Mineral Resources Limited

Good morning everyone. Welcome. Thanks for joining us at our full year results presentation. I think James would like me to mention that anything we say or do here won't be taken down in evidence and used against us. What we're after, James, isn't it? Don't take anything too serious. We've made a little movie up. Actually, we've made two. We've got a little movie we want to show you now. So we'll let you run through that. Then I'm going to tell you what we've been doing over the last 12 months. And Mark's going to share with us a detailed run through on the financials. And then I'm going to tell you where I'm taking the business over the next two to five years. And then we'll have some Q&A. So should we roll the movie? Thank you. Thank you.

Welcome to your

Pretty amazing, all those people, all those sites you just saw, they're all ours, which is quite incredible because on July 1st this year was our 30th anniversary. I started MINRES in the lounge of my house. My rented house, just over 30 years ago, I had $10,000 cash in the bank and a credit card they forgot to take off me. And we listed and 2006 we had a market cap of about 100 mil and we've just gone into the ASX 50 and we've got a market cap of about, well we did have on Friday, of about 12 and a bit billion dollars, so our little business has come a long way and it's got an incredible future ahead of it. We've done some milestones over the years, and the one that's just passed is probably one of our busiest ever. I mean, when you look at that and think, shit, did we get all that done, and we run the business, and we did. So look, I'll be as quick as I can. I'll run you through the performance of the business over the last 12 months. I want to talk about where we're going over the next five years. It's really important. I mean, it's not where we hope to be going. It's where we're actually going. We've got most of it's pretty much locked in. And at the end, we'll spend a bit of time on Q&A if there's anything I haven't really explained to you as properly. So highlights in the business. We've had just over a billion EBITDA, second best performance that we've had financially. We got about $2.5 billion cash at the bank. We did a bond raising with JP Morgan over in the US earlier in the year. We got our timing right on that. Very happy to have that done. We're going to pay a dividend for this financial year of a dollar. We didn't pay anything in the first half, but we're more or less holding back to make sure that we got our bond raising done, we understood where we're going on our funding, and we had everything in place, so we think we can afford to give our shareholders a dollar a share. I've restructured the business over the last 12 months, which has been substantial. I spent almost 30 years trying to make sure I had a fully integrated business with no silos in it. And I've now got four main operating pillars sitting in the business and we've brought in some extra help to make sure that they're all self-managed. That's gone incredibly well. We've done that because over the next five years, the business is gonna grow significantly. So commodities part of MnRES over the next two years will at least double. The mining services part of the business over the next five years will double and then some, so getting a much more difficult creature to manage, but we're just going about doing that in a different way. Some of the other highlights in terms of BD, business development, without doubt our best period ever. We've been working on some things for a number of years, but we've just got a whole lot of things to come together over the last 12 months. The mining service is part of the business. always performs pretty well. We're the premium mining services business in the country. If you've got Minres on the job, I mean, you're going to get your tons done every day, whether it's mining, crushing, or running process plants, or some of the innovation we've brought online lately. We're well known for delivering, and not just delivering, but the way we deliver with the culture that we have. Some of our major clients tell us they monitor our Our productivity, we're generally sitting 30% to 40% above our clients, and that's just because the nature of the beast, the culture that we have in that business. We've got some really good innovation. We're brought into the mining services. We've got these big trucks. We've really killed the price of inland haulage. We've got it down to a number that's getting closer to owning trains without the capital cost. And we've established a marine business. And as I said earlier, we're currently out there. We're building four trans shippers. There'll be a fifth one that we're going into the order line up shortly. On the lithium front, again, it's been a pretty good year for us on lithium. Wagena is back online, we're cranking up trains one and two, both of them are running now. We restructured completely the Albemarle deal, which I'll tell you about, and we're doubling production down at Mount Marion, so we're going from 450 to 900,000 tonnes. They're mixed tonnes, which I'll talk about as well. The iron ore, we have got, as of Friday night just passed, finally, it's been, we were talking a little bit earlier, we were heading towards trying to buy that asset about 2013. That's going to pay about one and a quarter billion for it. And I've now been able to secure the majority of that. And we had FID from all our partners, three great partners in there with Bauer Steel, POSCO and AMCI. We also were the winners of the last Cape Size Carrier berth in Port Edland. We got a majority share in that given to us and we used that majority share as currency and then we went and sat down with Hancock and we got a binding deal with them where we're gonna put together a port and rail structure for probably the last forever. And then on the energy front, our fourth arm of the business, We've probably got the largest onshore gas discovery sitting up in the Perth Basin. Sustainability, really important. We've got to grow our business around people. People are everything to us going forward. They are getting more difficult to get and even then when you get them, you've got to keep them. We've developed a fairly amazing work environment in our new head office. We've only been in it for a couple of months, but it's already changed the way people view it, the way they behave. We don't have one single person that wants to work from home anymore. It's fully equipped with a wellness center, medical facilities, a great coffee shop. We're serving over 1,000 meals a day in there, and there's a choice of probably 30 different meals you can have for lunch. There's four or five that you can take home at night. So your wife no longer has to cook. She can trade the kitchen in for about eight bucks a meal. They've got a really high quality offering. So we've got... A large training intake through apprentices, graduate programs, trainees, uni kids. We've got a lot going on on that front and we're exceptionally good at what we do when it comes to training. The safety, we've got a really strongly entrenched culture in the Minres business. If you have a look at our results, we're running over 5,000 people and we're throwing stones at bits of metal pretty much all day long. We haven't had one total recordable injury, sorry, lost time injury over the last 12 months, and our TRIFA rate is at a standard that you would expect an insurance company to have, so the results we're getting there are incredible. Most of these results are a direct result of either the culture that we run in the business in conjunction with all of the training that we do, and we're very heavy on training, That's the result you get out of it. Supporting local indigenous communities has really amped up a lot more over the last couple of years for us. Very, very focused and engaged with the traditional landowners around the Wadger and Onslow project. In terms of community donations, MnRES put nearly $6 million into the community and a different range of donations that we've done, about $1.7 billion spent into the local community and about $10 million spent into the indigenous communities and that's going to grow a lot more over the next couple of years. I think the environment, the mining industry in Western Australia is up there as probably, if it's not the best in the world, it'd be in the top two. The way that we manage the mining, the environment, the land that we're on is almost second to none in the world. I know that we've had some bad press over there for blowing up a cave, but you need to remember that that was the way it was done in those days. They were fully approved and permitted to do what they've done. It's just that the timing got wrong. We generally, I think, I look over rehab ground that we do, when we walk away from it, it's generally a better state than when we found it. There's any doubt about that. We're doing a lot of work around innovative ways on how we can better use water. We've had a lot of success on that. We're using less water now per ton of ore processed, and we're spending quite a bit of money on that going forward. That's becoming really important. If we can get that water usage down, we're also looking hard. We've been working the last couple of years on tailings management, dry stacking and trying to eliminate tails, dams. We're all aiming for a net zero on carbon emissions by 2050. I think the whole world's starting to think we can do a whole lot better than that, and we're trying to look in every area that we can. We're using gas and solar to transition away from diesel. So our focus has been for a couple of years on getting out of burning diesel wherever we can. We're installing solar. Solar's a good friend for us and the regions that we live in. So we can certainly create a lot of power during sunlight hours. and then we're looking at, wherever we can, we're heading down the path of going electric so that we can reduce emissions. The big haul trucks that we're running at Onslow, we're confident by 2025 we'll have them all running electric and that'll get rid of about 120 kilotons of carbon out of the atmosphere. The Wanmana solar that we put up there got rid of 1,800 tons out of the atmosphere. Our new head office already is totally carbon neutral. Wherever we can in those areas, we're working pretty hard to make sure that we can get the right outcomes. So look, I'm gonna pass over to Mark to talk to you about financials and then I'll come back to you.

