Brightstar Resources Limited

Of Brightstar Resources. Hi, Alex.

Thank you very much, Lawson, and thank you very much to Mining Forum Americas for the opportunity to present the Brightstar story. So at Brightstar Resources, we are an ASX-listed West Australian-focused gold developer, producer, and explorer. We have two key project areas located in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia: our Goldfields Hub and our Sandstone Hub. Across these two project areas, we have just over 5.2 million ounces of resources, located on granted mining leases. The vision for the business is to produce a 200,000 to 300,000 ounce per annum West Australian gold producer, filling that mid-tier scale of producers. We believe that the current portfolio really lends itself to that, and having two hubs, two production centers, producing well over 200,000 ounces is the objective of the business.

At the moment, we are in construction of our brand-new 1.5 million ton per annum carbon and leach processing plant south of Laverton in our Goldfields Hub. That project is set to produce 75,000 ounces per annum over six years. For us, that asset is very much a starting position for what we believe the Goldfields Hub can deliver. We are very focused and committed to ensuring that that mine life extension is real. We have expansion capabilities and optionality with that project, and ideally, we are targeting taking that project itself to something that could sustain more than 100,000 ounces per annum. That Goldfields Hub, even as a starter asset, is still quite cash flow generative. It produces about AUD $1 billion of free cash flow over the six-year life of mine. For us, that opportunity is then to recycle that cash flow and that capital not only through the Goldfields Hub but also across to Sandstone.

Sandstone is the flagship asset in the portfolio, albeit a little bit further back in the development queue. We are targeting the release of a pre-feasibility study for Sandstone in November of this year, ahead of a DFS at the end of next year and targeting to get into production, or sorry, construction, coming to early calendar year 2028. That project, we released quite a material resource upgrade earlier this week. That project sits at just over 3.6 million ounces of resources. Again, all on granted mining leases in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia. This is a great part of the world to build a gold mining business. Both of these assets are located, access, really good infrastructure, roads into nearby towns, on granted mining leases. And we’re really excited about building both of these projects into a genuine mid-tier producer.

Just quickly looking at the corporate snapshot, we’re about an AUD $650 million market cap. We are really well-funded for our aspirations. We had over $122 million of cash at the end of June. We do have an undrawn US $120 million bond. Both those cash and the equity and the debt position there really funds us through the construction of Goldfields into production, as well as funding Sandstone all the way to FID. So that’s through the pre-feasibility study, through the DFS, through drill outs, and getting that project all the way to FID.

Just looking now at Sandstone itself, taking a step back, Brightstar actually acquired three different companies and assets to deliver this portfolio. We really like this part of the opportunity for two key reasons. One, prior to our entry into this district, this area had about seven or eight million ounces of gold in that 100-kilometer radius around Sandstone. Yet in that same radius, there was not one operating mine. There’s no mid-tiers. There’s no majors. There was no operating mines. So you had this significant level of endowment, but no actual mining companies operating. What it was, it was characterized by fragmented junior ownership. We identified that and subsequently acquired one asset out of a company and two companies themselves to deliver this portfolio.

The second reason why we really like this opportunity was because that fragmented ownership really meant that there was a lack of systematic exploration. There was over two million ounces mined across this package. When we acquired this project, it had 2.4 million ounces. It’d be very difficult to understand why a greenstone belt the scale of Sandstone would have four million ounces of endowment in the top 200 meters and have no exploration at depth and for there not to be any upside. So we were very excited and confident with that exploration upside, and ultimately, that’s what we’ve shown. And in a few slides’ time, I’ll show you where.

But as a project, where it stands today, 3.6 million ounces of resources. This is a genuine district-scale opportunity. We own the entirety of the Sandstone greenstone belt, all of the resources on granted mining leases. We have a sealed highway that runs from Lenzer to Mount Magnet through the project area. We have an existing processing plant site that was last run in the early 2000s. Whilst that infrastructure is of no use to us in its own right, the cleared land, the ROM pad, the tailings, the haul roads, the camp, there’s a lot of infrastructure there that we will utilize that gives us a de-risked approach to not only permitting but eventually operations. We know right now we’ve got the critical mass for development here. Therefore, we will take this project towards construction and development as quick as we can. Based on our timelines, that sees us doing a DFS by the end of next year and looking to get into construction early in 2028.

We are now really quite far down the road of looking at the critical mass for development, but also, how big could Sandstone be? And this is where we’re starting to see ourselves today. We know there’s critical mass right now for a project. We’ve spent the last two years doing infill drilling, redoing all the resources, metallurgy, geotech, doing all the technical work really well to de-risk future development. That has taken us the last two years to do. That is now culminating in this pre-feasibility study due in November. What that’s afforded us now is to start to look at exploration. Where are the opportunities for growth? How can we grow this project area? We’ve grown this project over 50% since we acquired it. It was originally 2.4 million ounces. Now it’s 3.6. We are now really setting this platform for material growth.

