Earnings call transcript: Aurelia Metals shifts focus to base metals in Q4 2025

Aurelia Metals Limited (AMI) concluded its fourth-quarter earnings call for the fiscal year 2025, highlighting a strategic pivot from gold to base metals. The company’s stock has faced significant pressure, down over 45% in the past year according to InvestingPro data, with the latest session showing a 5% decline to $0.19. Despite market challenges, the company reported a robust cash position and significant progress in its mining projects. InvestingPro analysis indicates the stock may be trading below its Fair Value, presenting a potential opportunity for value investors.

Key Takeaways

• Aurelia Metals is transitioning from gold to a base metals focus, aiming for 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes.
• The company ended the year with a strong cash balance of $110 million.
• Operational costs decreased by 12% from the previous quarter.
• Significant progress in the Federation and Great Cobar projects.

Company Performance

Aurelia Metals demonstrated solid financial health, with a cash balance of $110 million and total liquidity exceeding $145 million. InvestingPro data reveals the company holds more cash than debt on its balance sheet, with a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.42. The company’s operational efficiency improved, as evidenced by a 12% reduction in costs from the prior quarter. The transition to a base metals focus is expected to diversify revenue streams and enhance long-term growth prospects, with InvestingPro forecasting revenue growth of 17.23% for FY2025.

Financial Highlights

• Cash balance: $110 million at year-end
• Cash flow from Peak mine: $96 million
• Growth capital expenditure: just under $72 million
• Total liquidity: over $145 million
• Unsold gold inventory: approximately $3 million

Outlook & Guidance

Aurelia Metals is set to assess the commercial production of the Federation project in July. The company plans to continue exploration at Nimbeji and Federation West, with a focus on achieving 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes. Investments in the Great Cobar and Federation projects remain a priority. InvestingPro subscribers can access detailed analysis of the company’s growth potential, including 8 additional ProTips and comprehensive financial metrics in the Pro Research Report, helping investors make informed decisions about this evolving mining company.

Executive Commentary

Brian Quinn, CEO of Aurelia Metals, stated, "We’ve delivered very strong results in FY ’25," emphasizing the company’s focus on improving margins and strengthening the balance sheet. He also highlighted the ramp-up in exploration opportunities for FY 2026.

Risks and Challenges

• Transition risk: Moving from gold to base metals could present operational challenges.
• Market volatility: Fluctuations in metal prices may impact revenue.
• Labor availability: Ongoing recruitment efforts are crucial to maintaining operations.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the consistency of the Federation ore body geometry, which was confirmed by the company. Discussions also centered around potential changes in metal reporting metrics and the cautious hedging strategy amidst capital expenditures.

Full transcript - Aurelia Metals (AMI) Q4 2025:

Ashley, Conference Moderator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Aurelia Metals Limited June Activities Report. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. Question I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer.

Please go ahead.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Ashley. Good morning, and thanks for joining us for the Aurelia Metals fourth quarter investor update. With me today on the call, I have Martin Cummings, the Chief Financial Officer and Andrew Graham, the Chief Technical and Business Development Officer. Today, I’m very pleased to provide a short summary of the quarter four results, which reflect our continued focus to safely grow our business before handing over to my colleagues to talk through some more information on the slides that we’ve sent here as part of the pack. I will refer to the slides as we move through the presentation today for ease of all the listeners.

Look, the key messages for Aurilion Metals that I would like to highlight is that Aurilion has delivered very strong results in FY ’25, and we’ll talk about the quarter’s day in particular, and especially in line with our guidance metrics that we put out for the start of the year through the end of the year. I’m actually really proud of the work the team’s completed to really place Aurelio in a position where we’ve been able to fund our growth and build our company to create cash and value for our shareholders. I just want to acknowledge the forward looking statements on slide two, and then I’m going to move on to slide three. So let me start by firstly talking about the highlights. But before I do, it’s really important we’ll talk about this in more detail, but ’ve really continued to improve our safety performance in FY 2025 from the previous year.

We’ve achieved guidance across all commodities and cost items for the full financial year, and we’ve delivered our growth portfolio in line with our plans to really focus on achieving 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes in the future. Federation has been ramping up with our meters being a little bit ahead of plan, and our volumes have delivered in line with our targets in FY 2025. Plus, we’ve actually done a lot of work to get internal approvals completed and the preparation work done for Great Cobar in FY ’twenty five the last quarter to be able to kick off in FY ’twenty six as we’re committed to the market. We continue to focus on improving our development performance at peak. And in this quarter, we exceeded 1,000 meters for the quarter.