Thanks Chris and good morning everybody. Apologies if I sound a bit croaky. It's a pleasure to be here this morning to walk you through the financial results for the group, for FY22. As Chris said, it's been a huge year for the business in many ways. From a financial perspective, it's been a year of two halves for us. First half was a challenging year financially, challenging period financially with steep decline in iron ore prices, widening discounts and increased costs, particularly in the shipping. We took steps to cut production in Yilgarn to remove high-cost tons and worked to preserve capital by targeting capex. The second half was very different. We saw the emergence of lithium as a real generating powerhouse for us. We expect that to contribute into the future. We saw lithium driven by higher prices and first contributions from hydroxide sales, which we'll talk about. Platts stabilised through the period and discounts tightened. And as Chris said, in the second half, we took steps to strengthen the balance sheet with the debt raise to help make sure we're well placed to fund the growth in front of us. So in summary, we're in a strong position, a strong balance sheet with great liquidity, ready to deliver all these opportunities in front of us. In terms of the underlying P&L, as Chris said, underlying EBITDA was 1.024 billion, a strong performance for us from where we were at the end of the first half. It was driven by record contributions from lithium, 585 million. Mining services, 333 million, both very strong. Iron ore rebounded from a loss in the first half to contribute 64 million. We did see considerable cost pressures through the year. I'll talk about that when we get to the guidance section. But the costs did land within the guidance that we'd provided. Overall, solid performance, and as Chris said, gave us the confidence to declare, or the board to declare a $1 fully franked dividend. In terms of the next slide, you'll see a bridge that shows how the year looks compared to the prior year. You can see from that graph the significant impact the fall in iron ore price had on us, about $1.4 billion, offset to an extent by Spodumene prices rising. That was a $400 million benefit for us. Overall, adjusting for pricing and so on, underlying performance of the group saw about 9% growth through improved volumes and so on. In terms of the cash flow, historically the groups had a very strong record of converting EBITDA to cash. This year we saw an increase in working capital, which I'll step through in a little bit more detail shortly. So we converted about 60, 62% of the EBITDA into cash in the period. The tax and dividends that you see there on that slide reference 2021. And we've invested about $800 million in CapEx over the year. We'll talk through that in a bit more detail. And you can see the impact of the bond raising and the cash flow, of course. In terms of the working capital movement, just to explain this a little bit better, we saw an increase in working capital required of about $404 million in the year. Three-quarters of that is tied up in receivables. Half of the lithium receivable is SPOD, and that's throughout Spodumene. That's the shipments of Spodumene right at the end of the period. So that's a sign of the increased working cap demands of the higher price in Spodumene, including true-ups on earlier shipments. And there's $223 million worth of lithium hydroxide receivables at the end of the year, and that ties to the commercial arrangements we have with Gangfeng through the conversion of that hydroxide. In terms of the capital expenditure of the $800 million, $431 of it's referable to investment in growth for the future. You can see in this slide the breadth of activity that we have across different categories. The recommencement of operations at Wojana, continued expansion or growth in new opportunities in Iron Ore as well as Onslow. Chris said that we've started there, we have. Mining services, continued investment there and the investment in the office, not just in the office but we've also started to invest more heavily in technology and moving towards the implementation of an ERP. In terms of the balance sheet, Balance sheet's solid position, closing cash of $2.4 billion, undrawn facilities on top of that, borrowing sitting at $3.1 billion following the new notes offering. Overall, I'm comfortable with the way the balance sheet shapes up. It leaves us in great position to be able to move forward and deliver on the opportunities in front of us. Just note that there is, playing with the numbers, there is a non-current payable of just under $200 million. That's part of the deal for the deferred consideration, effectively, on the Redhill Lion JV tenements. Net debt. So this is only the third time in the last 10 years that we've been net debt balanced state. So historically we've been conservative, we've been happy to sit net cash. Where we see opportunity to invest, we will and we have. Last time we went net debt was 2019 when we funded the lithium expansion. And what we saw then was a rapid transition back into net cash. We're happy to go net debt where we see good quality assets with long-term horizons. That's what we see here with strong returns. We've talked consistently and we haven't changed our view. We want these assets, these investments to deliver a 20% return on invested capital. That's an after-tax return. We haven't changed that metric. So we finished the year 700 million net debt. There's more details in the appendices around the credit metrics which remain strong. As we move through this next half and complete this next year, credit metrics will look very strong. And to be frank, that's why the bond investors were prepared to back us in the middle of a very uncertain debt market a few months ago. In terms of value creation, We like these graphs because we think they tell the story of the business. We focus on return on invested capital. Historically, we've averaged 21% since listing. That focus has helped us drive operating cash of almost $7 billion, $6.9 billion over that period. That's allowed us to grow dividends at a rate of 20% per annum. Balance sheets doubled in size over the last five years and will continue to do so in coming years. Key thing I want to leave you with as a thought this morning though, we're in great shape to be able to take on what we have in front of us. In terms of guidance, in terms of iron ore, we're keeping productions flat. We're being a little bit more targeted, particularly in the Yilgarn. We're trying to simplify operations there a little bit as we start to think about other opportunities down there. In terms of costs, the midpoint of our cost guidance is up 14% year on year. So we're seeing that industry-wide cost pressures, labour, labour increases, cost of retention of people, energy costs, We're seeing costs being passed through to us by OEMs on heavy equipment and so on. In terms of lithium, as Chris said, a significant ramp up of production ahead of us with Marion targeting to a run rate of 900,000. by the end of this year. Costs at Marion are going to be in line with where they were last year, and that's showing the benefit of improved scale. Wojana, we're giving guidance there on the basis of a 50% share in the asset. Just note that. We haven't moved legally to that point, but you'll see that detail that Chris will get to. Costs there are high, and that's just showing the ramp up at Wojana with lower scale. Life of mine, Wojana's probably 20% cheaper than Marion to mine, to operate. We haven't provided hydroxide guidance at this time because we're still working on finalising the long-term downstream arrangements. And Kemerton hasn't yet reached commercial production. In terms of mining services, expect those volumes to remain steady over this current year, FY23. In terms of capital expenditure guidance, debated whether to round some of these numbers up because they look very precise, but anyway, about $2 billion this year. 70% of it's with Onslow Iron. That's the spend that's underway now with FID taken on Friday night and the binding term sheet entered into. We'll be accelerating that in the months ahead. The team are ready. Some growth spend in lithium. Notably, we've set aside about $100 million to do more drilling and energy. We think there's a huge opportunity there. Chris will talk about that in more detail. But the payoff's already been huge and we just see enormous opportunity in the tenements that we have. So in summary, we're in good shape heading into this new year. The combination of those numbers that you see in the guidance will give you a good outcome in the current year. Balance Sheet's in great position to be able to help us fund the opportunities in front of us. Thanks, everybody. I'll hand back now to Chris.

