Aurelia Metals Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Aurelia Metals Limited June Quarter Activities Report. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key or the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Ashley. Good morning and thanks for joining us for the Aurelia Metals fourth quarter investor update. With me today on the call, I have Martin Cummings, the Chief Financial Officer, and Andrew Graham, the Chief Technical and Business Development Officer. Today I'm very pleased to provide a short summary of the quarter four results, which reflect our continued focus to safely grow our business, before handing over to my colleagues to talk through some more information on the slides that we've sent out as part of the pack. I will refer to the slides as we move through the presentation today for ease of all the listeners. Look, the key messages for Aurelia Metals that I would like to highlight is that Aurelia has delivered very strong results in FY25 and we'll talk about the quarter today in particular and especially in line with our guidance metrics that we put out for the start of the year through the end of the year. I'm actually really proud of the work the team's completed to really place Aurelia in a position We've been able to fund our growth and build our company to create cash and value for our shareholders. I just want to acknowledge the forward looking statements on slide two, and then I'm going to move on to slide three. So let me start by firstly talking about the highlights, but before I do, it's really important, we'll talk about this in more detail, but we've really continued to improve our safety performance in FY25 from the previous year. We've achieved guidance across all commodities and cost items for the full financial year and we've delivered our growth portfolio in line with our plans to really focus on achieving 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes in the future. Federation's been ramping up with our metres being a little bit ahead of plan and our volumes have delivered in line with our targets in FY25. Plus we've actually done a lot of work to get internal approvals completed and the preparation work done for Great Cobra in FY25 the last quarter to be able to kick off in FY26 as we've committed to the market. We continue to focus on improving our development performance at peak and in this quarter we exceeded a thousand meters for the quarter. This is a target we've set internally to really ramp up our performance to set ourselves up for success in the future. And importantly we delivered 110 million dollars of cash balance at the end of the year also. And we haven't drawn any debt while funding our growth plans. So overall, like I said, a really strong year and it really reaffirms that we have a team of committed to executing our short and medium term strategy, which is creating vape shelters and we'll continue to respond with agility to the evolving market conditions. Across multiple metrics, the team's... I just want to go to slide four for a slide plan of guidance. Across the multiple metrics, the team have been successful in achieving guidance. Some key call-outs. Obviously, in gold, it was really strong in quarter three, and we hollowed that to the market. And in line with our mining plan sequence for the full year, base metals have come home stronger in the last quarter, particularly zinc and lead, to bring the full year results home. Costs will lower on the lower end of guidance for the full year. There's still a large program of works underway to improve costs of which we've introduced a third party to assist in FY26 with improving mining and maintenance costs, which will be followed by admin and other costs in the back end of the year. Teams are really already working on this, but the extra horsepower to bring a third party in will definitely help bring the actual results quicker. And most of our management, as you well appreciate, are very busy just delivering the plans. So this extra horsepower will be assisting them to deliver the improvements. Growth capex was a little bit lower than midpoint, but obviously some of the development activities that we still are required from Federation will fall into sustained capex in FY26. But overall, the Federation project will be within the budget approved by the board. The lowest spend actually in growth capex is also attributable to the fact that in the last quarter, our main focus has been to demobilise the project team, finish the workshop build on site and really put our attention just on development meters and infill drilling spend. Otherwise, most of the other activities are now completed and there's some work obviously in FY26 that we've accrued for in the overall budget still to do with road intersections. Lastly, we did not provide information on guidance for the oil and sustain costs, as we are in a transition, as we reported before, from a gold sort of measurement to a base metals measurement in the future. But it's important, you know, $2.037 per ounce is still a very good story and shows a strong result and actually is very much in line with our FY24 result. And considering the inflationary pressures and the amount of work we're doing on site, to build our business, that's a good result by the team. But like I said, we still have a long way to go to improve this going forward. I'll just move on to slide five. Safety and sustainability and environment are very much a key drive