This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.
Released an updated four-year outlook which included our FY27 guidance. The bottom line of that outlook is over 200% production growth from FY26 levels whilst maintaining sector-leading oil and sustaining costs all the way through. So let me take you through it, noting that I have tried to talk in US dollars here to save you from doing the 70 cent calculation or conversion from Australian dollars. When in Rome, as they say.
As many of you know, our business is built around two high quality hubs, Mount Magnet and Rebecca-Roe. Underpinning both are large long life resources: 14 million ounces of mineral resources and 4.3 million ounces of ore reserves as reported in August. I will note that this resource does include the Edna May resource which we completed the sale of earlier this month and is no longer on the map.
This financial year, FY27 production will be between 205,000 and 225,000 ounces a year at an all-in sustaining cost of US$1,500 and $1,650 an ounce. That continues to put Ramelius in a peer leading cost position as I mentioned. And our four-year outlook takes production to between 560,000 and 610,000 ounces by FY30. Importantly, we expect to do that with an all-in sustaining cost of US$1,470 to $1,680 an ounce, holding our low cost position while the business grows almost threefold.
The Ramelius business is underpinned by scale, growth and margin. It’s also worth mentioning that we have almost US$200 million in listed investments by way of our 10% holding in Benz Mining and our 9.4% holding in Forestania Resources. Ramelius is a high margin tier one producer that is growing strongly with the balance sheet and track record to deliver. We are delivering a 205% increase in production from FY26 through to FY30, and doing it without diluting margin.
Secondly, we will generate significant free cash flow. At gold prices between A$5,500, which is consensus I believe, and A$6,000 an ounce, which is pretty close to spot. By FY30, the business will be generating more than US$1.1 billion of free cash flow per year. And we’ll do this maintaining a leading position on cost. We sit in the first third of the global cost curve, and all of our assets are in Western Australia, a low risk tier one jurisdiction.
Whilst we grow, we’ll continue to generate capital returns. In FY26, we return 65% of our cash flow to shareholders, whilst at the same time funding one of the strongest growth pipelines in the sector. We don’t see these as competing priorities. We’ve shown we can do both. We have the resource quality and is getting better through our exploration program also. Our resource and reserve inventory provides a high grade, long life base to support between 500,000 and 600,000 ounces a year well into the 2030s. And last but not least, shareholder returns. Over the last ten years, we’ve delivered total shareholder returns of around 25% a year using a combination of fully franked dividends and share buybacks.
We have what we believe is a world-class gold portfolio. On the left is the Mount Magnet hub, which will produce more than 200,000 ounces this year. This hub has 157 million tonnes at 1.9 grams for 10 million ounces. The mill currently runs at 2 million tonnes a year, and our focus is upgrading it to 4.3 million tonnes initially, but being capable of going to 5 million tonnes by FY30. When we expect this hub alone to produce between 420,000 and 460,000 ounces.
On the right is Rebecca-Roe, some 150 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie, our greenfields development project. We have a mineral resource of 3 million ounces, and we plan to build a 3.25 million tonne plant. At Rebecca-Roe project, the DFS is complete. Native title agreement has been signed, and we have a final investment decision in place. Rebecca has all of its approvals, both environmental and mining. And we announced today that the environmental Part Five approval for Roe was received well ahead of schedule. So in summary, we expect to have the more routine mining approvals for Roe within six months. And to that point, we are planning more early works this financial year than we previously planned to as we gain increasing confidence in the permitting timeframes. Mill construction at Rebecca is scheduled to start in the December quarter 2027, targeting first gold in the December quarter of 2028.
On this chart, Mount Magnet’s the dark blue and Rebecca-Roe is the lighter colour with all-in sustaining cost, the gold line obviously for combined for both hubs. Mount Magnet grows steadily from a little over 200,000 ounces in FY27 to around 260,000 ounces in FY28 and then 350,000 ounces in FY29. In FY30, as the expanded plant is fully operational and the Never Never underground mine is at full production, Mount Magnet will produce approximately 440,000 ounces at the midpoint. Rebecca-Roe comes in from FY29, contributing 80,000 ounces in its first year and closer to 150,000 ounces in FY30. As you can see, this takes group production to more than 560,000 ounces in FY30.
