Paladin Energy Ltd

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Paladin Energy Limited December 2024 quarterly results call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Paul Hemborough, COO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Paladin Energy's second quarter report for Finance Year 25. My name is Paul Hember, I'm Chief Operating Officer at Paladin and with me today is Ian Poodie, our Chief Executive Officer, Anna Sudlow, our Chief Financial Officer and Alex Ryback, our Chief Commercial Officer. We're pleased to be here today to present our quarterly results and discuss the number of positive outcomes that we've achieved during the last quarter. The ramp-up of operations at Lange Heinrich continues and we're seeing positive progress in the operation, particularly coming out of the shutdown in November. The shutdown was well executed with all of the intended activities completed on time. December 2024 recorded the highest monthly production volume since the restart of commercial production in March 24. There are a number of notable achievements in the quarter, including the sustained improvement in recovery rates and stabilisation of water supply to the plant. Paladin also closed out the acquisition of Fish and Uranium Corporation on the 24th of December and completed listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange on the 27th of December. This work is well executed and is a significant milestone for the company. I'll now provide an update on the operations and I'll deep dive a couple of issues. But first I'll start with our safety performance. On a 12-month rolling basis, the company trip sits at 4.1 per million hours' work, which remains under our target of five. The health and safety of all of our people, no matter where they are or what role they play, is incredibly important to us, and we work hard to continuously improve our conditions, systems and processes that drive safer outcomes. In Namibia, production for the quarter was similar to the previous quarter at £639,000, with two weeks fewer operating days than quarter one due to the shutdown. In December, we achieved production of £308,000 of drum product, which is a step change coming out of the shut. So we remain on track to deliver the guidance range of three to 3.6 million pounds of products for FY25. The November shutdown was an important factor that led to the results that we saw in December. Some of the work included improvements to the flash unit in the leaching circuit, a new burner installation in steam generation to improve efficiency, and some additional pump and pipe work in the CCD to improve our recovery rates. The team has worked very hard to lock in the recovery improvements identified at the end of last quarter. And so we saw an uplift from recovery at 69% in quarter one to 88% this quarter, sustained through the entire quarter. This is a result that I'm very pleased with and comes from a lot of good analysis and problem solving from my team. We've also made great strides in delivering improvements to the water infrastructure and systems that support consistent supply. And we've proven the infrastructure and the capacity works as evidenced by the December result where we had no water-related interruptions. We've seen minor disruptions to our operations in January due to sulfur blooms affecting NAM water supply. These types of issues are routine events which we cater for in our guidance. So we've solved the infrastructure challenges and we've solved the capacity challenge and we continue to work with NAM water to optimise water supply and we're continuing to make improvements to our water efficiency and water management on site. As many of you may know, we're currently processing previously stockpiled ore, and our base case plan is to move to mining higher quality ore from the middle of this year. Now, we continue to experience variability in the grade of that stockpiled ore, so we'll continue to assess a range of options to increase ore grade, including blending strategies and bringing mining forward from the planned July start date. My team has been working on the mining phase now for six months with mine planning optimisation and scheduling work. We've selected a preferred contractor, we've identified the equipment that we need and as I previously noted some of that equipment is on site already constructing the next tailing stand. We will continue to identify mechanisms that may enable us to bring mining forward. Restarting a mine and large processing facility has a lot of moving parts, and we're now nine months into what is a 21-month ramp-up process. I'm extremely happy with the work my team has done and the results of their problem-solving efforts. We continue to lock in improvements such as recovery, water infrastructure and delivery, and when we deliver the mining phase, I believe it comes together to move us closer towards our target levels of performance. I'd like to hand over now to Ian Purdy for an update on the fission acquisition.

Thanks, Paul, and hi, everyone. Really strong finish to the year across the company. As Paul has said at Langer Heinrich, some great results. And really importantly for us, we were so pleased to bring the acquisition of Fission Uranium Corp to successful completion. It came together really well at the end of the day once we achieved the Canadian approvals with the full support of the Canadian government. We were able to close the transaction very quickly just before Christmas and we're extremely pleased to see our ticker up on the TSX before the new year. So we're up, we're running, the transaction is complete in every aspect, successfully completed and actually came together very, very smoothly at the end of the day. We're underway. We've really got our boots on the ground working with the Fission team. A couple of highlights for us, and for me in particular, really pleased that all of the Fission employees have come on board. There's a fantastic team at Fission, culturally very aligned to Paladin. Fission's always had a very can-do attitude, and their whole vision and their whole focus, which is evident from the work they've done, is delivering this world-class project and they're committed to that task and they're committed to moving that company and project forward so really pleased to be working alongside chris the cfo um gary the vp project development and kanan the vp exploration and paul and anna are working very closely with the team on the ground and the integrations um been a strong success. We're acting as one company already. We're very focused on the critical path and moving PLS forward, and everyone's really excited to be working together. So over the next little while, we'll start to outline what our priorities and plans are, but I can say it's a continuation of the Fission Program, which is delivering this world-class project to market as soon as makes sense. So with fishing, the short-term priority right now is we've approved the winter drilling program. We'd like to see an extension of the resource and the reserves. Incredibly prospective area. They've got a fantastic drilling program which is very well considered. So that will commence with activities expected to commence on the ground this current quarter. and then obviously with gary we're doing a full review of the project plans we'll be looking to bring additional resources to move the project forward the environmental approvals are well progressed and we're working with gary to see how we can bring that to a conclusion and we've also had some very constructive discussions with First Nations and Paul and I will be over in Canada in the next few weeks to move those discussions forward as well. So all systems go and we'll be providing a lot more information over the next few months. Thanks Paul.