Ora Banda Mining Limited

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks, Alex, for the introduction. So, here to talk about Ora Banda today, which is a growing gold company based out of Western Australia. So the main thing where we're presenting from an investment case is organic growth. So we're in a process of rapidly expanding the exploration packages across this belt and what has been historically under-drilled for ever and a day. And in doing so, and parallel to that, is right-sizing the infrastructure to be a producer of scale.

So we're located just northwest of Kalgoorlie. So this belt is about 140 kilometers across. And importantly, it's got two major regional shears. So the Zuleika Shear coming through and the Ida Fault. So they're both known to host high-grade mineralization, both underground, big open pits. So they're deep mantle-tapping structures. And despite just being northwest of Kalgoorlie, it's never had really sustained exploration because it's always sat in smaller companies. So we're embarking on that, and over really the last year, we've added about 1.5 million ounces of resources. But it's very early days, and our reserve profile doubled along that way as well.

From a corporate perspective, we're presenting pretty strongly. So from where we have been, we've actually got a really solid board, all the disciplines covered, so that's going really well. Our senior management, which is super important. So everyone's jumped on board there. And most recently put on Steph Prinsloo as COO, bolstering that team. So team capability now is phenomenal, and we've got depth across the company. And in conjunction with that, we're about a three bill market cap, north of two sixty in cash, and then we've got an undrawn $200 mil revolver. So balance sheet is getting pretty strong. And then from a register perspective, well held by institutions, some key shareholders in Hawkspoint and Paradise. Board and management have a meaningful chunk, so they're representing to long-term value, so definitely wanna build the company over long-term value.

And despite FY26 being a standout year for us, really that was just the transition for us as we move forward. So when you're looking at us as a business, where we're going, we've spent the last really four years. So in FY23, it was a small open pit and a centrally located mill. And what that was, was just subscale, struggling to get out of any cash flow, so losing money. We transitioned to an underground, and also fixed up the infrastructure to support that. And organically have grown from 48,000 ounces to 140,000 ounces last year. So we did that, but in the process, we bottlenecked all the infrastructure. So basically, across our whole infrastructure suite, the mill got bottlenecked. We overmined the mill by 600,000 ton. But our camps, our airstrips, our roads, everything started getting overwhelmed.

But importantly, in doing that, we saw the value opportunity to rightsize that infrastructure. So in getting to 140 in FY26, we've brought out a new plan, Drive to 300, which is to get to plus 300,000 ounces in FY29. And really, that transforms the business. And what we'd say is, four years of fixing, then two years of growing to start that journey. It's been a seven-year journey to actually articulate the value, and then we can actually have a stable business. Our costs move from third quartile down to first quartile costs because they get the benefit of scale, and we get the benefit of multiple assets coming through. And then also production obviously coming up. So it's an important part, but it's a heavy CapEx period to achieve that. So we've spent a lot of time getting strength in the balance sheet.

But really the building blocks to deliver the Drive to 300, we're spending about $375 million on a new mill. And of that, $233 million is quarantined to an EPC with GR Engineering, who have already started on site. All the earthworks is done, and then we're working through the concreting at the moment. So that's been on schedule, although early days. And then the non-processing infrastructure is getting worked on as well. So that's a key part. And to give you a feel of really what that adds to the business, we're currently doing 1.2 million ton. That costs us about $75 million a year to run as a business. Adding in the extra 3 million will cost about $84 million to run. So you're spending an extra $9 million to get almost triple the production through there. So that's really where the scale piece comes in. But also recovery points jump up by a few percentage points. So you get the benefit of scale, and you get the benefit of recovery from that perspective.

So that infrastructure is a key piece. The other piece is this other infrastructure which I mentioned, which is airstrips, on-site assay labs, roads getting upgraded, camps getting upgraded. So that supports everything to be a much simpler business, a more scalable model. And the other thing is bringing in two more mines. So I'll talk the mines in a bit, but we've got Riverina as an underground, Sandking as an underground. We've just started Wahi as an underground mine, and we've also got, from a PFS perspective, Round Am as big open pits. So when you're looking at the business, what it comes to is getting the 300,000 ounces from two centralized mills, one doing 1.2, one doing 3 million ton, and four mines feeding that, which is three undergrounds and one big open pit.

And then in parallel to that is the investment piece that we're doing on the geology. So I mentioned at the start, we're a massively underexplored belt. So last year in FY26, we invested $75 million, about 320 kilometers of drilling. Our resources jumped over 1.5 million ounces. Our reserve doubled. Now we're onto these big systems. So what we wanna do is keep drilling them and keep that investment. So while we're right-sizing the business on one track with the capital investment and turning on the new mines, we're also protecting the medium long term with the exploration to push out our reserve and resource position.

