Aurelia Metals Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Aurelia Metals Limited March 2026 quarterly conference call. 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 followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would like to hand the microphone to Mr. Brian Quinn, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Aisley. Good morning and thanks to everyone for joining us in the Eurelia Mills March Quality Report. With me today, our Planned Air Leisure team, including Martin Cummings, the CFO, Andrew Graham, our Chief Technical and Development Officer, and Angus Wiley, our General Manager for the Karabakh region. We'll be working our way through the slides that were released today, and at the back of the end of that presentation, we'll also move to questions to the people online. Look, today's release is testament to a really going very strong performance and interdiscipline delivery outcomes that we've actually been able to achieve. We really continue to set the business to success and each quarter delivering what we say we'll do and ultimately providing good cash flow and profits for our shareholders in FY26 and beyond. From today's presentation and relief, I hope investors can appreciate the results are very good and we actually have a lot more to come. So I'll move on to slide two, the forward-looking statement. Please take the time to revisit your own time. On to slide three, it's with great pleasure that I can present the highlights of this quarter to the market today with some really clear sets of messages. Firstly, such a strong gold market we're in right now. We've been able to pivot and really deliver strong gold production for the quarter and an improvement to our guidance numbers as well for re-setting up for the remainder of the year with an increase in ounces. This is supported by also having longer stocks building on our stockpiles up to 61,000 tonnes. So we're really setting up to do risk to business for quarter four and beyond. Our cash flows are also moving in the right direction, delivering free cash flow this This is also showing some great results from our business and reinforcing our message to our shareholders that the business is hitting the right direction with the production and costs and the investments we're making. Our team have been actively engaged in safety this last quarter, really putting some step changes in place around behaviour-based safety programs, implementing our revised fatal risk programs to keep people safe and really improve our close-out actions and field leadership time also. In previous quarters we had numerous injuries around contracted partners and we've been able to really focus heavily on the ability to improve that over this last quarter. There's still lots to do. We want everyone to return home the same way they come to work safely and that's obviously something we're very proud that we're working on these programs to improve that for people working at Avelia. Obviously our balance sheet has continued to remain strong and obviously Mark will talk more about that later. in terms of what's happening in the balance sheet and what's going to be happening into the next quarter as well. All of the results from our teams at Federation have continued to demonstrate strong and disciplined delivery. Federation wine has increased the tonnages and also gold grades, and I think we've engaged our business. These results are actually improving our throughput at our peak mill as well, and that's allowed us to support the peak throughput at record rates which continue to ramp up as we get ready for expansion. The quality and blend of the Federation Ore is really helping us be able to ramp up our peak plant and get ready for expansion, and also get our stocks ready for these expansions. Lastly, our projects team are delivering expansion growth projects in the business in a very, very consistent way. We've actually obviously kept up the Great Cobar on track, and the Thickler project, and the Territory Mill expansion is also on track. as per what we've committed in the past. So overall, a very pleasing result for the highlights to talk through today and the message about how our business is delivering what we're committing to deliver and, in some cases, exceeding expectations for market as well. I think we'll turn to slide four, which is our cost and production slide. The key message for this slide is we're very focused on delivering value and cash, as I spoke about. You can sort of see from the slide the increase in our guidance for gold and also I'll just talk a bit about that increase. So our focus for gold has been to bring in some additional stoves that we've identified from infield drilling. So we're not actually taking stoves out of sequence. These gold stoves are basically running in sequence. We're bringing them into the plan and taking advantage of those smaller hydrates on stoves. We're also taking advantage of taking some of the copper ore that we feed into our mill and putting it through our levelling circuit to maximize gold recovery out of that ore as well. So in total, the benefit is we get more gold recovered and obviously more value for our shareholders. Obviously, we're also reporting a slight reduction in our guidance for copper, but that's also in line with the focus of pushing for more gold. So on a total value point of view, we're better off with the higher gold with current gold prices. And that's going to benefit our business and obviously benefit our cost structure as well. This higher gold production will deliver good operating cash and fit us more good cash flows than it could afford for this financial year and also set us up strongly for FY27. I'll just talk a little bit about the operating costs. They're also very much within dives and we don't see any higher costs coming in the Middle East price at the moment that's going to impact these ranges and Martin talks to more of that information in his section. So overall, when I look at the set of guidance numbers we presented, with the exceptional results involved, with a very much good focus on delivering our projects in line with our plans, things are looking very, very good for the company. You'll also notice we've actually reduced our guidance for growth capital. That's all to do with our timing of our projects. The projects are on schedule. It's more around the timing of the spend of those projects, which Mark will also talk to. I'll move on to slide six, which is the peak performance. So with slide six, Peek has continued to push development to have plenty of working areas available to production. This quarter, rate cover was slightly down on metres due to the ventilation establishment's works we had to do in that area. That works are now being set up to allow us to drive the development declines all the way to the bottom of the fresh air raise that will be sinking or raise boring in the second quarter of FY27. So pretty much that work is now set up for success for the continuation of the decline now as we move down towards October. With the build-up of the stocks from both Federation and Peak, As I said earlier, we've accumulated 61,000 tonnes of BOM available for mill and effectively this has enabled our mill to keep punching out really strong throughputs through the mill and allows us to do some record throughputs this quarter, which is impressive. I really want to take my hat off to the teams who are basically running the mill and getting not just good throughputs but also high recoveries. for our profitability business also. Key message here is the plan is ramping up around FY26 and setting up the FY27 once these expansions come online that I'll talk to you very soon. The stock build-up