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.

Thanks Darcy and thanks for those who have joined us today for our release of our FY24 Q4 results. I would like to firstly introduce everyone on the call from Aurelia. We have Martin Cummings, our Chief Financial Officer, Andrew Graham, Chief Technical and Business Development Officer and Angus Wiley, our new Cobar Regional General Manager who's just been recently promoted from our GM DAGS role after several good years of performance at DAGS. We'll use the saliva pack presentation that was released for the purpose of talking through the quarterly results and at the end I'll ask the team members to answer any specific questions you may have from the presentation. We'll focus today on our quarterly results and be providing a more fulsome forward look at the FY25 sorry, at the end of year results for FY24, we will be talking through our FY25 guidance, projects, discussion on portfolio optimisation at that sort of time at the end of August. Hope you can all join for that call at the end of August. If I just start with the first slide, really the four key messages I'd like to relay is we have delivered on our FY24 guidance for production and costs. Two, we have continued with our operational improvement plans. both with our COBAR regional team in place and stepping up performance. Three, our Federation remains on track for first DOPOR in late Q1 FY25. And four, we have reported in the last quarter some exceptional results in our exploration, and we'll have Andrew talk through some of that. Just on the slide four, Our guidance result shows a strong delivery in the last quarter for all commodities and costs. This has been a great team effort for the last quarter, and the broader operational teams have really stepped up to show what's possible. In our previous announcements, we talked about the final quarter being a big quarter with higher-grade stoves coming online, and I'm pleased to basically provide that feedback that we have achieved that. We've been successful in both recovering the ore and getting some good recoveries through the processing plant. On slide five, our safety performance has improved with less injuries this quarter, but unfortunately still one too many. We have a renewed focus in the quarter on using our Take Fives and JHAs and quality field leadership to really ensure people are working safely and have the time and the tools and skills to complete the work safely. It's non-negotiable that people go... It's actually non-negotiable. We need our people to go home safely every day. The majority of the injuries have been cuts, slips and trips on the site, but still there's much we can do to sort of stop that from occurring and work with our teams to really ensure that we do go home every day safely. Looking forward into FY25, our focus on the field leadership and the training around that will be very much a step up and we'll also be focusing on fatal risk protocols to ensure we can really get our fatal risk under control and updated in line with where our business is going. A real positive for Aurelia has been the sign-off of our sustainability strategy for the business. Going forward, we'll now have clear strategies for safety standards, a clear focus on reducing emissions and the use of town water. And in addition to that, we'll have some really clear plans around adding value to our communities that we're working with, and we want to be good neighbours with these communities going forward. On slide six, operationally, Firstly, operationally we delivered a strong fourth quarter, delivering both strong production at Dargs and at Peak. Peak delivered well in mining and the processing areas. Mined ore was 18% up this quarter at 175,000 tonnes. Meters remained above 700 metres per quarter that we've discussed on several of the different quarterly conversations. Mining unit costs per tonne reduced again from $134 to $120 per tonne from the previous quarter, and our processing plants also delivered a great result with record recoveries in zinc and lead commodities, which was also very pleasing for us. The combination of all these good results provided an always-sustaining cost for the June quarter of $1,277 per ounce, noting that the full-year number was $2,035, which was also within the guidance that we'd reported for the full year. The Peak Mine continued over the quarter to deliver also copper from Chesney, which continues to provide good grades and good recoveries through the mill. This has been very encouraging for us, obviously, as we transition over the coming years into the Peak North Mine, having these good grades and good recoveries is very much in line with our business plan going forward. On slide seven, Dargs is mainly focused on production drilling, stoping and processing of the quarter, and we'll finish in Q1 FY25. The operational team has delivered very consistent results at a low cost and they continue to look for those cost opportunities as we progress. We're on the final stopes now and some of the mining crews have already started to finish on site as their roster has come to an end. At this stage, mining will finish at the end of July and processing will finish towards the end of August. At this point, there will be a small crew moving to care and maintenance while we start selling off the assets and demilitarising the site ready for remediation over the coming 12 months. A full plan has been developed of all the activities and organisational structure signed off for the ongoing works and we're still in the process of selling off the plant and equipment to understand and basically to understand through the various options and offers we've been given what our sale proceeds will be versus our cost remediation. There's obviously going to be a trade-off there and we'll continue to look at that over the coming months. On slide 8 for Federation, the Federation project has continued to deliver work packages including surface construction, which has involved the ROM stockpile build as the Hawleys routes have been put in place. And also these things are important for our preparation for our production or in Q1 FY25. Those following roads will be what we take the ore from Federation to Peak on and join the Berthelm Road, which then joins the main highways up towards Peak. The power project upgrades have also been progressing in parallel to be ready in time for the site growth. and there was an acceleration in the construction of water dams and infrastructure to manage the heavy rainfalls we experienced over this quarter. Noting this will be important for both wet and dry seasons, having dam capacity to capture water in wet and to use the water in the dry is obviously something we're very mindful of in terms