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Thank you for standing by and welcome to the New Century Resources June 2019 Quarterly Report. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Patrick Walta, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Jennifer, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you taking the time to listen in to the New Century Resources' quarterly report conference call. We'll also, today, be discussing both the quarterly reports and, obviously, the recently announced fully underwritten capital raise that is underway at the moment. I'll firstly address the quarterly report, quarterly activities and cash flow reports there. Much of the activities report has been released and discussed previously, but I'll go through some of the highlights that have occurred over the last quarter, which you can see in the report itself. From a production perspective, it was continued to be our best quarter to date. So the ramp-up process, which started effectively in September last year, has now just had 3 of 4 quarters completed. And pleasingly, we have achieved consistent increases in total metal production from the operations to date. So we produced nearly 21,000 tonnes of concentrate in the previous quarter which, from a global perspective, really puts us into the top 25 in terms of operating zinc mines in the world, and there are about 350 of those in place today. What is also pleasing about that is that we do have the full knowledge that recoveries are continuing to improve, and we'll discuss those in detail next, but we also have approximately half of our plants sitting idle right now. So the refurbishment process that initially started last year and got us up and running was for half the plant bringing up plant online, and we are now going through a process of the rest of this financial year that we're in to bring -- to double that capacity, to bring that online. So we see a very clear pathway to significantly increasing our quarterly production rate and our target of being a top 10 zinc producers is certainly achievable in that regard. From a recoveries perspective, we've had a pleasing increase over the last few quarters. We -- as many people know, we achieved a monthly average recovery in March of 50%. We had peaks in the early parts of April up to 55%, with the 2 cannons online. So we've had 2 cannons online since day 1 enabling us to do a maximum of a 6 million tonne per annum annualized run rate. And it was during this quarter that we are just in that we focused on bringing a third cannon online really allowing us to get up to a maximum capacity of 9 million tonnes. In bringing the third cannon online, we did discover a bottleneck inside our cleaning circuit. So the roughers and scavengers part of the circuit has continued to perform well with the additional volume in there. However, the bottleneck is clear inside cleaner 2A, which was restricting the recovery performance of the roughers, ultimately flowing through the final product. So you saw there we had a big dropoff in recovery performance in May, and it was only sort of progressively resolved in terms of June as well. We do need to bring on additional cleaning capacity, and we'll talk about that process that we're going through now where we have -- we imminently have Cleaner 2B coming online to remove that recovery bottleneck. So despite the bottleneck through June and July, June was our best month in terms of metal production to date. July continues to be on track for our best month in metal production to date as well, and we've had recoveries up to 48%. So a decent increase in those recoveries from our May lows. And you can see that inside the quarterly, we actually released sort of daily trending data, so you can see where that performance is going. But we fully anticipate the next step change to be coming in this quarter than we had for last year, similar to what happened in -- at the start of January and in the March quarter as well where we initially had a bottleneck around Cleaner 1, Cleaner 1A was restricted, so we brought on Cleaner 1B, and that allowed a significant increase over the March quarter, a 10% to 15% increase in recovery. So that will be the focus of the quarter that we're currently in. The September quarter is bringing that recovery performance up and allowing us to fully utilize the 3 cannons, the 9-million tonne per annum operation. Following that, we'll be progressing on in terms of our ramp-up profile to bring on the additional scavenger circuit, and then it will be in March next year where we bring on the additional rougher circuit in as well. From a cash flow perspective, as we've outlined in the front of the quarterly there, that absolutely, the capital burn does continue, and our net cash used for the quarter was just over $16 million. The majority of that though is associated with continuing the expansion and sustaining capital components of our business to achieve the ramp-up to a 12-million tonne per annum run rate that fully utilizes the entire plant so bringing on the remaining circa 50% of idle capacity. So net of one-off charges, our cash burn was really only about $1.5 million, which is pleasing in the sense that we also had a fairly significant drop in the zinc price during the quarter, and also the record 10-year high treatment charge for the concentrate that we produced did persist in the quarter. From that perspective, that economic perspective, we are seeing treatment charges start to go down now. So pretty much since we started production in September 2018, we've seen a nearly 500% increase in those treatment charges, so all driven by Chinese smelter utilization. A number of those smelters in China were shut down, requiring a refurb or replacement for environmental compliance issues. As a result of that, that big drop in global smelters being available, we saw a steady supply of concentrate from mines all over the world but not enough smelting capacity to produce metal from them. As a result, lower supply and demand exceeding and treatment charges increased. So pretty much since we started operations, we've been increasing our production price and reducing our C1 costs, which I'll go into in a sec, but doing it against some fairly significant macroeconomic headwinds. But as of last quarter, it was the first quarter where we haven't seen a continued climb in those treatment charges. We've seen them stabilize. And based off our own -- of our panelists' report, and our own internal dealings direct with traders and with smelters, we're seeing them start to drop. And that's important. But smelters are definitely making very good money at the moment. And so they're obviously looking to produce as much as possible. So hopefully, we see TCs reduce as quickly as they went up, but we should see it say reducing over the short to medium term. And to put it in reference, the -- just the treatment charges reducing back to their 10-year average, the 10-year average is approximately $127 a tonne, we've actually reduced our C1 costs by $0.15 a pound. So treatment charges currently represent about 30% of our C1 costs. So it's quite punitive, but we should see an improving macroenvironment