Liontown Resources Limited

Welcome to Liontown's half-year results. Following the formal presentation, there will be a Q&A session for the investor, analyst and media. Participants can ask both text and live audio questions during today's call. To ask a text question, select the messaging icon. Type your question in the box towards the top of the screen and press the send button. To ask a live audio question, press the request to speak button at the top of the broadcast window. The broadcast window will be replaced by an audio question interface. Press Join Queue and if prompted, select Allow in the pop-up to grant access to your microphone. If you have any issues asking a web question today, a backup phone line is available. Dial-in details can be found on the Request to Speak page or on the homepage under Asking Audio Questions. To view documents relevant to today's meeting, including more detailed instructions on how to use the platform, select the Documents icon. A list of all available documents will appear. When selecting the document, it will open within the Lumi platform. You will still be able to listen to the meeting while viewing documents. Text questions can be submitted at any time, and the audio queue is now open. I will now hand over to Mr. Tony Ottaviano.

Thanks, Billy, and good morning or afternoon to listeners. Thank you for joining us today. Joining me, Tony Ottaviano, the Managing Director, is John Laddow, our Chief Financial Officer, and Adam Smith, our Chief Operating Officer. Today's presentation is really a build from our 21st of January presentation on our physical, quarterly and cash flow results. We have now presented today our half-year financial results. So if we move along to our next few slides, there's the important information. We'll get to the first slide, please. The next one, please. Okay, just summarising, we should start with our safety and ESG performance. And again, I'm very pleased to announce some very good results. We know the journey for safety is never complete and we're vigilant and In fact, my message to our staff today on these results started with a safety measure that we need to be vigilant in how we focus on the wellbeing of our employees, our contractors, and all our other supporters and partners. In terms of our ESG, we've fully halved. We delivered over 80% renewable power from our hybrid power station. and we continue to optimise the performance of that hybrid power station as we build our power consumption, our power draw from the plant. Our female participation in our workforce is in a strong 23%, and we continue to focus on that. We had International Women's Day only last week. Also very, very pleasing for me personally is we've awarded two significant Jawaal contracts over this period. One being one of the largest Aboriginal contracts in the gold fields with our ROM loading contract. So I'm very, very pleased to be able to announce that today. And we achieved three significant environmental approvals over that period as well. If we go to the next slide, please. I'm just summarising the key operational and financial metrics for simply five months of operation, which I'm very pleased to announce. We produced almost 117,000 tonnes of concentrate and shipped 92,000 tonnes of concentrate. Our lithium recovery for the period was 52%, but in December we achieved 59%. And I'm pleased to announce today that we've gone even better over the next few months, which Adam, our Chief Operating Officer, will allude to in his section. We've built some strategic stockpiles ahead of our transition to underground mining of 1.3 million tonnes. On the financial side, I'm pleased to announce we're now earning revenue in $100 million, which is a nice round number for the period, and we realised a price of $8.11 for that half. On the second quarter operating cash flow, again, as we mentioned on our 21st of January announcement, we're very pleased to announce that we did get a positive operating cash flow for that period. Again, a greater result given we're in ramp up. We've got a strong cash balance of $193 million. at the end of December 31st, and our unit operating cost is US$652. And I think it's important to note for the analysts and for the media on this call that this operating cost is based on a 6% concentrate. So when you do your benchmarking, please normalise for concentrate grade. The second element I will note is the exchange rate we used for that is at 65 cents. Okay, next one, please. Operational performance, I'll now kick over to Adam Smith.

Good morning, everyone. I think, as Tony has highlighted, we've only been running five months, and I think the key metrics sort of speak for themselves on the screen. Big ones for me are obviously the plant availability and recovery. What we're achieving, and this is not boasting, but more just a quietly confident view on the world, what we're achieving or have achieved with our team and our plant on site the first five months is what many operations have are operating at after five years, so with 92% availability and sort of 59% recovery. That performance has continued through January and February with similar numbers recorded in January. That recovery has stepped up to 64% average in February. So we're well on our way to that 70% target that we put there in front of ourselves. And we actually had nine shifts. during February that exceeded 70%. So it's not a pipe dream. It's actually real. And the team on site is working out of their skin to make this happen. In terms of ramp-up and production, the annualised run rate there at 2.4, we're actually exceeding that already in the coming months. Underground is performing exceptionally well with our partner Burncut, and we're very much getting ready to start stoping and paste-filling underground. All the key equipments and contracts and everything that needs to facilitate that underground works is in place or will be in place to start stoping and paste-filling in April and May. So we're well on track there. to meet that goal of having that underground wall coming out from underground. And I guess the big point there, re-commercial production being declared in January, just reflects the performance of the plant and the operation in general over the last sort of five, six months of operation.