Aurelia Metals Limited

I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you for calling in today for Aurelia Mettle's third quarter results for financial year 2024. Joining today are my executive leadership team members, Martin Cummings and Andrew Gray, who will provide some updates and then join me for Q&A. We will be using the presentations circulated today as a reference if you would like to follow these presentations. Let me start by highlighting that our solid third quarter production performance has been underpinned by peak north and south mine delivery, 10% higher oil mining volumes and 13% higher processing volumes, and the dark gold mine delivering slightly above target for oil around target for processing. All efforts towards delivering our FY20 point budget and delivering quarter-on-quarter improvements that we've discussed in our previous quarterly presentations. Our project and exploration teams are continuing to build our future pipeline for our growing base metal portfolio with some exciting releases and milestones presented during this quarter also. The Federation project has delivered many achievements and there are more planned over the next two quarters including first stowfall in Q1 FY25 which I'll talk to you later. Our focus efforts remain on disciplined capital management to keep our balance sheet robust with the cash balance remaining steady since last quarter reporting $106.9 million and $144 million liquidity available. This is very important for Aurelia and a platform to build our credibility for our ongoing journey and commitment to sustainably grow our business in line with our vision, values and strategies. With a strong outlook in gold and base metals demand and with our established infrastructure and resource base and our recently revised regional operating model being implemented in the quarter to achieve our goals, so we can continue on the journey to building our base metal business into FY25 and beyond to create shareholder value. Despite this great potential, we released some exciting building results at Federation this quarter and also at NIMIGI to confirm the high quality resource potential at both of these locations. They are significant results for Aurelia as we continue to review and work on our portfolio and pipeline of opportunities beyond what we already have in our resource model of 26 million tonnes in the Cobar region. The results also confirm our direction and transition to base metal business, which is a positive upside. And Andrew will talk to more of this in his section. I'm just going to move to slide four on the production and costs. In summary, during the third quarter, Aurelia produced 14.5 thousand ounces of gold, 4.3 thousand tonnes of zinc, 5.8 thousand tonnes of lead, Notably zinc and lead were up 30% and 46% relatively this quarter in line with our narrative in the December quarter report. Our group production was largely impacted by PEAK's processing plant online streaming analyser which reduced our recovery of base metals and force management to move to low-grade feed to prevent loss of high-grade base metals that we had planned in quarter three and I'll discuss this in more detail. These results generate a positive group operating cash flow of $4.2 million. This $4.2 million does not include cash flow which was impacted by timing of shipment and sales from Peak, where we are sitting with stocks on hand at $14 million at the end of the quarter, three, that will largely transfer into quarter four. We're anticipating a stronger quarter four cash flow based on production and sales in our plan. Mark will unpack some of these details in his section. The impact of these operational issues impacts the inability cost per ounce being higher than planned which is expected to reverse in the June quarter. We also had some higher costs from peak which I'll talk to you in the peak section. Overall we're committed to deliver on the upside of gold guidance, remain on guidance for lead and copper and have revised our zinc guidance down at our orange sustained cost upwards. We also slightly reduced the growth capital guidance to combat some of the delays to non-critical project work with Federation. in addition to our expanding capital guidance, which we're partly managing through our capital management framework. I might just move on to slide five, safety and environment. We continue to put safety above all else and have some improvements this quarter. However, our people are having instant injuries and we can't rest until all these people on site return home every shift injury-free. We've continued a disciplined process of reviewing fatal risks and business material risks across the site and business every month. And we continue to have our leaders focus on safety interactions in the field to observe safety in action and risk control effectiveness that must be in place at all times to prevent fatalities. As indicated last quarter, our report of injuries continue to be a report of mainly hand injuries, splits and trips. Subsequently, we've introduced some expertise in the organisation to assist, raise awareness on how to prevent these injuries and use our tools better. We can shift to operational efforts I think we continue to expect the base metal production and grade this year to be weighted to the last quarter after some operational resequencing had to occur when the online streaming analyzer failed. The online streaming analyzer, which we call OSA, receives plant slurry samples from the different streams within the circuit and tells us how much lead and zinc is in the feed. concentrate and tally streams that can manage the chemicals and concentrate grades and recoveries. Preparature failure, which was caused by potentially power and moisture issues from the regional supply, and required the mine and processing plant to change gears and stop producing high-grade lead and zinc due to loss of recoveries that were being caused with the OSP being out of action. This was down for nearly a month with this particular issue. In the meantime, we ran low-grade lead and zinc and then lower-grade copper production This was rectified in February and production of high-grade base metals prioritised for