This is a target we’ve set internally to really ramp up our performance to set ourselves up for success in the future. And importantly, we delivered $110,000,000 of cash balance at the end the year also, and we haven’t drawn any debt while funding our growth plans. So overall, like I said, a really strong year, and it really reaffirms that we, as a team, have committed to executing our short and medium term strategy, which is creating value shareholders and will continue to respond with agility to the evolving market conditions. Across multiple metrics, the teams I just wanna go to slide four for a slide on our guidance. Across the multiple metrics, the team have been successful in achieving guidance.

Some key callouts, obviously, in gold was really strong in quarter three and we hollowed that to the market. And in line with our mining’s planned sequence for the full year, base metals has come home stronger than last quarter, particularly zinc and lead to bring the full year results home.

: Costs were lower on the lower

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: end of guidance for the full year. There’s still a large program of works underway to improve costs, of which we’ve introduced a third party to assist in FY 2026 with improving mining and maintenance costs, which will be followed by admin and other costs in the back end of the year. Teams are really already working on this, but the extra horsepower to bring a third party in will definitely help bring the actual results quicker. And most of our management, as you well appreciate, are very busy just delivering the plans. So this extra horsepower will be assisting them to deliver the improvements.

Growth CapEx was a little bit lower than midpoint, but obviously, some of the development activities that we still required from Federation will fall into sustaining CapEx in FY ’26. But overall, the Federation project will be within the budget approved by the board. The lower spend actually in growth CapEx is also attributable to the fact that in the last quarter, our main focus has been to demobilize the project team, finish the workshop build on-site, and really put our attention just on development meters and infill drilling spend. Otherwise, most of the other activities are now completed, and there’s some work obviously in FY twenty six that we’ve accrued for in the overall budget still to do with the road intersections. Lastly, we do not provide information on this guidance for the all in sustaining costs as we are in a transition as we reported before from a gold sort of measurement to a base metals measurement in the future.

But it’s important, dollars 2,037 per ounce is still a very good story and shows a strong result and actually is very much in line with our FY 2024 result. And considering the inflationary pressures and amount of work we’re doing on-site to build our business, that’s a that’s a good result by the team. But like I said, we still got a long way to go to improve this going forward. I’ll just move on to slide five. Safety and sustainability and environment are very much a a key driver for us.

You’ll notice there’s been a good trend in the right direction to improve our all in sustaining total recordable injury frequency rate and also our recordable environmental incident frequency rate. I’d really like to congratulate the team for the improvements in the trends, the overall rates. This has been a great outcome. The focus for the twelve months and in particular the last quarter, we’ve really been working with our supervisors and leaders to be in the field, including myself and the other executives, which is just paramount to helping ensure that we really have the right focus on safety for our people and care for our people. We’ve placed a large focus over the last quarter on completing risk management, deep dives on high residual risk items on the register, and also had team members working on refreshing our failure risk protocols for the company and rolling them out on a soft launch.

This has been a significant piece of work and sets up the business for the future to be more looking around the corner at what can go wrong, identify the controls that can proactively prevent something happening and minimize the impacts, which provides a much more sustainable and reliable business in the future. This year’s results are particularly important as the trend shows that even though we were closing DARGs at the start of the financial year, and this has its own level of complexity and complications when it comes to people management and and focus. We’ve also been ramping up federation and bringing more people on to to set up, great cobalt project. So a lot of activity happening within Aurelia, and the management’s been really out of focus on making sure people come home, come to work, and go home safely. Let’s move on to slide six.

I want to talk about peak. Obviously, peak productivity improvements still remain a key focus for us. Over the quarter, we’ve seen a nice improvement in development meters from our jumbo fleet. There’s been improvements in availability at the second half of the quarter. We’re working hard on operator recruitment and availability in the second half of the quarter also.

Some of the highlights include record meters in June since we really recommenced our operator, and we achieved actually in the last month three ninety seven meters for the month. There’s still lots of room to improve through getting our utilization of our equipment up to the right sort of number of hours and the rate achieving good rates. But irrespective of the quarter, it still finished at 141 meters per quarter, which was in line with our ramp up profile that we’ve had we discussed in previous quarters. Cost per tonne were $140 a tonne. Still lots of work underway to improve this through operator availability being a core focus.

