Central Asia Metals plc

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Central Asia Metals PLC full year results investor presentation. Questions are encouraged, they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that is just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself, however the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it is appropriate to do so on the InvestorMeet company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Central Asia Metals PLC. Gavin, good afternoon, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us in this presentation of Central Asia Metals' annual results for 2025. I'll start by giving you a snapshot of the results for the end of the year. We have solid business with strong underlying operational performance during the year. And these have driven a really solid set of financial numbers. What you can see on your screen there is the production achieved at Qunrad in Kazakhstan in Sassa, North Macedonia. We produced 13,311 tons. of copper during the year, 17,881 tons of zinc and 25,156 tons of lead. The revenue generated from the sales of those metals amounted to $230 million for EBITDA of $102 million and an EBITDA margin of 44%. Cash in the bank at the end of the year was $80 million and that was generated by free cash flow of $56 million. which in turn translates into a final dividend, which we intend to pay, of 7.5p, taking the total dividend for the year to 12p. Now, 12p equates to $28 million, and is therefore 50% of our annual free cash flow that we generated. That is the top end of the dividend policy range of 30% to 50%. Most of you know us pretty well by now. I'll give you a quick overview of our asset base and where our current operations reside. We have the Kunrad asset in Kazakhstan. That is a copper production facility and it remains the bedrock of our business. It has been producing copper cathode at a high profit margin since inception in 2012. Sasa, a lead-zinc mine in North Macedonia, which we acquired in 2017, has produced consistently since and has undergone modernisation under our ownership. We have Aberdeen Minerals. It's an investment in a private company. This is exploring for base mineralisation in Scotland at its Arthrath project, and we own 32% of that. Plus, also, we have an exploration programme live in Kazakhstan, through CamelX and CamelXD. That is an asset that we own 80%, 20% of the remaining ownership is in the hands of the geologists, so they are very well geared towards success there and we're looking to drill on a couple of licenses and I'll tell you a bit more about that in a minute in 2026. Before we get there though, Louise is going to walk us through the financial results.

