Earnings call transcript: Ivanhoe Mines Q3 2025 beats EPS forecast

Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2025, surpassing expectations with an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.02 compared to the forecasted $0.0045, marking a 344.44% surprise. Despite this significant earnings beat, the company’s stock price experienced a decline of 3.19% in after-hours trading, closing at $14.58. Revenue for the quarter reached $129.4 million, slightly above the anticipated $128.95 million.

Key Takeaways

• Ivanhoe Mines reported a significant EPS surprise of 344.44%.
• Revenue slightly exceeded forecasts, reaching $129.4 million.
• Stock price fell by 3.19% in after-hours trading despite earnings beat.
• Kamoa-Kakula operations contributed significantly to EBITDA.
• Future guidance includes increased copper production targets.

Company Performance

Ivanhoe Mines demonstrated strong operational performance in Q3 2025, driven by its Kamoa-Kakula and Kipushi projects. The company reported an adjusted EBITDA of $87 million, with Kamoa-Kakula alone contributing $196 million in EBITDA. The company’s strategic focus on expanding its mining operations and enhancing production efficiency continues to support its competitive position in the mining industry.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $129.4 million, slightly above forecast
• Earnings per share: $0.02, exceeding the forecast by a wide margin
• Kamoa-Kakula revenue: $566 million
• Kipushi quarterly revenue: $129 million
• Cash and cash equivalents: $1 billion

Earnings vs. Forecast

Ivanhoe Mines’ EPS of $0.02 far surpassed the forecast of $0.0045, resulting in a 344.44% surprise. This significant earnings beat highlights the company’s operational efficiency and effective cost management. The revenue of $129.4 million also slightly exceeded expectations, contributing to the positive earnings surprise.

Market Reaction

Despite the positive earnings results, Ivanhoe Mines’ stock price fell by 3.19% in after-hours trading, closing at $14.58. This decline may reflect investor concerns over broader market trends or specific operational challenges facing the company. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $20.77 and a low of $8.76.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Ivanhoe Mines anticipates copper production at Kamoa-Kakula to exceed 550,000 tonnes. The company is also targeting 250,000-300,000 tonnes of zinc production at Kipushi. Guidance for 2026-2027 is expected to be published in early January, with the Platreef Phase Two project slated for Q3-Q4 2027.

Executive Commentary

Robert Friedland, Founder, emphasized the strategic importance of their mining operations, stating, "We have discovered a super monster, very long-lived, ultra important Tier One polymetallic mine." CEO Marna Cloete expressed optimism about the company’s future, saying, "We are on the brink of a new horizon."

Risks and Challenges

• Potential supply chain disruptions affecting production timelines.
• Fluctuations in commodity prices impacting revenue.
• Regulatory changes in key operational regions.
• Execution risks associated with large-scale projects like Platreef Phase Two.
• Macroeconomic pressures that could affect global demand for minerals.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the dewatering progress at Kamoa-Kakula and the company’s strategies for offtake agreements for Platreef concentrates. Executives also provided insights into the rehabilitation efforts underground and the transition strategies for stockpile and production.

Full transcript - Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (IVN) Q3 2025:

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Thanks very much, Operator, and hello everyone. I’d just like to first and foremost thank you all for joining us today. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to Ivanhoe Mines third quarter 2025 financial results conference call. As the operator mentioned, this is Matthew Keevil. I’m the Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. On the line today from Ivanhoe Mines we have Founder and Executive Co-Chair Robert Friedland, President and Chief Executive Officer Marna Cloete, Chief Financial Officer David van Heerden, Chief Operating Officer Mark Farren, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations Alex Pickard, and Executive Vice President, Projects Steve Amos. We will finish today’s event with a question and answer session. You can submit a question using the Q&A box on the webcast as well as through the conference operator via your phone line.

Please contact our investor relations team directly for follow-up questions that are not answered during the call. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that today’s event will contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Details of the forward-looking statements are contained in our October 29th news release as well as on SEDAR+ and at www.ivanhoemines.com. It is now my pleasure to introduce Ivanhoe Mines Founder and Executive Co-Chair Robert Friedland for some opening remarks. Robert, please go ahead.

Robert Friedland, Founder and Executive Co-Chair, Ivanhoe Mines: Thank you to everyone, all of our stakeholders all over the world. I’m addressing you from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where we’ve just concluded the Future Investment Initiative that occurs here annually in Saudi Arabia. It has become the premier investment destination in the world for people that are interested in the materials that comprise our supply chain and countries’ national security as pertains to critical raw materials. It’s particularly appropriate that we welcome the Qatar Investment Authority with their $500 million equity investment in Ivanhoe Mines as a leading institutional shareholder in this country with superb relations throughout the Islamic world, which I believe is the least explored part of this planet’s mineral endowment. We welcome Qatar Investment Authority as a long-term shareholder and we’ll be talking more about our excellent relations and future together in the near future.

It’s also a very good day today to have to tell you that yesterday we fed the first ore to the concentrator at what will become the largest precious metals development in our industry. It was in the 1980s that we began working in Limpopo Province in the northern part of South Africa to find a giant deposit on the northern limb of the Bushveld, which is quite different than the rest of the Bushveld. We have discovered a super monster, very long-lived, ultra important Tier One polymetallic mine. The ore was fed to the phase one concentrator yesterday, opening up at least a 100-year era of a very important developer of gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium, nickel, and copper. Rhodium is one of the most strategic of all metals.

