Atalaya Mining Plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Atalaya Mining Q1 results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand over to Alberto Lavandiera, CEO. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for being here. We are going to be going through the presentations related to the first quarter of the year. But I would like to take the opportunity to also comment a little bit about our growth plans. And of course, we will be very happy to answer as many questions as possible within our time limitations. With me, I have Cesar Sánchez, which is the CFO of the company. And I always start with a small summary of what happened in the first quarter. It was a tough quarter. It was a quarter where we had a strike in Spain due to the high diesel prices that created some issues with the transport. supply chain of lime, we had to stop, so we produced less copper than we had planned, almost 11,500 tons. As a result of that, higher costs due to reduced volumes, but also specifically due to the extremely high energy prices, electricity prices, plus also diesel and explosives. still overall we are seeing some softening in these conditions during the end of the year and we believe that the copper the production is going to be recovered so we are maintaining the full guy gear guidance very likely going to be in the lower range of the guidance from production point of view but so far we think we can still we still have time to be to recover it the beta was 27 around 27 million euros And important to mention that most of this EBITDA went to free cash flow of 20.7 million euros. That tells you a little bit that our cost structure really makes us flow all the costs directly from EBITDA to the balance sheet. because we don't have too many other overheads or similar things. Our balance sheet continued to strengthen, close to 87 million euros at the end of the year. And liquidity improved a lot because we had one of the historic shareholders, XTCS Melter, run into some trouble with its parent company. was distressed and had to sell their position and that created a big opportunity that has been taken by lots of institutions and individuals and our liquidity has improved dramatically. Right now, only one big shareholder has 22% of the shares of the company and the rest is all institutions which is helping the liquidity quite a lot. we are strengthening for the future so we are starting to build our lx plant the phase one we are starting the construction of the solar abic solar plant we have been continuing with exploration inspiration is going to be a very important aspect of this company in the near future i must have alberti satellites around 20 something kilometers from rio tinto and we have already started announcing the significant resources that we have both in Maza Valverde and in the satellite deposits of San Dionisio and San Antonio that are immediately besides our current terroir orbit. No issues with the COVID and we could try to continue to improve the efficiencies at Rio Tinto and And a very important point is that we published a first sustainability report, which is in our webpage. And we have just hired a non-executive director, which is highly specialized in ESG matters with a broad experience in the industry, which we believe is going to be a huge addition to this company. As I said, this sustainability report is It's published in our web page and I encourage you to take a look to it because not only it's nice, but it gives all kinds of data. For us, transparency is a key ingredient of a mining company, especially when you are looking at the future. It has been prepared by ERM, which is a worldwide recognized expert and has been audited by Ernst & Young. Looking to our production results, you will see what I mentioned before. The first part is that we produce a bit less tons of copper, but as you can see, most of it is due to the lower throughput that was due to the 10 days strike in basically the whole Spain of the transport sector that prompted us to stop the mill because we didn't have any line. Recovery was better than previous quarters, and it compensated the lower throughput. Of course, as a result of that, revenues, sales were lower than previous quarters, and EBITDA was significantly lower, obviously, due to two factors. One is lower production, and another important point is this incredibly high electricity prices and i'm happy to speak about that in a second having said that you can see in the last graph it's extremely important that that graph is how our net cash position has always been negative while we were reconstructing it means we were looking at sending all the cash flows generated by the operations into the into into the project without diluting our shareholders as soon as we started production with the expansion our cash position started going up we gave a 50 million almost a 50 million euros dividend that's why you see in the second bar from the right that was lower otherwise would have been fantastically high and important is that even after that our net cash position continued improving because as i said before our EBITDA reflects immediately to the cash flow. Right now, we have 120 million euros working capital surplus, which is quite a contrast of what we used to have of even up to minus 40 million euros just a couple of years ago. Let's talk a little bit, I'm sure you would like to hear about the the electric supplies in Spain. Spain is a kind of island in Europe and, incredible enough, we only produce electricity from gas and coal for less than 10% and going down. But the rest is coming from nuclear, from wind big time, solar and other 10% hydraulic. So as you can see, renewables and non-CO2 related. But due to the system that we have, which is a marginal production system, which means that the higher cost producer sets the price for everybody, we have been exposed to this high, incredibly high prices. In the last 10 years, the electricity prices, the base case has been around between 50 and 70 euros per megawatt hour, actually going down as you can see the trend due to the high input of wind in Spain. But since last year, prices of gas started spiking up and reached certain points with the war of Ukraine of around 300 euros per megawatt hour, which is, as you can see, is six times, 600% higher than what we had historically. Well, what's affecting us? The fact is that until now, until last year, the cost of electricity was represented only 10%, around 10% of our costs. And this year has gone up to almost 30% of the costs. Actually, in the first quarter, the cost of electricity at the plant was higher than all other costs together that we had in the last year. That tells you how important it is. We have been trying to to do our best optimization at the plant. But we have a