Just looking here at the Gantt chart for project delivery. We’ve released two resource upgrades this year. As I mentioned, we’re targeting that pre-feasibility study in the December quarter. We see twelve months for the DFS as sufficient to get through towards being able to make a final investment decision in line with getting the project approved, coming to early 2028 to enable construction. We are looking at building a five million tonne per annum processing plant. And we believe that’s gonna support quite a substantial production profile here.

We have now been afforded the opportunity for looking at exploration. Made quite material discovery at depth at a deposit called Two Mile Hill. This is something that’s shaping up as a very material contributor to Sandstone. This was an existing resource. We knew about it when we acquired the asset. We were unashamedly looking at the open pits here and the potential for a modest underground. During our feasibility study approach and our exploration, we started drilling some deeper holes, and Two Mile Hill certainly looks like it’s getting materially better at depth. The scale is blowing out in terms of the width and the strike, and the grade is looking like it’s getting a lot better at depth.

At the bottom, we’re seeing 400 to 500 meters wide in terms of thickness of this mineralized host tonalite unit. You can see there two example drilling results there, 225 meters at three grams, nearly 200 meters at two grams. We are seeing something here that could lend itself to a very large-scale bulk underground mine. The current resource there is 1.45 million ounces at 1.8 grams per tonne. Importantly, it is very much open at depth. We’ve put four holes below it at the moment, and we’ve put out some visuals previously that showed visible gold all through the mineralized tonalite and for a significant depth below the resource.

Importantly and excitingly for us, we are now changing our exploration methodology. We’re now targeting any other potential felsic intrusives in this greenstone belt. We’ve identified up to ten other lookalikes for Two Mile Hill. So whilst this is an extremely material discovery, very important for our project, we are seeing the opportunity for there to be multiples of these. We’ve got instances where there’s the same geophysical signatures. You’ve got historical rab or air core drilling at surface, logged in tonalite with gold in it, and it’s never been drilled below the rab or the air core. That is extremely anomalous. It looks exactly like what Two Mile Hill looks like. We’re now genuinely gonna start targeting other lookalikes for Two Mile Hill.

In this cross-section here, you can see that drill trace on the right-hand side. Each of those gold stars represents logged visible gold occurrences in this particular hole. You can see in that colored block model there, that’s the extent of the resource. We have drilled for 250 meters below this resource. And as you can see, we’re still in the tonalite. We never left the host unit. It’s the same alteration, the same veining, the same mythology, full of visible gold. We are reasonably excited about what that potential is at depth. You can see here that on an ounces per vertical meter basis, because of the geometry of the ore body expanding, because of the grade profile getting better at depth, this is now peaking at 6,000 ounces per vertical meter at depth.

We are very excited about looking to drill some further holes here. We’ve got four holes that have been completed pending assays, and we’re looking to drill another six deep holes plus thousand-meter deep diamond holes before Christmas. And looking to really enable us to have a further resource upgrade here coming into November with the pre-feasibility study. So suffice to say, this is quite a material development for our project. Even outside of Two Mile Hill, this is already looking like a fantastic West Australian gold development opportunity. I would happily contend that this is probably the best gold project in Western Australia that’s coming up for development in the coming years, and we’re on the cusp of making some potentially material discoveries here as well.

Just changing focus now to our Goldfields Project. This is the area of current construction and development. This has been the area where we have been operating for the last few years. For context, we’ve been operating two underground mines in the Laverton district for the last three to four years. Those mines were previously feeding originally Gwalia and then the Mount Morgans Mill, owned by Genesis Minerals. We elected to go down our own development path earlier this year. We put out a pre-feasibility study, sorry, a DFS in January. We subsequently went and funded this project and have now commenced construction. As you can see, it’s going well. It’s about two weeks ahead of schedule at the moment. We are building a genuine, very conventional CIL plant, off-the-shelf technology. Our EPC contractor is GR Engineering. They are the best in this space at building conventional CIL plants.

What we believe we have in this Laverton district is a de-risked pathway to first gold. It’s a simplified business model. We will remain owner-operator with our underground mines. We will partner with a mining contractor for the open pits. All of these mines have been mined before. They’ve been processed before. They’re well understood metallurgically, geologically. All the haul roads are in place. The infrastructure’s there. This is a de-risked asset base. Over the life of mine, about 70% of the production comes from open pits, and each of those open pits runs for anywhere between two to three years. We do see real potential for mine life extension here in amongst each of these deposits. At the moment, we’re only proposing to mine about one-third of our resource. So the opportunity for us is to continue to convert more of our existing resource inventory into mining inventory and ore reserves.

The processing plant that is being constructed is a 1.5 million ton per annum mill. We have embedded some upside optionality and flex here. A lot of the infrastructure we are building is actually already sized to be 2.5 million tons per annum. So we have an expansion upside case here that during operation, we can elect to do this. To effect that upgrade, all we would need to put in is an additional ball mill to complement the SAG mill and two additional tanks in the leaching circuit. That would get us to 2.5 million tons of processing capacity in an area that we believe not only in our portfolio, but broadly is lacking milling infrastructure and would see this project producing over 100,000 ounces per annum.