Three key points to note on this production outlook. Firstly, we’re leveraging existing infrastructure at our primary asset, Mount Magnet, and execution is already underway. Second, the two processing plant builds are sequenced one after the other and not being built at the same time. This reduces execution risk, gives us continuity of production, and in times means we’re not reliant on a single asset. Third, the costs stay disciplined. All-in sustaining costs sit between $1,500 and $1,600 an ounce US in most years, with a temporary lift in FY29 as Rebecca-Roe kicks off with higher strip ratios in that first year. But I will note that in FY29, Mount Magnet continues to operate at an all-in sustaining cost of around US$1,600 at the same time. More ounces at leading all-in sustaining cost levels means more cash generation and more capacity for returns. You will be getting fantastic growth without any erosion of margin at Ramelius.
The believability of any future plan should be confirmed by the ability to deliver historically. As you can see on the left, we have met or beaten production guidance range for the last six years running. When we put a number out there, we don’t do it lightly. We actually do it with the expectation that we will deliver and do it safely, which is one of the core company values. In terms of all-in sustaining cost, it’s a similar story with guidance achieved up until last year just completed, where if you adjust the all-in sustaining cost guidance range to account for the positive situation where we entered commercial production at Dalgaranga three months earlier, we were again within the guidance range.
This chart shows our all-in sustaining cost against the peer group average and also against the US gold price. So between FY23 and FY26, Ramelius averaged an all-in sustaining cost margin of around 50%. Over the outlook period, that is FY27 to FY30, that average rises to approximately 63%, roughly 13 points higher despite cost inflation the whole industry has observed. Based on consensus estimates, our peer group sits, let’s call it around US$2,100. That’s around A$3,000. While Ramelius sits between US$1,500 and $1,780. This is between $320 and $600 an ounce US lower than the peer average in each year. And this is consistent with historical performance.
Ramelius has outperformed peers on all-in sustaining cost margin over time, and we expect to maintain a meaningful margin premium all the way through to FY30. This means we can execute on our growth projects without compromising the quality of the business. It also means that more of every dollar of gold price flows through to cash, which gives us the flexibility both on reinvestment and returns. In short, we’re growing and remaining one of the highest margin producers in the sector while we do it.
This slide demonstrates a key part of our strategy in action, and that is displacing low-grade material in the mill feed with higher grade material discovered from our exploration program. Here, we show what it looks like in practice. The chart compares Mount Magnet’s FY30 mill feed in last October’s five-year plan with last week’s four-year plan. Mill tonnage is consistent in both columns. What has changed is the quality of the feed. Our FY26 exploration success has displaced some 1.3 million tons of low grade with higher grade ore. This means the average head grade has risen from 2.9 grams to 3.4 grams, a 16% uplift. This flows directly through to production. Mount Magnet’s output in FY30 moves from 380,000 to 440,000 ounces as a result, an additional 60,000 ounces. The benefit from our exploration success has only just started, and you can really see this in the mine plan from FY29 onwards.
The next three slides demonstrate the return on our exploration investment in practice at the mines. First, this is Galaxy, great example of our exploration strategy at work. It’s the closest mine to the Mount Magnet mill, only a couple of kilometres away. We’ve significantly extended the mine life after a successful twelve months of drilling with two rigs underground. With these results, we’ve taken the mine life from around three years originally to well beyond FY30, and we also have the potential for additional ounces at Hesperus and also at Perseverance South, which you can’t see on the image. It sits about 250 metres out of the page. Total inventory at Galaxy is now 2 million ounces. Noting of our total resource, we have over 9.2 million tons with grades above 2.5 grams per ton.
It’s important to note here at Satin also that the apparent reduction in strike length is only a drilling anomaly. We expect this strike length to increase as we drill our FY27 program indicated by the green lines. Our exploration targets are 400,000 to 600,000 ounces at Galaxy and 200,000 to 400,000 ounces at Percy South.
