Alkane Resources Limited

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to Elkhart Resources' first quarter fiscal year 2027 results conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants on the telephone are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After management's prepared remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. For those on the telephone, To join the question, you have to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone keypad. Participants on the webcast may take your questions on the Q&A feature on the webcast. Now, let me hand the call over to Natalie Chapman, Alkine's Corporate Communication Manager. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. Some housekeeping items to note. Please review today's press release for further details on our results and accompanying presentation for today's call is available for download from the company's website at alcres.com. For those on the webcast, please move through the presentation slides yourself as directed by our presenters. Moving on to slide two. I'll remind everyone that this conference call contains forward-looking information that is based on the company's current expectations, estimates and beliefs. Continuing on to slide three, today's presentation will use terms that are non-IFRS performance measures. Please review Alkane's disclosure materials for the risks associated with the forward-looking information and the use of non-IFRS performance measures. I will also point out that all dollar amounts mentioned on today's call are in Australian dollars unless otherwise stated. Another thing to keep in mind during our presentation is that Alkane's fiscal year ends 30th of June, so that the period ending 30th of September 2026 is our first quarter for fiscal 2027. Please move on to slide four. Today's speakers from Alkane Resources are Nick Earner, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, and James Carter, Chief Financial Officer. I will now hand the call over to Nick Earner. Please go ahead, Nick.

Hi everyone, and thanks for joining us today. This, I think we can all agree, is going to be quite an interesting day to be putting out a quarterly report and so I fully appreciate you all being here to listen and I expect you'll have one eye on Bloomberg as well. So let's get into the presentation. Let me start on slide five by providing some of the highlights of the quarter we've just completed. We've delivered a strong steady state first quarter and we hit our operational targets on the schedule we were after. So this generated nearly 41,000 gold equivalent ounces in the quarter, which is 40,000 ounces of gold and just under 400 tonnes of antimony. Puts us on a pretty clear trajectory to meet our full year fiscal 27 production guidance of 163,177,000 gold equivalent ounces. Across the three operations, our throughput rates met our expectations, our recoveries held steady in line with plan, and our lower than previous grades were successfully balanced by high processing volumes, and this was as we intended. So, driven by our solid operational execution and our disciplined cost control, our three mines generated $102 million in cash flow for the quarter, which consolidates our strong financial foundation. So, with this cash-generating capability, we have a strong balance sheet, and we've ended the quarter with $459 million of cash volume and investments. And as I've talked about, Previously on the last conference call, we're bringing that cash to work. 2027 is a year of positioning Alkane for fiscal growth, for future growth, as we're looking to invest $160 to $190 million of growth capital over this fiscal year, and we spent $37 million of it in the first quarter. And lastly, as we've talked about before, we're rewarding our shareholders who've supported our growth with the Shareholder Returns Programme. at the start of October 26 we paid our inaugural dividend of two cents a share and we announced a share buyback program of up to $50 million. So let's move on to slide six. On a consolidated basis in Q1, we processed nearly 741,000 tonnes of ore and an average gold grade of 1.83 grams per tonne and an average anthony grade of 1.11%. Recoveries of 89.6% gold and 89.1% anthony remained consistent quarter over quarter. I've talked you through The three mines production of just under 41,000 gold equivalent ounces and generally as I said these results met our expectations for the quarter. And as I said it was consistent, it was reliable, it was steady. So we're on track, reiterate, to meet this guidance of both production and cost. And as well as the investment that we have to maintain Our production and expand and maintain cost control. We're also focused heavily on exploration to expand the resources and extend mine life across all of our mines. We're also continuing to de-risk Bode Kaiser, our large copper gold project. And to that end, on all of these plans, we're going to be investing $215 to $255 million collectively on everything.