding 80.
Large variations of tax have been a factor of government intervention in the past. Will you try to lock in an agreed rate?
I don't understand that question. The Zimbabwe tax regime has been incredibly stable for as long as I've worked at this company. The income tax regime. I don't think has moved at all. The royalty did change a little bit. The tax regime in Zimbabwe is by no means as volatile as it has been in, say, Zambia or Tanzania. Our effective tax rate may from time to time vary, but that's got nothing to do with the underlying tax regimes. That's to do with structural inefficiencies as opposed to the way we organize our business. I mean, Chester, do you want to add anything to that question?
Taxes, I don't personally feel tax is a risk issue.
Well, I agree with you, Mark. Our tax rates don't fluctuate. Our effective tax rate fluctuates mostly due to forex fluctuations. Our tax stock is done in Zim dollars, and the devaluation of Zim dollar would affect our tax, you know, income tax expense, reducing our effective tax rate. The regime has been very stable.
Any variations in the effective tax rate have come from sort of exogenous variables, not because the tax rate's changed.
I think we've dealt with the next question. Just talking about $75 million royalty. If the numbers are enhancing cash flow per share after 28% dilution, why did you say the dividend won't increase?
In the short- term, it may not increase. Clearly longer- term, we're doing this with every expectation and intent of increasing the dividend, obviously. I was talking short- term 'cause that wasn't clear.
Will the new investment proposed here divert investment away from Blanket?
No. That would be very foolish. We have to keep and maintain Blanket as the goose that lays the golden eggs, and we have to treat that goose very well. That would be very foolish thing to do.
It does sound like a good.
I'm not sure I understand Howie's question there. I don't. We can.
Yeah.
Sorry. Do all questions have to be typed?
No. We can have people talk as well.
There's one person here who's raised their hand. Okay. With that, we're just gonna
I'm very conscious. I'm sort of being asked questions by Camilla, and I'm answering questions, Camilla's questions the way I would answer if she's sitting in the office which feels a little bit rude as in how I might answer a question from Michelle.
Can you hear me? It's Howie.
We can hear you, Howie.
I calculated return on investment about 50 or 52% if you include both the $250 million and the acquisition cost of $50-odd million and at $1,700. Would a pre-tax return on investment approximate 50 or 52% after all costs?
I wouldn't wanna comment on it without reviewing that math in more thoroughly, Howie.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, I'll call you tomorrow. I have some other calls after this, so we'll go through your return tomorrow.
That's typically a very difficult question to answer very easily. I think Maurice might need to scratch his head a bit on that one.
We'll talk offline, Howie.
Okay, good. Thank you.
Yeah.
There's one more question here.
Oh, hi there. Hi. Yeah. Thank you.
Go on.
Sorry. Yeah. I just got unmuted there. Sure. Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, this sounds like a great deal for the company, and I think it's the right thing to do for diversification. I have some of the questions that were typed earlier about Blanket, and I guess, obviously, the Central Shaft in investment in Blanket have taken up to 80,000 ounces a year, which is fantastic. One of the slides was showing that production for Blanket was penciled in as like 80,000 for the next two years and then slowly decreasing a bit in the following slides.
I guess the question is not so much can Blanket go above 80,000, it's more that, is it, you know, there could have been plans necessarily in Blanket to say, "Okay, well, this is our only mine, so we're going to invest a lot more to try and go even further." Or is it, "We've gone where we want to be with Blanket, we're gonna sustain it," which is great, but also we've got a new mine here which
Okay.
We're gonna divert funds from.
Let me explain. Under Canadian regulations, we're not allowed to show a production forecast for Blanket that aggregates production from measured and indicated resources and from inferred resources. The fall off in production that you see in those later years is because we, in terms of our mine plan, the production in those years from M&I falls off. If you were then to look at our mine plan from inferred, there would be incremental production coming from that. I'm afraid that's just a nuance of the Canadian reporting.
That's actually also why we couldn't show that graph going out much further than 2026, 'cause by the time we get to 2028, 2029, the bulk of our expected production from Blanket will be coming from inferred resources. So that's why that graph might have alerted you to that question. The best and the cheapest place for us to invest money for short-term growth, the best place for us to invest our money is Blanket, because we are gonna continue to invest in Blanket, and we have an exploration strategy at Blanket, which is to go do deeper level exploration.
