Aeris Resources Ltd

has got most of you on the call will know the company has got the three assets. It's got Triton, Graco, and had the Mount Colin mine, which is now in care maintenance. And the main asset, of course, is Triton, currently forecasting around 21,000 to 25,000 tons of copper. worth gold on top of that and crack out between 40 and 49. We'll talk about each one of these individually as we go through. And then the three projects in the portfolio is the Barbara project, the Jaguar operations and Stockman. When you go to the next slide, we'll see the last quarter, quarter on quarter copper equivalent production is up to 10.7,000 tons. That is mainly on the back of higher production from Triton and Mount Colin, and then offset a little by lower production from Krakow. But that was planned. The cost of our managers come down at a group level to $4.91 per copper equivalent per per pound, and then cash receivables in the quarter slightly up at 33.6. But that, to be very clear, in that number, on top of that, we actually put $14 million additional funding into cash back bonding. So that number would have been significantly higher if it wasn't for requirement to put $10 million specific into the ANZ facility to get an extension. At the operational cash flow level, a significant increase quarter on quarter to $45 million for the quarter. You'll see in slides coming up. It was mainly driven by Triton, and that's just the nature of the Triton mine and the sale of concentrate and timing of cash. There was cash coming in more concentrated sold during the quarter, but the year-to-date numbers will be accurate, although, you know, cash, the movements of working capital quarter on quarter, but a good outcome for the operations at that level. The safety, as always, has been well managed. No lost time injuries for the quarter. You would have seen there was this minor environmental incident due to heavy rains at Krakow. At Krakow, look, everyone knows the gold price is making a big difference. Lower on production for the quarter, but that was planned. We mined lower grade stoves on the quarter, but still low. for the financial year in quarter four, we'll see a improvement again for Krakow. At Triton, they had 4,300 tons of copper at all the same cost of 6.16. It's better than the last quarter, but we are looking at quite a big quarter in quarter four where the open pit now, as of this last week, is actually mining and keeping them all full at a run rate of about 1.8 million tons. So we're expecting a very good quarter fall on the back of those mine tons. And then we'll talk more about it. At Mount Collin, Mount Collin is now finished. So we ended up with 5,500 tons of copper for FY25 was slightly below guidance but then again on the gold side there was significantly more gold in the ore and the gold ended up at the top end of guidance. But what we're now doing with Mount Colin, it's in care and maintenance, and we'll talk a bit more about how we're progressing on those. The rest with the feasibility studies for JAG and Stockman is continuing. And as you would have seen in this last few weeks, we've announced the constellation mineral resource estimate update. That was a significant change. And to us, it's a significant change in the way we look at the business over the next three to four years. And we'll get into the details of that. If you move on to the cash flows, the cash flows, as you can see, they're significant operating cash flows from Triton, good cash flows from Krakow, the last bits coming out of Mount Colin. And then obviously we spent quite a bit of it on capital. One of the big outflows, of course, as I said earlier, was that restricted cash of another $14 million, of which 10 was put into ANZ for the extension of the ANZ facility while we're working on refinancing that facility. Ended up the cash more or less where it was in the last quarter. The year-to-date numbers, there's $135 million of operating cash generated between the operations, quite a bit of money getting back into capital. We are now putting significant capital dollars into the Marwambi pit. That has kicked off in February, and we can see those capital costs coming through and significant money as we move forward will be spent, but that will generate significant cash for us over the next 12 to 18 months. The look at Triton, the performance for Triton, as you can see, quarter on quarter, it's better. The grade is definitely better grades being mined. We can see the impact of a Volca tank in that quarter. And we also see the impact of pulling out of the Marwambi underground mine, which were low grade tons. So it is basically a higher grade quarter for us and an improvement in production and costs for Triton. We've been talking quite a lot about over the last six months about the improvement projects to improve productivity, improve the mining sequence, improve development. And the last quarter, we've seen a significant uplift in both in development rates, with achieving rates we haven't achieved for many, many years. Now that the backfill is up and running for budget, although there was a delay in that backfill because of OEM breakdowns at startup, We're now doing significant amount of paste. And that's all. And the drilling, the diamond drilling is all the things you need to do to advance and get that consistent production from the underground mines. And we can see that now flowing through, especially in the last month or so. But I won't be open pit that has commenced. There was a slight delay in start up because the contractor was struggling to get qualified labour. It is now in place and basically in May month they will mine all the ore which will be processed between May and June. So within the next few weeks we'll have significant stockpiles of ore which will be processed through the plant. And we see May and June where we run at full capacity of over 150,000 tons a month. What we also seen with the Marwambi pit, we originally talked about 1.3 million tons at 1.3%. We're now seeing that as a potential for those tons to go to 1.7, 1.8 million tons at slightly lower grades, because there is quite an opportunity on the lower grade side. So there you can see the pit stage one is basically taking the ore available in a short space, and then we'll do the cutback. So that's all going really well. But one of the big benefits, of course, we talked about a lot. You can already see the work which has been done on the old heapage pads in that photo on the right hand side, where we started to cap them with the waste from the pit. That has all been part of the environmental closure plan. That will save us about $8 million in environmental closure costs, because as we finish the marijuana we put, those heap-leach beds will be covered, and we can finish off the rehabilitation of those old heap-leach beds. The key opportunity which we've announced in the last few weeks was the consolation deposit. We've updated the mineral resource. We've done quite a large drill campaign. The resource is now 7.6 million tons at 