IGO Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the IDO Limited First Quarter FY26 results 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'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr Ivan Vela, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Darcy. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining and thanks for those accommodating our time change. We just wanted to avoid a clash. I'm sure you've all got a busy morning of calls lined up. Kath's with me again this morning, our CFO. She'll cover some of the financials. I'll jump in and run through a bit of a summary and then we can get into some Q&A. First of all, on safety, look, we signposted last quarter that The results of the hard work we did through 2024 are starting to flow through and we saw that again through the last quarter. We're delighted to see a period of over 90 days without an injury and that for IGO is a record as far as I can see back in the history and an indication of that steady improvement in the way that we're managing safety and the maturity for our operations. The trip has started to trend down which we'd expect and that should continue as we keep the focus up. Still lots to do. There's no question you don't turn safety around and build a strong, mature set of systems and culture overnight but I'm pleased to see that steady progress. In terms of the operations, I'll start on greenbushes and what's very clear obviously is the production was well down from prior quarters and that was a function predominantly of grade and you'll see that in the fine details in the quarterly report. It was quite a step down from previous quarters and that's a function of where we are in the mine plan. I'll come back and talk more to that in a minute but a big impact from that. Of course, that was then compounded by weather. Many of you will know that southwestern Australia had one of its wettest years in a very long time and particularly down in the southwest, that's very impactful. both in terms of impacting ore movement or material movement but also covering, standing water covering parts of the ore body and the ability for us to access that was limited. So that flowed through into sales, obviously unit costs, still great to see through the cycle. Right at the bottom here we're generating nearly 60% of our margins despite some of those challenges. On Nova, look, tracking the plan really, it's getting to the end of the all-body. We've signposted that and said we've got a tight plan and I think we had a couple of strong quarters to finish late last financial year. This first quarter, well, it's caught to the misfire in a minute, but aside from that, actually tracked really well. The team's doing a good job managing the challenges. It is complex and more difficult as they have less options And obviously the ability for them to flex their schedules are much more limited, but they've managed through that well and Nova's continuing to perform as expected. On Kornana, look, a lift in performance there and it's been a long time coming that step from what was done in the shutdown late last year. Naturally that flows through into conversion costs and other factors. And for us, you know, every bit of improvement is a real positive and something that does reduce the cash burn. And so that's, I guess, how I look at it, the good work the team's doing. And I've been nothing but supportive and given them credit. They try extremely hard to work on the asset to try and get it stable, to try and get it to perform. And that does reduce the cash impact. Ultimately, it doesn't change the long-term economics in our view, but It is nice to see those improvements. They're also being, you know, very frugal with cost and capex and so on. There's certainly no waste there. It's just a very challenged asset with a very difficult pathway to full production. More broadly, look, I won't get into the financials. Kath will cover those. But, I mean, other key highlights to take away, I think the Forrestania transaction is progressing and we expect that will close as sort of signposted later this year. And Cosmos, you know, a big milestone, which is a sad moment, but we took the decision to stop dewatering the Odysseus mine, the underground nickel there, after a pretty extensive technical economic assessment. Hard call, but, you know, that's a function of where the nickel market's at and the challenges of extracting that ore economically. So those are some of the highlights. Let me just dig into green bushes in a bit more depth, cover a few things there. I mentioned the grade being, you know, obviously a primary driver of performance there and there is a big pushback underway, which I've talked about in previous quarters. That's progressing. At the end of the day, that opens up that high-grade core, which is where all that, you know, critical value lives and, you know, that's still a work in progress, hence why we're seeing this sort of step down in grade. Naturally, as we finish the work on that life of mine optimisation and open up the mine plan, we'll try and look to stabilise grade, but ultimately you want to drive value first and foremost, and the grade isn't consistent across the ore body, and so we'll work through that and determine what's the best schedule and sequence to get through that. The Taliesin team are doing some great work there. Speaking of that work, the life and mine optimisation work is continuing and we'll naturally see some real benefits from that as they get into that more deeply, understand what part of the ore body will be accessed through the surface mine, what part might come through underground and ultimately how we get the best value from the ore body. In parallel