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Atalaya Mining Plc
5/26/2026
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Italia Mining Q1 2026 results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to the CEO of Italia Mining, Alberto Lavendiera, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.
Many thanks. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for being here in the conference call to review the financial results for the first quarter of 2026. I will be using the presentation that's going to be in the web page. And I'm with Tessa Sanchez, the CFO of the company that can answer any question after this. after the review of the slides. First quarter production had already been announced. And as you remember, it was below plan. It was below plan because we had quite heavy rainfall events higher than basically the whole previous year during late January and whole February. But since then, the end of the quarter and the first part of, well, I would say most of the second quarter, so during April and May, we have exceeded our plan and we have recovered some of this shortfall during Q1. So we are trying to recover those losses. And The cost performance, even being with low production, was within our guidance. This means that in relation to the full gear guidance, we will discuss this later with more detail, but we believe that's going to be unchanged because we see that we are going to be very close to what we have guided before. But we had a good EBITDA. We generated 48 million euros EBITDA, which was excellent and probably ahead of expectations. It was impacted by lower production, but it had the positive impact of better high copper prices, better copper prices. Actually, we achieved very good realization prices, good silver credits and low treatment charges. In the following pages, I will be saying a bit more about the financial performance in our growth projects. There are a few other comments in the page six of the slide of things that have been going on during the quarter, like the acquisition of almost an 8%, 7.3% stake in Lara exploration in Brazil and a few other things. Continuing with the production results, you will see that the mill performed quite well, but the rainfall impacted grades because we could not access the places where we were mining normally, so we had to rely on stockpiles, and this really affected the production. But Even with that lower production, as you can see in slide eight, we had very good financial results. Although the revenues were lower, the operating costs were also lower. The main reason for this, as I said before, was the high cover prices and lower TCRCs. And we ended up generating 29 million, almost 30 million euros of operating cash flow. This operating cash flow was more enough to cover our investments in LARA and the capex of around 20 million euros. So after all this, our balance sheet is extremely robust, extremely strong. We have almost 300 million euros of cash and net cash of around 266 million euros. which of course includes the proceeds of our capital raise back in late January of around 150 million euros. But even with this low production, we generated positive cash in spite of the investments, even with this bad production results. And the reason for this is that we have kept quite good control of the costs. The cost performance overall, the first quarter is consistent with our full year guidance. Cash costs of 252 and all-in sustain cost of 320. If you compare that with year 25, you will see it's slightly higher, but not that much higher. And if you compare it with 24, you will see that actually it's better than we had. The reasons for that, as you can see in the details broken down in page 9, is that we did have high mining costs and higher mining costs due to lower production, but also more importantly, also with the effect of unfavorable forex exchange rates, and also higher diesel prices started to bite in this, I would say, February, March, and continue in April. However, you will see that the by-product credits, which means silver, have been negative almost double than what we had previous years. So very strong silver credits and also very low treatment charges. You will notice that treatment charges are negative. The reason of this is that we have been making some shipments into the spot market that have been sold at negative DCs. And also, we have also benchmarks for the contracts that we have linked with long-term contracts. The benchmarks of these are quite low, much lower than previous year. This is also important because going into the future, because most or all of our legacy of tech agreements are expiring. And they're expiring in a moment where the concentrate market is pretty tight, which means we still have ahead of us an important period of production of concentrates in a moment where the traders and the smelters are ready to pay to treat our concentrates. We believe that this uncommitted offtake is a hidden asset for Atalaya. In other words, if we wanted to, we could even capitalize in getting some funding if needed through the existence of this uncommitted offtakes. both for the case of Rio Tinto and of course for our new project, growth project in total. All in sustaining costs of 320 are consistent what we had in 24 and slightly higher what we had in 25. But of course, this is, as I said, it's due to the lower production. We normally benchmark our only sustainable with the rest of the industry and we are keeping of course keeping within the range going up relative to previous quarters but still within being quite competitive looking ahead of the guidance we as we said we had a lower first quarter but we were able to recover some of this shortfall during April and May. So right now we thought that looking at the planning ahead, that we continue to expect our guidance for 2026 within the guidance between 50,000 and 54,000 tons of copper. Now, to be prudent, we are saying and we believe we are likely going to be in the low end of that, in the 50,000 range, but we will continue to make efforts to recover as much of that production and be able to get that higher. In relation to costs, as I said before, so far we have achieved our high guidance and it's consistent to what we had said. The only question that we have here is the uncertainty that we have around the Middle East. We are constantly quantifying the potential impact. The potential impact here comes mainly from with the price of diesel. The price of diesel has gone up, I would say, 20% in Spain in the last few months. And explosives could be affected a little bit, not much, but could be affected a little bit due to the prices of gas, which is linked with the price of ammonia, and the price of ammonia is linked with the price of explosives. But the potential impact of the diesel is the one that is... have an effect on our costs. We have quantified that in If things continued as they were this year, we could have an effect of around 15 to 20 cents in the cash costs and not in