Platinum and palladium are also used in data centers and are critical to every server in almost every data center in the world. With that, I welcome all of you. I want to thank all of our people that have been working on our recovery program from the seismic event we experienced in May. We’re delighted with our progress and the efforts of our people. With that, I’ll turn this over to Marna to start telling you the story. Thank you very much.

Marna Cloete, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: Thank you, Robert, for your introductory comments and good morning. Good evening, everyone, and thanks for joining us on our quarterly call. It’s indeed quite exciting times here in South Africa. We’re preparing for the G20 summit later this month, and I think we couldn’t have timed the startup of Platreef better to coincide with this important event in South Africa. You are seeing a picture of our management team there in front of a discharge and settling pond that’s part of our stage two dewatering. I’ll quickly talk you through our quarter three turnaround strategy and some highlights at Kipushi. We’re really on the brink of a new horizon. We had New Horizons as a tagline associated with us before, and I’m bringing it back again today because we’re quite excited about our plans coming together at Kamoa-Kakula. If we can turn over to the next slide.

The third quarter was always expected to be a slightly softer quarter, but we were reflecting on what we’ve achieved physically on site, and if we take the team and the massive effort that went into our dewatering, it’s going exceptionally well. The pumps that we flew in from China made a difference. We’re seeing a record speed of building projects, and Mark will take you through that in the presentation a bit later today. The team has really pulled off a significant effort to get the mine rewatered as quick as possible. We’ve got a team of technical experts. We brought them together. We’re busy with our new life of mine plan that we plan to release sort of in the first quarter of next year. We currently anticipate to bring Kamoa-Kakula back to copper production of over 550,000 tonnes in the future.

We were anticipating to be in a position to publish our guidance for 2026 and 2027 a bit sooner, but we did find that there’s a lot of moving parts. We are dewatering real time. We have technical experts that all need to reach consensus. We’re quite excited about what’s coming through these numbers, and we would rather take the time and get everything accurate and then publish it out to the market. By the latest, we will put these numbers out probably early January, but maybe before then. That’s what we anticipate to do over the next couple of months. Just quickly speaking about Kamoa-Kakula and focusing a bit away from our turnaround strategy, it’s been a very exciting time on this smelter. We’re going to start with the heat up soon.

We’re going to feed first, first concentrate into the smelter early December, and the technical people on the call will talk you through what that looks like and how we will go about feeding the smelter in early December. We’ve also completed Turbine 5 at Inga II, another major project that the team completed very successfully. We’re starting to transmit power through the grid and we expect to receive another 50 megawatts through the grid in November. As Robert mentioned, exciting times at Platreef and then Kipushi is sort of a rising star that we shouldn’t lose track of. We’ve completed the debottlenecking program and we are on track to meet our production and cash cost guidance at Kipushi. The same for Kamoa-Kakula. We’re also on track to meet our revised production guidance and cash cost guidance at Kamoa-Kakula.

Just one number I want to sort of address head on is the cash cost that you see at the bottom of your screen. That is the quarterly cash cost at Kamoa-Kakula. It does read higher than the numbers that you usually see. That’s just because of the base used to calculate this cash cost for the quarter. We had lower production, we carried some G&A in that number and then obviously we were feeding a bit lower, lower grade feed into our plant. That’s the reason why you see a differential there. If we move over to the next slide talking about health and safety, it remains our number one priority. I think these statistics speak for themselves, especially for a company that’s currently executing projects and running large turnaround strategies.

We haven’t had any LTIs recently on site at Kamoa-Kakula and the construction of the smelter, which is a significant achievement, was completed without a single lost time injury recorded. I think that is really a great testimony to our project team and our construction teams. Similarly, the construction of the Kipushi concentrator plant that started in September of 2022, as well as the recently completed debottlenecking, they were all achieved without a single lost time injury. I think a big shout out to our operational teams on the ground. They are doing an exceptional job. With that as an introduction, we will now delve into the details and I will ask David to take you through our financials for the quarter.

David van Heerden, Chief Financial Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: Thank you, Marna, and good morning and good day to everybody joining the call today. We can move straight into the next slide. Kamoa-Kakula sold almost 62,000 tonnes of payable copper in the third quarter. Production for the quarter was in excess of tonnes sold, and that led to an increase of contained copper and concentrate inventory on hand. That increased to 59,000 tonnes at the end of the quarter. That was up from almost 54,000 tonnes on hand at the end of Q2. The inventory at the nearby Lualaba copper smelter in Kolwezi was approximately 7,000 tonnes at the end of Q3, and that’s down from the almost 19,000 tonnes that was there at the end of Q2. The majority of the inventory is really sitting ready to be smelted. By the Kamoa-Kakula and copper smelter, it is really a supersized piggy bank.

At the current copper price, which is just waiting to be broken, we expect unsold inventory to gradually decrease. We’ve said this previously, but we sort of maintain that that should decrease to around 17,000 tonnes as the smelter is ramped up. Kamoa recorded revenue of $566 million in the third quarter, and that was at a realized copper price of $4.42 per pound of payable copper. Moving to the next slide, Kamoa-Kakula recorded EBITDA of $196 million for Q3. This was impacted by the lower tonnes sold and the lower grade of ore processed as the recovery plan progresses. Considering that this is what at least we believe to be Kamoa-Kakula’s lowest point of the turnaround, the margin of 35% looks pretty good. Cash cost for the third quarter of 2025 was $2.62 per pound of payable copper.