Also to do fill-in exploration in the areas of the mine above 750 meters, which we believe over past decades has been ignored. We also know that we've got exploration potential to the north, immediate north and immediate south of the mine area. Then finally, we want to start looking at something called the Banded Ironstone Formation, the BIF, which is a completely separate trend, which is about 800 meters to the east. We've got plenty to play with at Blanket. With potential to either extend the mine life and/or increase production. At this stage, I've got no basis to tell you that we've got a clear route to increase production above 80,000 ounces.
Hence, you know, the message I gave earlier on, which is 80,000 ounces for the foreseeable future. The balancing act for us is to invest money in new projects, but also by no means. We can't afford to strangle Blanket. It would be a very, very silly thing to do.
Thank you, Mark. I mean, that makes a lot more sense than kind of going around.
Well, you asked the question. I answered it. No one can ever answer the question. Didn't answer.
It's so much easier when you can expand on what you're really trying to.
Yeah. Yeah.
'Cause I've seen previous slides on Blanket showing all sorts of directions you could potentially explore.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes very sense. Now in terms of kind of what do you think are the major risks here? I mean, is it essentially I mean, some are within your control, some are beyond your control. I mean, I guess from my perspective, the risks on the whole seem to be around power, around getting the right staff. I mean, obviously the mine itself, 'cause you have to do your feasibility study. I mean, I guess are those the kind of main risks you see or are there things I'm not seeing?
No. I think we're gonna largely address power, but power is always gonna be a residual risk. I actually don't feel personnel is a substantial risk. I mean, one of the reasons we're entering into the tribute is because we're very keen to keep hold of some of the senior staff at the Bilboes project who we think are really rather good actually. We really don't wanna lose them. Having said that, you know, there are skills available in Zimbabwe. I don't feel skills is a risk.
I guess the risk is stuff that we just can't see coming, which would be you know, unforeseen eventualities in Zimbabwe which give rise to a series of policy responses that currently we can't envisage. There's nothing at all on the horizon that would suggest that's gonna happen. You know, we've got to recognize that we're operating in a very challenged jurisdiction where you know, it could therefore be unpredictable. My strong belief is that Zimbabwe is much more stable and much more sort of rational than certainly several other sub-Saharan African jurisdictions.
Okay. No, thank you. That makes sense. I mean, if I just ask one final thing, it is, I mean, it sounds, I mean, obviously Zimbabwe government themselves, are they keen to see it go ahead? I mean, it sounds like.
Absolutely.
They're supportive and they want the.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Things.
Oh, yes. They are very keen to see this project come to fruition for all the obvious reasons. More employment, more taxes, you know, everything. Caledonia's got very good standing in country because we've delivered, you know, it's quite substantial growth over the last seven years or so, in a way. They also recognize that in our own small way, we're a living, breathing demonstration to, you know, people on this call that Zimbabwe is an investable jurisdiction. They derive a lot of value, comfort from that. Government is very, very keen to see this transaction proceed.
We've spent a lot of time over the recent years to make sure they understand our strategy and they support our strategy. None of the conversations we're having with government now about selling our company, what's going on, none of this is new. None of this is new at all. We've raised this multiple times in recent years with the Minister of Mines, the president, or, you know, anybody who's relevant, they know this.
Got it. Thank you, Mark. I mean, thank you for doing such a good job over the last few years as well. Really, yeah, impressive. Yeah, hope it keeps going.
Thank you.
Mark, there was just a question about the $75 million royalty cap, which maybe we need to give a little bit more clarity on. They still get a 1% royalty on 2 million ounces of reserves at an 83% recovery. That's 1% of that at $1,700 gold is about $28 million over the entire life of the project over 10 years. If you discount that back on an NPV basis, we did the sums quite carefully, and we were comfortable that it represented roughly equivalent value to the dilution that we would have had to take were we to buy their share with equity.
You know, if gold price has doubled to over $4,000, then we'll probably end up hitting close to the cap of that royalty, in which case, we'll be happy to pay it at $4,000 dollar gold.