Well done, Mark. Thanks for that. Okay, so I'll just give you a little bit of a rundown of what we've done over the last 12 months from an operational point of view. For those that aren't really familiar with the MnRES business, we're sort of running four key parts, pillars to our business. So we've got mining services, lithium, iron ore, and energy. The mining service is part of the business. It's sort of where we started. It's sort of the heart and soul of us. It's where we stay agile and productive. It means that we use those skill sets and we can find deals. We can move on them very quickly. We've got good analytical people in our business. We know what we're doing. We generally get it right. We run mining services generally across, we started in crushing, we do crushing, processing, flotation, We also run mining fleets in specialised areas. We're not real big on that unless it's one of our key clients where they're looking to get productivity and they're willing to pay for our services. And we have a number of them. And we have this very unique build, own, operate model that a lot have tried to replicate and copy around Australia over the last 20 or so years. and they just for some reason haven't really been able to nail it and get it. So it's a little bit like the Bunnings model for summary. We must have some trick in there that they can't see. But it produces a very long-term annuity cash flow, incredibly reliable business. Every time I look at doing something out there, whether it be a joint venture or going and doing a deal where we're mining, I'm forever looking at where the mining services part of that deal is because each part of it has to have that mining services for us to make our model work. Lithium, we're in the top five global producers. We're going to do better than that over the next couple of years. We'll get bigger and better. We have got two of the most significant hard rock deposits on the planet, and I think that as time goes by, people will really get to realise what it means to have a Tier 1 mine, even more importantly, sitting in a Tier 1 location. So, you know... Tier one locations don't exist, for example, in Africa. They don't exist in parts of Europe. They sure as shit don't exist down in South America because you can own those assets and your ownership can change and the rates change. So we're very fortunate that ours are right here in WA. So we're progressing also in that area on the lithium. All of the spod that we produce, we're eventually going to turn it into hydroxide, and we're well advanced on doing that now. I can't talk a lot about that at the moment, but at the AGM we'll be able to give you a lot more news on that. In iron ore, top five producer. We're transitioning into long-life, low-cost operations. We're currently running about 20 million tonnes a year over the next five years, so we're going to move out to 90 million tonnes a year of people ask why we put money into iron ore why don't you put more into lithium and the answer to that is really simple we're going after lithium as hard as we can we're securing as much as we can and whatever we get we can fund but just remember the amount of cash that these iron ore mines they consistently pump out cash decade after decade i mean they're incredibly reliable business and where we're heading now, we've finally got a balance sheet where we can go develop some iron ore assets that higher cost in terms of the capital spend but lower intensity per tonne, good business. Our energy business, It's been around for a while. It basically looks after all the power that we run now. It goes out and buys the gas, runs the power plants. Where we're heading now is into a different area. We've acquired land over the last few years in the Perth Basin. So the Perth Basin is probably the most unexplored and the most prospective region in Australia for gas. So we're the largest holder in that region and also in the Carnarvon Basin. So that's sort of the business in a nutshell. That's what we do. Performance of the mining services business over the last 12 months. Again, it's been quite exceptional. I was road showing out in... New York in 2019 we done our first bond and I said to them that over the next two to two and a half years we're going to double the mining services business and the common theme was that every time you grow a business like that you melt away the margin so I said not not with us I mean we have a unique model so we've doubled that business and then a bit from 2019 through to 22, and we've increased our margins by 14% in doing that, so quite an outstanding achievement. We've had record volumes over the last 12 months. We've retained 100% of our contracts, and we've added five new ones, so they're always a great performer. We're running 23 operating plants. Construction division inside our mining services business is very strong. The leadership have been in there for 15 to 22 years leading that business and running it and they can time and time again, we can go on site, we can go build a plant at the number that we thought we could do it for because we've got people that know what they're doing. They've recently recommissioned Wojnar Trains 1 and 2 and they're almost there on Train 3. They're doing the upgrade obviously down at Mount Marion and they've got a fairly big chore ahead of them. They're spread out right across from the coast to 150km inland in Onslow and they're getting ready to crank that up. Haulage part of the business in our mining service has been really busy. They've developed these big road trains. They're the largest road trains in the world. Our cost of moving dirt now is under $0.03 per tonne kilometre. If you have a look at the capital cost of being able to put these things together compared to a heavy haul train system, these things open up stranded deposits. We've got about 25 of them running that we've developed over the last nine months. Again, they're a one-off. They're the first. Worked with Kenworth to develop these big girls that pull them. We've actually had one in the yard the other day and we've got a hydrogen injection that goes on the side of the engines now. We basically from what I understand we kind of get some water and we sort of inject it in the engine and it gives us about a 30% fuel saving already so we're working down that path but big trucks and they can move a lot we have also had an organization out of the us working with us for about 18 months we've actually got these big girls now they're autonomous but we've still got drivers sitting in them over the next 12 months those drivers will come out and we'll no longer have cabs on our trucks so on slow iron i'll be running stage one about 150 of these big girls and for that you need about 550 drivers so probably over 500 drivers will disappear. Obviously a big saving, but you take the drivers out of trucks too. The safety that it adds to them just goes to another level as well and consistency in running them. So a lot of good work done there. And also in the mining services, we've started a marine division. We have got the first four of our five trans shippers getting built. When we operate the Onslaught port, it'll be our lowest cost port. Even though we're running these transshippers, it'll be lower cost than Esperance, it'll be lower than Kwinana, and it'll be much, much lower than what we're running out of Port Hedland. So, good result for us. Commodities on lithium has performed well, as you can see. The average price of lithium going back a year ago is about 1,600 bucks a tonne for spod, and hydroxide was up to about 22,000 a tonne. Today, realistically, around about 6,000 a tonne for a tonne of spodumene, 6%. And we're getting, on all the tonnes we're selling on hydroxide, we're getting plus 70,000 US a tonne. I think last quarter we averaged about So numbers are in good shape. All of our offtake now coming out of Mount Marion as of February, we're converting that into hydroxide and we're doing that with the help of our friends from Gangfang who are toll treating for us up in China and come to a really great commercial arrangement. I've got to acknowledge Gangfang have been just a great partner from day one and very easy to work with. So the Wagena restart's going well, one and two are running. First shipment of spod went out in July for conversion over in China. The conversion's the responsibility of Albemarle, so what we're doing is we're buying and building plants, and as quickly as we can, we want to be able to convert all of our hydroxide or spod that comes out of Wagena over the years into hydroxide. Iron ore, we've had record tons, 19.2 million shipped, up 11%. Pricing has been challenging. If we go back a year and a bit ago, we were selling it like it was gold. Within about 69 days, we had the greatest crash in history of iron ore. We went back to work. We thought we were on the verge of retirement, but the price disappeared from under us. And then it's sort of been up again and down. But it's okay the way it is. I mean, if it hangs in the way it is, we'll be happy. I don't think we're going to see it getting back down around the $80 level. I shouldn't. I'm prejudiced by saying I don't think it will. I mean, there is a lot of challenges out there on the supply side at the moment, so there's not as much iron ore running around the market as everyone perceives. Birth three, as I said earlier, great achievement. We were given that by the WA government. We converted that into a binding agreement on a supply chain with Hancock, so that's gone really well. And the early works have started on Onslow, and in fact, getting into that in earnest. Energy, how did we go on energy? We doubled our land holding, there was a tender come out so we had the large land holding in the Perth Basin and we just went up and doubled it. We won the tender convincingly and since then every gas company in the country's approached us about being our partner. And the second thing we've done is we just got lucky. We've got some very talented people that looked at all the land and figured out if we drilled a hole four and a quarter's deep, we should hit gas. And we did. We spent $15 million. We've hit what they believe is the largest onshore discovery in Australia. There's no doubt there's a lot of gas down there. We've got a lot of work to do on that. We're doing it now, doing test work. So more to happen down there. We think that we can bring our red gully plant that we've had in mothballs, bring that back into line over the next couple of years and we've got a lot more work to do up in up in the Carnarvon Basin as well. That's the year that's been. Where are we heading over the next five years? We've got some projects that are locked in. We've got some great opportunities sitting in the beauty lineup. The first one that we're looking at obviously is Onslow. To be able to do what we're going to do over the next five years, it's a people thing. It's not money. I mean, we can get money. It's not getting great opportunities. We've got all of those sitting in front. It's just purely people. So in the next five years, we're going to go from 20 to 90 million ton of iron ore production. In two years, we'll be at 50 million ton. We're going to go over 100,000 tons of hydroxide production in our own right. Mining services, it'll more than double. I mean, if you just have a look at what we got locked away at the moment, I mean, we're adding three major mining services contracts out of the Onslow region and crushing tracking transshipping. We've got the supply chain from Marillana mine site to ship through Port Hedland, so huge numbers we're going to be doing. They're 30 to 40 year contracts and the thing that we need the