for us. You'll notice there's been a good trend in the right direction to improve our all in sustained total recordable injury frequency rate and also our recordable environmental incident frequency rate. I'd really like to congratulate the team for the improvements in the trends, the overall rates. This has been a great outcome. The focus for the 12 months and in particular last quarter, we've really been working with our supervisors and leaders to be in the field, including myself and the other executives, which is just paramount to helping ensure that we really have the right focus on safety for our people and care for our people. We've placed a large focus over the last quarter on complete risk management, deep dives on high-visual risk items on the register, and also had team members working on refreshing our fatal risk protocols for the company and rolling them out on a soft launch. This has been a significant piece of work and sets up the business for the future to be more looking around the corner at what can go wrong, identify the controls that can proactively prevent something happening, and minimise the impacts, which provides a much more sustainable and reliable business in the future. This year's results are particularly important as the trend shows that even though we were closing darks at the start of the financial year, and this has its own level of complexity and complications when it comes to people management and focus, we've also been ramping up federation and bringing more people on to set up great COBAR project. So a lot of activity happening within Aurelia and the management's been really able to focus on making sure people come home, come to work and go home safely. Let's move on to slide six. I want to talk about peak. Obviously, peak productivity improvements still remain a key focus for us. Over the quarter, we've seen a nice improvement in development meters from our jumbo fleet. There's been improvements in availability at the second half of the quarter. We're working hard on operator recruitment and availability in the second half of the quarter also. Some of the highlights include record meters in June since it really recommenced to owner-operator. and we achieved actually in the last month, 397 metres for the month. There's still lots of room to improve through getting our utilisation of our equipment up to the right sort of number of hours and the rate achieving good rates. But irrespective, the quarter still finished at 104.1 metres per quarter, which was in line with our ramp up profile that we've had, we discussed in previous quarters. Cost per tonne, we're $140 a tonne, still lots of work underway to improve this through operator availability, being a core focus, but we did have some good wins through the quarter with some of the new approaches to mining, reducing dilution changes, with some of the stoves improved recovery of around 10%, which also prevents hauling low grade rock to the mill and helps improve the overall mill recoveries also. Speaking of mill recoveries, you'll also note that we've also had some continued good focus and good results on our zinc recovery, which is very important considering that as we ramp up ore from Federation, obviously zinc's going to play a large part of that processing requirement and getting to recoveries means we're not leaving money on the table. Still a lot of work underway in recoveries and the team's doing a great job on that. The mills continue to perform well and this is important going forward as we continue now pushing the mill to ramp up to full capacity in FY26. Obviously we'll have the volumes out of the peak South Mine and the New Cobar side of the mine happening and we'll also have the Federation tons coming into the mill. So it's going to be a large amount of work focusing on bringing these volumes into the mill and maximising output. On a separate note, as I mentioned earlier, we've brought a third party in to really accelerate building our systems and processes so we can improve our productivity through our mine operating system and we've put a laser focus on recruiting all the people we need to ramp up the operations and really focus on employing people aligned with our values of the company. I'll move on to slide seven, Federation. Look, the key message there, development for the year was slightly above budget, which is a good outcome as we continue to ramp up the tons associated that we need the development for. So we achieved 1134 metres for the quarter. We introduced the second jumbo into the mine in this last half. It's still being ramped up. It's not on full utilisation for development. As we sort of open the mine up, it'll be on full utilisation. Our focus for the quarter has really been highlighted in previous periods, which is really making sure we push the decline down, get the infield drilling ahead of our production areas to understand the ore body better and set up mining to be as efficient and productive as possible. So really, at this phase, we've still been focusing on decline metres in-field drilling in comparison to try and ramp up tons faster. This trade-off will remain flexible in FY26 as we build the mine and look at the opportunity we have. Key point, production was in line with the plan, 106,000 tons for the full year, and actually 54,000 of that was actually processed in this last quarter, which is a good outcome. Just on Federation, we did spend 66.4 million for the full year. That's in line with