Aurelia Metals Limited

I would now like to hand the conference over to Brian Quinn, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome to everyone for joining this call to allow us to present our June quarter results update for 2023. I'm actually dialing in from the Noosa mining conference today where I'll be presenting tomorrow actually. more detail on Aurelia Metals and our quarter results. So please look at this information as it will be registered tomorrow on the ASICs. On the call joining me from Aurelia Metals, I have Andrew Graham, who is the interim CEO, Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, and Peter Trout, the Chief Operating Officer. We're actually excited to present to you the fourth quarter results today, and I'll continue to commence by talking through some of those highlights for Aurelia. It's actually been a very strong quarter and a half year from earlier in terms of financial improvement and setting up for FY24. Firstly, I would like to emphasise the outcomes of safety at the operating assets. The operating assets and projects have managed safely exceptionally well, with major step changes achieved in reducing total recoverable injuries. And in fact, I was on site this week celebrating DARD with a 12-month entry-free lunch, followed by an underground visit to the operating stoves. Production from the operating assets are delivered in line with our financial year 2023 guidance and so has the all-year sustainable cost for the business. We've experienced some welcomed tailings and prices from some of the commodities, for example, gold, balanced out by some of the softer prices in other commodities like zinc. So Martin will talk through some of these details in a couple of minutes during the presentation. Obviously, we'll provide the full year results, financials, on these outcomes in our reporting period in the next couple of months as well. During the quarter, some material activities have been completed, including the HERA care and maintenance. And as we report in the March quarter, we've also now transitioned the owner-operator at peak and resourcing up to delivering to FY24 with Aurelia employees and equipment. We've also made some excellent decisions to fully pay back all debt on the balance sheet in the June quarter. which puts Aurelia Metals in an excellent position to take on the new financing facility for our next major Federation project. It's also good business to us very well to look at project pipeline itself on our next projects after Federation is successfully completed, which obviously kicks off in August 2023. We'll provide more details on these sort of outlook in the full year results. To set up for Federation during the June quarter. Once the funding solution was delivered, we've been focused on remobilisation of Bread Path, one of our construction contractors, in addition to tendering our packages and focusing on critical path items to ensure we deliver the project on time and cost. We've also appointed a very experienced project director, Michelle Tracy, who will report to myself and lead the project, who is on the ground at Federation as we speak. Lastly, I've spent the last five weeks here to know the people, the assets, the potential in our in our resource and some of the shareholders and investors, and thanks to all those who have provided feedback. And as a result, I've developed a focused 100-day plan, which I'll talk to you towards the end of the call. This is aimed to really leverage the improved performance over the last six months and set up our company for exciting outcomes over the coming years. So in summary, a very good finish to the year in the last half of FY23 in safety, operating, production, balance sheet and cash. setting up Project Federation, and importantly, setting ourselves up for an exciting financial year 2024. So to get run through some of the details, I'll firstly hand it over to Andrew Graham, who is the interim CEO, to talk in more detail on the guidance outcomes for the past quarter. Over to you, Andrew.

Thanks, Brian. And also, like Brian, I'm at the MISA conference this week, so if there's a bit of background noise, I certainly apologise for that. Those who joined us at the AGM in December or November would have appreciated at that stage that there were a few things absolutely critical to me in my time as interim CEO. One of those was doing what we said, so delivering on guidance. And those who were following along on the presentation on side four, we provide a summary of that and very, very pleased to say that we have achieved guidance across the board on all commodities and also on long-sustaining costs. for the full year. Talking a little bit more detail about that, March was very strong. So when we look at the June quarter compared to the March quarter, it does seem a bit softer. The first thing people should be aware of is that we didn't have error in the June quarter. So March includes three operating assets. June quarter includes two. So therefore, we did see a reduction in production of commodities. That said, Particularly peak was making a lot of base metals, less gold, and therefore we did see a shift to base metals in the June quarter when we saw, say, gold. I'll look at costs. It was probably the one that was concerning me most. And when we talked in the March quarter, we looked at the commodity graph. All were on track to achieve guidance and I'm pleased to say that they did, and gold at the top end of that range. You know, price, cost was probably the area we went to focus to achieve our target of $2,300 a year. Please just say the half year came in below $2,000, which I recall travelling through Sydney, meeting investors very early in my time as interim CEO, and that was the one area most people believed wasn't achievable because of that we need to achieve below 2,000 all in sustaining as you can see on the graph on the right we did that and therefore came in on guidance on around that 2,300 all in sustaining per ounce. Critical to us as a business demonstrating that we say what we're going to do and then we do what we say and that's something you can expect from us going forward. Similarly around the time of the AGM and in the same scene of doing what we say I did say with people that safety was a key item for me. I'm a strong believer that safe production and production go hand in hand with safety. It's certainly what we've seen and I'll talk about that in a moment in relation to DARS. But across the whole group, we had a very pleasing result for the six months in that we had no recordable injuries through to the end of June. That has meant our total recordable frequency rate has dropped into the fives, which is a fantastic result when you consider we're operating three underground mines. The other thing to consider and keep in mind there is that it wasn't steady state. Things weren't stable. The business was going through quite a state of flux corporately, but also operationally. And Brian touched on it. We turned off HERA at the end of March. and had to take that site to care and maintenance and the site moving to the end of its period of operation into care and maintenance and certainly weighing on the minds of people as well as introducing a whole bunch of work to business as usual. The other item that Brian touched on is we took people who only operated mining as well through that period and it was extremely pleasing to see it come out of Piedmont and move into owner operator and not have any safety incidents in that period of time. Everyone touched on in slide five is our recorded environmental incident frequency rate. Just saying that our group manager of environment, John Thompson, effective as the architect of that, and it has been recognised as a finalist in the Youth of Wales Mining HSEC Awards. Please remember, this is our target for the year of three, and we've come in at 2.9. So as well as not harming people, we're pleased to say we're having a new impact on the environment as well. I did talk about good safety results, going hand-in-hand with good operation results, and the reality, we moved to a side six, which is the DARS result. And for an underground mine in Australia, this is really quite incredible, in that they have not had a record of an injury in 12 months. And therefore, total record of an injury frequency rate, which is a 12-month breathing average, has moved to zero. That's something, you know, that's incredible. But if you think about what that actually means, it means we haven't hurt people to the point of a record of an injury in the last 12 months. And that's what safety is all about. People come to work. do their jobs and can go home in as good a state or better state than they arrived. And the photo on slide six of a chunk of our workforce, underground workforce particularly, all very pleased with our outcome. And hats off on the safety outcome to Peter Trout as well as our three operational general managers for driving that. It doesn't happen with no work. and it's really great to see everyone focused on their own safety but also the safety of their workmates to ensure continuity of operations in the production performance that we saw on achieving guidance for the full year. That's all I'm going to cover and to cover the assets in a bit more detail I'll hand across now to Peter Trout.