Thanks Gavin. Firstly we'll look at the market conditions that informed our 2025 financial results. So firstly looking at commodity markets. Commodity markets were generally pretty supportive for us during the year. While the lead price was down 2%, the zinc price during the year was up 3% versus 2024. and the copper price was up 10%, and we achieved an average copper price of over $10,000 per tonne during the financial year. Looking at some other important macroeconomic aspects, firstly, treatment charges. It was a positive year for us in terms of treatment charges. And just to give you some comparisons, in 2024, we paid $15 million in treatment charges, and last year, that was down to $8 million. a $7 million reduction in the treatment charges that we incurred last year. Looking now at SASA in terms of currencies, there was a challenge there because the US dollar weakened 5% versus the DINAR. The DINAR is the Macedonian currency, but that is pegged to the euro. So really we're looking at the US dollar euro exchange rate. And the impact of that is effectively to increase our cost base in US dollar terms. At Qumrad, the story was the opposite way around, where the local currency, the Kazakh tenge, weakened 11% versus the dollar, so that helps us with our costs in Kazakhstan. Inflation, still in double digits for Kazakhstan inflation, 12.3%, and inflation for 2025 in North Macedonia was 4.1%. So if we now look at the income statement, We've reported revenue of $230 million this morning. That's up 7% year on year. And that's really been driven by those high commodity prices that I mentioned on the previous slide, but also a 55% increase in the silver price. The silver that we produce at SASA has been streamed off, but we receive the fixed silver price from the smelters. But in cost of sales, we have to buy that exact amount of silver for pretty much the exact price. So that number comes off in cost of sales as well. But that has been a factor in our increasing revenue. We were also positively affected by those lower treatment charges because they're already netted off in the revenue line that we report. Cost of sales was up 14% year on year. A few of the main aspects there, 4.1 million of those silver purchases that I've just mentioned, We have an extra $3 million of SASA depreciation, and that's because we completed the commissioning of the dry stack tailings, landform, and plants at the end of Q1 last year. We also have 3.5 million extra in revenue royalties. That was about 2.5 million extra at SASA because the government doubled the rates at the beginning of last year, and also higher what we call MET royalty in Kazakhstan, and that was because of the higher copper prices. And all that at Stasa was overlaid by effectively this strong operating currency. Admin expenses, they're up 12% year on year, which sounds like a big percentage. In absolute terms, that's 3.4 million. But just to highlight that during the year, we spent 3.6 million on business development. That was mainly the New World Resources bid. We also incurred costs of 0.4 million because we disposed of the Copper Bay entity, which we'd written off some years previously in the first half of last year. And also, we incurred some additional exploration-related admin costs in Cadbex Stamp for the CamelX business. So taking those things into account, this morning we reported EBITDA of just under $102 million at a margin of 44%. Looking at some of the other important factors in the P&L, key to these results has been the impairment that we've announced this morning of $117.5 million for SASA. That was flagged in our announcement on the 3rd of March. And there's also a very small impairment of $0.3 million for one of the Camelot exploration licenses that we're no longer interested in. It's also important to highlight almost a $10 million negative swing in foreign exchange from 2024 to 2025 as well and that obviously adversely affects our profitability. Tax, that's down and that looks considerably lower than 2024. That tax number has been positively impacted by the impairment because we're reflecting lower deferred tax liability effectively within that taxation line and that impairment-related positive tax number is about $10.9 million. And then just finally to point out EPS, we've stated our EPS there as a negative 42.56 cents, but we adjusted the EPS to 18.51 cents. That's stripping out the impairment, stripping out the, sorry, the impairment for SASA and the impairment for CAMELX, and also $1.2 million of unrealized hedges. We, right at the end of December, we put two hedge positions in place for Sasa. It was a 50% hedge of our zinc production for 2026 and a 50% of our operating costs exposure to the Euro. And we put those hedges in place. Because we put them in place within 2025, we've effectively got to value them and report this unrealised loss at the end of 2025. we look now at the cost base for the two operations i couldn't rather that was a very positive year for us in terms of costs our costs in absolute terms were up by only 0.2 million dollars or two cents per pound from 80 cents to 82 cents per fat per pound and that was uh reflecting strong cost control but also the 10 gauge evaluation which helps our cost base we have 0.4 million Lower costs are reagents and electricity. Those are variable costs, and they're reflecting the fact that we've produced slightly less copper in 2025 than we did