most out of all of that is we've got to get people, we've got to get them through the door, we've got to do it in the right way and we've got to make sure we get that retention. And we're going to go to, we have already started, we're going to a different level than anyone's gone to in the mining industry. We're going to be really innovative with this. When you walk into our head office, you'll think we've lost the plot, but about two minutes later you go, this is the place you would want to work. We don't have anyone that wants to work from home. They all want to come to work. They love the experience. We're going to carry that forward into our camp. So typically a room in a camp is about 12 square meters when we build on. So it's going to be about 30 square meters plus ensuite, plus laundry, plus a balcony with a barbecue on the front of it. We're looking at how do we get people to go there from a different area that we've recruited from. We're looking for couples, boyfriend, girlfriend, husbands, wives. I mean, if the husband's a mechanic and the wife wants to do something, in about eight weeks we can put her through a training course and we can give her a job for about 120 to 140 grand a year. And they can live there as a couple. They can do one on, one off, or two weeks on, two off. So we're going to have a whole range of different opportunities to bring people to site. Young people can go up there and earn some good cash and go buy a house. Older folk can go up there and just make sure that they really secure their retirement. I also want to get away from this thing where the guys walk in the camp, they hang up their hobnailed boots, they dominate the wet mess, they drink piss, they throw darts. Here we're going to have Olympic-sized pools in the camps. We're going to have restaurants. We're going to have taverns, very small taverns. We're going to have a lot of training on site. We're going to get involved in sport, all those sort of things. So my concerns, mental health. safety of our female population. So I'm going to create a community, not a single man's quarters. So community is going to be full of couples. It's going to have a very different atmosphere and that we get some pretty average press on. The safety of our women in our camps, our women in our camps are safe. They always have been. I can't guarantee at 100% when you consider the communities they're coming out of, they're not safe in. So they're much safer in my mind than anywhere, but we're going to multiply that up. So I just want to let everyone know that a typical room that I would have spent $40,000 on last week, I'm probably going to spend $120,000 on now. So it's going to be three times the cost. But if you knew the cost of losing people and not having retention in your workforce and the missed opportunity on production is, sorry, the room costs and what we're doing in the camp is an absolute pittance to where we're going. I'll explain that a little bit more shortly. I wanted us to be prepared for that because it's really important. Operations, where are we going over the next five years? Iron Ore, Utah Point. It's pretty much going to be business as usual. We're going to run about 11 million ton out of the year. It's coming out of Wanmunna and Iron Valley. Later down the track in years to come, we'll probably open up Lambs Creek and Wedge. There are other opportunities up there for us, but as long as that Utah Point thing makes money, I'll keep it running. It doesn't make a heap of beans. It's a high-cost operation, but it's like a cat with nine lives. It just keeps surviving. As long as it does that, I'll keep doing that. The Yule Gun. Again, it's sort of high cost. We're gonna be running about seven million tonne a year down there for the next four years. We're running hematite out of there. It's challenging again. It's 15 pits that we're running north to south. They're spread over 200 kilometres, so we're bringing them into a central hub, processing them, and then we're shipping them about 600 k's south to Esperance on rail. Where we are going with the Yulgan, the upside in that is that we have got an awful lot of magnetite down there, so I'm going to transition out of the hematite over the next three to four years and it'll be a full-on magnetite operation. I can see us getting to a good solid 15 million tonnes of magnetite coming out of there, about 67% Fe, so up the top of where you want to be in terms of quality. And then if you combine that with where we're going with gas, I mean, we'll have gas that's probably going to cost us about a dollar a gigajoule. I want to be able to get power down there. I've got the lowest cost gas in the world. If I can pelletize my magnetite, it's a much greener product, it's dust free and it's going to go to places like Korea and Japan and to specialty mills so I can see a 30 year plus operation in that and we've already got a great supply chain so that's where I'll be going with that. It's one that will almost certainly happen. The Pilbara Hub, so as I said earlier, we won the right to develop the South West Creek berth. We've married in with Hancocks and we've got the approval processes running. We've got a binding agreement with them. We're going to develop a 40 million tonne supply chain up there, rail and port. Great partners. We've known Hancock for a long time. They're an exceptionally good organisation to work for with high quality people. So that's going to be a great opportunity. We're going to develop Marilana. It's 50-50 between Minres and Brockman. and we'll haul that down and put it into ships. It's about a 30-year mine life, 20 million tonne run rate, about 60.5% ore, so good product. About two years to do the development and get the approvals done, and then about another two to two and a half years to go do the build, so no real money to spend there until after the ash burnt and sort of in operation. So a bit more detail here around the Ashburton. As I said, finally on Friday night after many years, and I'd hate to think how many thousands of man hours I put into this, but this is the toughest joint venture deal I've ever, ever put together. But it's three good partners, Posco AMCI and Baowu from China. So we've got good partners in there. It's transformational. It's low risk. It's a long, long-term project. There's over 3 billion tonnes of ore out in that region. We'll be there for a long time. Stage one, 30 million tonne design. All of the equipment we're putting in there has the capability of doing about 35, 36 million. It'll do 35 when it's running. Stage two, we can easily kick it up to 55 million without spending a heap of beans. So the project has been structured. Minres are the managers, they're the manager of everything. So we're the managers of providing the funding, design, build it, and then once it's built, we're the operators. So in turn for funding it, we went from 40 to 57% of the project. The project pays that money back to us out of cash flow. We've got a formula in there so we get that money back relatively quickly. And then we got another 3.3% shareholding through our ownership in Aquila. So the way we've broken this up is we've got what we call Mineco. Mineco is owned by the JV. Mineco owns the iron ore, the tenements, the pit, everything inside the gate with the miners, the camp, the airstrip. We operate that. When the ore goes through the gate, it goes down privately owned haul road into Onslow, into storage, and onto a transshipping wharf. All of that's the Infoco, that's owned 100% by Minres. We charge a unit rate for the use of that forever. And then the third part of it is that we got three mining services contracts, actually four. We've got the crushing, the haulage, we've got the port management, and then we've got the transshipping. So in a nutshell, it's got all of the recipe that Minres like. We've got the management control of it. We're gonna get this thing built fast. We're gonna be efficient. We've got the mining services carved out of it. And the reason that the mining services, it adds a huge benefit to our clients. It's not like we go and make our margin, which we do, but no one else has got a next gen plant. For us to go and put one of our plants on site, capital cost of putting our plant there is about a third of putting the traditional plant. That reflects in the rate. Yes, we make good profit, I make no excuse for that. but also our client gets it for a lesser cost than they can get it for otherwise. The trucks, without the trucks and the transshippers, this project would never go. So it couldn't afford the traditional Cape Carrier berth, 20 miles of dredging and heavy haul rail. it can stand this. So we bring a lot of benefit to our joint venture partners, and yes we do, we always make money in our mining services, and we're proud of the margin that we make, we just don't like to share it. So look, just in brief, central hub, 150 k's in land, the central hub, the main feeder pit's gonna be Cairnspore in there, that's where we put everything. We put one of these resort-style camps, an airport right beside the camp. The cost of Mineco, we've got a number against that. Fixed price for us to do that, $1.3 billion. As I said, Minres funded, and the money comes back out of the surplus out of the iron ore. And the mine cost, or mine co, operating cost, or sorry, the cost of iron ore, FOB, Onslow, is about $32 AUD a tonne. That is inclusive of the Minres mining services margins as well, so take note of that. BAU have given a commitment they want to market at least 50% of Minrej's share of the iron ore, and they've got an option over another 25% of it. So I think they'll most likely do that, and I'm more than happy for BAUWU to be hauling all our dirt into China for the next 50 years. Mining services, I think you've got a good grip of that. The infrastructure, as I said, we own it forever. We charge a fixed rate per tonne. Same with the mining services. It's based on charging them a fixed rate based on 30 million tonnes. If I do 35, 36, even up to 55, I still charge the same rate. Under normal conditions, those rates diminish. In this case, they don't. Same with the infrastructure. I mean, I charge that for as many times as it goes over the road, and I charge it for the next whatever hundred years, so another great asset for us to own. Total project's about a $3 billion spend. Capital intensity's about $65 US a tonne, but that kind of includes everything. A good solid 20% internal rate of return if the price of iron ore, the indices, is around 75. So, energy. Getting towards the end, we've got a lot of gas, and it's going to be a very substantial earner for Minres going forward. I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunity out there on what we can do with it. There's opportunities to convert it into LNG. Personally, I'm a strong believer that I think gas is going to be around in the market for the next 40 or 50 years. I think a lot of people have forgotten that We certainly want to get rid of carbon out of the atmosphere, but it's got to be staged. There's a lot of third world countries out there that can't stop using coal, for example. If they stop using coal, they'll freeze, they'll die. They don't have the capital. It's like Australia. Before we became a first world country, we went out there, we burned coal, we chopped down all the trees. burnt everything that we could and then we become first world and now we're really really good people but to get here it gets here at a cost so I think coal is going to be burnt for decades to come I think the world's trying to get rid of it but it's a long way down the track I think gas is a transitional fuel and I think that we're going to use gas for our own