costs. The reason for this is that we, for example, very simple numbers last year, we consumed around 30 million liters at our reordained operations. So basically an increase of... of 10, 15 cents or 20 cents will mean multiply the extra. By the consumption, you will get the extra cost that we'll be suffering due to the high diesel prices. Of course, we expect that this complex will be resolved in a favorable way. And because it looks like that's the way that the world is going to need it. And we don't expect really any other effect of this conflict. In the case of the energy, Electricity, actually, due to the high rain events in Spain, the price of electricity that, as you know, in Spain is very much linked with solar, wind, water, nuclear, has been quite low. Actually, the effect of the higher gas prices has not been as in previous years. And we don't expect that to have a high influence in the costs. That's why electricity really has not changed much. In relation to the CAPEX guidance, we have not made any changes, of course. If we had to do some developments or in the case of press stripping, obviously the effect of the diesel prices would have some effect in the CAPEX guidance as well. Going to these investments that we are doing, one of the things we are doing is getting to the high rates of the Saint-Denisio satellite deposit. You can see now what's the development of the Saint-Denisio. The pre-stripping is advancing quite well. And you can see in the picture the idea is to get into mine some higher rates through 26. Of course, the The stripping of 20 million tons, more or less, in 26 could be affected with high diesel prices if this was the case. We also continue to make some progress in the Massa Valverde development. Here we have a couple of rings drilling the red area, the copper area. We are finding very good rates there and we are getting ready after having acquired all the land and all the permits. We are preparing all the surface installations. We are preparing the explosives magazine. And basically we expect to start the real excavation of the rub later in the year. having gone through the contractor selection and of course subject to final board approval. In the meantime, we'll continue drilling this zone to better understand the area that we're going to be lining initially. We continue to do some work also in the preparation to construct a line to recover the sink inlet We do have around 130 million tons of polymetallic deposits known and drilled within San Dionisio, San Antonio and Massa Olverde. which compares to around 190 million tons of copper-only ore. The copper only has lower grade and better recoveries. The polymetallic has higher rates, but also requires a specific circuit to recover it. The specific circuit, I've said this in previous lectures, It basically is adding in a circuit to recover zinc and lead, trying to maximize the use of the existing installation with a capex that at this stage is around 80 to 90 million euros, which we are trying to optimize as we speak. We also have some drilling ongoing in San Antonio, which is a very shallow polymetallic deposit, very close to Rio Tinto. And we have there one rig, and we also have one rig in Maceo Almerde, and we continue to do some other exploration within the Rio Tinto East area and other parts of the Rio Tinto Belt. We continue to focus on potential opportunities within the Rio Tinto area, within the Pirate Belt, because we believe this is what can give more value to the company. But obviously, the important thing is the permitting of TOTO. TOTO during this quarter has had some significant changes. We have had several meetings with the authorities finalizing the documentation, clarifying things before final reports were issued by different departments. And actually, the Minister of of industry, Maria Jesus Lorenzana, she was saying that she was confident that the EIS, the environment impact declaration would be ready before summer. Still not clear if before summer is before the 21st of June or before August. But the reality is that all the reports that had to be produced have been finalized and we know they are all positive. which means the environment's backstatement can only be positive. And it looks like it's in the final stages. But very important also is the mention from the president of Galicia and from high ranks of the Galician government that there is a strict commitment to exploit the critical materials and the mining opportunities that are in Galicia. announcing the launch of tenders for free licenses, announcing social measures in order to get some of the profits of the mines into the surrounding communities. And really, at the end, the bottom line is some very proactive measures from the Melitian government to support mining, and of course, including Togrom. Autoro, we have basically completed most of the front-end engineering. We are advancing with the tail engineering. We are buying some land or getting options of some other land in order to get past access to the plant site in order to start construction as soon as possible. We have been negotiating with the main equipment suppliers for final tenders and ready to award the key equipment in order to shorten the the construction period. We have also strengthened our teams. We have built an assay lab. We are infield drilling around the pits that are going to be the first starter pits. We continue to operate the water treatment plant. We are building field offices for the construction. So very confident that the project will be approved and we are making prudently some preparatory works. We like TAURO because it's going to be producing over 30,000 tons of copper. It's going to be our second producing asset. It has a low capital intensity. Its costs are going to be around 50 cents lower than Rio Tinto. And we believe it has a huge upside in the deposit itself and its surrounding belt around Tono. With all this, concluding, Atalaya is very well positioned to grow. We are getting ready to get to our focus of around 100,000 tons of copper equivalent, which would come from Rio Tinto in the 50,000-60,000 range, with Tauro in the 30,000 or more range, and with zinc and lead as copper equivalent in the range of around 20,000 tons extra. The key components of this growth are all brownfields, And we have the teams and we have the balance sheet. We are very fortunate that we have a very good balance sheet and the teams to build it. And the important thing here is that we are ready to deliver this in a very short time frame. We're not talking about five and ten years. We're talking about three years or so. And I think this concludes my presentation. I would like to open it to some questions for me or for Tessa.
We will now begin conference line questions. To ask a question on the phone line, please press star one. We'll pause for a moment to assemble the queue. Your first question comes from Laura Chan from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
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