produce in 2024. We've got a little bit of an increase of payroll costs of $200,000, and that was in inflation-related salary rises, but that was in large part offset by the 10-gauge evaluation as well. And we've also reported a slightly higher taxes offtake fee of one cent per pound. And taking all that into account, we reported an EBITDA margin for the Cunrad business of 75% for 2025. If we look now at Sasa, during the year, our run of mine costs were up $5 per tonne. That's really related to three key factors, which is an increase in payroll costs, about $2.5 million. An increase in the costs for us to dispose of the tailings in the two new methods, the dry stack tailing and the paste backfill. That was an increase of $1.5 million versus 2024. And there was also a rise in some key inputs for reagents, power, et cetera. Those are the main aspects that increased the unit cost base by $5 per tonne for last year. Well, if we look at our C1 costs in absolute terms for SASA, they were lower year-on-year by $0.4 million. That's reflecting the lower treatment charges, which I mentioned previously. That's within that realization figure, and that's $6.6 million lower year-on-year. For SASA, we've reported an EBITDA margin of 26% for 2025. If we look now at our capital expenditure, Our group capex for 2025 was 19 million. That's down by 1.8 million versus the previous year. At SASA, we spent $14.1 million. 11.3 million of that was sustaining capex. And 2.8 million was on concluding the capital projects that we've been running for some years. And that was the dry stack tailings plan and the landform. Going forward, we do expect some additional costs on the landform in particular as we continue to expand that in the next few years but we're going to be treating that as sustaining capex now. At Qumrad our capex was higher than our usual at 4.9 million and one of the more notable aspects for that is we spent a million dollars relocating a portion of dump 15. Our capex at Qumrad will be back to much more normal levels around the 2 million mark for 2026 and all in all for 2026 we're expecting capex giving guidance between $14.5 million and $17.5 million. We've also capitalised more exploration in 2025 versus 2024, and that's really largely because these projects in Kazakhstan through CAMEL-X have matured to the point where they're specific projects which we've done dedicated exploration work on. So not dissimilar to previous years, we spent $0.3 million on SASA capitalised exploration. We spent $1.4 million on Capital X during 2025. And actually in 2026, we expect to increase that between $3 and $3.5 million. Looking now at the balance sheet, probably the key factor to point out again there is that that impairment for SASA of £117.5 million, that comes through the PPE line that you can see there. We've reported strong cash balances of £80.1 million. That includes restricted cash of £0.4 million. The investment in the associate, that's our investment in Aberdeen Minerals. At the end of, sorry, Post the period end in January this year, we exercised a portion of our warrants, £850,000 and $1.1 million. And so we've now increased our ownership from 28.4% to 32.6% in Aberdeen Minerals. The only other aspect I wanted to point out on this slide is we have had a prior year adjustment and re-spaced our 2024 accounts. This was due to an error made when we had infantry movements between our two Kazakh subsidiaries. These should have been reversed out on consolidation into camel PLC, but they haven't been doing. So this restatement increases infantry, reduces costs, and therefore increases our retained earnings, which occurs within the equity and reserves line. It increases the retained earnings by 3.6 million. That's because these minor adjustments have been added up over the years. The actual change to 2024 itself in terms of costs and inventory is about $500,000. I move to my final slide, which is to look at our cash flow and our free cash flow. So starting on the waterfall chart on the left-hand side, we started 2025 with $67.6 million of cash in the bank. We generated $89.6 million of cash from our operations. During the year, we paid $31.4 million of dividends. That represents the 2024 final dividend of 9 pence and the H1 2025 interim dividend of 4.5 pence that was paid in the year. Our income tax and withholding tax of 25.9 million. That was considerably from 19.6 million in 2024. That's pretty much all related to Kazakhstan. 5 million increase in corporate income tax and around about 1 million increase in withholding tax. We've talked about CapEx and capitalized exploration. The 4.1 million you can see there in the middle of the waterfall chart, That's our break fee of $1.6 million for the New World Resources transaction, which didn't conclude. And also, we made a gain on selling the shares that we'd acquired as part of that process of $2.5 million. At the interim stage last year, when we announced our results in September, we announced a $10 million share buyback. We'd undertaken $5.2 million of that in 2025, and we've concluded that programme in 2026. Taking all that into account, we've ended the year with cash in the bank of $80.1 million. That does include an overdraft of $0.9 million, and also that restricted cash of $0.4 million. That leads to an adjusted free cash flow for us for the year of $56 million. I'll hand back to Gavin now to run through the operations.