Yeah. The only reason for the cap being in place is that if we didn't have a cap, the transaction would therefore theoretically have an unlimited consideration, which then means under the AIM rules, we would have to qualify. It would then be a reverse takeover, and we would have to seek a relisting in London, which would cost an arm and a leg in terms of advisory fees and stuff. The way you cut yourself off from going down that rabbit hole is to put in place a cap on consideration. It's fair to say Baker Steel believe that there is at least another 2.5 million ounces in the ground. It's also fair to say, I think they're very gold bulls.
Hence they look for the upside in terms of what they could possibly get from the royalty. Maurice is right. When we went into this transaction, we offered all the shareholders, all the vendors, call it a deal of equity. Baker Steel said they wanted to take 50% of theirs in a royalty, and then we back solved it to make sure that in a reasonable scenario, the value that we're giving up in terms of royalty was broadly the same as the dilutive effect of the shares that we now are issuing.
There is one more question in here. Do you know if the future new block of shareholders have a common vision of where they want or don't want to go with Caledonia?
Absolutely. They absolutely do not have a common vision. They are not. If the question is, are they a concert party who are sitting at 28.5%? Absolutely not. From our interactions with the three investors, we know that they have somewhat differing views as to what they wanna do with their shareholdings. It's not for me to discuss that publicly, but I'm very clear in my mind that they're not a sort of sleeping concert party with a 28% springboard to make a bid for the company.
Howard still has his hand up. I don't know if he's got another question.
I have no others.
You've no others. Okay. I think that's it.
There is a raised hand from Clive.
Let's unmute that. There you are.
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, wasn't there another way you could have cut this deal, perhaps, investing directly into the project as a JV and reducing the existing holders in the project percentage in it, rather than giving them shares in Caledonia?
Two problems with that. The first is when we had to reduce our shareholding in Blanket to 49%, we were absolutely caned because ostensibly we had no control over the people believing we'd lost control over Blanket. Ending up in a minority position was not comfortable. If you do the math, if you go down the route that you suggested, if you effectively wanna get 100%, you've effectively gotta pay people to buy them out of an asset to which you've added value with your money. That just doesn't work. We weren't prepared to consider that. As we've said, we recognize the dilution, the dilutive effect of issuing equity to buy the asset.
In the round, once you've taken account of the shares we've issued to buy it, any shares we may issue to fund the building, there is still a substantial increase in net present value per share and Free Cash Flow per share. That's the approach that we've adopted.
That option wasn't on the table from the sellers without disclosing, you know, the negotiations. They wanted to sell rather than to have someone invest in their company to co-invest in their business. It wasn't really an option that was available to us, Mark.
No, it wasn't, but it's not something we'd have considered.
Yeah.
They are presumably looking in due course for a sort of liquidity event with Caledonia shares. Clive, that's not something we would have considered, even had it been available. Are we done? Last call. Camilla, can you see any questions?
Yeah. I've got a follow-up to that, to your answer then. If they were motivated sellers of Bilboes, and not all of them are that keen to hold onto Caledonia stock, would it not have been better just to raise the money with investors in Caledonia and take cash at a lower price of Bilboes?
It would have been unaffordable. They were not prepared to accept the same price in cash as they were prepared to accept in sort of in situ value of shares. It would not have been. I mean, I think previously this deal has been through many iterations from the vendor's perspective, and I believe they were looking at a much higher price for cash or something like cash. We could never have matched that.
Okay. If you look at M&A transactions historically in this industry, cash is always at a lower valuation than equity M&As. Yours has gone the other way around.
They weren't. I'm very clear, they were not prepared to accept. We offered $43 million, they would not have taken $53 million in cash. I doubt they would've taken $100 million in cash. It just wasn't an option available. For us to raise $100 million in cash, you don't issue shares at your share price. You know, you issue shares at a discount to your share price. It would've, the dilution would have been excruciating. It just wasn't a realistic option. Okay.
Okay.
Okay. Well, thank you very much for attending. Thank you for your questions. If anybody's got any further questions, feel free to send an email to either me or Camilla. We'll do our best to accommodate you. Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you very much.
Well, thank you. Very good.