But we did have some good wins through the quarter with some of the new approaches to mine, reducing dilution tages with some of the stopes improved recovery of around 10%, which also prevents hauling low grade rock to the mill and helps improve the overall mill recoveries also. Speaking of mill recoveries, you’ll also note that we’ve also had some continued good focus and good results on our zinc recovery, which is very important considering as we ramp up ore from federation, obviously zinc is going play a large part of that processing requirement and getting good recoveries means we’re not leaving money on the table. Still a lot of work underway in recoveries, and the team’s doing a great job on that. The mills continue to perform well, and this is important going forward as we continue now pushing the mill to ramp up to full capacity in FY twenty twenty six. Obviously, we’ll have the volumes out of the Peak South mine and the New Cobar side of the mine happening, and we’ll also have the Federation tonnes coming into the mill.

So it’s going to be a large amount of work focusing on bringing these volumes into the mill and maximizing output. On a separate note, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve brought a third party in to really accelerate building our systems and processes so we can improve our productivity, through our one operating system, and we’ve put a laser focus on recruiting, all the people we need to ramp up the operations, and really focus on employing people along with our values of the company. I’ll move on to slide seven, Federation. Look, the key message there, development for the year was slightly above budget, which is a good outcome as we continue to ramp up the tonnes associated that we need to develop it for. So we achieved eleven thirty four meters for the quarter.

We introduced a second jumbo into the mine in this last half. It’s still being ramped up. It’s not on full utilization for development. As we sort of open the mine up, it will be on full utilization. Our focus for the quarter has really been highlighted in previous periods, which is really making sure we push the decline down, get the infill drilling ahead of our production areas to understand the ore body better and set up mine to be as efficient and productive as possible.

So really, at this phase, we’ve still been focusing on deep climb meters, infill drilling, you know, in comparison to try and ramp up tonnes faster. This trade off will remain as flexible into FY ’twenty six as we look at as we build the mine and look at the opportunity we have. Key point, production was in line with the plan of 106,000 tonnes for full year, and actually 54,000 of that was actually processed in this last quarter, which is a good outcome. Just on Federation, we did spend 66,400,000.0 for the full year, and that’s in line with our guidance numbers. However, some of the spend from FY ’25 will be spent moved into FY ’26 as sustaining capital.

But like I said, that’s all still within our overall board approved budget that we’ve reported. I’ll just move on to slide eight. The Great Cobar project is underway. So we mentioned last quarter that we were basically kicking off doing the preparation work once we had approval from the board in quarter four of FY twenty five. That’s actually progressed quite well.

We now have a crew as of the July with a jumbo loader and truck all being delivered to site. We’ve been working on establishing the services. A large focus in the three months leading up to July has been recruiting in long winter values as discussed and really looking at how we start Great Cobra on the right foot as an owner operator sort of process. We’ve got obviously just over two kilometers to develop in FY ’twenty six, and our capital we reported in line with our guidance is very much there to be spent to deliver the project. So all on track.

Very exciting opportunity as we sort of get ourselves moving towards tapping into this nice copper and gold in possibly two years. We have the owners team on board for the project, working with the mining team to ensure we progress this development, and we’ll obviously report back on a quarterly basis as the project progresses. But importantly, as I said, the people and the equipment are on the job, and now it’s about getting the job underway in line with the project.

: Look, what I’m going do

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: is I’ll hand over to Andrew, who’s been actively working on the studies for the Peak Plant project, is on slide nine. He’ll cover that and the exploration slide, and then hand it over to Martin for the following slide. Over to you, Andrew.

Andrew Graham, Chief Technical and Business Development Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Brian. Because Brian’s mentioned, we’ll touch firstly on studies and projects. And there’s a photo included there on slide nine of the thickener being constructed in Vietnam. It’s a TechRef thickness with their Delco brand. And and really just important to flag that construction of the thickener, which is critical path to the tailings and water management project for the processing plant is is on target, you know, on schedule, which is good in some areas where we had a schedule, you know, working on the basis so that we will be delivered on time, which which is great for that first project.

The other two studies will go to the board imminently. They’re being completed to the the tertiary ball mill project and also the materials handling project for the plant. As flagged at investor day, but also before, you know, we previously guided that range of 20 to 25,000,000 for those two projects. It’ll come in substantially under that, which is great. And really just highlights the fact that the plant expansion that we’re talking about is really very, very capital efficient using all the latent capacity that we already have within that excellent peak processing plant.