And to fund this over the next couple years, the balance sheet's been improving from where it has been. So we finished last financial year with 260 odd in cash plus a $200 mil revolver. But importantly, what we did over this period is we protected the business with put options. So from November, in a month's time, all the way through to June '28, we've got 80% to 85% of our production from the one mil covered at $6,000 Aussie. So every time the gold price dips below that over that period, we can sell at $6,000 Aussie. And really, what we did there was we wanted to protect that investment phase regardless of the commodity market, while it gives us maximum degree of upside. So well-placed from that perspective. While we're building the new mill, we're producing from the old mill, so it's not directly coming down. We're always bringing cashflow in, but also we've taken out the risk of commodity to a significant degree.

And then when you look at the investment in exploration, just to see, the 14 million we did, we did that, found one underground. The 16 found the second one, so Riv, then Sandking. We got our eye and then this 75 brought in that 1.6 million ounces in resources. So now we're onto these big systems. We expect to be able to drill them out to a far greater degree from that perspective.

So moving on to the assets in particular. So one thing we're doing is we're not adding onto the old mill which sits there. So that's the 1.2 million ton. This is a brand-new mill that has been built right beside it. So we're expanding the ROM to be able to take up to three to 500,000 ton of ore, and then the new mill. So there's no tie-in risk. We can actually fully quarantine that workforce. We've got a camp here that covers them, so they can operate in isolation. So we can keep our operations going with minimal impact from the capital projects team, which are doing a great job so far.

Then moving on to the mining side of things. So Sandking, when we started this mine two years ago, we were thinking it'd be a 60,000 ounce a year mine for three years, and now we've been in there. We've got in a double decline instead of single decline. We think it's closer to 90,000 to 100,000 ounces for more years than that. But our resource and reserve position is covered by this box, and then we see this as a big growth area to the north. We've done surface drilling to prove that, and you've got two lode systems going there. So before the end of the year, we'll come in and we'll put a decline off this Palmerston open pit. We'll put drill drives left and right. And what you'll see is starting to just drill lines through this whole ore body. So basically, what we wanna do, like I said earlier, while we're right-sizing, building the infrastructure, we're starting to extend the mine lives on our mines. So Sandking, like I said, gone from 60 to 100, and we think that'll be something we can extend going forward.

Our other current producer at the moment is Riverina. So it's been a really good contributor. We started that one three years ago. We've mined about 250 meters below surface. We've tagged this ore body down to a kilometer deep. Because it's gonna sit in that 50 odd thousand ounce a year contribution, we don't plan on drilling these to an indicated spacing to get to reserve. So this one, we've got a 100,000 ounce reserve. Our current plan is we just keep pushing down, put in some drill drives and convert each year as we go down, because our investment dollars are spent better elsewhere. But it's a good grade, 3.7 grams, a 100,000 ounce reserve, so we can get that visibility and keep that bow wave going forward.

And so they've been the existing mines for the last couple years, ramp them up. And then in order to get to the 300,000 ounces, we're kicking off the Wahi underground. And importantly, what's happening within the business is we currently toll treat for that extra ore that we've mined in FY26. There's about 600,000 ton that went to a toll treat. Going forward, we're gonna stop that towards the end of this year while we build stockpiles ahead of our new mill turning on. So what that does is we stop being a volume play from a processing perspective and we actually start wanting to attract more of the high grade. So we've started Wahi because it's got some known high grade lodes to come into play. And most importantly, this one, Golden Pole, so it's a five gram reserve, 40 odd thousand ounces.

And if we think of the capital intensity, it's really over the next 14 months. So we expect to turn that new mill on by the end of next calendar year. This really starts supporting us from about July, June, July next calendar year. So as you approach the bottom of the J curve, you actually start getting grade through our old mill, the 1.2 million ton, and it means we can increase our ounce production and cash flows to really soften that CapEx burden. So it's a key part of the strategy. But it's also worth noting that it's actually similar to the other assets. It's been very under-drilled. So what we've been doing is we drill this to investment case from a surface perspective, and then we really wanna establish underground infrastructure to get in there. And we've done that previously at Riverina. We've done that at Sandking, and now we're doing that at Wahi.

And what that looks like is we've got an open pit there. We're gonna cut the portal that comes off here, and we'll do the decline to sit in here. Then we'll put a drill drive north and a drill drive south to really open that up. But you've got three major lines of lode to work in, and then we'll get the underground drills doing that. So this is what the Golden Pole plan is there. That's the 40 odd thousand ounces at five grams. So the decline will attack them first. We'll be drilling there. But this is the drill drive, goes left and right here. Importantly, it's very early days in this system, so we did some step-out holes and a couple of these holes, 500 meter step-outs, we hit 1.6 to 65 grams. And then we drilled this one, which is 11.5 at 26, and then 10.3 at 3.4, and they're separated by a little bit of waste. So all totaled, that one drill hole is 27 meters at 13 grams. So it's actually quite a big intercept.

So you've got 500 meters in the middle between there that this decline will give us a drill drive to be able to drill from. So we think this can provide not just bulk tonnes in these areas, but high-grade tonnes coming through, and then it'll be important to get that density from that underground drilling. So exciting to get in there. It's early days. We only cut the portal from early September. But basically, we'll start seeing production from that mid-next year onwards.