power Obviously, we're probably going to use gas if we can convert it to LNG and go sell it. We're certainly going to do downstreaming wherever we can where we add value. I think we'll end up with 40 or 50 years of gas up in that Perth basin. We're going to put about $100 million worth of holes down over the next 12 months and go find some more. That Lockyer Deep is no doubt, it's a large deposit. We think we're probably going to bring that red gully plant that we got up there, we inherited, we'll bring that back online in the next couple of years. We've got a lot of work to do up there. Lithium, just a few notes on lithium. The governments generally are putting policies in place around the world and they really want electric vehicles to be a large part of the transition away from all the nasty fuels that we're burning. It's going to be a game changer. They're already well on the way in the last couple of years. We've just seen them going from a couple of car companies doing electric cars to pretty much everyone. If you're not building electric cars, you're probably not going to stay in business long. The global car companies, they're definitely responding. They're targeting to have at least 60 million EVs by about 2030. They're always understating the number of cars they need on the road, the amount of power storage that's needed about every quarter. There's new numbers that come out. We identified back in 2010 that lithium was certainly going to be a metal of the future and it's going to have an important place in the world. There is no alternative for lithium at the moment and it can't be replaced. It's one of the few... commodities out there that has got really good visibility and that's I don't understand with a lot of the analysts I mean if you get a little thing called Google you can get on there and it'll tell you how many cars they're going to make this year next year in the year after and they'll tell you where the producers are with rock and brine and it's not a hard equation but we're in supply deficit at the moment and it feels like it's going to stay there through till at least 2030 The hard rock is probably the better source of lithium. I think that generally speaking, the battery manufacturers get much more power retention in the hard rock batteries. The best place to find it in the world is in WA. We've got most of it, so we're in a good spot. The price outlook for it, and again, I read that article a few weeks ago from Goldman Sachs and you just got to wonder what they were smoking. If you have a look at this chart here, that's us. If you're down in the black and you own rock in the ground, you're God. If you're in that other space and you don't own your rock, literally you're screwed by us. and it's a really good place to be. I mean, I haven't been there very often. I've been on the other end, but right now I feel really, really good about this. In simple maths, you need about seven tonne of hydroxide of spod to make a tonne of hydroxide, around 6%. It currently sells at the moment for about 6,500 US a tonne. Do the math. Chuck about another $4,500, $5,000 at that for reagents, labor, and capital, and that's what it costs you to make a ton of hydroxide. So over half the hydroxide around the world is made by people that don't own rock and the ground. So if I go to what the analysts say the long-term consensus price outlook for hydroxide is at $16,500 a ton, that means that all those guys in the blue are out of business. That means there's a huge supply problem. I like it. Again, we're in the right place at the right time. So I just think that you have a look at California come out of the blue last week and said by 2035, no more combustion engines on the road. And you go, yep, that's sensible. But none of that is factored into the numbers that people are looking at in terms of where the supply is coming from. So look, I just think, I'm not trying to pump our tires up, but I just think we're in a really, really good place We've got great lithium, great partners. Both partners know how to make hydroxide and they're making it, so I'm very hopeful that we're going to do a lot of good things with this part of the business. Mount Marian Asset, it's a great asset. We've been down there since 2010. We own half it. We designed it. We built it. We've got a great partner in Gangfang. We're doubling production down there at the moment. We're going to 900,000 tons. It's mixed grade, so what we do is that we scavenge every last bit of the lithium out of the product, so it's not all 6%, but if you went 900,000 tons, factor it back to 600,000 ton of 6% equivalent. We're spending $120 million down there just on improvement and recoveries, and we're just growing the plant and growing the camp. About $120 million, it gives us an awful lot of white powder, and it's a great return. All our share of that goes into hydroxide up in China, and we sell it everywhere. Finally, Marble, a Marble joint venture. That's the JV between Minres and Albemarle. They decided to call it Marble, which is a mixture of MIN and ALB. Nothing difficult with that. So we've just restructured that JV. So what it means now is on the Wojnar site, we've gone back to a 50-50 joint venture. Minres run the mine. We run the whole process up there. We've throttled back from Kemerton from 45 to 15, and then we are jointly funding all the future development going forward in terms of hydroxide. We're looking at a couple of plants offshore, buying one and building one, well advanced. That's all on hand and started. The one that I'm very keen on, I want to build at Wadjuna. I think I can build at Wadjuna for less than I can build up in Asia. and we're about 80% of the way through that study. We've done a lot of work on it, and it just makes a lot of common sense. If I can get it for the same capital cost here in Australia at Wodgina, I've got the cheapest power in the world. We own the gas. I've got great water supply. I've got total control over the whole thing. It's a great site. My people go in there. They go in there, do two weeks on, two off. I've got them held total captive. So once they're on site, I own them. it's a good place to be. So we'll get our cost down fairly low there. The other thing that we've done is that a while back Albemarle had all the marketing rights so they could market it to whoever they wanted for whatever price they wanted. So part of the trade down on the The sell-down on Kemerton was that I want control back of my pricing. They're still going to sell our product, but they sell it under our model. We have combined indices that we want them to sell it. Whatever the indices is on the day when we load the ship, that's what they'll pay, very much like iron ore. When you load a ton of iron ore on a ship, it's that number that's published. What I don't like to do, I don't like to... hedge any of our commodity or any of our dollar, we just take the price of the day. So I think Albemarle asked me what I'm going to do one day when it all turns around and there's more supply than demand, and I said, I'll do what I always do, I'll change. But in the meantime, while it's supply is short, we're going to take advantage of the price on the way up. And I am fairly convinced that I've got five to seven years of that. So Wajana, it's probably close on the best deposit out there in the world. It's open at depth, it's open in three directions. We've got it back into operation, it's running well, and as I said, you know, it's my preference is to build up there, so I mean, it's just a great asset, that wadjonarm. We're probably between now and the middle of next year, and it'll be pumping a lot of product. So our five-year plan for lithium. Almost, there it is. In about five years, we land at about 118,000 tonne of hydroxide. That's where we're aiming to get to. We're looking around the world to make sure if there's any other opportunities out there on lithium, we're keen. I feel that's a minimum of where we're going to be. I don't know where the development of Wodgina ends, but it can handle another three or four trains on top of what it's got now with a lot of ease. We'll see how that develops. We've got a joint venture partner and we bring product on in line with demand. The last part on our electric part of our business, I've got a really desire to develop battery manufacturing here in WA. I think it's logical. I think we have all the resources here, and what I'd really like to do is see how much of the value I can capture. I mean, we can go from obviously digging rock out of the ground to turning it into spot, and we can turn that into hydroxide. That's just purely value-adding. It's capturing all the value. I don't think there's any risk in us going down the path of manufacturing batteries here because, again, the one thing that we've got that most others don't have is that we've got surety of supply. So if we own the supply, we can command the terms and conditions. We've got cheap energy in terms of our gas. And I think if we want to create jobs for our kids, it's really smart that we do it here. Most of the battery factories, I mean, they're not overly labor intensive, but we should be able to make a very high quality battery here. All I have to do is go and get a battery manufacturer to come over here with their technology and a big bag of cash, and we can add surety of supply. Our vision is to see if we can make that work over the next couple of years. We're certainly going to be out there banging the drums. We spoke to the government about it and they think that it's not a bad idea and they're very happy to support us. The last page and then I'll get out of you here. I said earlier it was our 30th birthday recently. We started in my lounge with $10,000. We've gone through the list at about 450 people on the payroll in 2006 and about 100 million market cap. Today we've gone to over 5,000 people. We're on the ASX50. Got a market cap north of $12 billion. Our track record since listing, total assets have gone up 50 times to almost $8 billion. So that's 30% per annum growth. 21% average return on capital per annum. $7.4 billion in EBITDA. We've grown that by 25% per annum. No equity raises, so I haven't watered my shareholders down. Haven't gone out and issued shares and taken the easy way up. Fully franked dividends, a growth of about 20%. 30% per annum of total shareholder return. And we're the best TSR performance on the whole of the ASX. And aiming to get to the one spot position. Over the next two years, our business will double. When we get five years out beyond that, I think we'll probably double it again. So that's pretty much with what we've got in hand with the funding that we've got and the quality of people we've got. That's about as much as I can tell you on where the business is going. So thanks for joining us. And if you've got any questions, Mark will join me up here and try and answer anything you've got. Oh, sorry, we've got another little video. We've got some great people in the house that we're using them for recruitment and all sorts of things. Our photographer, Russell James, you may have heard of him. He used to be the guy that photographed all of the Victoria's Secrets and all the supermodels around the world. He lives in Perth now and he does our mine sites and videos and They're doing a lot of work around our branding, which has really done a huge amount for our business. We really want to make sure that we're a respected company as we go forward as well. The only difference now is we get to keep the clothes on. I got to say, I have been in LA with Russell a couple of times and bumped into Alessandra Ambrosio and Giselle. It's not a bad experience. It's worth it. Roll the video.