A key milestone for us for the quarter was the permit application has been made to the Kopar Shire Council to take that plant capacity up to 1,200,000 tons. Now we don’t expect there to be any issues in in that permit. It’s a very fairly low touch kind of expansion. It’s all within the footprint that’s already permitted with a few as we’ve touched on previously, a few very targeted pieces of equipment. So great that that’s in process now formally with the with the Shire Council, who is our permitting authority.

Flipping over the page then into slide 10 just on exploration. And in reality, I I probably could have led with any one of a number of photos in this one, and I actually think of Todd Bigilvray, our exploration group manager, who who made the comment to me previously that we’ve had a very good quarter, and we certainly have. Two releases have gone out to the market, which you will have seen, both in relation to Nimbeji District. One highlighting some federation west drilling particularly, and and also then highlighting Nimbeji drilling itself. So the photo I ended up running with in the pack here is is that of Nimaji.

This is some of the the drilling we were doing at Nimaji Main. It’s very, very good copper mineralization, which you’ll see in the photo, but also in the intercept. It’s listed on there, you know, five odd meters at at 3% copper. Excellent in anyone’s language. But also importantly, further down that same hole, substantial lead and zinc, you know, combined in excess of 15% lead plus zinc.

So getting some very, very good results there for Nimaji. We also, through the quarter, got the results back from a downhole electromagnetic survey that we did on that Nimaji Main area, which has given us some very interesting targets to follow-up. At the moment, as I speak, we’ve got drill rigs working at Nimaji North, which is several 100 meters further north than the drilling I was just talking about. We’ll continue to drill there for the next little while, and then the intent is to move the surface rig back down to Nimaji Main and test some of those deeper targets. Because I mentioned, could have equally showcased Federation West, Some very, very strong results through the quarter there.

We’ve actually taken the rig off FedWest at the end of the quarter. The second rig there working at Imogene before it goes to peak. But and part of the reason we’ve done that is really to allow the geology team there at Federation to think a bit about what the drilling means that we’re seeing and and plan the program for FY ’26. That’s all I’ve covered this morning. I’ll just throw over now to Martin to talk about the balance sheet.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Andrew. So turning to slide 11. And as you know, we’ve pre released our cash, but we finished with with around $110,000,000 for the year. Our loan note this quarter did amortize slightly down to US23.6 million dollars but that really with our cash results in total liquidity now of over 145,000,000 So we’re well set up to execute on these growth projects. The peak mine cash flow was lower this quarter at £14,000,000 with a higher base metal sales, but lower gold sales.

And as Brian mentioned, that was driven by our production mix. But pleasingly, costs were down 12% from the prior quarter, but we did have some higher sustaining capital for capital development in the South Mine, and we did make some of those maintenance investments in overhauling our mining fleet. But I guess it’s really important to sit back and look at the fantastic year that Peak had. It generated $96,000,000 of cash flow. Our growth capital, as Brian said, was lower at 15.2 with 10.8 for Federation.

The commencement of our investment in Great Cobar was $4,300,000 and $100,000 for Andrew’s expansion studies. So that took our growth capital for the year to just under $72,000,000 And as you know, we guided 70,000,000 to $80,000,000 for the year. Brian also mentioned that the project team is now demobilized with only minor surface works left to complete at site and our road intersection upgrades. And Andrew just touched on exploration. Their spend was a little bit lower this quarter at 3.8, but the overall spend for the year was right on the midpoint of guidance.

Corporate costs were lower this quarter, and we also did receive some proceeds from the sale of some biodiversity credits. So that resulted in the waterfall of a net inflow of $1,000,000 across those two items. And the other item in there is a favorable working capital movement of around $11,600,000 Around $8,800,000 of that was due to the timing of some year end supply payments, which will unwind this quarter. We don’t report finished goods in this chart, but it’s worth noting that we had around $3,000,000 of unsold gold on hand at the end of the quarter. And we also had some concentrate produced that we weren’t able to transport and get sales away by thirty June.

So all in all across that, there shouldn’t be any major impacts in the coming quarters. Our financing cash flows include some more cash backing with $3,800,000 for Nimaji, and that does take our restricted cash balance now to around $18,000,000 I talked about this in the Investor Day, but I am looking at refinancing our performance bond facility this financial year, and that should enable that cash to be returned to us. And finally, our financing cash flows do include some of the leasing for the Great Cobar equipment. So in summary, our operating performance this year has enabled us to deliver all of our guidance metrics, and we finished the year with an incredibly strong balance sheet. Thanks for your time.