Cash cost for the year to date sits at $1.97 per pound, and it’s still well within our guidance for the year of $1.90 to $2.20 per pound of payable copper. Grade mined at Kakula was roughly 5% in Q1, 4% in Q2, and decreased to 2.5% in the third quarter, which was sort of in line with the overall grade processed from Phase 1 and 3 as well as from the surface stockpiles. In the third quarter, we do expect that mining of the higher grade areas on the western side of the Kakula mine will commence in November. As Marna mentioned, Q3 was really an anomalous quarter when it comes to cash costs, not only because of the impact of lower grade but also because of other factors that will be addressed as the turnaround progresses.

At the moment, the mining teams are doing mainly mining development tonnes as part of the re-establishment, which does come at a higher cost than stoping. The crews are also getting used to the smaller heading sizes, and efficiencies are expected to improve in the future. As we have explained previously, we will get noteworthy cash cost reduction benefits from the smelter from early next year as the smelter ramps up. If we move to the next slide, this illustrates the usual Kamoa-Kakula EBITDA waterfall. The EBITDA waterfall highlights the drivers of the quarter-on-quarter EBITDA change for Kamoa-Kakula. While we recognized $90 million of abnormal cost in Q2 relating to the seismic event in May 2023, this was down to $9 million in the third quarter, resulting in a delta of $81 million.

Illustrated as the green bar to the left in Q3, only costs relating directly to the dewatering effort were classified as abnormal. For Q3, this was mainly the cost of diesel to run the generators powering the dewatering pumps as the mining crews were no longer idle. The other big driver of our lower EBITDA was the impact of the lower tonnes sold, which was almost $300 million. The higher quarter-on-quarter copper price resulted in a $25 million benefit. Logistics cost was a little bit lower quarter-on-quarter, and other costs also came down from the elevated levels in Q2. We turn to Kipushi on the next slide. Following Kipushi’s record production in Q3, Kipushi sold almost 50,000 tons of payable zinc, recognizing a record quarterly revenue of $129 million. Kipushi’s contribution to Ivanhoe’s EBITDA was $27 million for the quarter.

I think a pretty good result considering that Kipushi had a number of days downtime while the teams for the second phase of the debottlenecking was completed. Mark will talk you through the success of the debottlenecking later on in the presentation, and we expect Q4 results to be further improved as the production benefits are realized. Cash cost remains nice and stable and right in the midpoint of our guidance. We expect to see the benefits from the increased production from the fourth quarter onwards. Turning to Ivanhoe Mines Consolidated Profit and EBITDA on the next slide, Ivanhoe recorded a quarterly adjusted EBITDA of $87 million. In Q3, the key driver of the lower adjusted EBITDA was really the lower sales at Kamoa-Kakula, as I’ve already explained, and its impact on Ivanhoe’s share of the Kamoa-Kakula’s EBITDA.

This was partly offset by the increase in Kipushi’s EBITDA as exploration expenditure and overheads remained largely consistent. Ivanhoe’s profit for the third quarter was $31 million compared to $35 million in Q2 2025. Turning to a liquidity snapshot on the next slide, Ivanhoe had $1 billion of cash and cash equivalents on hand at the end of September while Kamoa had cash on hand of $125 million. We completed a Qatar Investment Authority investment as Robert already mentioned in September for gross proceeds of $500 million and received a further $70 million from Zijin as they exercised their anti-dilution rights, and Kamoa Copper concluded a two-year term facility of $500 million during the quarter and drew down $370 million in early October. Both Ivanhoe Mines and Zijin also funded our proportionate share of a $135 million cash call from Kamoa-Kakula in September.

Turning to the CapEx spending plans on the next slide, we lowered both the top and the bottom end of Kamoa-Kakula’s 2025 capital expenditure by $100 million and just shifted that into 2026. The work on Kamoa-Kakula’s updated Life of Mine Integrated Development Plan is well underway and then the 2026 CapEx will be narrowed and better defined as that is completed and worked into the guidance. Expenditure at Platreef is tracking at the lower end of the 2025 guidance and the capital expenditure guidance range for 2025-26 is kept unchanged. The first feed of the ore into the Phase One concentrator took place as Robert mentioned recently and the Phase Two expansion is proceeding as it’s laid out in the feasibility study and completed earlier this year, which plans then for the Phase Two concentrator module to come online in the fourth quarter of 2027.

We are also working on a senior project finance facility for Platreef’s Phase Two for a total of $700 million and that’s progressing pretty well and expected to close in the first quarter of next year. Kipushi’s debottlenecking program was completed in August ahead of schedule under budget and I’ve already mentioned Mark will take you through that and we have slightly raised CapEx for Kipushi just to cater for accelerated construction of the second tailings facility paddock as we prepare for increased production following that debottlenecking. On the next slide, this slide shows our consolidated pro rata financial ratios which have improved compared to where we were at the end of last quarter. That’s mainly due to the cash received from the September private placement from Qatar Investment Authority and we are in a very healthy pro rata cash position with over $1 billion of cash on hand.

We are taking on a little bit more debt at the Kamoa-Kakula level, but EBITDA and therefore the net debt ratio will improve as we continue to execute on the turnaround plans at Kamoa-Kakula and as EBITDA from Kipushi increases and Platreef’s EBITDA is added in the future. Our target net leverage ratio remains one times through the cycle and we still believe that that’ll come down in the near term as we progress our plans. I now hand over to Mark Farren, our Chief Operating Officer, to start the operations update portion of today’s presentation.