Thank you. Thank you.

If you'd like to ask a question via the phones, you'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to ask a question via webcast, please type your question into the ask a question box. For those in the room, there is a microphone. Please raise your hand and wait for the microphone before asking a question. When asking a question, please state your name and affiliation. As a courtesy to others, please limit your question to two questions at a time. If you have any further questions, there'll be more time to rejoin at the queue to ask further questions. I'll now hand to Mr. Ellis to take questions from the room.

Mitch Ryan from Jefferies. You've outlined the long-term strategy for lithium and spodumene and more specifically Wojnar. I guess at the fourth quarter you had produced and shipped tons from Wojnar but not yet booked those as revenue. Can you give us any update on where those tons are and if you've booked any revenue from them at this point in time?

There's a bit of a lag when we move into hydroxide. We've got to, from Marion and from Wojnar, get them down to the berth, put them on a ship. They're all heading for China at the moment and they are getting converted in China. We then have to go and sell that product, then we can book the sale. It's quite a lead time. Mark, do you want to add to it?

Sure. Thanks, Mitch. The whole logistics chain around moving the SPOD through China to the coal converters that Albemarle's using at this point is a little bit slower. So you need to add a few months for that process. And then there's the conversion process. And then there's the sale process including the logistics of the sale delivery to the customer. And then there's the payment terms from the customer to Albemarle. So it adds months to the process. We will be booking in this half though.

Rahul and Morgan Stanley. So with the announcement today, I just wanted to check on a couple of things. Firstly, you've called it stage one. So I wanna touch upon that perhaps. I believe the whole system at the moment will probably be constrained by the haulage on the road. Is that a fair assumption? And what kind of capacity can the port do? Because I'm trying to think about Bungaree South, Cumina, how those look going forward as well.

Yeah, look, the constraints probably going to be around the transshipping. That'll probably be the bottleneck. Not hard to add more trucks on the road. I mean, we could double the number of trucks on the road very easily. Then we would just have to manage the port storage. I'm thinking to go to from 35 to 55, we're almost certainly going to have to put more storage in at the port because we've developed this whole thing on the basis that it's totally dust free so the ore doesn't see the light of day from when it goes in the trucks until it goes into the Cape Carriers offshore. But look, I think the answer is There'd be more trucks, pretty easy to bring them on mine. It'd be a different crushing plant in a different location, so we'd be outside of Cairns Bore. The road will easily handle it. Different storage shed, probably even different product, so we want to keep them segregated. And then I'll probably need to add about another three transshippers

Perfect. And just one follow-up. In the announcement, there was a mention about Bungaroo South and Kamina last time, which had perhaps the ability to not have to pay royalties. How's that going to be going forward? Is that a combined package now and you have to pay the royalty on these assets, or if you develop them in the future, you don't have to pay any?

No, we have to pay the royalties.

Okay. It would still be paid. Okay, perfect. Thank you.

We did have a holiday down in that region for 30 million tonnes, but somewhere down the track, sadly, that runs out. And I haven't been able to renew it.

Hi, Chris. It's Glenn Lawcock at Barron Joey. Just interested a little bit more, you mentioned about toll treating downstream through the JV. So is the downstream 50-50 JV for Wodgena not just gonna be through jointly-owned or Albemarle-owned facilities? I'm just a little bit curious, because I assume you can probably ramp Wodgina up faster than you can build downstream conversions, so I'm just, you know, how does it all match?

So what's gonna happen is that we're gonna do a combination of buying plants and upgrading them and building plants. So, I mean, that's actually coming into progress. In the meantime, we're also out there using toll treaters. So obviously up front we're going to be producing more spod than we can treat because we don't have the plants for it. And we may use toll treaters long term.

Can you sell spod if you can't find a toll treater? We have an agreement with them that if we're producing more spod than we can...

to either toll treat or go put through our plants, we're gonna whack it into the market and sell it. Yeah, we've agreed to do that.

And train three seems to be slipping a little bit. It was sort of like now you're talking about mid next year. Is that still in line with the decision before Christmas?

Yeah, yeah, it's about, so train three needs more tailings facility storage, more water to come online. We've got to double the mining fleet. Getting mining fleet nowadays, you just don't get it over the counter. It's about mid next year when we've got all those issues addressed. We're going to have train three commissioned, I'd say within the next three or four weeks. What we're going to do is we'll rotate the train. So at any given time, we'll have two of the three running. So if we need maintenance, like we do on train one, it needs some work done on the ball mill. So we'll put that down and bring train three on run, just to make sure they're all matched for it. But we just don't have the downstream capacity to run all three at once. But we will get there. But it's about eight or nine months away. Okay.

And then just switching to Ashburton, or Onslow, whatever you want to call it. Just two quick ones. Just the quality of the product, I think I was sure 57%, 57.3. What sort of pricing do you think that'll attract? What are you expecting?

It's going to average about 58% over the first seven or eight years. The pricing, what do you think the pledge is looking like?

Is that just going to be sort of sold against the 58 index then? Yeah. It can probably get that? Yep. Okay. And just dollars per tonne on the contracts you're going to run? I was surprised it's 140 million tonnes, a bit more than I thought. Is that a couple of bucks a tonne you can clip on that?

Hmm. Always. We always get our share of that. Were you going to add something, Mark?