At Q, this asset continues to impress us even as an acquisition, not only the extensions that we expected at Break a Day, but also by adding the Lena Underground mine, which we’ll combine into a significant underground operation. Lena Underground was not envisaged last October. Most importantly, the deepest results at Lena, the 19.7 at 5.7 and 9 metres at 12.9, are only 400 metres below surface and suggest that Lena may even be getting better at depth.
Out at Dalgaranga, similar to Galaxy, we had two rigs drilling for most of last year, and they’re continuing to drill today. These have been drilling primarily the Gilbey’s area underneath the Gilbey’s pit. But periodically from time to time, we bring one of those rigs and drill grade control into the Never Never ore body ahead of mining front. Often, we intersect excellent results, too many to read out. But those intercepts on the left-hand side from Never Never do include 3.6 metres at 996 grams per ton and 13 metres at 34 grams per ton. Like everyone else, we cannot wait to mine these deeper areas at Never Never in the next eighteen months. At Gilbey’s, whilst the grades are lower, we have almost 600,000 ounces of resources, and we can see a sizable underground operation developing there, which will be an incremental addition to the main game at Never Never and further evidence of the depth of opportunity across the Mount Magnet hub.
Hayden, I’m not sure how I’m going for time. Just under five minutes. Yeah.
So a key part of the growth story is the Mount Magnet plant. You can see here a schematic of circuit two with circuit one in the bottom right. Effectively, we’re building a new circuit using some of the parts from Dalgaranga. Circuit two is gonna be a 3-million-ton plant running at a coarser grind, similar to what we’re running at Mount Magnet plant now. Circuit one will have a third mill, one SAG and two ball mills. We’ll add a leach thickener, and we’ll also add some residence time through a combined back end, so that we can slow that down and achieve a finer grind to achieve higher recoveries than the 84% we’re currently getting for the Dalgaranga ore. Noting that the 84% is about 3% higher than what test work predicted at the current grind that we run in the Mount Magnet mill.
In the interest of time, I’ll keep moving. This slide outlines the capital spend for the project. PFS estimate was $156 million, including contingency. Our current estimate’s between close to US$200 million. The variance in estimates reflects maturity of engineering and obviously the current market. It’s important to point that the current number is on the back of a signed EPC contract, which is obviously largely lump sum, and that constitutes about 90% of that cost. The other variance in cost here are scope enhancements. We’re building this hub to be operating for fifteen to twenty years. And on the right, total being $240 million to $250 million with another small amount of contingency, which provides a reasonable buffer to completion. Only a week or so ago, we appointed the EPC contractor, and we think that that structure does mitigate any further escalation risk.
Mount Magnet’s scale and quality justifies this investment. To put it in a global context, this chart shows the top twenty primary gold mining projects in Tier One jurisdictions. And you can see the big names on the left, and you see Mount Magnet on the far right. By FY30, Mount Magnet is expected to be within the top ten hubs alongside operations like Tropicana, Fort Knox, and Koty. This is a significant shift in scale and moves Mount Magnet to a position as a globally relevant gold-producing hub. And this is Mount Magnet alone before we add in Rebecca-Roe.
This breaks down the operating free cash flow over the next four years. FY27, up to $140 million at a A$6,000 gold price. 84 million for FY28. The Mount Magnet cash machine really clicks in as the CapEx comes off in FY29 and FY30, over a billion dollars in US in free cash flow in FY30.
This slide shows what’s happening with the quality of the Ramelius portfolio. You wanna be in the top right, longer life, higher returns. And that’s where more of our projects are. Rebecca-Roe sits in the middle of the page as you can see. We’re very confident that we can move that bubble up and to the right over time also.
So just to wrap up, Ramelius returns to shareholders both dividends and buybacks, which position us well within our peer group. We have long been a high margin free cash flow business, and this will only strengthen going forward. Our production growth profile is unmatched in the sector as we continue demonstrating the benefits of our low grade replacement strategy. I think I’ve shown that our exploration strategy is working very well, and we have another 70 million US earmarked for that in FY27. We are a proven, reliable, and consistent operator with a long track record of delivery. And we do sit in the key gold and ASX indices, which gives us the benefit of both scale and liquidity. Thank you.
Perfect timing, Mark. It’s just on the 20 minutes, so no time for questions unfortunately. But thanks very much for presenting again.
