Aurelia Metals Limited

Thanks, Rocco. Look, I'm Brian Quinn, Aurelia Metals Managing Director and CEO. And on behalf of our team and the board, I'd like to provide you with some key points from quarter one of FY26. And I do thank all of you for joining us today on the call. I know it's a busy time. I'm joined by Aurelia Metals Chief Financial Officer, Martin Cummings, our Chief Business Development Technical Officer, Andrew Graham, and our Cobar Regional General Manager, Angus Wiley. We'll run through the presentation and then take questions after the presentation. In today's presentation, we'll be referring to the slides released in today to the market, and we'll spend additional time on any illustrations we pack to cover anything important. Just to kick off, look, first and foremost, it's a strong start to the year for us in terms of quarter one. production definitely in line and on track against executing our strategy across the business. Metal production and cost very much on track and our cash position has remained robust at 124 equity on the back of 84.8 gross revenue sales and improving cost per ton results. This has delivered approximately 24 million cash from operations, which if you exclude sustaining capital, This strong result were underpinned by a focus on ongoing productivity improvement projects across the business, especially at peak. I'll talk to some more of these physical results as the presentation progresses. And Martin will talk to some of the financials in the balance sheet later as we have the discussion on the balance sheet. One important thing, obviously, the business is in great shape and our growth continues to be self-funded, which is important for us as a business because that's what we're committed to do. If I just talk about Federation, the ramp-up is definitely moving in line with our plan. In fact, it's delivering better than our plan with strong performance in development meters and targes. I'll recap on some of those in future slides as well, but we're very happy how Federation mine is now progressing. Our Great Cobar project commenced on the 1st of July and really development and construction activities are definitely heading in the right direction on track and our run rates are definitely improving and got some good conditions and a very good team on the job. So that's great news for us. And importantly, we've also released our MRAW report for calendar year 25, which represents growth in our resource and reserves. Resource up 12% to 21 million tonnes and reserves up to 17%. 5.5, driven largely by copper increases in the region, which we'll also talk to you later in the slides. All of these results today really enforce that we are a business that's delivering what we've committed and working hard as a team to deliver better results than we've committed where possible also to really support maximum value for our shareholders. On the next slide, which is our group production and costs, the key message I want to get across to our investors is our delivery of our guidance at this stage remains very much in the range we talked to before the start of the financial year for both production and costs. During quarter one, the mining sequence and production sequence has been very much focused on base metals, in particular zinc and lead, and quarter two will sequence to an increasing proportion of copper ore. So at the moment, both costs, capital and our commodities that we're producing from our business is definitely moving in our direction, as is our exploration projects as well that we're working on. On the next slide, which is our sustainability slide, our injuries for the quarter were not in line with our expectations. We've had a few injuries which really have not been satisfactory. We fundamentally believe all injuries can be preventable and people can leave work at the end of the day without injuries. On these occasions, we've had a few people with injuries which has not been satisfactory. Look, our focus on this is to really reinforce our efforts on shorter term contract management, ensuring that our people that come onto site on a short term, really using our process around taking five, doing JHAs properly and really being supervised well. And a large amount of the injuries have been over the last 12 months, really around hand injuries, making sure people are putting their hands in areas where there's pinch points. So we believe we can turn this around and really ensure our people go home safely like we want them to every day. In terms of our environmental results, once again we've delivered some really good results both meeting our standards and also meeting our compliance requirements. and delivering a very good result in terms of our recordable environmental incident frequency rate. When I move to the next slide, which is our peak performance, when I start talking about our production activity now, our development at peak continues to improve in line with our targets we've committed previously. For previous quarters, we've continued to make step-by-step improvements and we continue to drive that very, very hard. This is great news for the business. It creates optionality. The more we can get ahead in development, the more we can set ourselves up for creating optionality. If we have a problem in a stoping area, we have somewhere else to go and we can continue feeding the plant and keep them full. We did prioritise Great Cobar development in July and August to ensure a fully resourced and well-designed commencement for Great Cobar. The outcomes of the quarter has delivered peak at 1379 metres, which is a great outcome relative to historical outcomes for peak as well. So we definitely believe the business is in the right direction and we're going to continue to focus on that as we go forward with the program we have. Underlying that is we've actually had improvements on our truck payloads by 16%, which is part of our productivity project. And we've also seen our productivity project sort of improve our availabilities in and around 85%, which is our target. So for our critical equipment, The focus remains on improving our utilisation of our equipment over the coming periods through recruiting the right people and making sure people are on the job. These actions have all resulted in a reduction in cost per tonne, and as we've highlighted before, that 40% reduction is only the first step in the right direction. We have a clear plan through our productivity project to get down towards $100 a tonne, and it's very much built into the KPIs of our people to deliver that, and we have a plan to do that. In terms of our unit cost, as we sort of said, it's a step in the right direction. In recovery, we have continued to improve with the delivery of very good quality ore coming from Federation. I