Thanks, Libby. So let's start with QNRAD, which is our in-situ leach operation in Kazakhstan, which produces copper cathodes. We've produced, as I said earlier, 13,300 tonnes of copper in 2025, which is right in the middle of the fairway for guidance. Guidance was 13,000 to 14,000 tonnes. And we're guiding 12,000 to 13,000 tons for 2026. We've produced around 178,000 tons of copper since we started producing in 2012, which is enough to use in over 3 million electric vehicles per year. Each one of these takes about 50 kilograms of copper. So in the context of today's world, you know, whilst we're a small producer, we are pretty significant in terms of the electrification story. We're also exploiting an area roughly the size of 1,500 football pitches. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the operation, you can see on the top right-hand side of the slide there, the open pit in the top centre. That's about two kilometres north to south, so the dumps on the east, which is to the right, and down to the southwest, bottom left. Those constitute 600 million tonnes of material, which contain tons of that copper out of these dumps. So as I said, we've taken 178,000 tons before. That is actually slightly ahead of forecast. And the next slide will show you why. If we look at that leach curve, the dotted line represents the forecast leach curve and the solid line is the actuals. So we're actually receiving or recovering a little more copper than we first expected. So what that indicates is that as we go towards the mature end of those leach curves towards the right, the rate of recovery will be going a little lower, but the ultimate final recoveries are going to be a little higher. During 2025, as Louise said, we were fortunate enough to receive some of the highest copper prices, or record high copper prices, in fact, towards the end of the year. And that leveraged the strong operational performance that we achieved there. In terms of cost, the solar plant on the top right-hand photograph, that was something we've had in place since 2023. That is now producing consistently just shy of 16% of the power requirement for the plant and generating a useful saving at the same time. Somebody told me that's enough to drive one of those electric cars I mentioned earlier, 45 million kilometres. which means you need a lot of charging infrastructure and hence more copper, so good story all around there. We move on to the next slide, actually, please. Getting on to Sasa. This is a much more conventional mine where we mine underground, crush and grind the material, put it through a flotation plant to produce two concentrates. These are not metals themselves, but a metal-rich material which have been sold to the smelters. And in 2025, we did meet our revised guidance. Those of you who remember from our, I think it was back in July last year, we revised our guidance down in response to some of the production problems that we were having there and produced 17,881 tonnes of zinc and 25,156 tonnes of lead, which was slightly below guidance. Guidance this year, we've moved up again to 18,000 to 20,000 tonnes of zinc. and 26 to 28,000 tons of lead, which is much more to the normal range that we've experienced in the past at SASA. This is because we, in the final quarter of 2025, had really good production statistics coming through and managed to actually produce at a rate higher than the 800,000 achieved for 2025. Now, back in a year ago, we were talking about the 764,000 tons we produced of all throughput in 2024 and how we were targeting getting to the 800,000 tons. So we're pleased to say that we did achieve that. On the other hand, unfortunately, geological variations impacted the amount of metal we produced. And this is both in terms of geometry, which is the shape of the ore body, but also the grade, which is the concentrate of the metals in the rocks that we encounter underground. Despite this, as I said, we achieved that revised guidance and we've also now completed the capital projects at SASA. As Louise said, from now on, we'd be looking to return to a much more stable, sustaining capital run rate at SASA. So let's talk a little bit about some of the issues at SASA. Last September, we talked about this review that we'd undertaken. one of several independent reviews that we thought was necessary to start turning SASA around that we conducted last year. And 2026 is all about implementing a lot of those recommendations. So far, we've made good progress on controlling costs, as Louise was talking about, in 2020, 2025, and that'll continue into 2026, and also managing staff levels. We've, to date, lost around 11% of our colleagues at SAASA as we try to right-size the workforce for the mine going forward. We've also focused on improving production efficiencies and also improving the geological understanding. That's going to be key, and in doing that, we are doing a lot of what we infill drilling, much more drilling to understand your body and drilling on a closer spacing, improving the laboratory performance so we get quicker turnaround of assays to inform our decision making, and also digitalization of all the stages of mine planning, so making sure that the systems that geologists use speak to the mine planners without having to go through a stage in between, and then saving time and also improving decision making underground. we've got many technical projects underway and to look at my life extensions so nobody here is thinking we're going to be shutting the door at sasa in 2034 uh you know certainly with these narrow underground uh vein or bodies that do tend to extend the life from time to time and we're doing that through three methods one is this drilling i was talking about not only within info drilling but we're also exploring for new material around the spin your echo or body which is the old body we're currently exploiting we're also looking at upgrading some of that material within spin your record from one resource category to another resource category. This gives you a higher confidence, and you can then put it into the mine plan. And there's a satellite all-body called Galea Marica, and we're going to be starting a full-blown scoping study on that to ascertain how many of the 9 million tonnes of resource that we have at Galea Marica can be brought into a future mine plan. Part of that will be application of different technologies again. For example, ore sorting. This is something and discard some of the lower-grade material in your body and allows the plant, again, to run profitably, which is the key that we're trying to aim at here. And last but not least, with the dry-stack tailings plant, which is the photograph on the right-hand side, up and running since March last year, we've managed to put 75% of the tailings of the waste that we've generated either back underground, onto the dry stack landform where we dewater all this material and put sort of what's called a filter cake onto the dry stack landform, with the benefits being no future capex on another wet tailings facility, a much smaller footprint, a much more environmentally friendly way of disposing of new tailings, and fewer social issues if we could expand the footprint we'd have to get into discussions with the local communities around land acquisitions and potential relocations of dwellings and the like, which we obviously want to avoid. which brings us nicely into sustainability. We have five key pillars of sustainability simply because it makes good business sense to do so. On the left-hand side, it's pretty obvious to maintain home safely at the end of every shift, and we've had independent reviews conducted for us, and we're currently implementing some of those findings. The review itself was fairly positive, but, you know, clearly