Asante Gold Corporation

Thanks. Okay. Righto. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for having me. My name’s Campbell Baird, and I’m the CEO of Asante Gold. My job today is to present to you the opportunity that is Asante. But first, just wanna tell you a bit about myself and just ease into the story with us. I’m a mining engineer. I’ve had over 36 years of experience in an industry that’s been incredibly good to me.

I’m just gonna jump ahead, and we’ll come back to a few things. I actually started there on this map in St. Ives back in 1993. Since then, I’ve been able to work all around the world in plenty of commodities, seen plenty of things, worked with plenty of people. But gold always very much pulls you back. And I think that’s why it’s important, because I wanna explain to you today why myself and a number of the team or all of this new team in Asante is here because of the opportunities that we see in the Bibiani and Chirano system and corridor, if you will.

If we go back and start talking about Asante, it’s two operating gold mines, the Chirano gold mine and the Bibiani gold mine. It’s in a contiguous 83 kilometers of strike. It’s the first time in over 100 years that that tenement package has been brought back together. It’s only just been brought back together in the past three years. Chirano, great bones, a 3.6-million-ton per annum milling capacity, five underground mines, a number of open pits. Bibiani, one large open pit, a large processing facility. It’s just spent the past ten years on care and maintenance. Bringing something up out of care and maintenance is not really easy.

But this asset base, which is really only just starting to come into production from Asante’s perspective, is why we’re all here. It’s not often that you are given the opportunity to walk in to an asset base of over six and a half million ounces, reserves of 2.8 million ounces, mine life of seven years, and then with a package of land that really everybody is saying is super, super underexplored.

So who is the new team? Myself, mining engineer. Glenn Baldwin, joined three months ago, has moved himself to Accra. Fred Atakama, Dindiock, Juliet, stalwarts of Asante. I have to call out Dindiock in particular, has absolutely stepped up over the past couple of months as interim chief financial officer and is doing a marvelous job in that role at the moment. Also wanna say we’ve got really great supporters in our senior lenders, RMB, GCB, Fidelity, Ecobank, our three local Ghana banks, and Appian, one of our financiers. Also, Helikon is part of the mezzanine finance. And there’s also a number of our board, Malik Isa, executive chairman, and then board advisors, Kevin Tomlinson, Michele Masulio. Look, it’s a pretty big team, but it’s a very, very experienced team. And those guys, ladies and gentlemen, are all here because of the opportunity that we see here in the Chirano-Bibiani corridor.

A little bit about Ghana. We’re located in Ghana. Gold is Ghana’s largest production source, 17% of its GDP. It’s Africa’s largest producer of gold. It’s a really great and easy place to get to. You land in Accra, and then our mine is about a 30-minute flight from Accra up to Kumasi and then a two-hour drive. So, like most assets these days, the world is getting smaller and smaller.

But why am I here, and why are we here? I think this is my favorite map picture. When I wandered down to Ghana to have a look at Asante in February, was asked to go and have a look, this is, I guess, what kept drawing my attention. The guys have actually got a couple of these up on the big wall in one of the best mine planning offices I’ve ever seen down at Chirano. Five underground mines, plus an older underground mine. Akwaaba was their first mine, started in 2005. Today we’re mining in Suro, Pobasi, Obra, and also across there at Akoti, south and north.

We just released a new PEA or 43-101 a couple of months ago, added about three years of mine life to it. That three years of mine life was generated from an exploration program just on six months at the end of 2025. We continue to explore. We continue to explore on the surface. We continue to explore underground. And one of the, I guess, just to zoom in, is this area between Obra and Suro. While I won’t say that it’s going to join, you can see that as we start to drill in between these two structures, you really are starting to see some really quite interesting mineralization coming together. And also, if I were to come back to that one, we’re not down there into these high-grade zones yet. We’re still up quite high.

We see Chirano as a real productivity opportunity as well. We have a lot of equipment. We’re not as productive or as efficient as we would like. One of the things that myself and Glenn would like to think that we’re gonna be bringing to this business is the ability to really lift the productivity of our underground workforce and really start driving these declines down as quickly as we can, down into these higher-grade areas, and really start to develop some pretty interesting production flows over the next couple of years.