2% copper and 0.66 gold. And as you can see, the 150,000 tons of copper and 161,000 ounces of gold. I don't think we always realize the value of that gold in these deposits. And we'll talk a bit more when we talk at the open cut mining as an example. So we see significant increases in both contain copper and gold. And the real upside for us is that open pit resource has increased by 46%. So There's now 4.7 million tons. And what that means is originally our view about this was it's a small open pit and then you go underground. And the new resource update has shown that you can actually have quite a large open pit, which means if you mine 800 to a million tons annually from this open pit mine, you've got an open pit mine running for three or four years. And then you add on the current open pit for Marwambi, which will run 15 to 18 months in itself. So you will have a six year period where you will have a good baseload feed to the Tritton Mill from these mines. And if you go look to the next slide, The specific interventions we're focusing on, there's going to be a three-stage approach to this. There will be a, the oxide literally starts five meters below surface. There's an opportunity for a heap leach of one and a half million tons, which will be a pretty fast process. But the main opportunity, the way I look at it, is you look at that super gene and primary ore in the pit, that starts around 50 meters below surface. There's 3.2 million tons. Now, if you say you mine 800 to a million tons, it's anything between three and four years of open pit mining at grades of two and a half percent. That is where we bring Triton to a 30,000 ton producer worth consolation and evoke a tank and budget gas part of the feed. And then you get underground, it's still open at depth. There's already 2.9 million tons around 2% plus 2.2%. So for us, we can see this mine being used in the Triton processing plant and projects for mining. close to 10 years and we know it's open at depth and it should continue as we move forward so we quite we see this as as a sort of a game changer for us if we can have five to six years of base load at high grades open pit mining it will really trigger a significant uplift for the business On the development plan, so the EIS is large. We're doing a feasibility study to turn the indicated resource to a reserve. And then we will start to look at how do we bring, basically trying to do, you finish off the Marwambi putt and go straight into constellation putt with the same contractor is a timeline we're working on for the start of constellation development. If you look at Krakow, once again, slightly lower quarter. They had two really good quarters, but a lot of the production for this quarter was planned because there was some lower grade stoves, which was always in the plan, which has come out. We had a bit of production losses due to the cyclone, not impacted by rain, but more impacted by people who couldn't get to the mine or couldn't get to work, and we lost a few production shifts from that. Not material, but it did make a difference. One of the projects we're working on to improve the recoveries is a – a secondary cyclone project. So that is busy being commissioned. And that should give us 1% increase in recoveries as we move forward. So for us, really, Krakow generates good cash. It is, as we said now multiple times, the cash we generate from the gold assets is how we develop the copper assets. And that will help to fund the startup of the Marawampi pit. It also will look at how do we fast track and progress on the constellation mining plans. Then you move on to Mount Colin. As I said earlier, Mount Colin is now finished. As you can see there, we produced 5,500 tons. It's slightly below guidance of six to seven, but on the gold side, we produce more gold than what we estimated. So it one offset the other. What the plans are now, we've basically relocated all the buildings and infrastructure off site. We're busy looking at the rehabilitation plans and we'll kick that off. But also as part of the bigger picture, we have decided to divest our North Queensland assets, so the Barbara deposit and all the tenements surrounding it. and we're running a formal process. It's all part of focusing the capital where there's better returns, but also on projects with a longer life as we move forward in the business. On the Jaguar deposit, nothing more to report on the quarterly really other than we have done a lot of work on ventilation and due technical reviews ground control at the restart of the Bentley mine or the turbo deposit. That work has now resulted in a new mine plan and we're now looking at that mine plan specifically around power supply. and a distribution network across the business so that work is still underway and we are also doing quite a bit of work on both base metal and gold exploration opportunities as we said previously it is got gold tenements and gold targets very close to other gold miners in the region So the work is ongoing for JAG. The production plans are being pulled together based on ground control and ventilation. At Stockman, Albion Process, the test work is literally underway, as I said before, trying to finish off what's a cost and capital associated with those. And once we finish that off, we will update the feasibility study with results from the Albion Process test work. At a group level, at a corporate, as we talked before, 33.6 cash and receivables. Receivables is basically Triton Concentrate, which hasn't been sold. We've put another $10 million into cash backing against ANZ facility. That would have put the cash receivables at 43 if we didn't do that. The restricted cash now sits at 28.9. That restricted cash is all cash back bonding facilities on top of the ANZ facility currently in place. Moving on to the The debt side, so I'll just touch on that quickly. We are in the process of finalizing the debt refinancing with the replacing the AZ facility. That is close to being a position where we can talk about it. And also the current debt in place, as you all know or might know, is the $40 million on the Washington South Patterson facility. So I think that sort of summarizes it as we sort of kicked off with two producing assets, three development projects. We really can see the value of exploration opportunities both at Krakow and Triton. And we're still maintaining that copper equivalent guidance between 40 and 48,000 tons copper equivalent for FY25. With that, I don't know if there's any questions happy to take. If you want to put your hand up, we can open it up. Or if you've got a question and you want to put it in the Q&A, we will answer those questions. So there's someone who asked, can you please provide further details on ANZ facility that we paid 10 million in fees? No, it's not 10 million in fees. It was just an offset on the cash backing facility. So the facility was 50. We put in 10 million to offset against that. So it's basically turned into a $40 million guarantee facility. So that 10 million is now cash backed against bonds.