Just in terms of the Gantt chart for pouring first gold in nine months, we are midway through, as you saw in those photos, the construction process. The Brightstar owners team is working with our power provider to build an LNG power station on site. The bore fields are being established right now, and mining is looking to commence mobilization in December for first mining to commence in January. That would give us about four months of mining prior to commissioning and looking to start commissioning in late May.

The economics themselves stacked up, even though, as I mentioned at the start of this presentation, for us this is very much a starter project. I do not believe that what we’re building here is six years at 75,000 ounces per annum. The opportunity is to really start to build this infrastructure, get the cash flow going and look at mine life extension, look at potential inorganic opportunities. We can look at exploration across our portfolio, and we really see the opportunity that the key asset here is really the milling infrastructure and what we can do in that district. That said, it’s still a very robust project, economically enabled us to get it permitted and funded, producing about $160 million of free cash flow per annum. You can see the NPVs and the IRRs there. Great return on capital, great return on investment even though we truly believe that we can make this project look a lot better than what is being put up there on that screen. The all-in sustaining costs are about AUD $3,000, so giving us ballpark $3,000 margins at spot price.

So where does that put us in terms of our market position? There’s a lot of data on this screen, so I won’t necessarily go through it. But Brightstar genuinely believes that given our portfolio, given that we are nine months away from first production in Goldfields, and that because we’ve got a very material potential development opportunity in Sandstone, the valuation is relatively undemanding. We’re trading about $100 per resource ounce. We are pending quite a material resource upgrade at the end of the year. With our PFS that comes out for Sandstone, we’ll be declaring very substantial reserves. Again, so you’re looking at EV resource, EV per reserve ounce metrics there. We do trade at relatively undemanding valuations.

We believe that our peer groups there, the established emerging peers in Auribanda and Catalyst, are great peers, companies that we look up to, and you can see where they’re trading at from a valuation perspective and where we believe we can start to trend towards. Minerals Two Sixty with their Bullabulling project, they’ve done a fantastic job taking that project from ownership to where it is today. But trading at a really healthy valuation in terms of what’s that as a PNav in terms of their NPV and versus what we believe certainly Sandstone will show is a very comparable asset to what Bullabulling is in terms of mine life, production profile and economics.

We’ve had a demonstrable track record in growing our resource base over the last few years. When I started at Brightstar, the resource base was about 400,000 ounces of resources. We’ve now grown that to over five million. That’s through both M&A and aggressive exploration. You can see that bubble chart on the left, that is West Australian gold developers in terms of resource size and grade. The bubble there reflects the enterprise value. You can see why we believe that Brightstar is undervalued, certainly when you compare it to something like Minerals Two Sixty, based on the size of that bubble. But that’s certainly our aspiration, that the pre-feasibility study, due for release in November, will show a project that is extremely comparable on all metrics.

Where does that put us in terms of our eventual strategy? We genuinely wanna be a 200,000 to 300,000 ounce per annum producer. We believe that both of these project areas supports that aspiration. Where does that put us in terms of the established mid-tiers? It puts us right in the middle of some very substantial companies in terms of market caps and production profile. And for us, that’s that opportunity. That is really what the business has been established for. That’s our aspiration, is to build Goldfields, build Sandstone, and be a 200,000 to 300,000 ounce per annum producer.

So for us, the platform is set there to execute. We’ve got Goldfields in construction. We are very focused on delivering that project on time and on budget. We are equally focused on getting Sandstone all the way through to FRD. Sandstone is a very material project in terms of West Australian gold development assets. We have a pre-feasibility study due in November, which we believe will show a substantial production profile and opportunity. We’ve got a really strong team. We’ve attracted some great talent, largely out of the mid-tier gold producers to come join Brightstar. We believe that our employee value proposition is very unique. Building Goldfields then building Sandstone is a very unique proposition to go build two projects essentially sequentially within two years and take a project from essentially zero production all the way to potentially 200,000 to 300,000 ounces. Because of that, we’ve been able to attract some really strong professionals to join our business, that we believe we’ve got the right talent in the business to execute.

We have aggressive drilling programs in place. This is our aspiration, is to continue to grow this resource base. We’ve spent the last few years consolidating assets, consolidating companies to give us the portfolio that we’ve got today. Now the opportunity is to continue to grow that. We’ve seen that in the recent resource update in Sandstone. We’ve added 1.2 million ounces there, and we’ve barely tried. And by that I mean most of the exploration to date has been infill in nature, confirming the existing resources, improving the quality of the resources. We haven’t really begun trying to grow this project. So that is very exciting for us now, given we’re afforded the opportunity in terms of timelines to start to look at exploration. So exploration and drilling is a key part of our business moving forward, and we believe that there is genuine opportunity for us to start to capture more value as we rerate from being an explorer and a developer into an existing producer. Thank you very much.

Alex, thank you very much. That was fantastic. Unfortunately, we’ve run a little bit over time. I’m gonna have to leave it there and give folks an opportunity to ask you questions maybe on the sidelines.

Fantastic. Thank you, Lawson. Thank you.