St Barbara Limited

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the St. Barbara briefing on full-year 2022 half-year results conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. 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 call over to Mr. Chris Nateland, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Please note the disclaimers on slide two. On our call today with me is our Managing Director and CEO, Craig Jetson, and our CFO, Lucas Walsh. We will discuss our half-year results after which, as we just said, we'll open the call to questions. With that, I hand the call over to Craig.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning and welcome, everybody, to St Barbara's FY22 half-year results briefing. As always, I would like to begin by recognising the traditional owners and first nations people of the lands of which St Barbara operate in Australia, Canada and Papua New Guinea and pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. So today I'll be taking you through our progress for the first half of FY22. I'll celebrate our improved safety performance and progress that we have made improving in the diversity and inclusion in our teams. after which we will discuss our operational results for the first half. I will then hand over to Lucas Welsh, our CFO, who will explain our financial performance. Finally, I will discuss our vision for St Barbara's future and our new aspirational production targets. As always, safety remains number one priority and we are committed to our goal of eliminating fatalities and life-changing injuries. We have continued with our trend in reducing total recordable injury frequency rate, which has dropped to 2.7 injuries per million hours worked. Although this is great to see the improvement, we are mindful of not becoming complacent. To that end, we have made significant advance in our Safety Always Leadership Program, which aims to build a better in-field safety leadership at all levels and encourage regular conversations about finding and fixing any areas of concern. Those that have followed my career will know that gender equality is something amongst a lot I'm very passionate about. So I want to take this opportunity to convey how happy I am that St Barbara being once again included in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index. This is the company's second year of inclusion, recording significant improvement on performance metrics year on year on all GEI measures. St Barbara has already been recognised in the Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency as an employer of choice for gender equality for a number of years now. As is the case with safety, we celebrate the great work that has been done to date in this space, but do recognise it's a journey and we have more to do. We have delivered a strong production result of about 133,000 ounces of gold at an oil and sustaining cost of $15.39 per ounce. Our operations delivered $42 million cash contribution after both sustaining and growth capital, a great effort considering all the capital works for the tailings facility at St Berry in this time. For me, the progress we are making within the Leonora Province Plan was our biggest achievement. I'm going to go through that in greater detail shortly. But the work I'm most proud of at this point was the work done by the St Berry team who completed laying of the new deep sea tailings placement pipelines at a time to finish this complex engineering work and deliver the DSTP within six months in the middle of a global pandemic associated with supply disruption issues is nothing short of a great team effort. And with that team effort, our team is able production at Sinbury to commence early in this new year. This demonstrates that we can deliver complex engineering work such as a sulphide project in very trying circumstances. This half we've also moved to reporting our reserves and resources over the calendar year periods. The only changes in the report against the prior one relate to depletion and the change to Tower Hill as an open pit mine which has increased its resource by 600,000 ounces. The first half of this year saw us delivering multiple steps of our Leonora progress plan. The progress we have made on the PFS for Tower Hill led us to select an open pit mining approach to its development. This in turn grew our mineral resource for Tower Hill by 600,000 ounces and added a further 16 million tonnes of ore for processing. This means in a short period of time we will go from having excess capacity in our 1.4 million tonne processing plant to being mill constrained. To accommodate this increase in volume of ore for Leonore, the PFS identified a cost-effective approach, expanded the processing plant to 2.1 million tonnes per annum. A capital outlay of approximately $30 million will see the installation of a new bore mill and other associated de-bottlenecking equipment to expand the throughput of our current facility by 50%. The study also identified a Glencore Albion process as a preferred process for treating refractory ore at harbour lights. This equipment will be cost between $110 and $120 million to install and will uniquely position Leonora to take advantage of other satellite refractory deposits within 200km radius of the plant. We believe we can make the Leonora process plant a hub that could service multiple satellite deposits in the region. On 20 December last year, we announced we had entered into a scheme that will execute an all-script acquisition of Bardock Gold, who own the well-advanced Aphrodite and Zoroastrian deposits. Leonora is uniquely placed to add the value to these deposits as the plant is connected to them via existing road and rail infrastructure. Developing these deposits accelerates our province plan by filling the mill much sooner. We plan to proceed quickly with the development of Zoroastrian. It's a high-grade, free-milling ore body which complements Gwalior as a near-term mill fee. We are initially likely to transport Zoroastrian via road to be treated at Leonora at the rates of around 400 to 500,000 tonnes per annum and aimed to have this production by the second half of FY24 or sooner. Oil produced from a much larger Aphrodite deposit is expected to follow within a few months, coinciding with when we expect the Leonora plant to be ready to process refractory oil. we are getting ready to commence the pre-feasibility studies and construction of both Sarastrum and Aphrodite underground mines. Our exploration team have potentially identified a new mining front at Gualia, which is at significantly shallower depths than our current mining operations. The high-grade intercepts at Old South Gualia are very promising and we are aiming to add them to our mineral resource in the fourth quarter of this financial year. We don't know yet how big this could be or its ultimate ramifications. However, an additional shallower mining front has the potential to increase the rate of ore delivery at Gwalior and add mining flexibility, which can reduce production variability. We have also completed further drilling at Tregobor, where we are targeting a maiden mineral resource in quarter four FY22. Last Friday, we announced the COVID-19 pandemic infection rates across the Daburr group of islands and had significantly increased, impacting both our local community and our workforce in St Berry. The graph on the slide shows how sudden this increase has been. Up until this month, we have been able to manage the case numbers with minimal disruption. We have had in place for some time now a COVID-19 management plan to minimise the risk of infection of individuals. The mine and the processing plant continue to operate, but at reduced rates. The rising of infections is affecting various operational teams and departments in mining, processing and maintenance. These departmental impacts have rippled through the entire operation. Currently we have a third of our workforce in isolation in camp, with a significant proportion of senior management impacted by COVID-19. Cases require constant on-site care, ensuring the wellbeing of our people and community, which also takes considerable management time. COVID-19's effect on the maintenance team has meant we are building a backlog of maintenance issues that will require attention. These will take some time to work through. The mining team has also been hard hit, resulting in a mining ramp-up rate being phased far slower than we expected. At this stage, we do not know when we can get back to full production, full workforce, healthily on the ground. For this reason, it's too early to update some varied guidance that we withdrew last Friday. And with that, I'll now hand over to Lucas Welsh, our CFO, to take you through our financial results. Over to you, Lucas, and thank you.