BCI Minerals Limited

I'd now like to hand the conference over to Mr. David Boshoff, BCI Minerals Managing Director. Please go ahead.

Welcome everyone to the March quarter presentation from BCI Minerals. I'm really excited to be here with you today. We had an excellent quarter and I have to say the moment I received the news that we've got our groundwater management plan approved, I felt like running around the office and high-fiving everyone. It was such a good moment and so good to be here with you this morning. With me is Steve Fuster, he's our CFO, and we'll be taking you through the presentation now. So first of all, I'd like to acknowledge our traditional owners at our project, it's the Marathunara people, as well as the Robe River Kuruma people, and here in Perth, it's the Whadjuk people from the Noongar nation. Over this financial year, just this financial year alone, we've spent more than 13.7 million with our traditional owner partners, And we're really proud to be able to continue to strengthen those relationships with them as we continue to build this project. Now, as at the end of this quarter, our market cap is nearly $700 million. Also, our project is fully funded with nearly 900 million available, not only for the capital of the project, but also for that working capital as we commence operations. Our project, will be the largest salt operation in Australia. It's the third largest in the world. And we've got some unique features that gives us a competitive advantage. One of those is our port. Our port will enable us to load Cape size vessels, the only salt operation in Australia being able to do so with a short access to customers in our region. And as I mentioned just now, our project is fully funded. That allows us to continue to finish the project as well as those funds we need to be able to commence operations during the ramp-up period. This project affords us three revenue streams, three discrete revenue streams. The first one is our SALT operations that we have commenced operations this quarter, full operations this quarter. Also, the other revenue stream is the SOP revenue stream. We're in early piloting work. I'll step through that in a bit more detail later on. And then the third revenue stream, which we haven't discussed in a lot of depth, which Steve will take us through a little bit later on, is Cape Preston West Port. That port allows additional revenue stream, low risk for operations. So for the March quarter, we had excellent safety performance. First of all, we completed more than 200 critical control verifications, and our TRIFA is now at 1.8. That's the lowest it's been since the project has commenced. Additionally, I shared with you, received our groundwater management plan. This is both from the state government and the federal government, and that allowed us to commence full operations in the middle of April. Now, from a construction perspective, we have completed more than 60% of our construction portfolio. We've completed the secondary seawater intake during this quarter. Also, pond 69 is now complete. We've completed the construction of the main hauler that connects the salt wash plant and the port. And on the marine package for the Cape Preston West Port facility, that's almost 80% complete. That gives us confidence that we still remain on track for our targeted EFSO state in late December 26. And during the quarter, we also commenced our engineering work, the early engineering work for our pilot plant of our SOP facility that we're planning to construct at the Māori site.

From a corporate perspective, a big shout out to our lender group. who have been major supporters. They've backed us in a project that hasn't come to market for many, many years. So across the quarter, we were able to complete two drawdowns. So we've been able to draw down $120 million that's been applied to the project. And that's in addition to the bank guarantees that we'd already drawn upon. So what that means is we still have around $887 million of funding available to complete the project. Our CAPEX, forecast CAPEX to complete is an additional $619 million. So you can see there's plenty of funding available there for both the CAPEX component of the project, as well as the working capital required during ramp up.