Mark Farren, Chief Operating Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: Thank you, David. Go to the next slide, please. Thanks. Okay, we have spoken about this and we do think this was the bottom. It wasn’t really the milling so much. I mean, we milled 3.4 million tons, but it’s the grade. It’s really the grade. If I can explain to the listeners, it’s really about two things. Mainly, it’s getting into the higher grade areas of the Kakula mine, which is all in the lower section of the mine, obviously where the water issue is. As we move and develop the footprint at Kamoa 1 and Kamoa 2, the grade improves. You’re going to look at a number of things that will influence the grade over the next immediate short term and then over the longer term.

That’s why we’re pretty sure that we’ve hit the bottom, the bottom of everything hopefully, and we’ll see a big turn from now going forward. What is encouraging is phase three concentrator is running sustainably at about 30% above its design capacity. When we talk long term, you’ll see the reference is always to 17 million tonnes. Setting up this infrastructure that we have to get to the 17 odd million tons and then to increase the grade in all the different areas to get that target, short term target I think of getting over the 550,000 tons of copper that will be in all the project plans and all the long term plans that you see coming forward. My belief is that there will be some further increases above that in the longer term. Next slide, please, David. Just to talk about water. The blue looks like a fish.

We call it a whale. It actually looks like a whale. You’ll see the west and the east have been joined between the two. It was sort of flooded between the two. In the lower sections of both, the mining was actually taking place in the top sections of the west and the top sections of the east a little bit. Those areas are actually the lower grade areas. The 2% grade areas, the light blue on the western side, is going to be the first target area that we dewater, and we’ve done this in stages. Stage one was to install temporary pumping capacity and stabilize the water levels at levels way above where they are now. Stage two was to put these high capacity centrifugal pumps down these vertical shafts and then pump out at 2,600 liters per second.

Those pumps were imported; they were installed within six weeks. I think the team on site has done an absolutely fantastic job to get all of that pumping infrastructure working. Stage three is really going down the declines and opening up within the existing infrastructure, pumping infrastructure and rehabilitating the underground infrastructure and then dewatering first the west and then the east. We believe in the month of November the west will be completely dewatered and then we will target the east. I believe that early next year the total east will be dewatered and, as you can imagine, all the crews are waiting to go back into the higher grade western section. It’s all been scheduled and I’ll talk about the life of mine planning in the next couple of slides as well.

There’s a proper solid pumping plan to get the infrastructure back on track and to get the crews back into the higher grade mining. Thank you. Next slide. This is just a picture of what we’ve had to do. We had to go down through ventilation shafts about 300 meters deep, put in very high capacity pumping systems. I thought the idea was very clever and it’s worked extremely well. It’s probably going to be used in the longer term as well because these pumps are working really well as long as the water is clean. I guess going forward we’ll use these high capacity pumps in different areas of the mine. Thank you. Next slide. This is just a picture to show you what we’re dealing with when we talk about rehabilitation. You’ll see there’s spalling on the sidewall. That was really what that whole incident was about.

The seismic activity we referred to is mainly sidewall spalling. Pillars spalling, which has to be then rehabilitated as you go down and then recapacitate the pumping infrastructure as you go down. The next slide will just show you what it looks like when it’s rehabilitated. Next slide please. If you have a look at this, the sidewalls and the hanging walls are resupported and it looks like a new mine and it goes quite fast. We’ve made very good progress, I believe, with the rehabilitation. I think, like I said, the month of November we should open up the whole western front which is about 30 new faces that the teams can mine. Next slide. Yes. A different approach to planning. This is just one of the pictures but it’s done. The same principles are applied to the new mines.

The Kamoa 1 and 2 mines have the same principles applied. You’ve got a very good, and Marna referred to it, a very good, competent team that’s working on the mine design of the future. We do believe it’ll be finished by quarter 1 2026 and we’ll move as fast as we can to give short term production guidance, aiming for the next three years and then the longer term as well. We do believe the engineering is being done with the best experts in the industry to make sure that we get back and that we don’t have a repeat of any of this again. The plan short term in my opinion is to get back to 17 million tons with the best possible grades. You can see that little block in green which means that we will exceed the 550,000 tons per annum in the medium term.

Medium term to me is the next two, three years, and then take it on from there to grow the business. Next slide, please. The smelter. We did speak about the smelter. It’s sort of coming in at the right time for us because of a couple of things. Number one is obviously we, the thing we’ve always spoken about is our logistics costs. We now have about half the logistics cost. We dropped it to less than half, I guess, because we’re going to export now 99.7% blister copper, anode copper actually. The other thing that’s just coming, it’s going to help us quite a bit, is the acid credits. As you can see, we’re expecting to receive prices of in and around $500 per ton, which is very high in the industry.

There have been export bans in Zambia, which means that the logistics cost to bring acid in from other countries is going to cost a lot more. We’re sitting right in the DRC where we need the acid for all the other mines. I think it’s going to be very useful for us. Obviously, David’s little piggy bank needs to be broken. That 59,000 tons of unsold copper needs to be fed into our smelter. What we’ve had to do because of the SNEL interruptions, SNEL is still not perfect. We’re doing a lot of work to stabilize the infrastructure as well. We did speak about Inga II being commissioned, which was done very, very well. There are other things that we’re doing on that network to stabilize the network completely and they’ll take a little bit more time, but we’ve put in uninterrupted power supply of 60 megawatts.