I’ll hand it back to you, Brian.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Andrew. Look, just on the last slide, our focus remains very much on improving our margins, providing cash and strength in the balance sheet and growing our business portfolio in the copper and base metal space as we’ve sort of highlighted in line with our strategy. But to be clear, our priorities don’t seem to change much quarter on quarter. We’ll continue to ensure our people come to work and go home safely every day.

And as you’re seeing, we’re making some good inroads there, but, you know, every day is a new day. We don’t wanna be complacent. We need to work hard at making sure that continues on, especially as we’ve got a lot of project work and a lot of new people joining the company. There is a laser focus on cash management for the growth journey, and we’ve proven we can generate cash to fund our growth in FY ’25, and we’ll continue to have plans in place to improve our cash. Federation ramp up and understanding the geology as we progress is important for our business, especially as we want to ramp up to our full capacity over the coming periods.

Great Cobar will be the same focus as we have for Federation. We’ll basically be managing that project and all the contingency allowances very tightly and actively looking for opportunities to improve the cost of the project as we did for Federation. We’re ramping up our focus on exploration opportunities in FY 2026. We’re keen to build our portfolio of organic options in Australia that will feed the future peak expansion that we’re working on and also look at what options we have for restart in medium term. Lastly, and most importantly, we’re spending a lot of time looking to how to ensure our people have a good employee value proposition, relevant development and training.

And we’re recently looking at all of those things in more detail and changed our, actually, bonus system to be quarterly focused instead of annual focused for for the workforce. Importantly, as I described earlier, it’s all about having the right people with the right mindset to live our values and and deliver the performance we need for this business, and it will really make a difference for the company.

: So with that as it is, I’ll hand it back

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: to you, Ash, to move into questions from any of the people online, and then I’ll wrap up after that. Thanks, Ashley.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press 2. If you’re on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question today comes from Adam Baker with Macquarie.

Please go ahead.

: Good morning, Brian and team. Just firstly, just didn’t see any commentary about Federation entering commercial production on the July 1. Just checking if this has still occurred.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Hi, Adam. Look, yeah, that’s something we will assess. I think we were saying we made the assumption in our outlook that we would be commercial from January. So as we step through towards the end of the month, we’ll make that first assessment then. But the mine’s ramping up in line with the plan.

: Okay. Thank you. And secondly, just good to see the uptick in zinc recoveries at 83%. Just wondering the drivers behind this, whether it’s just purely the high grade that zinc ore going through the mill? Or has there been any optimizations to the flow sheet?

And second to this, do you think you’ll be able to maintain these rates of recovery moving forward now that Federation is going to form part of the processing mix?

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yes. Good question. Look, I think we do have good grades coming through better grades coming through this quarter of zinc and lead coming out of the mines. We actually have worked actually recently on the filter press. It fills the back of the plant to improve also the throughput at the back end.

So don’t see why, we can’t continue to, achieve the recoveries, if not, improve the recoveries as we sort of unlock this latent capacity we actually have in the plant. Obviously, the work Andrew has been doing on the optimization of the plant, we’ll we’ll continue to look at all the aspects of how we do it. But it’s also important that, you know, if we can minimize dilution coming from the mines and and make sure we’re we’re bringing the right ore to the mine, feeding it through the mill, that’s gonna make a big difference as well. Was there anything you wanna add to that, Andrew, at all?

Andrew Graham, Chief Technical and Business Development Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. Adam, I’ll just flag I I think the team’s been making better use of the regrind, which has been good. And the and the other bit is going to come, which Brian just touched on, Once the water management project comes through, which will be in the second half of the financial year, we should see an uptick in recovery just from getting cyanide water out of flotation, which is depressing, you know, recoveries a little bit. So, yeah, I can’t see any reason why it won’t continue. Certainly, the federation of the war has processed exactly as we had hoped through the feasibility study, which is awesome.

But then as these other projects start to play through, we should see improvement further.

: Thanks, Dave. I’ll hand it on. Thank you.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: Your next question comes from Daniel Rodden with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

: Good day, guys, and congratulations on the report. Just wanted to I guess, you know, availability or labor availability has kind of been flagged again as a bit of a, I guess, trouble in the quarter. So I understand the complexities of the, you know, operating region, but, like, you know, I guess, what’s you know, can provide a bit of commentary on, you know, I guess, you’re doing around initiatives around availability. You know, I guess Federation has now done you rotating into Great Cobar, but, you know, that might force availability. Is there any kind of updates on improvements there?