consumption of around 24 kilowatt per hour per ton of production. And it's not much we can say that we can do. Prices have eased a little bit both in gas and electricity around 200 as we speak, but but lower in the weekends. And the Spanish government has been given the okay, although not finally settled, but given the okay to limit the gas prices in Spain and Portugal at around 40 to 50 euros per megawatt hour, which means prices for electricity would be around 130, 120, roughly half of what we have right now. This is going to have a huge impact. And this is only going to happen during the second part of this year. Going forward, we are in a much better position. We signed during the first quarter a long-term agreement with our main supplier, Endesa, at around €52 MWh for around 33% of the needs. This 33% of the needs... Excuse me, I'm going to go back again here. 33% of the need combined with construction of the solar plant, it means that from 2023, 53% of our electricity costs are going to go back to normal, actually to even under what has been normal during the last 10 years. So hopefully this situation of the gas is going to be disappearing. Other inflation points like diesel, which basically has doubled, although there's a small help from the Spanish government of 0.2 euros per liter. Explosives, they have an important effect, but maybe 10, 15% of the global costs of mining. So it's not that significant as the 500% increase in the electricity prices. So with that, we had a guidance that we are maintaining and we'll show you a little bit why. The guidance is composed, the guidance of production and costs are composed basically by ore that you get through the plant, grade that has that ore, the recovery of that copper, And that gives you the production, depends on the production and your costs. You have your cash costs and your own sustaining costs. Well, we believe we are going to be in the high end of the ore process. So we will be able to catch up a little bit what we lost in the first quarter. The copper grade is also expected to be improving. The recovery rate is higher. right now it's around 86 accumulated so very likely even with a slow start during the first quarter we will be probably in the lower part of the of the guidance in production but we will be there cash costs depends a lot on the assumptions for electricity and that's why we gave such a wide guidance because we're basically talking about 50 cents variation which is basically what it means having 100 euros per megawatt hour variation as i said before i respect that the second part of the year is going to be closer to the 120 so half of what we had in the first quarter so the guidance will be cash costs and also in sustaining costs are expected to be substantially lower than we had in the first quarter due to the higher production and due to the lower expected costs. As I said before, important factors to reduce the electricity are the construction of a solar plant in an old dump close to the plant. The plant is seen in the slide 11 in the center all the civil on the right side is finished it's been completed in the the north side all the equipment has been ordered in addition to that we have signed this power purchase agreement with indesa And we are looking at some additional other initiatives. A specialized company has made a study of four wind turbines sitting between Corta Tabayas and Inisio in our tailings in a hill. There are measurements and there's a measuring station with 20 years measurements that we have used. I mean, they are not high altitude measurements but based on the studies it looks like it would be economic. It will be four windmills at six megawatt hour for six megawatts each. We will be studying this in the next few months and if it's positive and we believe it may be positive we will pass it to the board. This has the special advantage of being self-consumption and you can use the wind also at night. not only will be economic from the long-term point of view, but it will all be in our land, but it will also be very important from the sustainability. And I believe we will be one of these companies that has most of the power self-generated and from sources that are renewable. An important point that I wanted to highlight today is the growth. I mean, I think People are starting to realize that this is not only Cerro Colorado that we are mining, where we have, let's say, mined for another 10 years, but we have a pipeline of projects at the rail, not only Touro, that's been permitted, but also our San Dionisio, which is near to Cerro Colorado and Maso Valverde, plus the exploration that we are going around. So for those of you who are not familiar with it, we are mining in the center part of Cerro Colorado. We have another place called San Dionisio, just east of the west of Cerro Colorado and an underground deposit in San Antonio. Why we believe this is very important? Well, the grades of the overall reserves of Cerro Colorado when you look at $4 per pound prices are 0.38. we will be mining around 0.41, 0.42 and leaving the stockpile to the very end. This would give us around 12 years life. But what we have in San Dionisio on the open pit side is around 0.9% copper. So it's very evident that if you could substitute some of these stones of San Dionisio and blend them with Cerro Colorado, you would have a much higher rate with the same installation. Through the same mill, you would be able to produce much more copper. The open pit section of San Dionisio contains two zones. The upper zone contains much higher copper and the lower zone contains copper and zinc. If I show you in a graph how it looks like, this is the old Atalaya pit. Sandinista deposit is basically what has been mined in the past. It's in the center of the pit. It was a very high grade zone that was mined in the last century. And they left what they call lower rate, but it has basically around 1% close to the stops. and analo for around 0.8% average. You can see in the section on the right side of slide 16 that the center core has been mined out, but they have left all the right side with only copper, and in the bottom part you start getting massive sulphides that also contain lead and zinc, mainly zinc. uh you can see that it's not an aggressive pit we are using slopes that's similar to what we that there are right now in terra corral in in terra corral but the mineralization starts basically from surface uh the san antonio deposits is a underground lens located immediately west from Middle East from Cerro Colorado. We can access it with an underground ramp, very simple. It contains copper lead sink. It's quite high grade. It starts at 200 meters from surface to 500, more or less. It's quite easy to mine. It's flattish. And it's open to the right, which means the east. It's just