IGO Limited

Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Thanks for joining us everyone. Cath Bozanich is joining me on this session again today. I'm going to try and run through the highlights quite quickly and just leave more time for the Q&A. There's a couple of slides we'll step through. First of all, on safety, look, the last quarter we've seen a continued improvement in performance, which is encouraging. There's still plenty to do. I guess I I feel the momentum and the direction of improvements good when we look back over the last financial year, but still at a triffer of 10.4 is still not what we need to be. And it's great to see the focus across the team, across the business on safety. Our leading indicators in regards to safety interactions and leadership engagement, the general focus across the business is continuing to lift. And that gives me a lot of encouragement and a sense that We're on the right track, but need to keep working at it. We've also been focusing heavily on the psychosocial safety of our people, and I'll talk more to the changes in our corporate structure and exploration later in the call. But as you can appreciate, a period of a lot of change, a lot of uncertainty within the business and also within the broader market, that thinking about the wellness and the psychosocial safety of people is very important. Before I dive into green bushes, I thought I'd just share a few reflections on the market, which probably isn't going to add a whole lot across the call. I think that we would all agree there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of things we don't know about the world of lithium. It's still very volatile, and obviously prices are quite subdued at the moment. There's a fairly high level of pessimism across the market, both on the demand side. We see lots of media and commentary around EVs. My observation is that in China, there's still... pretty solid momentum and progress and strong take up. There's obviously quite a lot of focus on that from the government in the way it's been incentivised. Equally, there's a great product being offered to consumers there in the EVs and a great price point. You then contrast that with Western markets where there's a lot more uncertainty and more questions and obviously the political situation in different environments is playing into that as well. You know, not much signal, real tight signals for direction on demand overall. And I guess we see that on the supply side as well. There's a mixed set of stories coming through around projects that are progressing, some that aren't. And overall, still a fairly high degree of uncertainty. Our view continues to be that over the medium term, supply will be more challenged than a lot would hold out. And of course, we want to continue to focus on our asset green bushes, which is right at the bottom of the cost curve and continue to, I guess, get the very best from it, help it with its performance. Let's talk through green bushes briefly. I think some real highlights from the quarter. Clearly, it's great to see it back to full production. The 200,000 tonne sale that we talked about in the last quarter's a good outcome and I think removed any constraints there from production. It's nice to see the challenges of Q1 and the uncertainty there unraveled and put us back on a path of full production. The EBITDA margins for the June quarter were just shy of 68%, which is fabulous in this kind of market, and 85% across the full financial year. It just shows you the incredible strength of this asset. That translated to some good cash generation and dividends that flowed through to to IGO, totaling $760 million over the full financial year, 159 for the quarter. Looking into FY25, we've got a new CEO for Taliesin coming, Rob Telford, who some of you I'm sure will know, ex-BHP, stunning career, very, very strong technical background. He has a pedigree around operating excellence and improving minds across that business in his career. He's got extensive experience. He was the global head of health and safety for BHP at one point as well. He comes very motivated to make this shift and to, I guess, bring all of his experience to bear as he helps to optimise and lift the performance of greenbushes. We're also continuing our construction of CGP3, which is the next step of growth for greenbushes. We've had, as you know, some early delays on the piling, which added some time and cost. And beyond that, we're still progressing towards or expecting our commissioning to commence in the third quarter of next year. From a guidance point of view, we expect Greenbushes to continue to run unconstrained through FY25. The midpoint of our production guidance is just a little bit higher than where we finished in FY24. and costs are guided between 320 and 380 per tonne. On Kwinana, look, a good quarter, better quarter, maybe not good, a better quarter, certainly some improvement. The team's focusing very hard on operational stability and control and doing their best to manage the asset as it is until the shutdown in the last quarter of this year. That's where we will expect to make some more material changes to the way that the asset's configured and lift performance again. Production of the battery grade material progresses and you know, I think that's very stable and you know something that we can depend on now and the sales of have started to flow as well, which is good. We need to work through some of the backlog of inventory there, but it's nice to see our customers taking that product. A couple of comments on Nova, which had a really strong finish to the year. They had a tough last quarter and quarter prior this quarter. They really came home well and finished the year just a little below guidance on tonnes, pulled in their cost guidance. And, you know, overall, this is a mine that's obviously delivered very well for IGO over the years. It is getting towards its end of life, and the optionality in that mine is certainly less and more constrained now. We don't have the open pathways and schedule that we've had in the past. So very conscious of that. Our guidance for the financial year 25 reflects that. We think that we need to be quite attentive to that schedule and make sure that we get the very best out of the asset. Equally, we're working hard on our costs across Nova to make sure that they're trended and managed in alignment with our production. The team at site are doing a fabulous job. I was there last week, spent a few days with them, went underground, went through the mill again, performing well, doing a fabulous job, and I have a lot of confidence that they'll manage this much more complex phase of the mine through to closure in a couple of years' time. Forestania, so we see that's obviously much closer now. It's got a matter of months to go effectively. We expect that we'll move that into care and maintenance by the end of the year. And we just recently had another seismic event. This is not unusual for a mine of that depth and that age. That's definitely affected some of our planned