want to call out some key numbers here, 85.5% zinc and 88.4% for lead, which is some of our highest recoveries in zinc that we've been able to see through the processing plant, which is an amazing result from the plant. We've still got many, many projects underway, which we'll talk to you later, which will continue to improve these recoveries based on what we're installing around the plant. So overall, the productivity improvements delivering our results and setting us up for success as we move forward. Moving on to the next slide, which is around federation. We're really happy with the delivery of federation performance. We've basically been continuing to see step change in our development, 31% higher. and that's very much in line with where we want to be now for development, and hopefully we can even beat that going forward at the same cost with the same resourcing, but definitely the ramp-up has been very much a positive for our business. Similarly, you can sort of see the ramp-up in our Tums. It's been very much a great result for the business, and these are the commitments we made to the market and the investors, and this is what we're delivering. Overall, although it's not on the slide in the pack, The mining cost per tonne is around $270 per tonne. We don't have a benchmark. It's the first quarter of results we can actually use that cost per tonne. But just in comparison, we have that against our budget of about $326 per tonne, so quite substantial, over $100 per tonne difference, better difference that we're achieving right now for the business at Federation. We expect that to continue to go down in the cost per tonne basis over the coming quarters. as we continue to ramp up our terms in line with our plan. Like I said, the exciting thing for Federation is we're definitely ramping up and we're ahead of plan in our volumes, and we expect to deliver that over the 12-month period. I want to just think now, just because we're reporting Federation as commercial operation, I wanted to stop and take stock of what we've achieved as a company around Federation. It's been a very strong project execution and operating ramp-up. It's important we stop and pause and sort of call us out to our investors to really think about where we are as a company and what we've delivered. So without going through each one of the dot points on the slides, what's important is the Allbody was found in April 2019. There's been a bunch of studies done and exploration decline commenced in 2022. After refinance was secured, we recommenced development in August 2023, followed by progressive achievements, as you can see on the page. all in line with the commitments we made to investors. We said we'd go after them. We've achieved those and allow us to really deliver our commercial production this quarter. I think it's important that we recognise the team efforts for managing this budget from greenfield exploration to commercial production in such a rapid time and done it very, very safely. No doubt we've had lots of headwinds along the way, like any project, but from a company point of view of Aurelia, we've delivered that in line with what we committed to the market, which I know is not normal in this industry. and I want us to celebrate that as a company and recognise that for our investors. FY26 and beyond is really focused on ramping up the business and continuing to unlock potential upgrades to the resource reserves and production targets as we push the decline down deeper and collect more results from infield drilling and provide confidence to our models. Similar to what we've done in the upper zones of the ore body, we're going to continue to progress that into the lower zones, deeper zones, and hopefully be able to provide that information as we progress to unlock further potential for the business. It's been great to see Federation West Deposit also featuring our story going forward in our Emerald, which is exciting for us on the potential of what's actually at depth and also what's around the main oil body for Federation. So we're very excited about where Federation is going and I really want to take the opportunity to sort of call it out. to really reinforce, you know, we're now building Great Cobar, and I wanted to lead into, if these achievements were done, I wanted to sort of reinforce the credibility of the company to deliver these projects, which we've now kicked off with Great Cobar. So on the following slide, you know, where we are with Great Cobar as a growth project, capital expenditure and scheduled progress is on track. I know it's only early in the project, but realistically, all the key aspects of the project are looking in the right direction. Our development meters, as I highlighted earlier, are definitely in line with the plan and ramping up. So we actually have very good confidence over the potential of Great Cobar. Conditions are good and the sequencing is getting done well. If you look at the plan on the actual PowerPoint presentation, you can sort of see the purples are quarter two and the greens are quarter three and the blues are quarter four and then beyond this financial year is red. Why it's important that the purples look a bit everywhere is we obviously want to maximize the efficiency of our operation by creating working faces so our jumbo can be operating, our bolting can be operating, and our loading and mucking can be operating all in sequence so we can optimize the performance of this area. So we're very happy with where we are, both surface and underground, and we've already started our early engagement with the raised board contractors to secure availability and pricing for construction, the air raise, which will be in FY27. So the key message is our growth project for copper, well and truly on its way now, and very exciting for us as a company to leverage what we learn in Federation of all the key milestones we've lived through with it, and we believe we can do the same with Great Tobar project. Like I said, it's not the norm for our industry, and I really want our investors to understand as a company, we believe we can do that. The other projects, obviously, which are very important to us, which will deliver our processing tons and targets of 1.1 to 1.2 million tons and allow our strategic aspiration, really our strategic target of 40,000 copper equivalent tons in FY28 to be delivered. So our tailings and process water management is very much on track. The capital we've deployed still allows us to be commissioning Q4 Some really key milestones around the tailings and process water management has been that we've been designing the thickener tank overseas. It's now been designed, it's been constructed, and it's been shipped to Australia, and obviously the civil works will be underway to get ready for