You can also see at Serero there and Obra, open pits. It’s a very interesting dynamic at Chirano. Chirano is an underground operation. It’s bone started as an underground place. But the open pits, as we’ve seen the gold price increase, the open pit production becomes something that’s really quite desirable. And then from a production profile point of view, you always wanna have that sustaining level of open pit production to supplement your hard rock underground production.

And a great example is Koliwa over here. You can see it’s quite a small little pimple, if you will, in this 15 kilometers of strike. We opened that up in March this year with about a three-month mine life. Just a little bit of an oxide base, just a feed of 10,000, 15,000 tons a month. Three months later, we drilled it out again, did further grade control. There’s another three months. So we keep on going. One of the things we’ve started to ask the team is not just look there on that little pimple, but what can you do stepping out to the left, to the north and the south? We’re now starting to do a couple of hundred meters of step out. We’re starting to take that from 300 meters worth of mineralized zone out to about 1,000 meters worth of a mineralized zone.

The same’s going on in Mamum now. And some of these pronunciations are quite challenging for us Australians. But Mamum now is quite a shallow open pit resource at the moment. It’s being mined with very small equipment. We’ve been asking the team to just start stepping out. Don’t just step out 15 meters or 25 meters. Step out 200 meters. And what do you know? 200 meters, 200 meters, there’s extensions going on and going on.

So our challenge as engineers and professionals is to start looking at this from the perspective of: we’ve got a $4,000 gold price, we’ve got this massive resource base. We are not mining it as efficiently as we can be with the right size gear. So our challenge over the next six to twelve months is to be pulling back and starting to work out how we get into this from an underground and an open pit point of view with more efficient gear, with more efficient size mining. And what’s that going to do from our production profile and our cost base. That’s Chirano.

Bibiani, look, Bibiani’s been around for a long, long time. Its short life history has been with a group called Noble at the end of the last gold boom, around 2010, 2011. Then acquired with Resolute, who always wanted to bring it into production, but were never able to because they were distracted with a number of other operations. And then Asante. In January, we had quite a large pit wall failure coming down into the south of the pit, covering over all of the ore that they’d been working on their production profile for 2026. And I have to say to the team that while all of 2026’s ore pretty much was covered by waste, and we’re still working through that and trying to remove all of that, that’ll finally, we think, be cleared around November. The team has actually met their ore delivery schedule all through this year. Not obviously in the spatial compliance that we’d actually like it to have been met, but they have been able to deliver their ore schedule.

Before I move to the next slide, you’ll also see there a lot of underground development there set out. You can see both the voids, the old historical voids, and a current plan for a future underground mine. One of the things, we had been working towards starting that underground mine right now. Three portals going in, one at the north, one at the south, and then this Greg Hunter decline coming in at the center.

Some of the work that we’re starting to do, and I guess I’ve had my feet under the desk now for about five months. Glenn’s had his feet under the desk now for about three months. And then with the support of some of the board advisors, we’ve been getting the time and the air space now to start thinking about the bigger picture at Bibiani, but also at Chirano. But I think this is a really, really interesting big picture thinking page for us. We can go underground, and there will be an underground there one day. But three declines going down is $90 million, $100 million, $150 million next year of capital that we probably don’t need to spend.

Because as we start to look further to the north, through cut five into that area there, then out into cut six, rather than being down in the bottom of a pit or trying to go underground, we’re actually finding a significant amount of oxide resources there. Yeah, it’s all at about one gram, but oxide resources have a much better recovery profile through our Bibiani mill. And it starts to de-risk us coming down into the bottom of the main pit where, yes, there is much higher grade. But if we’re making that 70% to 80% of our production profile, trying to do a rapid vertical rate of advance downwards through a lot of these underground voids, that’s gonna be challenging for us.

So if we can just move that to being about 30% of our production profile going forward, start to bring our operations back out of the bottom of the pit up onto the surface, I think you’re gonna see a much, much longer open pit life, and we can defer the underground for a number of years to come. There will be an underground mine there, and this operation will be mining at the Bibiani main zone for many, many, many decades to come. I’m very, very confident of that. The team’s been doing quite a significant amount of drilling at depth, and they’re getting great results as they go deeper and deeper. So there is continuity of that ore body.