It’s a huge project on its own and it’s been commissioned as we speak, which means that we can start feeding our direct to blister smelter. It’s over a $1 billion project that was done extremely well, in my opinion. I think one of the best installations in that country or the best installation that country’s ever seen. I’m very proud of the work that’s been done and that thing will be heated up in the month of November and first feed in December. We’re very excited for those reasons. We’re going to make money on the asset and we’re going to drop the transport costs a lot. Thank you. Next slide, the turbine at Inga II is complete. It’s online at the moment. It’s a huge project on its own.

It’s been done very, very well and we will be receiving the first 50 megawatts of power in November and then that ramps up if you cast your minds to what it was. It’s 180-odd megawatts of power that comes out of that turbine of which we will be able to receive 150 megawatts as we fix. Like I said earlier, we strengthen the transmission. There are upgrades that we’re busy with, such as these resistor banks that we’re going to complete in Quarter 2, 2025, 2026 to increase and improve the stability of the whole infrastructure. There are capacitors that we are also installing as additional projects. Generally, we’re strengthening the network for the country so that whole DC line and its changes over to AC are being strengthened as we speak. Thank you. Next slide, the green power.

We’re busy executing two of 30 megawatts on-site solar facilities with battery storage. I think these are two fantastic projects that also bring our operating cost, our power cost down compared to diesel. Hugely, it’s less than half of the diesel cost. Our first two will be running in Quarter 2, 2026. They’re big installations, they’re fantastic installations and we are working on work to expand that on-site solar facility to 120 megawatts. The first two will give us about 20% to 25% of our energy requirements and you can work out what the rest will do. I think it’s expandable. It’s something that we’d want to take forward and expand incrementally as we grow our business and as we expand into the Western Forelands. It has a very good benefit of being clean and cheap and it complements hydropower very nicely.

I think as we move into the future, we’ll be working on clean hydropower and clean solar power to expand our business. Thank you. Next slide. Kipushi. We did speak about Kipushi, I think a couple of times we were dealing with the debottlenecking projects. Both of them are now complete. It was split into two, basically a shutdown in June and a shutdown in August. Both are complete. There’s a little bit of work that we’re still doing to add energy backup, basically diesel backup just as contingency backup, and that’ll be complete in November. We are taking Kipushi to about just north of 250,000 tons, 250,000 to 300,000 odd tons of zinc. That will happen from next year and there will be a strong quarter this last quarter. Quarter four will be stronger than quarter three, which was quite a significant improvement over quarter two.

We are moving to set up Kipushi to do about 250,000 to 300,000 tons of zinc from next year, which puts it on the next slide, I think. Next slide, yeah. Puts it number three in the world. It’s a small mine but it’s very high grade and you can just have a look at that grade. It’s north of 30%, that little red dot, and it takes us to pretty much the third biggest in the world. Also, I might add that the zinc price has gone up quite nicely. Our C1 cash cost has been contained very well by the operational people and the project has been done, I think, competitively, competitively on time, on budget, it’s gone really well and we’re looking forward to see what Kipushi does over the next couple of years. Thank you. I think. Alex, are you going to do Plat?

Steve Amos, Executive Vice President, Projects, Ivanhoe Mines: I’m going to take this, Mark. Thanks. Yeah, I’ll take it. Yesterday was a big day for Platreef. We fed the mill with first ore, ran the mill for four hours at 30% ball load, which is in line with mill hot commissioning stroke ramp up. We’ve since stopped the mills. We’re going to add the rest of the balls up to 100% charge. That’ll probably take us a day, a day and a half, and then we’ll restart the plant and start the ramp up. I would expect approximately a week or so from when we restart the mill, hopefully tomorrow, till when we get the first concentrate. That’ll be an exciting thing for Platreef. Next slide, please. I’ll talk a bit about Shaft 3. Shaft 3, 4 million ton per annum rock hoisting shaft. It’s the picture in the middle.

You can see the sinking headgear, the brown construction there, really necessary for phase one to sustain phase one but also very important for phase two to ramp up the production to 4 million tonnes plus and to create a nice big stockpile before we start the phase two plant with this shaft and with Shaft 1. Shaft 1 is the shaft on the left-hand side in the background. We’ll have a total of 5 million tonnes of hoisting capacity. Shaft 1 will for the most part be used for men and materials, and Shaft 3 will be used for rock hoisting. In the foreground, you can see a whole lot of steel work. That is the permanent headgear structure for phase three, which we will load into place. The schedule, and we’re on schedule, is end of March 2026 to start hoisting rock from that shaft.

That includes underground rock handling, which is a crusher, two conveyors, and a tip, and then obviously hoisting through the shaft. Next slide, please. I’ll talk a bit about phase two and Shaft 2. Phase two, for those of you who don’t know, is a 4 million tonne mine and concentrator, produces about 450,000 ounces platinum, palladium, rhodium, and gold, about 10,000 tons nickel, about 5,000 tons of copper. We’ve awarded the EPCM contracts to DRA based in South Africa. They’re the same contractors that did the phase one work. We’ve started the early procurement. We plan to break ground with the earthworks in Q1 next year. In Q3, Q4 2027, we start the big plant. That’s a total of 4 million tonnes worth of hoisting capacity for Shaft 2, which we require for phase two. It also opens up phase three.