our guidance numbers. However, some of the spend from FY25 will be spent, moved into FY26 as sustained capital. But like I said, that's all still within our overall board approved budget that we've reported. I'll just move on to the slide. The Great Cobar project is underway. So we mentioned last quarter that we were basically kicking off doing the preparation work once we had approval from the board in quarter four of FY25. That's actually progressed quite well. We now have a crew as of the first week of July with a jumbo loader and truck all being delivered to site. We've been working on establishing the services. A large focus in the three months leading up to July has been recruiting along with the values as we've discussed and really looking at how we start Great Cobra on the right foot as an owner-operator sort of process. We've got obviously just over two kilometres to develop an FY26 and our capital we've reported along with our guidance is very much there to be spent to deliver the project. So all on track, very exciting opportunity. as we sort of get ourselves moving towards tapping into this nice copper and gold in possibly two years. We have the owner's team on board for the project, working with the mining team to ensure we progress this development and we'll obviously report back on a quarterly basis as the project progresses. But importantly, as I said, the people and the equipment are on the job and now it's about getting the job underway in line with the project. But what I'm going to do is hand over to Andrew, who's been actively working on the studies for the peat plant project, which is on slide nine. He'll cover that and the exploration slide, and then he'll hand it over to Martin for the following slide. Over to you, Andrew.

Thanks, Brian. As Brian's mentioned, we'll touch firstly on studies and projects. And there's a photo included there on slide nine of the thickener being constructed in Vietnam. TACRAF thickness of their Delco brand and really just important to flag that construction of the thickness which is critical path to the tailings and water management project for the processing plant is on target on schedule which is good in some areas we're ahead of schedule but you know working on the basis so that will be delivered on time which is great for that first project. The other two studies will go to the board imminently. They've been completed to the tertiary ball mill project and also the materials handling project for the plant. As flagged at Invest Today, but also before, we previously guided that range of 20 to 25 million for those two projects. It'll come in substantially under that, which is great. And really just highlights the fact that the plant expansion that we're talking about is really very very capital efficient using all the latent capacities that we already have within that excellent peak processing plant. A key milestone for us for the quarter was the permit application has been made to the Cobarshire Council to take that plant capacity up to 1.2 million tonnes. Now we don't expect there to be any issues in that permit, it's a fairly low touch kind of expansion. It's all within the footprint. It's already permitted with a few, as we've touched on previously, a few very targeted pieces of equipment. So great that that's in process now formally with the Shire Council, who is our permitting authority. Clipping over the page then into slide 10, just on exploration. In reality, I probably could have led with any one of a number of photos in this one, and I actually think of Todd McGilvery, our exploration group manager, who made the comment to me previously that we've had a very good quarter, and we certainly have. Two releases have gone out to the market, which you will have seen, both in relation to Nimidji District, one highlighting some federation west drilling particularly, and also then highlighting Nimigi drilling itself. So the photo I ended up running with in the pack here is of Nimigi. This is some of the drilling we were doing at Nimigi main. It's very, very good copper mineralization, which you'll see in the photo, but also in the intercept it's listed on there, you know, five odd meters at 3% copper, excellent in anyone's language. but also importantly further down that same hole, substantial lead and zinc combined in excess of 15% lead plus zinc. So getting some very, very good results there for Nimigi. We also, through the quarter, got the results back from a downhole electromagnetic survey that we did on that Nimigi main area, which has given us some very interesting targets to follow up. At the moment, as I speak, we've got drill rigs working at Nimigi North, which is several hundred meters further north than the drilling I was just talking about. We'll continue to drill there for the next little while, and then the intent is to move the surface rig back down onto Nimidji Main and test some of those deeper targets. Look, as I mentioned, could have equally showcased Federation West. Some very, very strong results through the quarter there. We've actually taken the rig off FedWest at the end of the quarter. Got the second rig there working at Nimidji before it goes to peak. But part of the reason we've done that is really to allow the geology team there at Federation to think a bit about what the drilling means that we've seen and plan the program for FY26. That's all I'll cover this morning. I'll just throw over now to Martin to talk about the balance sheet.