But these gray zones that you can see right up at the top, they’re a lack of drilling. They’re not, “We didn’t think there was anything there.” They’re just a lack of drilling. Look, just five days ago, once we started to work these things out, there’s now two RC rigs sitting there in cut five and in and around and starting to move, starting to drill that and starting to try and fill in some of those gaps.

Russell Pit was one of the reasons we were able to meet our ore delivery schedule this year. That’s now finished. There is some good underground potential there. We don’t have a great picture to show them together, but it’s actually just a little bit over off the page to the south. It’s probably about 300 meters. There’s a road, and then you have Russell Pit. So when we do go underground, it’s probably something that, as well as going down for main pit, you might also go out to the Russell Pit. But again, that’s something for the future and the opportunities that are here.

And the last thing, we don’t make enough noise about one of the most amazing things that this company has pulled off over the past twelve months. This is the resettlement, the Bibiani Resettlement Action Plan. In the past twelve months, we’ve spent US$50 million. We’ve built 325 houses, 34 schools, electricity, water. We’ve put in all of those roads. We’ve put in the sewerage. The school’s up and functioning. We’re driving people to and from schools. Where they’re all coming from is there’s an old historical town wrapped around the southern end of Bibiani Pit. We’re moving all of those people, so we can do that final pit wall cutback at Bibiani.

But this is an absolutely extraordinary story. 325 houses in twelve months, and that’s just stage one. We still have stage two and stage three to go. So it’s quite an undersold development by us here at Bibiani. We’re moving several thousand people right now into this township as we speak. So yeah, something that Asante is super proud of, and we’ve achieved not just digging a hole. We’ve been building a few houses at the same time.

So look, that’s us. That’s Asante. Got a couple of minutes, so happy to take questions. There’s a number of us here. Very happy to meet you. I’m here all day tomorrow, as is Glenn and a couple of others. So, yeah, thank you.

Campbell, thank you very much. I think we’ve got a question down there.

Campbell, thank you for the presentation. Could you comment on Ghana’s regulations about using local contractors? There’s been a lot of noise in the investment community.

Yes, I’m not a 100% expert on that, but yes. So open-pit mining must be done by local contractors in Ghana, and that’s just the law. So we work actively with that. We have about four open-pit mining contractors spread across our organization. If you, as a contractor, want to come into Ghana from an underground mining point of view, you have to enter into a 50/50 joint venture. Hence, we don’t have the Western mining contractors in there as much anymore. But we are working with a very experienced local underground mining contractor as well. We’ve just started to give them an opportunity, but we also have a very large owner/operator workforce for our underground operations at Chirano.

Any other questions from the room? Yes.

Could you just address your balance sheet cash position, please?

Look, one of the opportunities that comes with working at Asante is it’s been an extraordinary balance sheet that we’ve been presented with. We’ve got some pretty supportive bankers, and they’ve been working really well with us over the past couple of months, where we’re working through our current balance sheet challenges with them. That balance sheet was set up for a 400,000 to 500,000 ounce per annum production profile. And you will have seen about three months ago when I got my feet under the desk, that was one of the first things we stood up, put our heads up and said, “That’s not a production profile that we support.” So we immediately have been engaging with our bankers and our financiers to work through what that looks like. And that’s gonna be an ongoing process over the next six to twelve months, to work through how we make that better.

I was just gonna ask as a follow-up to that, what’s the current level of production, and how do you see that evolving in the next year or so?

Current level, our current guidance is around 275,000 to 300,000 ounces for 2026. And that’s where we’re aiming to maintain that at the moment. And I think we’ll start to build that into 2027, particularly as you start to see some of the things that we’re seeing. One of the things I’ll flag is we’re all pretty new there. It’s been very much a stabilize and then thrive operation, and we’re still very much in that stabilization phase of just trying to wrap our arms around the whole business and trying to just work out what are the levers that we need to pull in order to really actually get it to start thriving.

Okay, that’s great. Thank you very much, Campbell.

You’re welcome.