to assist us in continuing to lower our costs. Just on our C1s to date, you can see in some of the graphs in the quarterly report, we've been achieving a consistent quarter-on-quarter reduction in those C1s to the tune of about 15%, and that's despite an increasing treatment charge cost, which does add to it, and so we continue to track down -- in line with increasing production, we continue to track down to our target life-of-mine average of $0.56 a pound, which ultimately, the majority of that value proposition, of our ability to get down to those low C1s, is driven by our ability to execute the ramp-up process inside the plant. So we know that by increasing capacity in the plant, we're able to significantly increase our production rates, effectively get them up to double where we've already achieved in the current quarter that we're in. But we also leveraged our relatively high percentage fixed cost base. So I just say that again, on the site costs, around 70% of those site costs are fixed costs, so we get a very strong leverage. It's a competitive advantage over all of the other zinc producers globally. So we have a very strong advantage in that as we increase production utilizing existing plant that's sitting idle, we can materially lower our C1 costs which is a great advantage. We need to deliver on our ramp-up schedule. And it's obviously one of the reasons for the raise that we're completing at the moment, and we'll go through that in a sec. But it's of utmost importance that we continue to complete that ramp-up schedule on time and unabated as well. So it's pleasing from that regard that the team has been able to continue to deliver and drive down our C1 costs in the process to-date. I'll just go through some of the other capital items we're planning on spending for the current quarter we're in, so you'll see that in the projections in the Appendix 5B. We are looking to continue capital expenditure this quarter as well to the tune of about $17 million. $10 million of that is allocated towards expansion capital, and we also have a relatively heavy quarter in terms of sustaining capital in the business as well. So from our normal sustaining capital expenditures, so we have our Wunma transshipment vessel, which is used to transship parcels out from the Karumba port offshore to load up the big export vessels that sit in the Gulf of Carpentaria. That is going in for its annual -- sorry, its 5-yearly survey, which is effectively a refurbishment process in itself to enable it to be compliant to be a seagoing vessel, so that's a relatively large capital impost that occurs every 5 or 6 years. And we're also doing our annual dredging as well. So you recall, late last year, we completed the dredging program of the Norman River. So this actually allows the Wunma to continue loading parcels or getting parcels out into the Gulf of Carpentaria unabated. And so we're removing any silting that occurs in the river on an annual basis. We did do enough dredging last year to what we estimated would actually last 2 years plus. However, due to the large weather event that occurred in Northern Queensland earlier this year, while our -- we didn't suffer any process interruption in terms of the railway line, as you remember, a lot of the other zinc producers in the region were restricted because the railway line was out of action for a period of time, our slurry pipeline continued delivery to our port without any stopping at all. That's -- ultimately, that weather and all that rain ended up flowing out into the Gulf of Carpentaria by one of the main rivers is the Norman River and so the river silted up. So we are completing another dredging program this year as well. And so there's an additional cost to do that. And a significant portion of that is borne in this quarter as well. So while we see the operations are pleasingly even in a lowering zinc price environment, so the zinc price dropping nearly 20% in the quarter, the operations were still washing their face. We had receipts from customers of a tick over $50 million, and our direct production costs were only $44 million as well. We're seeing that operationally, if you normalize it, we're starting to move into that positive territory. But we continue to invest in this ramp-up, which will ultimately expedite the reduction in our C1 costs, increasing our EBITDA, and ultimately, as we get through this -- the capital expenditure program, it will be a finite program that will be delivered over FY '20, that EBITDA can then translate into free cash flow as well. I'll move now just in terms of our cash position and talking about the raising that is completed. We elected to undertake a capital raising, you can see there the announcement that's fully underwritten, $42 million placement that's occurring at $0.33 a share, and also details of a share purchase plan for all shareholders will be announced in the coming days for participation from all shareholders to take advantage of it. The prime reason for undertaking the capital raising is to ensure that we can continue this ramp-up process unabated. So we know exactly what we need to do to achieve our goals, and we need to make sure that we can continue that ramp-up process unabated. We do have -- we do continue to have an existing conditional debt facility available through Varde Partners to the tune of $40 million. It was intended that, that $40 million facility would be utilized to contribute to this ramp-up program. To date, we haven't hit all of the hurdles required to draw down that facility. And we're also assessing some options about reducing the cost of that facility going forward as well. So that's a process that we fully plan to execute over this quarter. We still plan to have that facility there fully available without conditions, ready to go, to be drawn then as required. But we have, over the last quarter and certainly the last few months, been continuing to execute the ramp-up, spending capital, both expansion and sustaining capital by utilizing our working capital buffer. And we do need to maintain a decent working capital buffer in the business because we have relatively large intra-quarter swings in working capital. So for example, we have consistent monthly outflows of cash in terms of operating the business, however relatively lumpy inflows in terms of the production and getting paid when material is loaded onto a ship or is sitting in our shed under a holding certificate as well. So we do need to manage those working capital swings and completing the capital raising is an important part of making sure that we don't, at any stage, slowdown in our expansion process going forward. So that provides a decent amount of rationale for that process. I might just -- I've got Barry Harris, our COO, with me now. And I might just hand it over to Barry and perhaps, Barry, you can take team through in a bit of detail about our ramp-up process over the financial year '20 in terms of how the progress with the scavenger -- sorry, the cleaning circuit is going and also the scavengers coming online later this year and then ultimately, the final rougher circuit in March next year that will also bring on the fourth hydraulic mining cannon.