We’ve just awarded what we call the slip and line contract. What we’ve got on site at the moment, you can see the headgear complete. We’ve got a 3.1 meter diameter raised bore all the way down to 950 meters. What the slip and line contract does is that it slips the 3.1 meter diameter shaft to a 10 meter diameter shaft. We then line the barrel and equip the barrel, and by Q4, 2028, we plan to use that shaft for mana material at a later stage. We equip that shaft to hoist rock, and eventually that shaft will be an 8 million ton per annum rock hoisting shaft, which will support phase three of the project. Very exciting. Mobilize the crew for the slip and line in Q1 next year, and that’s about an 18, 18 to a 24 to 30 month project. Next slide, please.

You want to take that, Alex?

Alex Pickard, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations, Ivanhoe Mines: Yeah. Thank you, Steve, and good day to everybody on the call. It’s Alex Pickard here. We added this slide, really just to congratulate ourselves, I think, on the impeccable timing of first production at Platreef after certainly more than 25 years of effort. We’re just past LME week here in London and there has obviously been a lot of emphasis in the market on the gold price and also the copper price. In fact, the PGMs, the platinum group metals, are the best performing metals year to date. Platinum is up approximately 78% and palladium is up 56% since January. This means that Platreef will produce even stronger margins.

Remembering of course that as we ramp up to phase two, we expect to be one of the lowest cash cost producers in the whole industry because of the large scale mechanized underground mining and also the byproduct credits that we receive from nickel and copper. On the chart on the right hand side you can see the spot basket price for Platreef today, which includes platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold, is $1,900 per ounce. The target cash cost once phase two is up and running is $600 per ounce. Phase one is certainly sub $1,000 once we are fully ramped up. If you look also at the sensitivity analysis that we put in our most recent feasibility study which was published earlier this year, at spot prices the NPV is 40 to 45% higher than the base case we presented.

I think we are very firmly of the view that the NPVs that you see here on the bottom left are not really reflected in Ivanhoe Mines share price today. Hopefully that will start to change as we will be reporting revenues and earnings from Platreef from the next quarter, which is quite exciting. Moving to the next slide and to exploration starting as usual with the Western Forelands. Across the Western Forelands this year we’ve drilled over 40,000 meters of diamond drilling. That includes a lot of work that we’ve been doing around the Makoko District which is pictured here. I’ll ask the audience just to look quite carefully at this graphic which is showing the 18 kilometer long strike length.

What you can see is the outline of the Makoko, Makoko West and Kitoko ore bodies where we announced the upgraded resource in May of this year, and over 9 million tons of contained copper between those three ore bodies. You can also see if you look to the east, the proximity of Kakula West which is only 8 km away. On this chart, what you’re looking at, the larger colored circles that you can see are the holes that we’ve drilled this year subsequent to the new resource. You can reference the grade of those holes against the scale that’s shown in the key. What you can see is that we’ve been very productively infilling the area between Makoko West and Kitoko with some good grade intersections.

As well as that, we’ve been stepping out to the south of Kitoko and also to the east of Makoko with some success. I think you know what we have in the Western Forelands really is some of the best bang for its buck copper drilling that you will find anywhere in the world. Our discovery cost is demonstrated at less than $10 per ton of copper across the Western Forelands. We’re now moving into the wet season. It’s sort of starting in November and certainly in December. We’ve made preparations again. I think it’s the third year running that we’ll be drilling through the wet season. Watch this space at the Makoko District but also elsewhere in the Western Forelands license package on the next slide.

Really, the continuation of the strategy that we have at the Western Forelands is the work that we are doing in neighboring Zambia and Angola. Starting first with Angola, we have a huge license package, over 22,000 square kilometers. That’s multiples the size of the Western Forelands. We’ve been conducting baseline geochem and geophysics which is now complete, and we are about to start our first drilling on this land package in the fourth quarter. That’s quite exciting. We have two drill rigs mobilized for over 6,000 meters of drilling. Zambia is not quite as advanced. We only recently acquired that large land package, and really we’re doing the sort of foundational work to set up to commence drilling in Zambia in Q2 of 2026. Watch the space on both of those fronts.

The final slide, moving even further afield, I think Marna mentioned New Horizons and Kazakhstan is certainly a new horizon where we formed an exploration joint venture to earn up to 80% over time, and that is over 16,800 square kilometers. Again, it’s about seven times the size of what we’re looking at in the Western Forelands. I think given that we only signed this joint venture in the first quarter and we really staked the licenses in Q2. The joint venture team have done a fantastic job of mobilizing very quickly and we are already drilling. We’ve already started a 17,500 meter diamond drilling campaign, and some very good initial news is that we have seen visible copper mineralization in the first drill hole on that license package. We are very excited about the future in Kazakhstan and looking to leverage from that.

That concludes the presentation and I will pass back to Matthew Keevil to chair the Q&A.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Thanks very much, Alex. Thanks everybody. We’ll now proceed with the Q and A period. First and foremost, we’re going to clear the phone lines of any questions coming in through the phones from our analysts. Operator, please do move forward with the Q and A period.

Operator: Thank you. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do have any questions at this time, please press Star followed by 1 on your touchtone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, you will need to press Star followed by 2. If you’re using a speakerphone, please lift the handset first before pressing any keys. As mentioned, you can also submit questions via the webcast platform. Thank you. Thank you. Your first phone question will be from Ralph Profidi at Stifel Financial. Please go ahead.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Thanks, operator.

