Catalyst Metals

Thank you, Alex, and thank you everyone for coming to watch me present today. My name's James Champion de Crespigny, and I'm here to talk to you about Catalyst Metals. Today, we're announcing the, uh, target of two million ounces of reserves has been achieved by Catalyst. That's quite a milestone for our business. Over the last three or four years, we've come from being a small micro-cap explorer to being a, an ASX 200 listed producer. The journey that we've gone to get there has been, uh, quite, quite a significant one for myself and, and our team. We've got a number of them here in the audience today.

What we hope to do in regards to this milestone is, uh, something a little bit different. To talk through the last fifteen or so years of the Catalyst business in the hope of providing a flavor for how we look at the gold mining business, how we look at, uh, Catalyst and, and how we might take it forward from here. But before getting into that, just a few of the high levels. We've got about a half a billion dollar balance sheet, a market cap there of about one and a half billion. We don't have any debt drawn, but do have corporate loans. And as I said, we've reached that two million ounce reserve target that we've been talking about for some time. We've got a resource base of about five odd million ounces, and board and management hold about five percent of that business.

So if you'll humor me for the next, uh, few minutes just to talk through the last fifteen or so years. Hopefully, I'll move through this with pace, and we can get to where the business is at today towards the end. But we do look at Catalyst as a business first and a gold miner second. What we're trying to do is develop a business model that we think provides the lowest risk returns, the best returns that we can to shareholders. We therefore think a gold business needs to be built. It's not about exploring, it's not just about developing assets, but it's about managing risk to deliver the most attractive returns for shareholders.

We can't all, on day one, be born with Escondida or the, uh, uh, gold operations here of Barrick and Newmont or the Super Pit in Australia. You need to build a business. You need to acquire and develop assets and try and add values to those, and there's a different way to do that, that each company has an opinion on. So we hope by giving you this flavor today, we give you a bit of an insight into how we look at some of the challenges and decisions that present themselves to gold miners today.

So our story started, I suppose, back in many years ago, and we, pre 2021, all the way back in about 2010, 2011, we acquired a large land holding immediately north of the famed gold fields of Bendigo. The reason for that was quite simple. Where else in the world could you walk five kilometers away from a twenty-million-ounce gold field and peg all of it for relatively no cost at all? So whatever you may think of the Bendigo gold fields, the proposition was there. Own the gold fields, do it at a cheap, uh, in, in a cheap way, and, uh, and go forward and try and delineate some wonderful deposits. We have had some success there over time, but one thing was certain, that we always knew it was a built scale opportunity, but it did require time and capital. So for the next ten years, we went about trying to deal with those issues. And it was trying to fund exploration from cash flow, not being at the mercy of the market to fund that exploration.

It was in 2021 that we were able to get an opportunity to buy a small gold mine down in s- in Tasmania, in the southeast of Australia, for those that don't know it. The opportunity there was to acquire an asset cheaply and use that cash flow to continue sustaining administrative and exploration costs up in Bendigo. And it was also here that we learned-- we, we cut our teeth in what operations were. We did have a bit of success at increasing gold production and extending that mine life. And we would put some of those skills to work later, perhaps with greater effect at Plutonic. But there's no doubt, smaller mines, as anyone knows, can be more challenging. And so Henty, for us, we always felt it was a stepping stone.

And so as the time went on, we really kn- knew that we needed to grow. We needed to grow much more than just twenty-five, thirty odd thousand ounces of production. And so we got the opportunity to do that in the Western Australian gold fields. Of course, if the opportunity was there for the taking for anyone, it wouldn't have come with any risks. The price would have been higher, and it would have been outside of our control. And so what we saw in Plutonic, that yes, while it did have its risks, we saw an opportunity to consolidate the belt. And it was in that consolidation that we were able to address many of the risks that come with gold mining. It was, in the short term, about pairing those higher grade deposits that existed on the northeast of the belt with latent processing capacity at Plutonic that had some challenges at the time.

So in 2023, we got the opportunity, at least in our mind, in Catalyst's mind, to upgrade the quality of the assets. We then had the challenge on our hands to put our, our head down and work through the operations at Plutonic. We didn't have a large balance sheet at the time, and so it really was pulling together a management team in a short space of time to effect quite an operational turnaround. We had learnt some of those lessons from Tasmania and from Henty, and we saw them coming to the fold here over the course of the financial year of 2024. And gold production increased for us, luckily, about forty-six odd percent.

Gold prices really hadn't taken off by there, but what we did see was a larger vision for Plutonic. In fact, it was a ten-year vision, and we saw the makings of an asset very early on that could change the profile of Catalyst. It could be a belt-scale proposition. Yes, it might take time and capital, but being in Western Australia, they were perhaps shorter than what we faced in Bendigo all those years earlier. So the vision very early on at Catalyst for Plutonic was about a hub-and-spoke model. It was about targeting those very large reserve base of two odd million ounces. And we hoped we could build that mine life out to some ten years. And very g-- very encouragingly for us today and why this presentation is being marked a little bit differently is because that two million ounces ten-year milestone is here being, being achieved.