March. Unfortunately throughout the quarter and more particularly in March peaked at over $3 million of maintenance and repair costs associated with changing our tower ropes, some major repairs to jumbo loaders as a result of some tough conditions in the South Mine. These tough ground conditions also changed the sequence of two high-grade stoves which will be extracted in the June quarter. Increasingly developed metres were also higher at peak by 5% for the quarter. which continues to set up the mind for optionality of production. Having these development needs ahead of plan continues to provide options for stoves if conditions are providing challenges. I'll move on to slide seven on data. Data has continued to produce in line with their plan with production drilling and stoking keeping up with the monthly production targets. The plan has been resequenced to bring additional ounces into FY24 from FY25 to allow a smaller At present, soap is sequential and providing good reconciliation grades. The closure plan is well underway at the start, so we are ready to execute the preferred plan post Q1 FY25, once production is completed. And the sale process is well underway with several inter-parties in the processing plan, which will be finalised in the coming quarters. We're now at the end of underground production. The teams at the start are also looking at extracting valuable items from the mine that have been reused that peak or federation to offset future capital requirements. At Federation on slide 8, we continue to be firmly committed to deliver Federation First 04 in Q1 FY25, with the team modifying the mine plan to accommodate the lost time in January where we experienced rainfall events that we did report. At present, the project is slightly behind on de-climbing development, which we have plans in place to recover in the coming quarters. With all the focus on infill drilling work during this quarter, the geological team is getting ready to release the block more in late April for the production protocol of the Federation mine. Other key milestones include two shafts being completed and a third nearly completed, all incident free, which is a fantastic result for the team. And it also decreases the first stove oil risk as it relates to having ventilation and the unknown geotech issues that we get with the shaft raising. The construction of the ceiling has been completed. are now fully functional and accessible under all weather conditions with our heavy equipment. As highlighted, we've downgraded the capital for FY24 based on several non-critical projects, slipping in and cleaning earth, pollution and surface for future ROM areas, delivery of main ventilation fans and other items that we've decided to re-scope or remove from the project, none of which will stop the first step or the associated ramp-ups. Operations range is progressing as we employ the operations management team to assist building on the operations into the future in line with the regional operating model. The team has taken the best information from PEAC and rebuilding to the Federation site. Lots still to be done over the coming quarters but the team is committed to the plan to achieve our goals. Now I'll pass on to Andrew to talk more around the exciting new exploration results we've released recently. Over to you Andrew.

Thanks, Brian. And it certainly was a very strong quarter for exploration. I want to take the chance to recognise the entire exploration team who are really doing an amazing job. For those following along, we're on slide nine, which talks about the Federation exploration update to be released to the market on the 5th of April. If you haven't had a chance to read this, I would strongly recommend that you do. The release included two standout results. Firstly, we drilled below the main thrust, at Federation and hit some very high grade mineralization over very good meters. Now I'm talking kind of 27.9% combined lead zinc over 14 meters. So the question I suppose is why is this result important and why are we so excited about it? Previous drilling below that main thrust yielded kind of disseminated sporadic sulfides. This high grade result was our first high grade result below that thrust. It's offset about 35 meters to the south. and it really gives a strong suggestion that the high-grade eastern lands federation continues to depth. Now, perhaps more excitingly in that release, the exploration team tested a concept to the west of federation, really testing whether it's offset actually to the north in this area. And what we had seen to the west is strong alterations, but we weren't getting the mineralization. So it really pointed to something being there. The team did some excellent work. to chase this concept of an offset and frill hole 215 intercepted massive sulphides about 140 metres north of the strike of the main deposit. Now if you do go to our release from April you can see a photo of this outstanding core. The results of that northern offset are visual at present and we'll provide assay data once it's available. But it's a great result that demonstrates the potential for the high-grade federation mineralisation to continue out to the west. Now, just turning the page, the other very strong exploration result this quarter was from NIMIGY, which was the subject of a release on the 22nd of February. We touched on this, I believe, at our half-year result call. The exciting piece here really for us, as well as the very high-grade zinc mineralisation in the western lead zinc zone, were multiple thick high-grade copper lenses. And now I'm talking 29 metres of 2.3% copper in one of our holes. So a really good result, and certainly we'll be back at NIMIGY in financial year 25 doing further drilling. Now, not to be outdone, we were also very busy at peak, and we've touched a little bit on that in our quarterly report. We haven't gotten the assay results from that drilling to share with you today, but we will bring you those results from those programs throughout this current quarter. Suffice to say, look, we've been very pleased with the results we've been seeing for our efforts at peak. We'll pass on to Martin now, who's going to cover off on balance sheet.