Operator: Good morning to Marna and the team. Very pleasing to see the recovery plan at Kamoa-Kakula going accordingly. Congratulations on the landmark investment by Qatar Investment Authority, Marna. As the mine has been dewatering and continues, have you seen or do you expect to see inflow rates increase, basically due to the pressure?

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Differential between sort of external and in.

Operator: Situ pressures on dewatered workings? It sounds like, judging from the progress, that inflow rates have at least been relatively stable. At last I remember, sort of 3,800 liters a second was kind of that rate. Is this still the case?

Marna Cloete, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: Thank you, Ralph. I’m going to let Mark answer the question. It’s quite a complicated set up because you’ve got horizontal pumping as well as vertical pumping. Obviously, as you go ahead and dewater, you need to move infrastructure down. There’s temporary installations and permanent installations. You don’t sort of measure it meter per meter, day by day. We haven’t seen increased inflow rates, I think that’s safe to say. Morgan, maybe just explain to you how the metrics that we dewater differentiate from day to day as a result of these different pumping installations that we are busy with.

Mark Farren, Chief Operating Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: No thanks, Marna. No, that’s right. You’re actually not wrong. You’re pretty good. We pump around about 4,000 liters a second. It hasn’t changed yet. We’re trying to lower this, the whole system, let’s call it the system which relies on the vertical pumping system, but also the horizontal, let’s call it the horizontal or the decline. Your rehabilitation and your decline system also need to go down at the same rate. Vertically it’s about a meter per day that we lower. We have not really significantly increased anything. We’re running at about 4,000 liters a second for now. We have updated our hydrological model which tells us over in the future. In the future when you carry on mining, particularly towards the west, we will increase our pumping rate. In other words, we will encounter more water. We know about it as we move further west when we’re mining.

That’s going to be all in hand if you add the pumping capacity that we have. Currently we’re sitting with about north of 10, about 11,000 liters, let’s say 10,000 liters a second of pumping capacity with an inflow of 4,000. As we increase hydrologically, as the water increases as we move west, we increase that vertical and horizontal pumping capacity where it’s needed. It’s nothing out of the ordinary and nothing that we don’t expect. Thank you.

Operator: Understood. I appreciate that.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: If I can sort of switch gears.

Operator: Completely different topic, and encouraging to see.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: The progress on Platreef.

Operator: Can you help me bring me up to date on the offtake agreements, negotiations with multiparties and counterparties? I’d just like to know what the milestones we should be looking for as those are secured in the future.

Marna Cloete, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: I’m happy to take that. Alex, maybe you can also just augment. The phase one concentrates we’ve placed with Northern and that’s pretty much finalized and in place. A portion of our second phase concentrate we’ve placed with Sabanier. We actually had a meeting this morning with SFA and they’re currently doing a tour of South Africa and capacity. We understand that there’s likely to be capacity for the remainder of our concentrate. Those portions we still need to tie in as we bring phase two online. We are quite confident that we will find a home for the remainder. There’s also expansion capacities at some of the existing fully integrated producers where one can join forces to do capital expansions if needs be, but we don’t even think that would necessarily be needed.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Oh, great.

Operator: Thank you for the encouraging update. Excellent. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, a reminder to please press star one on your telephone keypad if you have any questions. Next we will hear from Andrew Mikitchook at BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead, Andrew. Yeah, some great questions already been asked and answered, but maybe if I could just get a few more comments from Mark on, you know, maybe on the basis of slides 20 and 21 where you showed the before and after of the rehabilitation in Kakula. Is that representative of what you’re seeing or what’s the range of impact you’re seeing as you’re dewatering and your crews are going in there to rehabilitate? You know, generally, I don’t personally consider myself an expert in rehabilitation. Is what we’re seeing in those pictures extensive or expensive or time consuming to rehabilitate?

Mark Farren, Chief Operating Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: That’s a good question. It is representative of what we’re finding. There are some areas that are much better than that and there are one or two areas on the eastern side that are worse than that that we’re busy with, but we haven’t found anything that we can’t deal with. We’re finding the pillars sprawling as we lower the pumps, we rehabilitate them with crews that are trained to do it. I think there are seven different crews that are doing different areas and they’ve done 10 plus kilometers of this. They’re pretty familiar with what to do. They’re making the progress, they’re keeping us on track. Like I said to you, we should get the west open and dewatered in this month, in the month of November, which is a major breakthrough for us.

Then we can put the resources in and make sure we get the eastern side re-established with their pumping systems, etc. I do believe they’ve made the progress we needed them to make. The risk to me was putting in those big pumps that we didn’t know about. We didn’t know, I haven’t used them before. We didn’t know if it was going to work and it worked exceptionally well. We have made the progress that we wanted to make and we continue to make good progress. We will talk to you if something goes wrong, we will talk to the market and say, look, we hit this problem or that problem, but so far I think it’s going very well. Thank you.

Operator: Just to come back to the other project of the moment, the Platreef. We just come back to Shaft 1 and 3 and how those are performing so far in terms of ramping up the phase one, because they’re the key that are holding together both the ramp up and the expansion to phase two. Just how’s the performance been so far?

Mark Farren, Chief Operating Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: I’ll do that one as well, if you don’t mind. Phase one, we sort of pushed out the commissioning of that plant to focus in on the critical infrastructure to get phase two running. Phase two really had to be done through shaft number three.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Three.