Then we move on to our next deposit. I'll just show the overview first. So this is Round Dam. So Waihi sits at the top of that trend, then 20 kilometers south is the whole of the Round Dam trend. But we're focused on a 3.5 kilometer section there at the moment. And this is the area that we started drilling around October last year, and we turned it from 100,000 ounces to 1.3 million. So we see this as scale that we haven't seen at the other deposits yet, although early days, but this is part of a 20-kilometer massive scale system that we're just starting to unlock.

And one of the reasons for that is the previous understanding of the geology from 20 years ago was it was a single lode coming through offset by faults. And so these pits came in and just took the one fault. And what we've since found is it's actually a whole series of lodes that come through. So each pit was mining a slightly different lode, but we've got up to five stacked lodes rather than one. So when we drill that through section, you can see the impact there is you've got these lodes coming through. Previous pits focused on that or that. We've come back and drilled all five, so we get the benefit of the multi-lode system. And not only that, when you break it into the long section, you're getting these high-grade, northerly plunging shoots. So these are about 600 to 800 meters long to give you a feel for scale, and we're seeing them. So as the geology flexes around, we see those high grades form.

So at the moment, we've got 700 odd thousand ounces in a PFS there. We're drilling that out to indicated, to be able to take that to the board around April next year for the FID. And then that'll feed about 2 million ton a year into the upscaled capital processing infrastructure, getting us to that 300,000 ounces.

So in addition to that, from an exploration perspective, if we go back to Riverina, which is where we were up there, a key change from a geological perspective of how we're looking at these from previous iterations is just, I guess, the camp scale perspective. So whilst it was previously looked at as little mines, we look at these as big trends. So this is a 10-kilometer trend where everywhere you drill, you'll hit mineralization in a stacked sequence. And now we're really trying to find the high-grade concentrations. So Riverina was the very start, but we've since been working on Little Gem, which is about a two-kilometer wide window there with stacked lodes, high grades, bulk low grades. And then when you cut that into a section, we're drilling that out. So just to give you a scale, that's 100 meters wide. But we see potential for undergrounds there and also big open pits as well.

But importantly for Little Gem, we haven't brought the MRE out, so we're still waiting for all the assays to come back. That MRE will come out either just before end of the year or early next year. But really, this is a whole growth piece that's outside of the Drive to 300. So once we get the maiden MRE, we can dissect that a little bit more, and we can actually work out how we're gonna approach the next phase of drill out and how it fits into the plan. Because at the moment, the infrastructure will be full with the other assets we're talking about. And it just really highlights, I guess, that organic growth potential of the belt. And then the other thing that highlights it, we've got seven major trends, and they all play the same way that for 100 years, everyone focused on the top 100 meters, despite all the gold coming from down here. So we're just starting to unpack things like the Mullon trend as well. So there'll be a lot of areas, but the bow wave of this is certainly pushing out.

So all in all, where are we at? We're just on the way to really going from an uncomfortable 140,000 ounces to really pushing towards that 300 plus, 300,000 ounce run rate, but in a right-sized infrastructure and upscaled quality of assets to see our unit costs come down and production come up. And I say to people, it looks easy when you whack it on a few pages on a screen. But basically, the building blocks are the old plant keeps running, build a new plant for commissioning, ideally finishing by December next year and commissioning that first half of CY28. Sand King and Reef keep going. Waihi underground's started. We bring the FID for Round Am in April, as I mentioned. And importantly, we start building stockpiles. So by the time we turn on that new mill, we've got big stockpiles to just bring a lot more flexibility into the business, and a lot more consistency in production.

So yeah, we're looking forward to it. We're in a really exciting phase as a business. And what was an 18-month plan is now a 14-month plan, so it comes around very, very quickly. But we're just looking forward to looking internally, delivering on the operations, delivering on the capital and, in that next 14 months, turning it all on and being in a whole different world. So that's Ora Banda. Thank you all for listening. Any questions?

I'll just give you a quick one. Obviously a compelling regional exploration opportunity, extensions at all your mines. As you step up the mill capacity and your production, is there any short-term impetus for pushing out the reserve life, or are you just comfortable where that is, it'll take care of itself?

No, it's a good question. So our focus of that $75 million for FY26 was getting resources onto the books. But more so than that, just working out the scale of the systems. So we could actually go, “Okay, how big can these get?” And we're a long way towards answering the initial phase of that, which means there's a lot more investment to come. But from now on, we'll actually split that exploration res dev, especially like Round Am and Little Jam, it'll be a 50-50 split between resource growth and then reserve conversion within the mine plans that'll follow. So you'll see that strategy change, but ideally, over the next two to three years we will get to north of seven years reserve life, north of 15 years resource life.

Outstanding. Thanks very much, Luke and Ora Banda.

Thanks, Alex. Thanks, everyone.