Andre, we have questions from David Coates and Paul Caner.

Yep. Can you open them up?

Paul. Andre. Hey, Paul.

How are you doing?

Good, mate. Hopefully you can hear me all right. Yeah, I can. Yeah, just first one quickly on Triton. I see you sort of kept... guidance unchanged there, which would suggest around sort of 8,000 tons of copper to be produced in the last quarter. I guess throughput will increase with the addition of Murrawambi, but should we expect grades to tick up as well in this last quarter?

Yeah, there's a high-grade zone coming out of the pit, and we're also expecting higher grades coming from a Boca tank as part of the volume mix coming more tons from a Boca tank. But there is a high-grade zone in the pit where we're currently mining, and those tons will... will be on their own pad within the next three or four weeks.

Yeah, that's great. And then I guess, how should we think about the transition from sort of, I guess, the MoWambi open pit to the constellation pit, just rough timing on that?

So the constellation pit will run for about 15 months as of today. And we will basically, as the pit finishes up, because when you get to the bottom, you know, you can't keep all the trucks, those equipment will move straight over there. to uh conservation so the one will start when the one finish up the other one will start um so basically in our view uh by mid next years when you want to be into the constellation open pit mine yeah no that's that's very clear now that's all for me andre thank you very much thanks paul Stefan, would you open?

Hi, Andre, can you hear me?

Yes. Hi, Adam, how are you doing?

Well, thank you. Just had a question on Marurumbi historic heap leach pads and I guess the mechanics of the bonding. You mentioned you'll save about $8 million environmental costs from the rehab of these. Just wondering if you can talk through when you're expecting to receive that cash back and is that an annual readjustment or a quarterly readjustment, any sort of colour you can add to that would be great.

So out of my understanding is that once we have finished off the profiling with the waste and the closure of the pads, you then get someone in to assess it and you can resubmit, basically post that. So within the next 15 months or 12 months, we can resubmit our bonding and get back some of that bonding reduction through the government bonding scheme or the environmental bonds. So you need to prove that you've done the work and then a reassessment will be done and then you can claim your bonds or a reduction in the bonds back.

Okay, that's helpful. And just following on from the bonding, is there any further cash payments now that Mount Colin's been transferred into care and maintenance moving forward?

On Mount Colin, their bonding and the environmental cost is between $1.5 and $2.5 million. So it's not a significant amount. So what we need to do, we need to close the water dams. and close the portal and do a bit of rehab. And then we can claim a reduction of those bonds back. But it's not significant in the bigger scheme of things.

OK. Thank you, Andre.

Thanks, Adam. There's a few more questions we don't see in your hands. I don't know if that's going to work. So we've got a question from Jason. I'm just reading the question. The question is around hedging and the cash flows from Triton and then also just on the Washington saltpats and ANZ facilities. So at this stage, Jason, we don't have any hedges and there is a view currently that Once we refinance ANZ facility and the outcome of those, we might start to look at some gold hedging or hedging some of the gold. But it will all depend where we are at the time. At this stage, we haven't done any purely because we are working on the refinance options for the ANZ facility. And your question around the facilities outside, We are working on those facilities. And as I said earlier, the ANZ facility replacement for the bonding guarantee facility, we're working on that and should come into the market shortly with an update on those. There's currently none of these facilities requiring us to do compulsory edging. But we can do edging is the answer. David Coates asking about permitting a consolation. So David, we've submitted the EIS. We're expecting that to, we're putting a few more amendments in with the road changes. We're expecting the approval of that towards November this year. And once we got that, we can do the final mining lease. And that sort of take that where we can start mining in calendar 26. But it's well underway and well in hand and being submitted. Stefan, I can't see any more raised hands. I don't know if there are. And if there's no more questions from anyone, I think we'll close off on the presentation. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate your attendance and we'll give you a further update when we're ready on the refinancing. Thank you.