we wouldn't have done it if we didn't think we could learn anything, so I'm happy to make the workplace much more safe for all of our staff. We've also instituted an alarm system around the tailings dams, and that alarm system has actually now been integrated into the National Alert Network in Macedonia. Secondly, we value our people. I won't go through these in exhaustive detail, but what struck me as the chief exec is that we've spent 44,000 hours training our people. So continuous development of the people will ensure that we have a sustainable business, that people are well trained and highly motivated to generate the profit margins that we're looking for. Okay, we care for the environment. That should go without saying. And as I said earlier, 75% of the tailings we put back underground or onto the dry-stack landform last year exceeds the target that we have of 70%. We also continue to create value for our communities to ensure we have a social license to operate. And we do that via our two foundations, to which we contribute 0.5% of our revenue every year. And these foundations focus on educational initiatives, business startup initiatives, plus also some of the needs assessments, things like upgrading clinics, helping with schools, those sorts of things. just to make sure that we are good corporate citizens within the communities that we operate in. And last but not least, ensuring ethical practices. Again, emphasis here is on policies that ensure that we're not doing anything untoward as a business, and this involves training and regular reviews as well. And we've also ensured that our staff has access to a wisdom learning channel, which we tested last year to make sure that these things were all working properly and the messages were getting through to the right people. So as shareholders, you're obviously going to be very keen to hear about our capital allocation and outlook. And I'll start by talking about the exploration activities I touched on at the beginning of the presentation. CamelX and CamelXD have done a fantastic job in moving from target generation to securing licenses and doing some field work on licenses. And in the last two years, we've advanced to the point where now we have drill targets on two of our licenses. And I can assure you that's very quick from a pure greenfields perspective, from what is effectively just those fields you see in the background, no previous workings. to generating drill targets is a fantastic result, and we've got 2,000 metres each to be drilled at our Otter and Ugenoy licences in the summer this year, and we look forward to receiving the results from those. Third licence, Cheyenne D, we've advanced to the point where we're going to be doing a number of line kilometres of geophysics, again with a view to establishing drill targets either late 2026 or early 2027. Aberdeen, both the reasons I've spoken about, funding that we've put in is going to finance six new drill holes and that is really to hone in on where we think the feeder zone or the higher grade portion of this mineralised system is. So far we've hit mineralisation in several holes, it's tantalising, but we've taken a lot of advice, done a lot of interpretation and think that the four holes that we've got cited right now are going to give us the best chance of intersecting this higher will constitute a discovery. We've got two holes in the back pocket just in case we miss those. But, you know, this just shows the disciplined approach that Campbell has in terms of financing exploration where, you know, we've churned through the licenses at Campbell X and at Aberdeen, you know, we're making sure that the money is being injected in a stepwise fashion and each step is going to give us more information and hopefully more results going forward. So looking forward to an exciting 2026 on the exploration front. Now we still continue to look at larger scale growth opportunities after the disappointment last year of missing out on New World. The strategy remains the same. The board has reviewed the strategy and discussed it exhaustively over the last two board meetings and we continue to look for an acquisition of the material size that will populate the area between those two exploration assets plus the production assets that we have right now and that will allow us as a business to drive a huge amount of value into these projects as we develop them from, say, a resource through to the engineering studies through to a final investment decision. We'll move them up what we call the PNAV curve and get close to the full value of these assets through that, but doing it in a way that we're comfortable with, using our skills, our ethos of looking low cost at a high margin, and engineering the assets exactly where we want them to. So watch this space. We have, however, got a long-term track record of creating value for our investors. Camel has generated extraordinary returns for small mining companies so far. We've paid over $420 million in dividends and buybacks since inception, and this is against the total amount raised from the market of $240 million. Our full year dividend I mentioned earlier of 12p represents And that's at the top end of the range. And we will continue with this disciplined approach to capital allocation. In terms of the business case. We are producing base metals that are essential for modern living and I think that is key now with the wider community, the wider investment community, governments and everyone across society is now beginning to understand the importance of critical minerals and we are right in the middle of that with our copper, lead and zinc. So we'll continue to look for assets producing those base metals, things that we know a lot about. We'll continue to generate strong free cash flow. Our free cash flow yield is over 14%. Our dividend yield is over 7%. And resilient margins of 44% that we've reported today will give you confidence that the business is strong to move forward as well. We're committed to value-accretive growth. We're building a pipeline of assets that we're looking at right now, and every single one of shareholder returns and shareholder accretion. And we're going to do that by exploiting our, you know, experienced and capable team and our strong sector knowledge and operational expertise within that business. And off the back of a really strong balance sheet, as Louise said, you know, $80.1 million in cash, minimal debt, and the ability to provide impetus to our exploration efforts, to our growth aspirations, and also ensuring continued returns to our shareholders. If we look at ourselves in the context of the market today, we can clearly say, and the statistics bear this out, is that we are undervalued. If we look at our typical market metrics of EV, EBITDA, EV to free cash flow, we're well below the sector or the peer medians. And as I said earlier, our dividend yield of now about 7% is well in excess of what we get from the average when we put C100. So again, a great investment case for Camelot. So to summarize, our financial position remains strong. It's underpinned by two cash-flowing assets. Our guidance at Conrad is 12,000 to 13,000 tons. At Sasa, for zinc and lead, we've increased those from where we were in 2025. And our priorities in 2026 remain to Implement all of the improvements at Sasa. Maintain focus at Conrad. Ensure production efficiencies and high profitability there. We want to identify and structure a material transaction. And we're all looking forward to the results of those drill programs, both in Scotland and in Kazakhstan. And at the same time, remain disciplined in terms of how we allocate capital across the group and to you, our shareholders. On that note, I'll conclude and invite any questions from the floor.