north of the Nerva village. In San Dionisio, as I mentioned before, it contains two zones. One is copper with around 0.8. Another one contains copper and zinc, which is quite significant, high grade, and also contains certain zones of underground that can be mined underground with 1% copper and 2.5% zinc plus some lead. There are some indications in the presentation, I'm not going to read, page 18, of how this can be mined, but the idea is to blend one third of the capacity of our current mill with this open pit from San Dionisio, so we can increase the grade of the existing feed and produce more copper with the same installation. Once we get into the sink, we'll have to add a flotation circuit to recover the zinc or the helix and the helix and this will give us an additional production of of zinc and lead for which basically is a byproduct so the copper equivalent production will be much higher we will be doing a preliminary economic statements this year actually hopefully starting in this next quarter and we'll have it three before the end of the year And Massa Valverde is another deposit which is located 25 kilometers southwest of Rio Tinto. We gave some preliminary estimates based on an independent company, a specialized company. It's a substantially big, massive deposit, almost 90 million tons, open in certain directions. and it's a combined copper-lead sink, in some areas it's high grade, some areas it's low grade. The importance of this is that it contains some very high grade intercepts of copper that can be put directly into our plant. How is this going to be developed? It's going to be basically ramps starting from surface to the shallower area of Majadales, which is high grade and shallow and small, and then that ramp will continue to be able to drill the lower part of Masao Verde as well as develop it and be able to strike through these ramps either through a belt or trucks directly from surface. The importance of these two deposits is that they can be mined directly without having a plant and that's why you can get special high revenues from this deposit early on. We could start mining the higher portions of the copper and feed them into our existing mill without any significant investments in constructing a new mill. The area is, the deposit is quite well defined, but still wide open because in some areas it has, the intercepts are very wide, but contains some higher grade zones, clear high grade zones, including the presence of gold, which still needs to be to be assessed and we are not considering at this stage. The importance is to contain some soil that has copper only, which can be fed into the plant without any problem. We are also starting the completion of a preliminary economic study as soon as possible. Very important to be able to recover this very important to recover this. Polymetallics is the development of this system, which has been working for two years in a pilot plant that some of the pictures are shown here. And we have just started the construction of an industrial plant, which should be ready at the end of the year. um this is like i'm going to excuse me let me jump this slide because this slide should not be here with um with this um with the initiative with these initiatives that i just mentioned about production without even considering elix what um is going to happen is that we expect to have a production uplift from our existing deposits of between 17,000 to 75,000 tons of copper. So I see ourselves, we're in 22, I see ourselves in 24, producing from Rio Tinto 70,000 to 75,000 tons of copper, in addition to what we can get from total around 30,000 tons. Why we can do that is because if we add around 5 million tons of higher grade material uh of open bit from san denisio basically we are blending five million tons at a point seventy eight percent we can get sixteen thousand dollars copper more and and if we can mine from san antonio one million tons at one thirty two we're getting eight thousand tons so there is potential to increase the production from terra colorado uh from ferrocarrado without any significant investment So those are the key initiatives for the year, solar plant, PEA, PASA Valverde, PEA San Dionisio, TORO continued to permit, exploration, big exploration is planned in Osa Morena and TORO. Let me go back to the slide. This slide should be at the end. It's a slide over progress of the initiatives to to improve the water quality at Togro. In Togro, we got two years ago a negative environmental pact declaration. That was due to the anti-mining groups making a lot of noise and stating things that were not true. The main one was that the mine was going to be polluting the area. We had assumed that we were going to be taking care of the liabilities, and this was going to be done after we got the permits. After lots of dialogue with all the implied parties, including associations from the area, fishermen, they said, look, show us that this can be done, and this would be very positive. So we engaged in more approval, approved to construct a water treatment plant to treat the water that's is coming from operations that were finished 37 years ago which are not that relevant but they make a very bad picture like you can see in the center part of the picture where it says before a small creek of around one meter wide that contains some acid water we started immediately the treatment and right now only just few a couple of weeks after starting our operations they already the creek is starting to turn green again and the waters are clear In addition to that, we are building a water treatment plant for all the other rivers or small creeks in the area. The water treatment is almost finished. You can see some of the pictures in that slide 24. And this will be shown to the community, and it will be an important step of credibility before we submit all the paperwork for the permit. As I said, we are doing this in theory unrelated to the permitting process itself, but certainly will add credibility to our proposals. So that's in a nutshell the plan that we have. And of course, there are some few other data in our presentation that I will use as needed depending on the questions.

Alberto Cesar, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated in the top right-hand corner of your screen. I'd like to remind all investors on this call that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Alberto Cesar, we received a number of pre-submitted questions from investors and I want to start off the Q&A session with these. The first one reads as follows. When will the Spanish government implement the gas price cap? Will the Spanish electricity cap be passed on to the businesses or only to customers? And is Atalaya Mining planning to revise its cost guidance range once the cap has been implemented?