schedule on the stopes and the tons that we can pull out. These are the, I guess, the normal challenges that you get when you're nearing the end of life of a mine. We'll manage that closely. The cash position's still strong given the hedge that we have in place, and we continue to focus on our South Island cap lithium exploration. There's some good potential there and something that, makes a lot of sense given the infrastructure base that we've got in place. On exploration, we've been working through that broader business review that I signposted last quarter. That's progressing at pace. Suzanne's our GM, Exploration's done a fabulous job working through an end-to-end rethink of how we approach our exploration. We've got, as I've said before, fantastic ingredients in terms of our tenement, landholding, belt scale positions in very prospective ground. fantastic capability in our team, just deep technical capability across all the disciplines that we need, access to an incredible range of data that underpins our work, and we're now just rationalising that program of work, the portfolio that we focus on, and directing our attention onto the areas that are most prospective to generate value. Our guidance for the FY25 takes our budget down to 50 to 60 million, But ultimately that's going to trend down towards a target run rate for the following year of less than 50 million. And that's really about making sure we manage all of the commitments across those tenements and our position and make sure that we've gone and tested each of those as we unwind some of that portfolio. I'll also note the impairment that we announced a few weeks ago, $275 million to $295 million against our exploration portfolio, and that's part of this rationalisation and review that's going on that focused on predominantly on Silver Knight, Mount Good and a range of other largely nickel related assets in our portfolio. I won't go through the guidance slide, which I've sort of touched on on much of this as I've gone through it, but we can we can come back to that in Q&A as you as you need to. Maybe just to sum up, and I wanted to take us back to the five priorities that I've talked about. I'm now just over six months into the role and these five priorities I think really stand well and we're making good progress against them. Firstly on safety and sustainability, we continue that focus on safety and I think of course it's a journey but there's a good momentum and direction of improvement there. Through this period, and I'll talk more to the changes, we're also very focused on our culture. And that's something that IGO has been well regarded and recognised for. We're going through a lot of change affecting our people, and that's very difficult. It's so hard hearing from people in our business where they're leaving our business that they're deeply connected with IGO and they're not necessarily worried about finding another job. They're worried about not being part of IGO. And that's... That's heartbreaking to hear, but equally it speaks to the culture that we built and what we need to reinforce and not lose sight of through this period of change. And of course, that has a very strong link to safety performance across the business. Secondly, on green bushes, I've talked about our focus there, working closely with our joint venture partners. We're very aligned on that future for green bushes. Everyone's equally committed to the success and performance of that asset, driving efficiencies, productivity and very careful allocation of our growth capital. It is clearly the best place we can allocate capital by a long shot. There is a lot of potential there, and we believe that the new management under Rob's leadership will absolutely make a standout difference. He'll bring fresh eyes, fresh experience, that deep pedigree from his time in BHP and help us lift the business to the next level. Kwinana, look, the big focus is on that shutdown. The team's preparing well for that, getting all of the materials and equipment in place. That will be a significant milestone for Kwinana and will tell us the potential of that asset. It is good to see in the intervening period that they manage very closely on their day-to-day operating performance. Nickel, I've talked about really the priority there is managing our cash and our performance from safe production at NOVA and then taking Forestania through to care and maintenance as quickly as possible. And then lastly, I've talked about preparing for growth, and that really is about reviewing our business top to tail. You know, I've sort of signposted some of this in my prior calls. The focus on getting the right capability, the right strategy and the right focus across our business is key. We are finalising the exploration business review that's progressed well. We've gone through a significant corporate review looking at our operating model and our org structure that's well progressed as well. We've been working through the impairments of different assets across our balance sheet in exploration as we rationalise that portfolio. And as you know, we're working through and well progressed on a significant strategy refresh as well, which has taken a very deep dive into the commodities that we're focused on in the battery metals sector. So all of this is significant work all in parallel, which has been tough on the team. They've done a great job to steer through that. And I feel very confident with where we're getting to. We've got new ELT members joining. Brett just started last week, and it's great to have him on board. Marie comes in a few weeks' time. She's excited about that as well, and I think both will bring fantastic fresh new energy and experience to the team. And with that new strategy, allow us to look forward with a lot of confidence where we take IGO in its next chapter. The last point I wanted to note was that our quarterly reporting in the spirit of simplifying our business, which we're doing from top to tail, we're also going to simplify that and you'll see next quarter a recut and reshaped and much simplified quarterly report really focused on our operations and our operating performance and separating that from more of the detailed financial results that we've tended to put in the past. With that, I'm going to, how did I go? 15 minutes, probably a bit longer than I'd hoped. But anyway, let's throw it open to Q&A and tackle the questions you've got.

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Hi, good morning team. Thanks for the call. Two questions from me. First one perhaps on MOVA. Seems to be a bit of a drop off in production into next year at least versus our forecast and consensus which I think were informed by some of the site presentations in the past. I just wanted to check in on a few things. I mean, is this a bit of a change in the plan to preserve mine life? Are you still expecting mine life to be around that FY27 mark? And how are you thinking about grades till the end of mine life? That's the first one on NOVA. I'll come back with a second on green bushes. Thanks.