It does come from many more deposits that haven't been mined in the past. So that central hub had the spokes of those multiple resources, but we always knew that they required drilling and they required development. The future, however, was always very promising. It was a very, very large mineral endowment at Plutonic. It was a fifteen odd million ounce system in the past and with to those resources at the time. So we saw a wonderful long-term opportunity. The challenge was to get through from that to twenty twenty-three position to that longer term, uh, position. We needed to refurbish the hub. We needed to drill out and develop the spokes, as I mentioned, but ultimately, the future was clear.

We then took the next steps of the corporate reset. In order to be able to drill out and refurbish the hub, we did need a corporate reset. We needed to simplify our business, and we did that early last year in March twenty-five by selling Henty. That allowed us to focus on Plutonic with greater intensity. We thought an important acquisition to finish off and round out the consolidation of Plutonic was a neighboring deposit called Old Highway. We then went out into the market quite soon after and raised what we have always felt was a very large sum of money. And on the back of that, put a debt facility that we didn't draw on. It gave what we felt was a fortress balance sheet.

We think gold miners constantly come and go, but the aim of gold mining really is to be able to play the cycles. And if we're no longer dependent on the market, you can see that's a consistent theme in the life of Catalyst that I've brought up in this presentation, is to never be at the mercy of the market, to raise money at an inconvenient time, to be pressured by someone else. It's terribly important to be the makers of your own destiny. So that was really what twenty twenty-five was about, and we didn't wanna let that opportunity go. Obviously, gold prices were rising at the time, but we were able to rest on those wonderful backbone of operations.

And the discoveries that we talked about in the future started to come then thick and fast. We had quite some exploration success that was off-- made off our own balance sheet at Trident, and it was a deposit that over the last three years has contributed significantly to our reserve base. And increasing that some twice, uh, double by, uh, in the resource space and about three or four times in the reserve space has been very encouraging. And it is an area that we think will continue to grow. Today, reserves have only, uh, been done to, to about, uh, half of the resource base, and so there's no doubt more to come from Trident in, in terms of future mine life.

But that wasn't all. It was in Cinnamon that came again, another discovery made there at Cinnamon. You can start to see now with these repeated discoveries taking us to two million ounces, we were starting to see that future that I talked about before. The s-- the reason we pursued the, the belt in the first place was this lack of attention to exploration along it. So Cinnamon has been a new discovery. It was only an open pit, low-grade ore feed, and over the last three years, we've been able to increase that by about five-fold and discover a quite nice high-grade chute that's gonna provide the majority of the base feed load at some three or four grams at forty to fifty thousand ounces per year. For those that know the Plutonic asset, this is really starting to be something very different than what might have been known in the past.

And hence Catalyst came in. Again, we saw what in the past was an opportunity because others neglected to see that longer-term vision. We did need to put our head down. We did need to raise the balance sheet. We did need to drill and have the exploration success, and then we did need to bring these deposits online. It's an incredibly difficult thing to bring deposits online. We think it's probably the hardest thing to do in mining, and some of those in the room have gone about developing deposits. It's without a doubt the highest risk point.

But if we've got an existing operation on which we can fall back on, of which each day other people around us are pulling in the same direction, a deposit that's making money, it's gonna make these satellite deposits easier to do. If we're doing it with a fortress balance sheet, we're never gonna have people sitting there thinking we need to raise money under a pressured situation. So it allows our team to go about their work in a calm, sensible, and of course, a safe manner. And really, that's what the last some twelve and the next twelve months is gonna be about, is about developing out these deposits.

And that ultimately led us to today, where we were able to put the two million ounces on the balance sheet, and we were able to do that really from much higher grade reserves. Very encouragingly for us, we were able to do that around about the hundred, hundred and twenty odd dollars, and that's a reserve ounce. That's quite a competitive rate of replacement after you consider depletion. Again, this is the long-term future of the Plutonic belt that we saw, the vision that we saw back in twenty twenty-three coming to light.

So our hope really going forward, where we are here today, is we've got what we think is a very interesting gold belt in the Western Australian landscape. We've got six deposits here to draw from that make up the two million ounces. We think that is a wonderful risk mitigant for our central two-million-ton processing capacity. We think that allows us to mine many more ore sources and mu- have much more ore than our two-million-ton mill can, can, can swallow. But that therein lies the strategy. Take away the mining risk to make sure you're suffocating or choking that mill with so much ore feed. We continue to explore along the belt, but really the future at the moment is about rehabage- rehabbing in, uh, that infrastructure, refurbishing that old infrastructure, and ramping up production by developing these mines.

We think we have all of the ingredients. All of the components are in place to get to that 200,000 ounce milestone. The situation does evolve. There's no doubt about it. Anyone that's spent any time in gold mining operations knows that the situation involves. But [coughs] over the medium term, while those things will move around, we do think it is inevitable that we will get to that 200,000 ounce milestone. This was guidance that we put out some, uh, this time last year. And again, we still think that this is a very real possibility. But as I was talking about, the development will move around how exactly that unfolds to the 200,000 ounces.

