Metals Acquisition Limited

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Max Cooper Limited Q4 2024 conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mick McMullen, CEO of MacCooper Limited. Please go ahead.

Thank you and thank you everyone for joining. Obviously it's a busy couple of days for quarterlies in Australia. We'll try and get through this fairly quickly for people.

So there's a presentation online there that people can see that's also been lodged on both the exchange platforms and I'll talk to that. Joining me today is Mornay Engelbrecht, our CFO. And so as we go through the presentation, there's the usual disclaimer and forward-looking statements that people can read. In terms of Q4, where did we land? We landed at 11,320 tonnes of copper at a grade of 4.1% milled. So that brings us in just above the midpoint of guidance that we had for last year. And pleasingly, the grade continues to be good as we continue to work on... dilution control. Morne will talk to the financial shortly but you can also see on that slide that we had a C1 for the quarter of $1.66 US a pound and so that's quite a good result. We saw really only about a month of benefit from the lower exchange rate and so that bodes well for 2025 obviously as the Aussie dollar has fallen significantly. Again liquidity, we had about $213 million US of liquidity at the end of the year. which in Aussie dollars is actually a very large amount of cash for us given our operating costs. We continue to run at about a 47% EBITDA margin and we convert about 74% of that to cash for the year. And we're well on our pathway to our greater than 50,000 tonnes of copper production by 2026. As per the quarterly report we announced, we will typically announce our resource and reserve and any changes to guidance in about the third week of February. And that work is well underway and going through the final external checks. So if we look back on 2024, I think we delivered on all of the things we said we would. We operated the mine safely, all permits in place. We increased the reserve life to plus 10 years. So it's about 11 years based on last year's reserve. We had record copper production. We achieved and beat the midpoint of guidance. We delevered and simplified the balance sheet massively. So at the end of the year, we had net gearing of around about 15%. And again, with the cash flows we're generating, we continue to pay down debt and reduce that. We got started on a bunch of growth projects, mainly the Vent project and the Kuta South Upper. We raised a fair bit of equity on the ASX in two raises. And we've built out our management team so that we're set for the future and stability. We have a clear pathway to get to about 50,000 tonnes internally. Whenever we look at stuff, we're always lining up the best options for shareholders in terms of return of capital and certainty. And right now, the best thing we can do, apart from delivering the balance sheet and reducing our interest burden, which is well in hand, I might add, but is to actually grow organically. We have a lot of opportunities. If we take the midpoint of guidance for next year, it's at about 50,000 tonnes. The midpoint of guidance for this year is about 45,500 tonnes. And for those of you that are quick on the calculator, you'll see that we basically ended Q4 last year at the midpoint of guidance for this year. We continue to optimise the mine. Then obviously we've got the growth projects like the ventilation project, which really does unlock the bottom of the mine. and allows us to try and fill that mill up. We know the mill will run at 80,000 tonnes of copper anguillage. We have run it at that when we had the ore. And in Cutia South Upper, we are well and truly into the development of that now. There's been a big focus on that in the last couple of months of last quarter. And I'm pleased to say that that thing's moving ahead. So we're feeling very confident about this, about actually potentially getting a little bit more than that 50,000 tonnes. because there's a few things like Cutia South Upper, which last year were not in reserve. We've now drilled it out and it will be in reserve, which then allows us to start including it into our production plan. Again, highlights for the quarter. So record production under the MAC ownership, record low C1, total cash cost of about $2.31 a pound. We average just over 12 pounds copper. So again, in anyone's language,