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. Good question. So Federation definitely hasn’t been affected by that red path or the contracting partners down there have maintained the labor we need. I’ll just bring it back to peak. So we made some changes in this last quarter.

We’ve moved it to owner operator both on the production drilling and also blast and charge. So effectively, we’ve moved to two out of those two contracts, you know, owner operator for both of those. So recruiting for those roles has been obviously part of the operator availability and and and getting those people on board has been taking a bit longer than we’d hoped, obviously. And, obviously, once people find out in their contracts, they no longer have a role, they don’t hang around for very long. So we had a few gaps pop up in that change management.

Those roles are being recruited for, if not recruited for already. It was just a a period of time in that changeover process in this last quarter. In terms of Great Cobra, last I had reported to me that we had all the roles filled. We had a couple of extra operators starting, I think, last week to fill the last couple of roles. So like I said, it’s gonna be an ongoing, you know, issue in the industry as, you know, people look for higher higher salaries and higher better opportunities where they can earn more money.

But hopefully, with the employee pay proposition roll out we’re doing this month, we’ll be able to settle that down and hopefully provide good outlook for people. As I mentioned, we’ve instigated a quarterly bonus now for the crews, which focuses on safety, meters and tonnages. And that, well, I think, be really encouraging people to to feel they got some control over, you know, how they get a quarterly bonus for their output. So, yep, there was some change. There was some work we did during the quarter, which, was probably caused a few of the operator availabilities from the change management side of things, but I think the the team’s working well to recruit the right people, not just anyone as well, which takes a bit longer, obviously.

: Yep. Yep. Understood. Thank you. And probably just depicting a little bit, but on the trade credit on months next quarter, are you able to, I guess, define what level of unwind you’re expecting into q one twenty six, and is that kind of approaching, like, I guess, a normalized kind of, I guess, working capital change?

You know, you had you had, like, two or three quarters of of working capital build. So I think the expectation is that it probably would you know, was going to unwind in in q one. But just trying to get a sense of, I guess, past that, you know, next quarter is the are we are we at, like, a normalized run rate after that?

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah, Dan. So so as I’ve I’ve said in my notes, probably $8,000,000 of that, you know, you could have expected to be paid this quarter, but wasn’t. We will go into as Great Cobar ramps up and Federation ramps up, you know, in line with our spend outlook. I expect, you know, our asset to trade credit is balanced to probably lift a bit, but counter to that, as I said, we’ve got some unsold product. So I don’t see it, you know, from a cash perspective being significant.

But, yeah, I think ordinarily, maybe a slight increase in working capital just given the high level of spend this year. But but I think around norm normal levels, yeah, where where it’s been tracking, yeah, it it shouldn’t be too huge, I guess, is the answer.

: Yep. Yep. No. Understood. And and final quick one just for me.

I know probably just because you brought it up in in your opening remarks, but I know we spoke in about it historically. But just the, I guess, you know, mix of metals going forward, how are you thinking about changing, I guess, the reporting, you know, going on forward going forward basis? Are you thinking about pivoting away from, you know, gold equivalents, and and what would that change look like?

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. I think we talked about that probably twelve months ago. As you can see, the all in sustaining cost per gold ounces, you know, it’s a bit volatile just given the where there is high grade gold coming through the production and where there isn’t. I think ultimately a base metal per pound metric as we transition towards that 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes milestone that we talked about at the Investor Day, we’ve transitioned to a cost metric that aligned to that production profile. So this obviously and I know your report sort of does it a few different ways.

There’s a few ways we can construct that and how we treat byproducts, but but a copper equivalent metric, you know, per pound is is kind of where my head’s at right now.

: Yep. Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you, guys.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. And probably just the other bit to add, Dan, is is is with all of the all of

: the

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: metals in the denominator that can give you a a smoother kind of profile than than having the swings in five products.

: Yep. Yep. No. Agreed. I appreciate your responses, everyone.

Thank you. I’ll hand it over.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Dan.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: The next question comes from Paul Kaner with Ordmanet. Please go ahead.

Paul Kaner, Analyst, Ordmanet: Yes. Hi, Brian, Martin and Andrew. Thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, just on Federation. Obviously, we got more commentary there on the ore body at the Investor Day.