Perfect, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can all be accessed via your investor dashboards. Guys, you can see there we have received a number of questions, and thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But if I may just hand over to you to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.

Okay, and our first question was pre-submitted. It appears that we are no closer to an acquisition and have a problematic mind in Sasa, and one that will run out of reserves at some point. Isn't it time to ensure that shareholders are given the opportunity to decide whether the company simply returns cash to shareholders and stops looking for acquisitions, which seems like more of a distraction for management other than anything else more productive? In my view there needs to be a strategic review regarding the future of the company.

Okay, thanks for the question. I think I mentioned earlier that the board sort of takes the strategy of the company very seriously and we discuss it in detail at every board meeting and the most recent board meeting was only last week where we reiterated the strategy as we set out today really where we need to grow the business. Now the reason you do that as a mining company is because you constantly reducing the size of your asset base. Every day we produce, we take the material out of the business and convert it to cash. Now we've got to reinvest some of that to keep those assets going and we've got to pay some of that back to the shareholders as we've done through the dividend today. But in order to sustain our levels of production and hence profit, we do need to invest in new assets and replace the ones we're meeting now. As I said, the board acts on behalf of shareholders. They have, as I said, conducted several strategic reviews over the year, most recently a week ago. And I suppose that shareholders have the ability to make their views known at our AGM, which will be held in May as well, if you wish to.

Thank you. Right, our next question. Does the high silver price have any bearing, either positive or negative, on the company, given that we have a streaming agreement in place with OR Royalties?

Sadly not. I think the previous owners of the mine had streamed the silver and the agreement there is that we receive $6 an ounce for the silver that we produce, which is a little bit galling given where the silver price has been this year, but unfortunately is a contractual obligation. that we have been stuck with. So no, sadly, we don't get any benefit from the silver. And as Louise was pointing out, we have to, you know, there's a bit of admin that we incur on it in terms of, you know, fulfilling the obligations under that contract.

All right, next question. You've reduced your production gardens for Coonrad for 2026 by about 1,000 tonnes of copper per annum. What kind of a drop off in production are you modelling for the rest of this decade?

up to 2030 and thereafter from 2030 to 2034 what can we reasonably expect kumar to produce in its last few years of life we don't give production guidance beyond the year and partly at kumar because it is um we learn every year as it goes to how these ducks are going to perform but what you're right in pointing out is that there has been a reduction in the uh in the slide, which means that a lot of the dumps that we are leaching and the cells that we're leaching are moving towards the more mature side of that curve. So you can expect production to drop down, and I think I mentioned the other key number there was that we originally forecast around 280,000 tonnes, or 270,000 tonnes, sorry, of copper that was recoverable from the dumps, and we had 178,000 now, but I also said that the production so far has actually exceeded expectations, and the theoretical leach curves are actually underestimating what the recoveries are and what we've achieved. So a little bit of a woolly answer, I'm sorry, but we can't give much guidance beyond the end of the year. But again, you know, this is a highly profitable asset that we'll be producing to 2034, and the expectation, given what I showed you, is that there is an opportunity to extend that production beyond 2034, but that's going to take a study on our side. We'll have to submit that study to the authorities to extend the license, as you would anywhere in any jurisdiction, and that would also be an associated environmental study as well. So quite a lot of work to do in order to do that, but it's certainly something we think is worth doing.

Right. Next question. Having missed the boat on acquiring additional resources, does the board favour a takeover of the company or a managed wind down?

Thanks for the question. I think it's from Neil. Look, as I said, the board is in favour of us growing the business. Now, if somebody came along with a good offer, clearly the board would be obliged to take that seriously and look as whether that would generate more value for shareholders today than continuing down the growth path. So that's, I don't know, potentially on the table. Who knows? I mean, it's not up to us. But I think the wind down of a business and running it for cash, it is something that we've done the maths on. It's another thing that's easier said than done. One thing I would point out, the minute you do that, you end up with all sorts of production issues because the best staff will leave to go somewhere else. Retaining stuff will become expensive and ultimately you'll end up getting to your terminal value probably a lot sooner than you originally forecast. So it's not something that we would elect to do because we think there are more value accretive things to do as a business for our shareholders.