that to be installed and commissioned as per the plan. Our tertiary ball mill obviously will improve our copper recoveries, especially as we move to 50% copper ore coming into the business. in the next couple of years. So we've actually repurposed the mill, as you recall, from Dargs. It'll be shipped up and installed into the plant, or actually on the outside of the plant, and allow us to really, allow us to grind the material to improve our recoveries. That's still on track, so is the capital for our commissioning in quarter four. And lastly, our crushing and materials handling, that work is underway as well. The benefit of the crushing and materials handling is really around providing better throughput. If we can take some of the oversized material out of the equation and allow the plant to run at higher capacity than is currently being achieved, we can get more throughput through and deliver significant more value. So all of these projects will give us that 1.1 to 1.2 million tonnes capacity, and they're all working very much in line with our plan, etc. That's the summary of where we are with our process plan upgrades to deliver our growth. In terms of our mineral resource and reserves released today, we're pleased to see that we've been able to report an increase, a 12% increase in growth in our resource, a 17% increase in growth in our reserves, and an overall increase in our production target for the business. The current emerald results are obviously very copper-dominant, But as we've highlighted throughout the year, the observed change in orientation of the Federation deposit has meant that we've had to change our mining approach and increased focus on our infield drilling, which has been done successfully. Hence the ramp up and hence the metres we're delivering at Federation. And the results of the mining of the upper levels has confirmed the contained metal is very comparable to the mineral resource estimate for the upper levels. As we continue infill drilling and is undertaken in the deeper zones of Federation, the upper zones reconciles and suggests strong potential for the upgrades to the mineral resource reserves and the production target estimates. So our priority really remains on these infill drilling results and unpacking the potential of this deposit. What's also important is the Federation resource also remains open to depth and in numerous directions and drilling these areas will continue to be part of our program exploration which we've done over the last period of time and will continue to. So we're very excited by what we've been able to put on the table for our resource reserves, and obviously still work to be done, but obviously definitely I think we've got the right plan and the right sort of approach to providing a long-term value for our shales. On my next slide on the exploration update, exciting news we've released last week on Nimigi. Over to Andrew. Thanks, Andrew.

Thanks, Brian. I might just make a comment on Inverland Production Target. Obviously, release is going out today. We don't expect anyone's read all 159 pages of it, but it's long and there's a lot of work that goes into it. So particularly just like to acknowledge the work of our competent people. They're listed on page 11 of the release and the enormous amount of effort has gone into giving you those results today. And as Brian said, they're extremely good. Just to touch on a little bit there, Peak copper, 19 million tonnes of inventory at 1.8% copper, including 17 million tonnes in new cobar, including about 11 million tonnes in grey cobar at 2% copper. The numbers everyone would love. And lead-zinc, 11 to 12% lead-zinc combined at Federation is certainly a valuable ore. But anyway, turning to exploration, I particularly just want to highlight one thing we've been working on, which is NIMIGI. You may have seen a release that went out last week on the 16th of October on our Nimidji drilling. And if you haven't seen that, I'd encourage you to go and have a look at that release. It has more details than what we've got in this slide here. But the slide on page 12 just deals with this at a high level. If you've been through NROR so far, you would see that Nimidji, we're quoting 3.9 million tonnes of material, 1.7% copper with lead, zinc and silver. Importantly, that's up 70% on our 2024 NROR. Now, If you have a good memory, you remember I had set a target to our exploration team to try to get to 5 million tonnes of ore, the intention being that I kind of feel that that's about a number that allows us to justify a mine. We didn't get there, but we got awfully close, and the 70% upgrade is extremely positive. Now, the other pleasing piece is the drilling we released last week didn't get done in time and assayed in time to flow through to that emerald. So this is all in addition to what we've put out today for the IMAGY resource. And there's three things, particularly from this drilling, that I'd just like to draw your attention to. First one, as we note on the slide, we discovered two new lenses for this drilling. Both really quite interesting. So laser lens, as we're calling it, about 200 metres further east than the IMAGY north. It's not a position where we've seen mineralization before. Some excellent geological work went into targeting that, and we've certainly got plenty of follow-up to do on that. The other important lens of discovery then is metropolitan, we're calling it, which is named after a local pub. But it's between Nimidji Main and Nimidji North. And one of the things in order to get a mine up in Nimidji is to try to get continuity, and certainly being able to try to see a join between Nimidji North and Nimidji would be extremely positive to that. And Nimeji, all this drilling we've had at Metropolitan Lens has certainly helped in that regard and further follow-up required. Other things that we flagged in the release, Nimeji North drilling to the north of Ngunnawanore, we extended mineralisation by about 50 metres. You know, in the Great Hole, we're talking 2.7% copper, 1.8 grams gold. with zinc, with lead, with substantial silver. So, you know, an excellent hole to extend to the north there. And I mentioned gold. That's the third piece just to touch on. We haven't seen a lot of gold in Nibiji, Maine. Really not much at all. I think the Emerald has 0.1 grams per tonne gold in that three odd million tonnes of material. But we're now seeing with some very good gold numbers in this drilling, and it bodes well that we're actually moving into a higher gold tenor part of Nimmogee. Anyway, in short, strong quarter for exploration. We'll continue with downhole EM on Nimmogee North, and we're drilling at the moment on Nimmogee Main, targeting some of those downhole conductor plates below Dunoan Ore. Passing on now to Martin.