of laying out the site properly for the future. On the people side, we've continued to onboard new employees. And in parallel to that, a focus has been to really look at the operations readiness works to include operational contracts, people planning and systems, and doing a lot of work around completing risk assessments and management plans for the operations when we go into full production. But as reported, we have had some challenges this quarter with water, both at Federation and some water issues at DARGS. Rainfall, firstly, at DARGS has continued to increase water levels significantly. in the TSF at a time when mining has come to an end and it's going to put pressure on our remediation works timing. Nothing that can't be managed, but it's just one thing we're working through. But the multiple rain offence at Federation has created more rainfall than the project can manage while we're in this middle of the project build. Even all the evaporators and pumps that were installed in February were not as effective as planned. Fortunately, we had in our planning and approved through the regulator to install a large water management dam and associated infrastructure So these were fast-tracked, and now we are really bolstering up the water management capacity going forward. To preserve some of the cash for the project, we paused underground works. People were sort of redeployed under other works through our contracting partners, and we recommenced operations in early July. The impact of these delays have meant that our ore drive development and infill drilling programs have been delayed. and hence our ability to finalise our geological models and stoking plans for the remainder of FY25 ramp-up. But these will be finalised now. Development has resumed and we'll be releasing some of that information in our four-year results with our guidance in August. We've also experienced some inflation pressures on the project for labour, diesel, concrete and equipment hire. These cost inflations have drawn down some of the contingency, but also we've continued to review the scope of the project and look for improvements in our capital to keep us within our approved budget. It's our intention at the four-year results to provide some details of the changes to the project scope that we've used to stay within budget. Ultimately, the result of the production performance for the business and the capital works has mentally resulted in $116 million cash in our balance sheet. which is a great finish to the year. I'll obviously have Martin talk to some of those results later. In the meantime, I'll pass over to Andrew to speak through some of the exceptional exploration results we've continued to unlock in our region. Thanks, Andrew.

Thanks, Brian. And for those who've been reading our releases, certainly the exploration results have been exceptional. So just to touch on a few of those. During the quarter, first of all, those following along, we're on slide nine. We received assays from our federation drilling that we did discuss in the last quarterly, although at that stage the results were visual rather than having assays. As expected, the assays came back and certainly confirmed what for us was a very exciting development federation. And it was released on the 14th of June. And if you haven't had a look, I'd suggest it's worth a look. Basically, drilling to the west intercepted high-grade mineralisation at about a 140-metre offset to the north of the strike of the main ore body. Now, why is this exciting? Well, certainly exciting, and on the slide you can see some of the grades there. We're talking 50% plus lead plus zinc with great copper and great gold. So that in itself is exciting. But the real exciting thing there for me is it opens up the potential for federation mineralisation to continue to the west. on that offset. So certainly plenty there for our exploration team to get into. Slide 9 of Owen from our Energy District team, certainly got his work cut out for him in the next while. That release we also put out information on Lancelot. Those who have good memories will recall that we put out some reduced polarisation work on land slot some time ago. We'd followed that up following our progressive approach to exploration to keeping costs low through soil and auger sampling, which certainly came out with some very interesting results. And we got some coincident copper, lead and zinc anomalism, and that was coincident again with the IP result. So given us some good targets and we'll be drilling that in FY25. Moving away from the Nimidji District and onto the Cobar District up around our Peak Mine on slide 10, during the quarter we also released an exploration update on a range of drilling that we've been doing there and again if you haven't had a look, 17th of July we put out that release and it's worth following up with a look. Particularly pleasing to me in this release was the copper success that we had and Peak does transition this year from to being dominantly fed by copper ores and definitely getting some good copper exploration success will support a long life for Peak as a copper mine. To touch on a few of those, Queen Bee, it's a historical mining area 10km south of the Peak processing plant. Results did include 17 metres of 4.7% copper, which I'm sure everyone agrees is a fantastic result. Within that, up to 17% copper grade. Early days for Queen Bee, but the hope for us is it develops into an ore body that supports a mine, which will then feed the peak processing plant only 10 k's away. We also saw some really good intercepts in Mount Pleasant, you know, grades up to 11% copper. Mount Pleasant is effectively the next ore body along from Burra Bungee, and you may recall that we released Burra Bungee results in March last year. It's in that north minor peak. and it's really starting to build an interesting copper picture in North Mine beyond Great Koba. We all know about Great Koba. So we're now extending the known ore bodies, and with this drilling, continuing to delineate additional ore to the south. And while on existing ore bodies, the release also included some Jubilee North drilling. That also is in the Peat North Mines, just north of our mining areas. And we've been able... with that drilling to extend mineralisation about 150 metres to the north. Now, interestingly, that is on the way to Great Cobar. So certainly some great potential for that to come into the plant. Photo in slide 10 of Fernanda from our Cobar district team. The reality is these results, be it around Federation, you know, in that Nimidji district or up around Cobar, are a real credit to our exploration team who have continued to deliver the goods Pass over now to Martin, who's going to cover off some balance sheet.