You’ve changed the mining method there in the the upper levels given given the change in the the ore body knowledge. I I know what you sort of do down deeper is largely predicated on on more drilling, but what’s the what’s the current mining method being assumed at depth, and is this difference versus the the previous feasibility study?

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. Look. Thanks, Paul. Look. The the mining method that the guys have assumed is obviously once we receive the infill drilling information, they’re obviously putting the the shapes around that from a mining profiling point of view, and that’ll be depending on the on the lenses and on the direction and on and on the location.

And they will be sort of, you know, stopes probably similar to what we’re seeing. But like I said, once we have the drilling information and the block models sort of, you know, sort of updated with the result of that, at depth as you called it, we’ll we’ll be able to describe that probably in more detail. But the infill drilling really is defying, you know, like I said, the the upper areas has really helped us to find, you know, the most efficient and also best recovery of high grade ore process. And as we we go down, we’ll obviously wanna continue that. Obviously, we’re very mindful.

We don’t wanna obviously put tonnes out on the road that are low grade that really, you know, obviously cost us money and and affect our recoveries. So the infill drilling will sort of, you know, guide us in terms of how we set those block models up and also look at how we set up the the shapes for for the ore recovery. But right now, the assumption is more of the more of the same based on the information we have for the next two years from the actual ore drilling we’ve done.

Paul Kaner, Analyst, Ordmanet: Yeah. So in so I guess in sort of FY ’28, for example, we’ve we’ve got we’ve got zinc ticking up. You’ve got other commodities ticking up. I guess, what’s the mining method assumed for FY ’28 relative to ’26 and ’27?

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. The the original yeah. Well, the original design had sort of a the the area is getting deeper sort of broadening out. So the original assumptions have been broadening out into in a different, you know, obviously, the bigger bigger bigger lenses. So, obviously, that would assume that we we are gonna get some, obviously, bigger stopes as well in that mining method.

But like I said, the FY twenty eight outlook was kind of a a view of the information we have, which hasn’t been infill drilled or or or in in any more detail than what was in the feasibility study. That’s still the assumption. Once the infill work is done in FY ’26, that’ll form what FY ’28 looks like in more detail. So the assumptions are still the same assumption, Paul. Nothing’s nothing’s changed at this point in time till we get that work done.

Paul Kaner, Analyst, Ordmanet: Yep. No. That’s that’s very clear. Thanks for that, Brian. And then just when when should we expect the updated resource reserve?

And then, I guess, within that, how much, I guess, extensional drilling has been done at at Federation relative to to infill. I guess what I’m trying to get at is just just trying to figure out what if there’s any potential mineral mineral inventory additions or or depletions that sort of come with that that updated resource.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: I guess, so we’ll be releasing our MRAW later in in second quarter of this year. So, obviously, the drilling has been done. We’ve actually now getting all the assays in over the coming months. The block models will be sort of formed up, and then we will obviously be doing the process along the lines of that. Andrew, is there anything you wanna add to that at all from a technical point of view?

Andrew Graham, Chief Technical and Business Development Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. Paul, just the comment about infill or extensional. So within Federation itself, most of the work has been infill. But by default, that’s in some areas become extensional, and then we’ve gone under mineralization that wasn’t previously in the model. So, yeah, whether you can be definitive about saying it’s infill or extensional, really, it’s infill drilling that that’s had some success.

So that will flow through into Emera in October. The we’re looking through that process. We’ll assess what, if any, of Federation West can also come into that inventory as well. So those two bases for Federation are the focus for this year.

Paul Kaner, Analyst, Ordmanet: Yeah. That’s great. Thanks for that extra color there, Andrew. That’s it from me, guys. Thanks.

Thanks, Paul.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: Next question comes from Peter Gormandy with Shaw and Partners. Please go ahead.

Peter Gormandy, Analyst, Shaw and Partners: Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I just have another follow-up from Paul and Adam on Federation. And I’m just wondering if you can confirm what the geometry of the ore body looks like vertically.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Confirm what the geometry yep. Look. I think we’ve we’ve provided information at the Investor Day on the geometry as we’ve seen it so far based on the infill drilling and mapping, etcetera. I’m just not sure if you’re looking for something additional to that or, Andrew, if I missed something in that question.

Peter Gormandy, Analyst, Shaw and Partners: I just wondered if you had any further information on on how that on how that changing shape is looking from underground, or is that

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Oh, okay.