Right, next question is from Mike. Prior to the SASA announcement, and I assume he's referring to the one about the impairment chart in early March, the share price had performed well. How much of this can be attributed to the share buyback and how much to the general critical metals market?

That's a great question from Mike. I think, look I'll say two things about that. I think to answer your second question first, I think has been a lot of positivity around the critical mineral space. And I think, given our metals that we're in and the profit margins that we make, we're clearly going to move up with the market as it rallied from the end of last year through to effectively the onset of the Iran war, which of the impairment with Sasa. Now, the share price did drop in line with the market and a little bit more in response to the Sasa news. If you read the analysts' reports, and I'm not sure everyone on this call has access to those, to be fair, but since the September announcement and the performance of Sasa was effectively laid bare to the market in terms of financials, the analysts and a lot of institutions that follow them effectively mark down SASA already as far as that goes. And this impairment effectively brings the valuation, the book valuation of SASA in line with analysts' expectations already. So it's difficult to unpack whether or not the you know, how much of that was in the market and how much of it wasn't. You can look at our peers. Yes, we underperformed our peers on that particular day. And, you know, so therefore the SaaS news definitely had an impact.

Right. Next question is from Paul. How do you plan to deal with short and long-term share price underperformance at this stage?

Well, Paul, I think the best thing we can do as management is run the business as best we can. And as Louise was saying, we've got to control costs. And, you know, what we've got to do is find reasons for people to buy the shares, you know, and that would entail shorter term, you know, turning the SaaS operation back to, you know, good profitable levels. And I think we're well on the way to doing that. And then also adding to the portfolio and replacing the resources that we need either through that exploration I was talking about or an acquisition.

Next question from Vasily. Previously you considered a growth potential by M&A, the Antler project in the US. As of now, where do you see growth potential? Only through the project development at CamelX and CamelXD in Scotland, or do you still consider M&A as potential focus for your team?

So it's a good question Vasili. I think the answer is yes to both. I think the ANZLA project in the US was a really good template for what we've been trying to do. We've been telling the market for years that that's the kind of asset we would like, that allows us to drive it up the value curve. So we continue to look for those. To answer your second question, I think And growth is probably the key strategic objective of this business right now. But we are expecting that CamelX, CamelX Gear and Aberdeen in Scotland will also deliver on that front over time. It's just a longer timeframe from taking something from greenfields exploration in Kazakhstan, for example, through to cash flow, whereas we could accelerate that by acquiring an asset.

There's a question from Paul here. Do you own the rights to the Kurnad pit itself?

It's great not to know. Kazakh Mis, those of you with long memories will remember Kazakh Mis listed on the land exchange in the early 2000s and then split into Kaz Minerals and Kazakh Mis is still a very large mining company in Kazakhstan. It owns mines and smelters all over the country and the open pit, although it's not operated mine some ore from there for a smelter complex that it owns about 18 kilometres away to the south.

Right, well that's all the questions, although there were a couple of questions here which we believe would be more appropriately addressed to the annual general meeting which is in May, so we would ask the people who have submitted those questions to resubmit those questions to the AGM.

Guys, if I may just jump back in there, thank you for addressing all of those questions that came in for investors this afternoon. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you after the presentation has ended. But Gavin, perhaps before, really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.

Sure, thank you. Well, first of all, thank you to everybody for attending. It's always fun to have to the other feedback they'll be giving us. Really do appreciate your attendance and I'll just leave you with the thoughts that the underlying business remains robust. We've got two producing assets generating a decent amount of cash. That cash is going to allow us to continue with capital allocation which includes investment in the project, investment in exploration, returns to shareholders and will also help finance our growth ambitions. And the priorities on the short term, as I said, are going to be solidifying the implementation of those initiatives at Sasa, turning that into decent profitability and then longer term leveraging of that growth platform we've got into a large showed you in comparison to all of our peers, we are undervalued and I know markets are tricky out there these days, but it does look like a good investment thesis right now for Campbell.

Thank you very much. Perfect, Gavin. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Central Asia Metals PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good evening to you all.