to that, and I think you can almost consider it two separate pieces of work, is a broad productivity program. Adam Malaspina is up and running and doing a stellar job there as COI working with Rob and he's got a deep pedigree in this kind of productivity program, got that stood up looking at asset management, looking at throughput and recoveries, all of the different aspects that you'd expect and again, we've talked about broadly in context in the previous quarters, he's getting those programs moving and obviously that'll start delivering results quarter on quarter. That's, I guess, the key headline for Greenbushes. I mentioned that sales is lower quarter on quarter, which is a flow through from production. And, you know, the last point to note is probably just pricing. And there was quite a lot of volatility through the quarter. And we, as you know, have a one month lag on our pricing. So as that washes through, we'll see the pricing play out. Overall, what we have seen, though, is the realized pricing that Greenbushes is achieving is actually really strong if we look back through the trend and compare it with our peers in the industry. So a very simple model. There's no big sales and marketing effort. It really is just a one-month lag on the PRAs and that actually delivers a pretty good outcome. On NOVA, not too much more to add there really. I think just to talk to the MISFIRE, there was one stoke there that had MISFIRE which I guess first and foremost didn't result in any safety. and then in terms of recovering it, that's where the safety starts and the team did an extremely good job risk assessing that and working through how they'd recover it. They've done an outstanding job and effectively there's not going to be any long-term impact in our mine plan. There may be a small amount of tonnes that we don't recover, which we're assessing at the moment, but ultimately the team's worked through that The other point to note there is the closure planning. That's progressing well. We've got a very strong team on that and as again we've signposted, our intent is to have the study work done, the approvals in place so that we can move directly to closure at the end of production late next year once the oil bodies run out. On the lithium production at Kwinana, I think I've covered the key points, you know, step up in production related, step down in the unit conversion costs. CapEx was pretty modest. The team is into a shutdown this month and, you know, there's obviously more projects focused around that. But overall, you know, the team has continued to work extremely hard to try and get the asset to perform. to lift production rates, to continue to deliver high levels of battery grade product and give them full credit for that. As I said though, it doesn't change the degree of challenge on the economics for the asset. As we look into the industry, I'm sure everyone on the call knows that the Chinese refineries are extremely competitive, running at about 3,000 a tonne US, some actually below that but That's kind of the benchmark in the industry and it's very difficult to see Australian or to be honest Western refineries getting anywhere near that level of performance. Not dissimilar to other processes like copper or aluminium where China continues to demonstrate extremely capable downstream processing in the way that's operating. I'll hand off to Kath in a sec. Maybe just a couple of other quick points. On exploration, we put in a small update in the call. I didn't put a slide in on it, but, you know, there's a number of lithium targets that we've been working through testing and will continue through this field season and probably some run into next year. Nothing more to report at that point. Continuing to rationalise the ground and clean up the portfolio across our exploration team, the tenements, We've gone through the fine-tooth comb and we're managing that quite well. There is some generative work going on around copper, again, which I've mentioned previously. Nothing material to report at this point, but the team's got some interesting things they're working through. And I've already covered Cosmos and Forestania in terms of the key news there. So, look, I might hand off to Kath to just run through some of the key highlights and the financials.

Good morning, everybody. Slipping through the financials this quarter, revenue was down with Nova having won less copper shipment and also realised prices being lower. The Nova EBITDA was lower on the back of lower revenues and underlying share of net profit from TLEA was also down from the lower sales at Greenbushes. It's important to note that we are expensing capital at Kwinana, having impaired the asset to zero. Underlying EBITDA was higher as it includes a movement in the mark-to-market listed investments, with the prior quarter impacted by the expensing of rehab habilitation provision, which increased last period. We remain laser-focused on cost, noting that corporate costs continue to trend down, and you will see in the cash flow that it is a higher number. That's a timing issue around payment of short-term incentives only. There's a reduction in costs at our care and maintenance side, including the decision to cease the dewatering at Cosmos and heading towards the completion of the sale of Forestania, as Ivan noted. And we've got reduced capital spend at Nova, where we expect the run rate to continue to reduce as we head towards closure. Free crash flow was positive at 15 mil, and this included 12 mil of spend on care and maintenance at Cosmos and Forestania sites. Finally, our balance sheet was further strengthened with net cash increasing to $287 million. I'll hand back to Ivan now to give a summary.