So we'll just turn to slide 13, which is the balance sheet. And as you can see, we finished with cash of just over $88 million at the end of September. And along with our undrawn loan note, which did step down slightly to US $23.3 million this quarter, but takes out liquidity to around $124 million. During the quarter, we did have to put up some more restricted cash, so that financing cash flow in the waterfall of around $1.9 million. that we had to lodge as part of the Trafigura facility. So now we're up to $19.6 million of restricted cash. So that is not included in the cash flow on the waterfall. I've talked before about our process to refinance our facilities and that's underway and we are on track to close the revised facilities during this financial year. And when we do that, that $19.6 million, along with any future restricted cash, will be able to be returned. So in terms of what's happening with restricted cash, the next milestone is in the December quarter, where the $19.6 million will actually increase to just over $27 million. So that's in line with the schedule of cash backing. In terms of the other movements, as Brian said, we're now reporting Federation as an operating asset and we're reporting it as part of the Kovar region. So the Kovar region generated $24 million of operating cash flow. The way we represent this chart, though, is that we show it after sustaining capital. So $8 million contribution for the quarter. And that did, as some of you have noted, did not include a buildup of concentrate that we had during the quarter. So there was around $10 million of realizable value from concentrate that we hadn't sold at the end of the quarter. Most of that was zinc concentrate, and we'll look to move that concentrate during the December quarter. So within the result, Federation did contribute a modest operating cash flow now that it's a commercial production operation, and that will ramp up during the year. But overall, when we factor in sustained capital, it was slightly negative. But that sustaining capital is supporting our future production. So as the mine builds up its tons and as we build up the throughput at peak, that operating cash flow will increase significantly. Brian's taken us through the growth capital projects. All I really need to say there is that the spend on those projects is tracking in line with guidance and in line with our budgets, as is the exploration spend. In the working capital, there was a net outflow of $5.5 million for the quarter. Predominantly, that was driven by when we pay our annual incentives to staff, so that happened in September. There was also a little bit of trade creditors unwind that I talked about last quarter, but predominantly being the incentive payments. Finally, I'll just talk about all-in sustaining costs. You'll notice that we're not reporting all-in sustaining costs in the report, and we've been talking for a while about the fact that all-in sustaining costs was a less relevant metric for us in terms of assessing business performance. We haven't guided on our all-in sustaining costs since FY24. We did guide this year in dollar millions and we reported that in the report, but what we will do this year is to report our performance based on a dollar per tonne metric. So as you can see for the Cobar region, it was $343 a tonne. So that represents all costs, all operating costs right through to royalties, concentrate, refining, transport, etc. And for the group with the addition of care and maintenance and corporate costs, it was $367 a tonne. So that really will trend down, particularly as Federation volumes ramp up and as the throughput goes through our plan. So to give you a sense of how that $367 per tonne compares to our guidance for this year, if you took the midpoint of our group operating costs and the midpoint of our tonnage volume for the year, you'll get a dollar per tonne of around $328 a tonne. As you can see, 367, we are above it, but as Federation volumes increase and our throughputs increase, we will average 328 for the year, so we should be finishing the year lower than 328. So in summary, look, it's been a really strong start on production and our cost metrics, and that is all supported by our ongoing strong balance sheet. So I'll leave it there and hand it back to you, Brian.