Mark Farren, Chief Operating Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: Shaft number three, as Steve Amos pointed out, is a 4 million ton wasting shaft. That shaft will be commissioned and running in quarter one, basically by March next year. Remember, phase one is something like 700,000 or 800,000 tons a year. It’s a tiny little mine. It’s a small little mine. We have gone very quickly. We were executing phase two in parallel. That shaft, that shaft number three is what we needed. That, I’m telling you now, will be running at the end of quarter one next year, which completely de-risks phase one hoisting. In other words, the longer open stoping that you need to do in phase one is completely de-risked. You can put material down, you can blast, you can hoist, you can do everything else you need. It accelerates the development towards the footprint of phase two.

We can increase the development as much as we need to. We can open up the long haul stoping faces for ourselves while Steve Amos is busy building the concentrator. I think the decision to do that, shaft number three, was a good decision. He also spoke about shaft number two, which we are also doing with phase two, although it’s for phase three. It is sort of de-risking phase one by doing shaft number three, getting phase two ready early, and then longer term setting up phase three by doing shaft number two. The sequencing is working. In my opinion, the risk is much lower than it would have been and I think we’ve done a good job there. It’s going to, it’s going to work. Thank you.

Operator: Okay, that answers my questions. I’ll pass the microphone. Thank you very much for your time, everybody. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have any questions on the phone lines, please press star followed by 1. The next question will be from Alon Olsha at Bloomberg Intelligence. Please go ahead.

David van Heerden, Chief Financial Officer, Ivanhoe Mines: Hi there.

Operator: Thanks very much for taking my question. I just had three, if you don’t mind. Personally, on recoveries, you’ve mentioned that you’re aiming to target recoveries of 90%. Obviously, recoveries have been lower than that given the grades you’ve been processing. Of course, then you’ll move up to that 95% later on when things are fully recovered. Just on that 90% roughly, I think around 82% in the quarter. When should we apply that 90%? Is that potentially going to come in as early as kind of Q1 next year, or is that a little bit later?

Steve Amos, Executive Vice President, Projects, Ivanhoe Mines: I can answer that one. The reason for the low recovery, the 82% odd, is twofold: low grade, which means a couple of percent; low feed grade, which means a couple of percent reduction in recovery. There’s also some oxidized copper that had been sitting on the stockpiles. The stockpiles had been there for a number of years, which is not recoverable. It’s not, you know, the sulfide is oxidized so it’s not recoverable by flotation. I think once the stockpiles will be depleted by the end of the year and once we start mining fresh rock, we will get back to close to 90% recovery, which we were sort of achieving before we had the issues. I’m not sure if we mentioned that. We are busy with a project called Project 95 at Kamoa. Phase one and phase two, it’s basically installing a whole lot of regrind capacity.

The reason we call it Project 95 is we’re going to take the 90% odd recovery up to 95% recovery and that will be commissioned in Q2 next year. Q2 next year we’ll be mining fresh rock, the grade will be better and the plant will be achieving 95% recovery on phase one and phase two.

Operator: Okay, so it’s 95% from Q2 next year on phase one and phase two, and potentially is 90% by Q1, is that correct?

Steve Amos, Executive Vice President, Projects, Ivanhoe Mines: Yes, correct.

Operator: Okay, got it. Thanks very much for that. Just another question on the stockpiles which you’re working through, which have helped kind of feed the concentrators while you rehabilitate the mine. The plan is those stockpiles are depleted by the end of Q1, although I think I may have misheard, but you may have just mentioned they may be depleted by the end of this year. I just want to kind of try and understand the transition from stockpiled ore feeding the concentrators to mined ore. Kind of having run of mine feed come through, is there a risk how you kind of managing that transition? Is there a risk that you deplete some of your inventories, your stockpiles, your surface stockpiles, before you’ve got sufficient run of mine ore to feed the concentrators.

Steve Amos, Executive Vice President, Projects, Ivanhoe Mines: Yes, I think there will be a reduction in throughput through the concentrators, in particular at Kakula. The additional tons we mine at Kamoa will tram across to Kakula to try and assist there as well. I think that there’s an upside in terms of the material being fresh, in terms of recovery and processing. The production rate at Kakula phase one and phase two will reduce slightly just because there’s not enough fresh run of mine to fill those plants, to fill the 10.5 million tons of capacity that we’ve got installed there.

Operator: Okay, thanks. Understood. Final question on the stockpiles, the copper and concentrate stockpiles at 59,000 tonnes, how should we think about how that gets drawn down over the course of 2026? What’s the optimal level that that hits and by when?

Steve Amos, Executive Vice President, Projects, Ivanhoe Mines: think the optimal level from what I can remember is about 19,000 tons. That’s the inventory and the stocks ahead of the smelter. They’ve got a ramp-up plan which completes in about Q3 2026. Certainly by Q3 2026, that 59,000 tonnes will be down to 19,000 tonnes.

Operator: Okay, great. Very clear. Thanks very much. Thank you. At this time I would like to turn the conference back over to Matthew Keevil.

Matthew Keevil, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, Ivanhoe Mines: Thanks very much, Operator. We’ve come up on the hour here, and there are no questions sitting in our webcast queue. With that, we’ll wrap up for the day. Thanks again, everybody, very much for joining us. We’re looking very much forward to a lot of great news coming out of the recovery program and the ramp up of Platreef over the next few months. We look forward to talking to you again, and have a great day. With that, please wrap up.

Operator: Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending, and at this time we do ask that you please disconnect your lines.

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