But what is indisputable is that we've got the capital to get there. We've got the capability to get there. We've got the ore sources to get there. And we face things like this, where exploration targets and resources are placed by new discoveries like Cinnamon. We're able to bring on additional high-grade production and re- [coughs] and displace the existing lower grade frame, feed from some of our other deposits. So it is a position where we do think we've got a very, very deliberate strategy over time. It's been a very concerted effort over the last three or four years to try and achieve this vision.

It is in the des- in, in the pursuit, I'm sorry. It is in the pursuit of Catalyst being first a business and then a gold miner. It has taken time to put those foundations in place, but Plutonic is very much becoming a stable pillar today. We have many inorganic growth opportunities that we're bringing online, but in the meantime, we've got a clear strategy for our team to deliver 200,000 ounces over the next two years. Thank you very much. If there are any questions, happy to take them.

Um, yeah. Any questions from the floor? First up? No? Okay. Um, I'll ask one myself. Thank you for highlighting the, uh, the history of, of your project delivery and the integration and, and, and everything you've done. Um, does that sort of motivate you for the future as well, to keep looking for those inorganic opportunities? And I'm, I'm sure shareholders will give you that mandate, you know, knowing the, the success you've had. Is that where some of the, the growth will come from in future?

A huge thing in Western Australia is, um, labor. I think it's terribly difficult to attract the people we want to our business unless you're an exciting proposition. Having this type of organic growth profile, I, I think, is no doubt exciting. We need to have a balance sheet if we're gonna be able to pay and allow people to do what they wanna do. And there's no doubt Catalyst has got each of those tools. So, you know, for us, it's very much about marrying all of those different pieces together to, to get it all to work.

Um, uh, congratulations on the two million ounces reserves, five in resource, and that's, that's plenty. Good, good lives. Uh, is the next step lifting the production? You, you highlight the grade prioritization. Is, is that where your mind is at? Maybe capacity even, thinking about the milling?

Yeah, I, I think there's no doubt we'll get to that 200,000 ounces. How we get there, we now have a choice. We can make sure that we develop these mines appropriately ahead of themselves, make sure that production comes online with lower risk than perhaps you might be if you're forced to do a greenfield development or something like that. That's very much part of that risk proposition of the business model that we think we're taking less risk than perhaps might, might come in, in, in other areas of the industry. So it's very much about leaning on existing operations, very much about leaning on our balance sheet in order to try and lower that overall risk profile to the business.

And you, you, you touched on the risk profile, um, and the, the optionality selectivity that six mines gives you. How do you see sort of your consistency going forward when you hit that, that production level? Um, you know, is that what we should be expecting from Catalyst year in, year out, quarter in, quarter out?

Yeah, I, I mean, those of us that, that sit in these seats and run, uh, gold operations, they're highly volatile, they're highly variable. We could not come up with a different way to get that to be consistent other than choking the mill. And, and so that's really what these six deposits is, is designed to do. We think it will always move around between plus or minus 200. You'll see whenever we refer to it, it's always plus or minus 200. And we think that's all that can be asked of gold miners. When you're mining parts per million, it's impossible to run it like a factory. But you need to therefore have a balance sheet to, to weather the storm and, and, and try and have enough ore sources to mix and match to get that to be as consistent as possible. So while I'm sure we'll fall short some quarters and, and go over others, by and large, we think we've got the ingredients to be as stable as humanly possible.

Uh, last chance for-- Oh, over here.

Uh, thanks, James. I think there's a sentiment in the market that Catalyst is, uh, is acquiti- acquisitive. So I was wondering if you could chat a little bit more about, um, how you think about external opportunities for growth.

Yeah, d-d-definitely anyone that mines finite assets we think must be, uh, acquisitive. Um, yes, we've had some luck in, in being acquisitive, but it is very, very competitive space. We operate amongst a group of peers that are very good at doing what they're doing. You know, we, we do our best to try and see where we might be able to have a competitive advantage and, and I think the way that we try and do that is, is we're trying to play today for tomorrow. So where can we put ourselves into a position that then opens up many other positions? Of course, we've gotta be good enough to then realize those next steps.

But, uh, when you're playing in such a competitive space, uh, you need to try and find a different way in which to create a, a transaction, 'cause there's many people in the industry that, that, that are very good at doing what they're doing. Some of them have had, you know, great success on, on consolidating areas and, and, and that type of theme. You know, we got a bit of luck with the Plutonic consolidation, but it was very, very high risk. We had to recognize that risk, take the risk, and try and execute on it well. Now we're a different business today. Uh, it's a different type of transaction we're looking at. So hopefully we're good enough to play in that space, but boy, it's competitive. [laughs]

Okay. That's great. Thank you very much, James and Catalyst Metals.