is by design and really focused on de-risking the FY27. So overall, if you look at the big happy hammer progressing and really happy our planning to achieve that at the bottom line. I'll move on to the Federation slide. We've heard the great news from the Federation performance. Mining comes ahead of target. We're continuing to... Sorry, mining comes ahead of target. We're coming 42% higher than the previous quarter. Gold is up by 11% on grade. And both of these sort of key physicals are supporting our improved recoveries in the peak plan as well. Overall, Federation mine continues to be a success story. with additional information that Andrew will provide around the exploration as well. We do see ex-Federation being a really good story for our investors going forward. Just on Federation's costs, the cost per tonne, also moving in the right direction as we committed to as well. As we ramp up our tonnes, we are seeing a reduction in our cost per tonne, which is great. Really proud to present these results to the shareholders in terms of where Federation is. These are the sort of increase in volumes we committed to, the reduction in cost we committed to, and the sort of improvement in our performance is showing through, hopefully, for shareholders. I'll just move on to the growth projects and exploration slide. I'll talk about the growth projects and hand it over to Andrew to talk to us through the exploration update for the quarter. So, of course, the great cover on slide nine, you can sort of see from the timeline, the project's progressing well in line with our commitments. As I said earlier, the focus is getting development down to the bottom of where the fresh air rays would be in place. So we'll have development putting, punching down underneath those areas and then we can start the raised bore work in quarter two FY27. The raised bore is the next key milestone for us, for the project. Obviously we're working through finalising the contractors for that work now and we'll be putting a lot of discipline and focus around making sure that big shaft raised bore is done level. Taking learnings from the shafts we've got at Federation and industry as well to make sure we do that well. The other major change we made in quarter three was the sequencing of the development declines beyond the actual raised bore shaft. We're going to bring our development to sequence to get down to the drilling platforms sooner so we can set up a drilling platform for infill drilling. and also exploration drilling and really unlock the potential of this resource-based reserves that Frank Tobar has for this company. We all believe it's going to be a game-changer but obviously we've got to get down there and put those additional holes in to hopefully give the channels confidence in where it's going. I'll just talk to slide 10 now which is the expansion projects. There's two parts of the project which are progressing very well. Firstly, the tailings and process water management. That project is going very, very well. In fact right now we're dry commissioning that particular thickener and we'll be basically moving to recommissioning in the middle of May as part of that cut over into the plant when we do the shutdown. So at this point in time nothing's stopping us from really delivering what we said we were going to deliver there in terms of the schedule and that's going to apply very, very well for us as well because effectively we'll be pushing higher copper ore through in the quarter four of FY26 and that copper ore obviously will get the benefit of better recoveries and better throughput from the thickener once it's in place as well. So that will actually work out timing wise perfect for our sequencing. The second project is the tertiary ball mill. All the major items are on site. All the excavation work has been done. We're now in the process of the build of the tertiary ball mill and all the electrical works. It's on schedule for quarter one FY27 also. So it's going very, very well and we're looking forward to seeing that. So I'll just reinforce the fact that we've been able to build up stocks, very important expansion is a great result for the team. The fact that we're getting the recoveries through the mill as it stands now and setting up for the expansion is a great result. and the fact that our grades are sort of moving through the planet in a nice way, delivering significant value for us, is also in line with our plan. So, as I said earlier, these are all the right steps and the right questions for us, having come to this point in time, and really happy how the project's been delivered safely. I'm going to hand it over to Andrew to talk through the exploration slides.

Thanks, Brian. We're on slide 11 now for those following along through the pack. Last week we were very excited to be able to release an energy district exploration update. If you haven't had a look at that release I'd encourage you to jump on our website, the ASX website and have a look. Obviously we've been doing very extensive underground infill drilling at Federation but this reporting is of our first exploration focused drilling from underground and we had to get the declines down, get the platforms in place to then be able to do explorations at added value. And it's great that this first program was immediately successful. So the three key items of federation that we released. Firstly, we drilled out federation west further down dip, and we got an extremely good hit about 70 metres further down dip. So it's extended that federation west all-body area You know, when I say very high grade, you know, we were 43% lead plus zinc with 1.2% copper with 0.9 grams gold. You know, a fantastic intercept over nine metres. And there may be midships on the slide. It's in the center there on hole 354. So extremely exciting. We do need to do more work to see if that continues to extend. We are doing some very early work, thinking about whether we push an exploration drive in that direction to allow us to explore there, but also to explore the central part of the observational body at depth. The other interesting piece in that slide, which you can see on the left-hand side, is that we discovered a new lens further west, and we've called this the Harley lens. It was intercepted from surface as well as from underground. Grade's good. Still an enormous amount of work to be done on that. But the pleasing piece for investors to think about is that we found that offset on FedWest, and now we're seeing additional mineralisation further west, which bodes very well for us continuing to find more at Federation. The other fringe benefit we had from exploring from underground is we actually hit some very, very good mineralisation in the early part of the exploration holes, so they're adjacent to the underground workings, and this material's been handed straight over to the mine to infill and then bring into the mine plant. And when I say very, very high grade, we've only got 43 grams gold, over 3.9 metres. We got 48% lead plus zinc over 5.5 metres. So this grade is just exceptional and it'll feed straight into the mine plan as additional material for us to mine. The other bit in our relief, we covered some regional work, Lyle and Lancelot, particularly in that release, but it is important to recognise that we're doing Quite extensive regional early-stage works, both at the Nimigi District but also in the Peak District, or the Cobar District, around Peak, and that's explained in our quarterly report. We're on the hunt for the next federation, and it's really exciting to be able to step beyond the mine areas and start looking for these future deposits for the company. I'll pass over now to Martin on the balance sheet.