Regis Resources Limited

I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Jim Beyer, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thanks Rocco and good morning everyone and thanks for joining us for the Regis Resources September Q1 FY25 results. I will be or we will be making references to some of the figures and diagrams. we will be referring to the release that we put out earlier this morning. In the room with me, I am joined by our CFO, Anthony Rikiki, and our COO, Michael Holmes, and our Head of Investor Relations and External Affairs, Jeff Sansom. All right, well, to describe our Q1 FY25, I think I'd have to defer to Dickens and say it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, or maybe bittersweet. Our team delivered some sweet outcomes at Duketon and Tropicana, mixed with the bitterness of a very unexpected outcome at McPhillamy's. So to kick off our story today, on the safety performance, it saw us finish the quarter with one lost-time injury that resulted in a LTIFR rate of 0.4 for the quarter, up from zero in the past quarters. Our goal has always been and continues to be to provide a workplace that's free from serious injuries. injuries and life-changing injuries. Safety is a journey that hasn't an end and we'll keep driving to make those continuous improvements happen. Now, before we get into the main part of our operational business, I'll talk on McPhillamy's. All of what I will talk to now has been discussed in some detail over the last couple of months, so I won't go over it too much. But at the end of July, we released the results of the McPhillamy's DFS, which confirmed McPhillamy's as a long-life, low operating cost, open-pit mine that delivers robust or delivered... ..had the capacity to deliver robust financial metrics with significant leverage to the gold price. And if you don't think it's a valuable project, do the maths on the current spot environment. The average production for the mine is 187,000 ounces a year. The average oil and sustaining cost is just under $1,600. At spot price, using those average numbers, McPhilemys would be generating over $400, $450 million a year at the moment. So it is a clearly valuable project. So back to the DFS release. We put that out and about 25 days later we were notified the Federal Minister declared a Section 10 over a proportion of the site. That's under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act of 1984. This area encompassed the approved locations of the tailings storage facility, meaning the project was no longer viable in its current form. Consequently, we were forced to withdraw the findings of the DFS, impair the holding value by $192 million, and withdrew the 1.89 million ounces of reserves. More recently, two weeks ago, we received the Minister's statement of reasons outlining the considerations under which the Section 10 declaration was based. It seems clear that a decision that goes against the views of the locally recognised Lands Council has not been considered reasonably by many people who have extensive experience in this space. The decision just doesn't seem to pass the pub test. Needless to say, this broader issue of what happens to be or what appears to be an unclear process and a decision-making process that lacks or appears to lack transparency relating to important investment projects is a topic of heated and much discussion at the moment. Taking my Regis hat off, industry cannot function efficiently with the uncertainty. And further to this, the uncertainty builds risk and risk reduces attractiveness for investment. A reduction in attractiveness for investment is something this country cannot afford. Despite our frustration with the process, we are looking forward. And we're following two paths of action. Hope for the best and plan for the worst, I guess. We hope by continuing to review and evaluate the Section 10 reasons and working to determine our next legal steps. But we plan and we plan, we pick up the team, we dust them off and we get back to work, starting the planning works on identifying an alternative location for the TSF. I note here, as we stated previously, to appropriately evaluate and study these alternatives and develop one that's suitable to meet the extensive list of approval standards and requirements, we believe it could take five, even up to 10 years, before a new TSF can be confirmed and approved. So, McPhilemys is now sitting in the longer-term project horizon for us for the moment as we work on all these possible angles. But, and I have to emphasise the but here, Regis is so much more than the story of McPhilemys and a decision by the Minister that rendered a permitted mine unbuyable. Operationally, it's been somewhat boring, sorry Michael, as the team has gone about delivering on the plan and this is what I'd say is nice boring. Financially, the quarter has been about as action-packed as anyone would ever want. Actually, driven by the gold price, we'd like it to be even more action-packed in future, which we've got the potential to be. From a group perspective, we produced 94,500 ounces of gold at an all-in sustaining cost of $2,495 an ounce. Now, in that is $132 an ounce of non-cash stockpile costs. As previously noted, this is related to stockpile drawdown and is not a cash cost. Now, with our production at 94,500, an average gold price received at $3,717 an ounce, which was a record, we were well set to deliver, and we did. At this high level, at a high level for the business, what does it mean? Well, we made cash and lots of it. The end of the Q1 FY25 quarter, we built our cash and bullion position by $85 million, finishing the quarter with a balance of $380 million. And this is off the back of the previous quarter where we added $109 million to the balance sheet. In fact, in just the last six months, we have more than doubled our balance from $186 to $380 million. Have a look at figure four in the release and you can clearly see the cash generating trend of our business. This shows a significant cash-generating performance of our assets. Impressive, sure is unexpected. Well, not for us. We've seen this coming for a while. We've long been talking of the cash-generating capacity of Regus, and this, our third quarter of that, could provide comfort and insight into what we can be delivering, assuming the guidance ranges we've provided and the current gold price. Now, look, I want to talk a little bit more about our organic growth plans, ex-McPhilemys, but first I'll get Michael to provide more insight into the operational performance and Anthony to provide some more details on the financial performance. Over to you, Michael.

Yeah, thanks, Jim, and good morning, everyone. Operationally, we were pleased with our performance in the quarter as we delivered in line with our expectations. At Duketon, our open pits and undergrounds produce 57,000 ounces at an oil and sustainable cost of $2,650 per ounce. Our open pits were responsible for 52% of the production, or 30.1,000 ounces, with mining occurring at Garden Well, Ben Hur, Toohey's Well and Russell Find Pits. Operationally, our open pits are stable and perform well. Our Duketon undergrounds, Gardenwell South and Rosemont undergrounds, perform well and delivered 24.2,000 ounces. As Jim mentioned, we did draw on stockpiles during the quarter and this is reflected in the non-cash charge of $163 per ounce. We expect the stockpile draw will continue through FY25. We progressed the development of the Gardenwell Main and Rosemont Stage 3 In our release, you will see that in the last few days, we opened the Rosemont Stage 3 ventilation portal. Duketon Mills, both Garden Well and Rosemont, performed to expectations with no unplanned downtime. Low-grade stockpile material supplemented the Duketon Mills throughout the quarter, as mentioned, and will continue for the remainder of the FY25. Through the quarter, Regis identified the opportunity of low-grade material processing through the Moolart Well Mill. This is currently being tested as a project to determine its viability as a short-term opportunity. As for Tropicana, their production was 37,000 ounces at an oil and sustaining cost of $2,173 per ounce. Open pits performed well following two quarters that were significantly impacted by ongoing rain events and disruptions associated with roads and other infrastructure. The open pits delivered 20.1,000 ounces at 1.22 grams per tonne and in line with expectations. However, equipment availability do still continue to remain a challenge. The undergrounds delivered 16,000 ounces, which was again in line with expectations. And as announced on the 9th of September, the Havana underground development was approved and this was commenced and progressing during the quarter. The Tropicana mill performed to expectations with no unplanned downtime and the low-grade salt pile material supplemented their throughput as well, which will continue in FY25. I'll now hand over to Anthony who will discuss the quarterly financials.