Liontown Resources Limited

Good morning and welcome to the Liontown Resource March quarter results call. Following the formal presentation, there will be a Q&A session for 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 will be replaced by the 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 question via the web, 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 selected, the documents will open within the Lumi platform. You will still be able to listen to the meeting while viewing the 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.

Thank you, Billy. Good morning, everyone. Appreciate you making the call between the Easter and Anzac Day holiday. I'm proud to say today that we have got an excellent suite of results to disclose to the market. With me today, helping me present these results are John Latto, our CFO, and Adam Smith, our Chief Operating Officer. So, Billy, without too much more time, can we go into the slide, please? So the first slide is the disclaimer or the important information, followed by the summary slide. And if we start with the summary slide, Again, it starts with safety, and you will see from the highlight side we've had another strong quarter of safety. And this safety is usually a precursor to good performance. Good safety almost always aligns with good performance. So that underpins, you know, the plant improved performance, and we're seeing that through our confidence that, as we previously alluded to, We've been trialling a lot of the high-contamination, lower-grade material through the plant because the plant can take it and it's performing very, very well. And when we get to the section in the plant that Adam will present, you'll see that for yourself. So we've reinitiated the oil sorting and we've done also some underground trials which have given us very good results. We're continuing to successfully ramp up and, as we mentioned in our half-year results, we called commercial production in the processing plant and we've commenced underground production on schedule. We're increasing our sales volumes, which is lowering our operating costs, which has resulted in a net positive operating cash flow. That's two quarters in a row that we've been able to deliver net cash flow from operating activities. a quarter. And then finally, you know, from our inception, we've produced over 200,000 tonnes of spodumene at a 5.2% grade. Again, that's after eight months of operation. So, Billy, if we move to the next slide. We've got our ESG performance. Both our lost time injury frequency rate and our TRIFA have gone up slightly as a result of two things, in part mainly because we've seen a drop-off in the amount of total working hours as part of our construction demobilisation. But as operations normalise, we will see that come back into the zone we need it to be. The other point that I wanted to mention is the renewable power. We've had over 80% penetration in the quarter, and that's very encouraging because it keeps our cost of power down to a very attractive level. And on the right-hand side, I want to draw your attention to this photo. This is a joal company called MPH run by... A very, very impressive young man in Troy. He's second from your left. And I've personally visited this operation. NPH will do all our maintenance on all our light vehicles. It's one of the largest contracts awarded to Aboriginal corporation in the gold fields. Next slide, please, Billy. So just the highlights, I'll just draw your attention to a couple of key points. Firstly, concentrate production. We've increased that by a further 12% from the previous quarter. Again, a very good performance. The second thing I wanted to draw your attention to is the net cash from operating activities. What makes this even more pleasing to the team is that this quarter we didn't have the benefit of capitalised commissioning costs and we've incurred a full quarter of royalties. So that's a particularly strong performance. In comparison to our competitors... The second one I want to draw your attention to is lithium recovery. And this is a very important, it's a noticeable increase, 10%. And we've also mentioned in previous disclosures that during this quarter we've had, during the underground trials, recoveries of over 70% and producing concentrate over 1,700 tonne a day. So it's very encouraging of what we can look forward to as part of the underground operations when we get going 100% underground. And we see the underground as a point of competitive advantage. The other point to note on this lithium recovery, it's done on an average mine grade or lithium grade to the plant of 1.3%. The normal view is the higher the feed grade, the better recovery. The plant is performing where we can feed to it a lower-grade product but still get very strong recoveries. The next two points I want to draw your attention to is the cash on hand. There's $173 million in the bank at the end of March, but even better, we've got 23,000 tonnes of concentrate at the port ready to put on a ship. And finally, operating costs. The points I want to draw out here is this operating cost is done on a 6% basis. And please, I ask the analyst to normalise the competitor's cost to a 6% standard and then compare us. On a US basis, it's $512 a tonne FOB. On an Aussie dollar basis, it's 18% lower than the previous quarter. And if we do it on a 5.2% basis to compare ourselves, it's $708 a tonne Aussie. Next slide, please. I'll now hand over the production side of the quarterly report to our Chief Operating Officer, Alan Smiths.

Thanks, Tony. I think another strong quarter for the open pit with just under 2.5 million tonnes of ore mined or ore and waste mined from the pit. Of that, sort of 550,000 was ore and a stripping ratio of just over 3%. Great control drilling was finished in the quarter. It's very, very important to finalise the wireframes and the ongoing extraction of the remaining part of the pit. The pit is on schedule to be finished in sort of January, February of next year, and I'll talk more about that later in terms of the transition from open pit to underground. and we have over a million tonnes, at 1.3 million tonnes of ore now, ore and OSP material on the ROM pad, and that's composed of about 800,000 tonnes of OSP and just over 400 of clean ore. The picture at the bottom of the page, I think, sums it up, and you can see the various fingers of ore on the ROM pad, and there's a large stockpile to the right of that picture as well of further ore. We'll just go to the next slide. I can just add a couple of points on this one.