No, I wasn't going to add anything to that, Chris.

Hi, Chris. I'm Mark. It's Paul Young from Goldman Sachs. Good to see you here in person, Chris, and thanks for the publicity during the presentation. Always appreciate it. I'm assuming you didn't write that. We can talk after. First question is actually just on the joint ventures. First of all, well done getting those three partners aligned on Ashburton. I mean, that took you a long time, I know, and they are tier one partners. I'm interested in two things. One is on the fact that you're funding your partner's share of capital to get it into first production. I'd love to hear your thoughts or maybe Mark around, you know, why that was the case. Is it because Baustil doesn't want to actually physically put, you know, money into Australia at the moment? Is that it? And secondly, with Baustil taking the offtake, I mean, they're clearly interested in this product and they're taking, you know, 50% of the offtake and it's low grade. So just curious about when, with your discussions with Baustil, what is their view on the market? Is this a diversification strategy away from the majors or is the fact that they see the iron ore market tighter long run?

No, look, on the marketing first, Baosteel, because they own part of the project, they want to be seen to be able to use that product back in China, but they like the product. They simply like it. So they're going to take, if you take 35 million tonnes, 60% of that's ours, so they want 50% of ours, plus they've got an option to take another 25%, and they're saying they almost certainly will do that, plus they take 100% of their own allocation. So they're probably sitting up at about, if they took all of ours, and all of theirs, they're sitting at about 82% of the product they'll take. They like it. Okay, great. And then just on the funding and how that came about with respect to pulling up. The funding was easy. There's a mechanism in there that said he who funded it got another 17% of the project forever. It was a no-brainer. So we funded it and we get the funds back fairly quickly when the project goes into operation. The other side of that too is that it gives us total control as managers. So now that it's approved, we're in total control. We go out. raise the funds, we have the funds, and we just go build it at our speed. And we don't have a committee from three joint venture partners overlooking us and giving us approvals to do everything. We've got a fixed price, which we're good at. Pretty much every project we've ever built, like for FMG or Rio Tinto or any of those guys, we're only interested in doing it on a fixed lump sum. We're not interested in doing reimbursable.

Thanks, Chris. And then on the gas, pretty unbelievable discovery, it seems. And you said it's a large onshore discovery. So you must have a number, at least a minimum number, that maybe you can point to in that regard. So I'd be interested in your views around how we get to a first resource, the size of it. And then you said you're being approached by big gas companies. So what's your thoughts, high level, around how you monetise this? Do you JV it?

what I'd like to do basically is I want to build a gas plant. So we're looking at it now. We've got to do some more development holes around it. So we step those holes out and it'll grow. At the same time, we're getting our development approvals in place. I'd like to be able to have a gas plant operating there by, let's say, no longer than 24. So the opportunities with that, the... I like what Beach and Mitsui are doing. They've got a pretty good deal of wood, so they've got capacity to turn gas into LNG fairly economically. I'm going to power all of our plants that we've got, so I shouldn't be much more than about $1 a gigajoule in cost on my own gas internally. I want to be able to turn magnetite into pellets. That adds a huge amount of value and whatever else.

Good question.

Need to get a bit more information on it. We were thinking about a 250 terajoule a day plant. It was sort of day one.

We're looking at a modular design that we can scale up because we know that there's a lot more gas there. This wasn't the most prospective hole that we dug first.

Morning, Chris and Mark. Thanks very much for the briefing. So just a couple of questions on Wojnar from me, Lachlan Shaw from UBS. So just firstly on your thoughts and your comments around onshore processing, Chris. So I get the gas, but what about reagents and waste handling? And I guess, what are you thinking in terms of timing for when you might look to start construction and ultimately get that capacity up at Wojnar?

So you're talking about hydroxide at Wojana? Yeah. Yeah, so reagents are fairly simple. We'll import them all in through Port Hedland. They're building Lumsden Point up there that'll facilitate that. All of the waste is pretty much that comes out of these plants is totally inert. We've done a lot of test work on that through what we're doing at Kemerton. And that waste can actually be used for a whole range of different things. Road base is an easy one. So not an issue with that. But the facilities that we've got at Wodgina, we've got good water up there. We've got a large gas pipeline that comes in. I mean, we've got enough gas capacity to be able to fire that thing. And the good thing about Having it at Wadjan, that means when we control the energy costs for the next 30 or 40 years, we're not going to get a spike like you're seeing all over the world at the moment. You know, urea plants, anything that's operating on gas, they're going out of business because of the cost of energy. I just think that we've got the total package there, and I think it's in WA, and if we can keep growing downstream in WA, we're creating jobs and future for our kids. Chemical plants that we're putting kids through uni, I mean, I want somewhere for them to go. So we could be in those areas. We may not be the best in the world at making cars, but all of these products that we're producing, we've got to do a lot better than just sell the rock.

And then just on timing, do you have a sense of how that might play out?

I would like to be talking sooner rather than later because the easy way out for me is I went and got partners that knew what they're doing with hydroxide. I don't have to take a risk on that, and I'm happy with the partners I've got. To do battery manufacturing, we've just got to go find someone. I get calls from car companies regularly because they want surety of supply. I mean, and they're happy to pay market price, they just gotta know that they can get it. So if I can get someone that wants to make batteries, and I think we'll get a bunch of them, they don't care where they make them as long as they're guaranteed supply, but I also want them to bring the funding. I think we'd get a free carry on our half of the funding.

Yeah, okay, great. And then just a second one. So going back upstream to spodumene at Wojnar, so 6%, how are you thinking about the balance 6% versus 5.5%, 5% for more volume coming to the plant?

We've done a lot of work on that across both the operations and the... Dropping it down to about 5.5% gives you more lithium unit recovery. So we sell more lithium units. It's a better value proposition. So we will probably eventually head in that direction. We're just going to make sure that the plants at the other end are adjusted to take it.

Around the corner, James. James, around the corner.

Good morning, Chris and Mark. Matt from MST here. A couple of questions. Firstly, on the mining services business, you're guiding to flat mining services volumes year on year, which I guess is a little bit different to some of your prior overarching guidance of volume growth in that business. I'm wondering if you can give a bit more detail on some of the moving parts there. I notice internally you're guiding to lower sales from the Yilgarn, which is obviously a pretty important driver of at least internal mining services volumes. But maybe there are offsetting factors externally, so wondering if there are any opportunities for growth in FY23 that you see and might be working through but haven't factored into that guidance, or otherwise what are the key moving parts to that flat guidance?

So we see significant opportunity externally. As Chris said, there are some real challenges in the industry at the moment around supply And because of our agility, we offer a solution that others, well, really there aren't many other choices, but we have this great record with the majors working with them. So we see a lot of opportunity externally. The reason you're seeing that overall guidance number flat is because strips coming off on the projects that we're working at quite considerably. And as you say, combined with the lower tons out of Yulgan, we're seeing the internal tonnage dropping considerably.

Got it. Thanks, Mark. Maybe another one for you. Wondering how you think about the right level of gearing or debt on the balance sheet. If we look forward to FY23, you're spending $2 billion on CapEx. That's without any new conversion assets in the Marble JV. It does seem like gearing will start to creep up, even if your operating cash flows are pretty strong. So just broadly, what level of debt or gearing are you guys comfortable with? And where would you have to start considering the timing of projects or the timing of spend if you reached a certain threshold?

We finished the year about 3.1 times gross debt to EBITDA, and that was including six months of almost no EBITDA. So when, as I said earlier, when we run the full 12 months and even on a rolling 12-month basis by December, that ratio is going to come down significantly. We feel very comfortable with the quality of the assets that we have and the ability to deliver quickly with them. to be able to hold this debt. We don't anticipate needing to go and raise further debt at this point.

We might just go to the phones. Are there any questions? Moderator? Darcy?