Peter Gormandy, Analyst, Shaw and Partners: In the resource and the reserve update in the

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. So so the the information any additional information, like I said, the the the drilling, we’ve we’ve pounded a lot of meters in in field drilling to really get confidence in our in our numbers, and and, obviously, that that that information is getting assayed and worked on in the coming in the coming months. So I in terms of directional change of the ore body relative to what we’ve described, I don’t have any new information at this point in time. Andrew, do you have anything anything you wanna add to this?

Andrew Graham, Chief Technical and Business Development Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: No. Look. I’ll just reiterate, Peter. I think through the phase, it was modeled as a East Northeast trending mineralization. It was domain that way.

What we’re seeing as we’re getting more detail, that 12 and a half meter space infill is really it’s still that East Northeast trending mineralization. But within that, there’s a a set of effectively sort of North Northeast oriented ore bodies. We’re getting a really good handle on that now through infill. I think you you mentioned a little bit about sort of vertical nature. It’s still exactly as we we’ve modeled, and we’ve got drilling, know, all the way down through the ore body.

So we didn’t expect it to suddenly become flat aligned or or an ugly angle or anything like that. So it’s still kind of near vertical and and, you know, very easy from a mining perspective to be able to stay open.

Peter Gormandy, Analyst, Shaw and Partners: Okay. Yeah. That’s great. Thank you. Thanks for taking the question.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Peter.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: Next question comes Thompson, Private Investor. Please go ahead.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Hi, John.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Hello, John.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: Apologies. We’ll go to your next question. This is from Ashley Chan, a private investor.

Paul Kaner, Analyst, Ordmanet: Hi, Ashley.

Ashley Chan, Private Investor: Hi. Hi, Brian. Thank you very much again. Well done on another report, and thank you for taking my question. I guess I have the the standard question on hedging.

Now that you’re sort of ramping up, you’ve got over a 100,000,000 in cash and expenditure from your investor presentation of about 55 ish million dollars through the year. Are you expecting that you will have will for full year if you’re just in hedge program as you ramp up successfully and have a 100,000,000 cash in the bank that you’ll just let your hedges expire? And then the second question I had was I noticed for this quarter, the only new hedging you did was gold hedging. But when we look at which is now comes almost to 20,000 ounces, which is about more half of the gold production. But I’m just querying about the mix of hedging.

Why are always hedging gold and compared to, say, copper where copper is relatively unhedged? I think you only have 620 metric tons of hedging, 4,000 tons for lead, and 5,000 for zinc, predominantly predominant hedging for gold rather than being weighted equally among gold, zinc, lead and copper as per the production profile for FY ’26.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Hi, Ashley. Martin here. Yes. So I’ll go to the first question. So you’re right.

As we go through the capital spend this year, I am just looking at hedging still as a bit of insurance as we go through this process. So the strategy hasn’t changed from before. We only have hedging on out to June at this stage. But as you’ll know from the outlook, we do still have a decent amount of capital to spend in FY 2027. So we constantly look at our hedging levels, we run sensitivities to spot prices, to our internal prices and make an assessment there.

So strategy hasn’t changed, but for now, no hedging on for that period. On the second one, in terms of the relativity, it’s probably just more a point in time when the report was cut. We do look at hedging across the board in base metals and in gold. We also look at hedging lines available. We did do a little bit of hedging 6,000 ounces in the back end of the quarter, and we are still looking at lead, zinc and copper as well just to balance it out because I don’t want to go too heavy on one metal as you pointed out.

So it’s probably just a point in time assessment rather than a change in strategy to target gold.

Ashley Chan, Private Investor: Excellent. Thanks, Martin. Much appreciated.

Martin Cummings, Chief Financial Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Thanks, Ash.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: There are no further questions at this time. I’ll now hand back to mister Quinn for closing remarks.

Brian Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Aurelia Metals Limited: Yeah. Thanks, Ashley, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today, for for the fourth quarter, report back. Just wanna thank our shareholders and employees for their continued support. Obviously, we are in a state where we’re trying to create a business for the future in base metals and obviously taking advantage of using our goal to fund us to get there as well as the base metals. The business has a lot of potential, and this will be delivered through our people and supported in line with our long term growth story, hopefully.

We’ll aim to exceed expectations on generation of value and cash whenever we can, And the entire management team is focused on that as we speak to try and make sure that we set FY twenty six up for success and deliver our plans and the guidance numbers we’ve given the market. So thank you very much for attending, and we look forward to the full year presentation to the market in late August. Appreciate that everyone called in today. Thank you.

Ashley, Conference Moderator: That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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