Thank you. Your first phone question comes from Hayden Bairstow from Macquarie.

Yeah, morning, guys. A couple from me. Chris, just on the iron ore business, just keen to understand, you sort of talked about the availability of mining fleet. You've downrated these assets a little bit on volume. But if we do see weaker iron ore prices, is there options to do that even more aggressively and shift some of the gear to Wadgin or out of Iron Valley, stuff like that?

Yeah. Yeah, there is. We... I don't see that happening, Hayden. I mean, the main fleet we're hunting at the moment is certainly for Wadjuna, and we're gonna start gearing up for Onslow Iron as well. And I mean, Onslow Iron has got Pretty good returns with it. But yeah, look, the answer is we can easily move around. I mean, if we had to back off on a mine site like Iron Valley, we could easily move that and accommodate that into Onslow Iron and probably wouldn't fit in Wadjuna. I mean, we're going for bigger equipment in there.

Okay, great. And on the downstream hydroxide wadger, I mean, you're comfortable, you can convince Albemarle that you can deal with a much lower cost than they've just delivered at Kemerton?

Hayden, your wife could do that. I think, to be fair, Hayden, there was a period of COVID which impacted quite considerably, right? And I think the supply chain disruptions have had a significant impact on that cost. We don't expect to have those going forward.

And just the final one from me, just on the rest of the sort of downstream within Marble, I mean, at what point do we think we'll get clarity on where they might be? I mean, Al Muzzles, he talked about a fair bit of capacity in China. Is that still the most likely location for it all, or is there other parts of Southeast Asia you're looking at?

No, I think our eyes are wide open on a few locations. We're not wed to any particular country. We're doing some study. I mean, obviously, we're looking hard at Wojnar at the moment, but we're also looking at a couple of other regions as well. I mean, labour availability is always a key factor. Cost of energy going forward is always important. But, look, there's probably about four different locations that we're running the rule over right now.

Okay, great. I'll leave it there. Thanks, guys.

Darcy, we'll take one more from the phones. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Lyndon Fagan of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks very much. The first question is just on the toll trading. Obviously an amazing 30% EBITDA margin there. I'm just wondering if you could give us some insight into the toll charge itself. Is that a percentage link or is it a dollar million charge? I'm just wondering how it changes with price. If prices go down, is it still a 30% margin? Thanks.

Sorry, Leonard, you're talking about Mount Marion?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. So with Mount Marion, as Chris said, we've got this wonderful partnership with Gangfang and basically we've developed a formula that accommodates the mixed blend of our grades. So it scales depending on the... on the grade that goes through, and it varies from ship to ship. You'll see in the FY23 guidance, we've guided higher volumes. We're capturing more lithium units, as Chris said, but we're thinking that about 40% of that product will be higher grade. So you could expect that compared to the first half, where we had much less high grade, that the costs will come down relative to last half. There's a combination of dollars and ratio per tonne of feed. So there's no simple formula I can give you, I'm sorry.

Maybe just to follow up on that. So at a much lower price, is it possible to sort of talk about how the toll margins would look? just to be able to give us a sense of, you know, everyone's forecasting lower prices long term. How would that sort of earning stream look at a lower price?

Everyone except us, we don't think the price will be lower long term. And we think there's a compelling reason why that's the case. But anyway, if you believe your world that they'll go lower, we still think we're in reasonable space there. The cost of the spot coming down will come down as well. We'll still be making good margin. The one thing that's great, or one of the many things that's great about the relationship with Gangfing is that we can pivot it quickly if we need to.

Okay, thanks. And then just another question on the Wojnar cost guidance. You mentioned it'll be producing at 20% below Mount Marion over the longer term, but how quickly do those operating costs come down? If we're looking into 24 and 5, I imagine we're not instantly below... Mount Marion or any sort of colour on that would be helpful. Thanks.

You can imagine when we're running three trains in steady state, that's when we're running at a reasonable indication close to life of mine, plus or minus, depending on the year and the strip. So we need three trains to be running steady state to get to those sorts of numbers. You should expect the numbers to come down, though, from this half. This is a start-up half. We're not capitalising the costs. So there are inefficiencies. We've staffed up at Wojana to get ready for three trains. So we're carrying overhead and so on up there for that reason. So if you think in those terms, that should help. We've got time for one more question.

Thanks, and just to... Sorry, go, Lyndon. Oh, sorry, I was going to sneak another one in. You're now guiding for 20% a lump at both Utah and Yilgarn. I remember some previous comments around moving away from lump. Is that now, is that unique to FY23 or is it, should we now be thinking about 20% lumps going forward? Thanks.

I think you can, well, sorry, let me go back a sec. We've adapted to meet the market and we've moved the equipment around to be able to flex for the product that's coming out of the pits. At this stage, you should assume that there's lump going forward.

Thanks very much. We've got time for one more on the floor here and then we'll have to close it up.

Hi, Chris and Rahul again here from Morgan Stanley. Look, just continuing on that lithium tolling arrangement, how should we think about the longevity really is what I want to touch upon. You've obviously got a short-term contract in place right now for Mount Marion. How are the conversations looking to extend that further whilst keeping your capital light and being able to extract some of that margin for a long period of time? That's the first one. I'll come back with the second.

Okay, so on that, I mean, we've got options on that, obviously, I mean, we can kick that out for a period of time. We're just trying to balance that with what's the longer term that we want? Do we want to own our own plant or and how long will that take to build so we're just working through that and we're working through that with gang fang so we'll keep doing what we're doing my guess is we'll keep doing what we're doing for another couple of years and in the meantime we'll probably go and put something in place and probably jointly with them that that'll be for the long term

Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you. And then the second one on lithium was around the Wajana stake. You talked about it briefly in your presentation. How are those conversations progressing? Is there any sort of timeline that you have in terms of converting that, the extra 10%?

Yes. I mean... I think it would be true to say that we've got an effective date that we've agreed on and all we're doing is we're going through the album mail process on getting to binding documentation. It's tedious, lengthy and detailed.

Perfect, final one, Iron Valley. There was a mention of Lamb Creek and Wedge. I just wanted to know, are you in that area right now and perhaps getting some tonnes out, or that hasn't been opened up at all and that's purely in the future?

No, that's in the future. We've been in there and doing our thing, getting ready to do something in there, but it's a few years away yet. I think, look, don't quote me, but I think Iron Valley's probably got 70 or 80 million tonnes left in it. One Munna's still got a lot and there's some more land at One Munna we've got to drill out. So I just added that in because somewhere down the track we'll probably add one of those. Okay. But I wouldn't see it in the next three or four years.

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

Thanks, Chris. We'll wind it up there if you've got some final comments. Yeah, no, look, I appreciate everyone coming along today. I mean, it's always our businesses can be a little unpredictable. I hope we present and give you as much information as we can. I mean, I got a little bit of criticism last AGM around how we're going to fund things going forward. There is some information that I just can't put out there. We try and get to the market whenever the information's available freely. But I did say then at the time that, I mean, you've got to trust us a little bit. We brought the business this far that we're not going to do a whole lot different. We don't put our balance sheet at risk and we're pretty good at identifying projects, getting them running and being able to get value out of them. So we've got a better balance sheet now than we've ever had. I mean, I think that where we get to with the business over the next two years especially is going to be really interesting. I mean, I think the next two years will be absolutely defining on where Minres goes over the next decade or 15 years. So really critical time we're in now and if we get all of the things right that we've got to, I think it'll be a great business for a long time to come. So look, thanks for the interest in our company and I'm obviously passionate about it and passionate about making sure the growth in the business is maintained. I think our margins that we've had in the past, I think we can improve on them. They won't diminish. They will improve. And we'll continue to get things done. And hopefully, come the AGM, I'll have an awful lot more news flow and we can get some real numbers out there that you can really work on. So I appreciate you coming along and thanks very much.