Thanks, Pat. I think it's key to note that from the closeout of the Phase 1 refurbishment work that we did, we actually got the team together and got all the lessons learned from that and took that information away and built an owners' team that's a lot more robust to take on the secondary expansion works. And that team has been put together over the last quarter and really started to deliver and getting us to a point where we're going to be bringing the cleaners on as anticipated. So we actually had the team come to site this last week, the commissioning team, reran through all the [indiscernible] and the risk assessments of that. So we're well and truly in line with the schedule to bring those additional cleaner capacity online, and the team will be doing that through the beginning part of August. So that will actually be integrated into the overall flow sheet in due course, which then removes the bottlenecks that we have in the cleaners, not only for now when we're running at 8 million tonnes per annum but also for the rest of the operation when we're running on tailings. We no longer have any in the way of bottlenecks in the cleaner circuit. So that's tracking along very, very well, and we're very confident in our capability to deliver that on time, on budget and to the schedule that we set out. The other pleasing part of it is that the next part that we're working on is in the scavenger side of things. And the team is currently actually ahead of schedule slightly on that. And each one of these projects that we complete and we deliver, we gain knowledge and capability from the first one to then apply to the second one. And the teams are applying all those learnings into the actual scavenger circuit, and that's tracking along very, very well. So with all of that, this quarter that we're currently in now is about bringing in the cleaner capacity and bringing that into the flow sheet and optimizing that. The next quarter, we'll be bringing in the scavenger side of things, which then opens up the opportunity for us to increase the actual throughput that we have coming through the plant from hydro mining, because where we are right now at the moment is hydro mining has some additional redundant capacity after all the upgrades that we did last quarter. And we've actually seen some very pleasing consistency from them in their ability to deliver. And currently, the way we're actually running the plant is the mill is asking for that 8-million tonne per annum throughput range and the hydro mining team has been delivering into their feed tanks on a consistent basis for them to draw down from. So in the second quarter of FY '20, when we bring on those Northern scavengers, they'll then open up the opportunity for us to increase our throughput from the hydro mining side of it. We will be lifting to closer on that 9 million tonnes per annum throughput going through the plant, keeping in mind that we will have then been running the cleaners since early August in the same configuration. And we'll really be optimizing the cleaners to get that upgrade going properly through that side of the plant. The whole time that all of that's going on, we will be doing the works required to upgrade to the additional cannons we'll need down at the dam later on in the financial year, so the second half of the financial year. And in that third quarter of FY '20, we'll be bringing on the Northern roughers. And to coincide with that, we will then be bringing on the fourth cannon to increase the feed. The key thing to note about the FY '20 and the way that we're structuring all of this is we've put enough contingency in the budgets around the projects and around the schedule and the time frame to make sure that everything we do is done in a measured, managed way. The way that flow plants are is they really like consistency in feed, not only in the tonnes but the density, everything to do with it needs to be about consistency. So we've set up FY '20 with enough leeway in everything that we're doing to allow the teams to do that in a measured, managed way, so that we don't have multiple variables all coming on at once. So it's a very managed step process, and the projects team is delivering in spades at the moment.
Thanks, Barry. Before we open up to questions, I just wanted to speak for a minute about the additional team that we put in place over the last quarter. So we've had some Board and management changes. We've been very fortunate to acquire the services of Rob McDonald as our new independent Chairman as part of our continued Board evolution process that we've flagged for a while. So it's great to have Rob onboard. He brings a significant commercial credibility to our business with very strong networks, particularly with his long-standing association with our partners at MMG. That will be great to continue to build and mature the relationship between the businesses as well. And also our new CFO Mark Chamberlain as well. So as a the former CFO of OceanaGold, been heavily involved in debt processes and that sort of thing as well, so really bringing a lot of financial maturity to our business. So absolutely, as the operations are evolving and maturing, we're continuing to evolve our Board structure and our management structure as well. That's more in line with the operational status of the business there. So we'll continue to do that over time, as Barry said, building the team on site, building the commercial team based in Melbourne and the Board as well, so we can ensure we have all the experience and capability to deliver on our goals as well. Jennifer, that concludes the bulk of the quarterly report commentary and also the discussion about the capital raise. I will open it up to questions now. So Jennifer, please open the question lines.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Michael Slifirski from Credit Suisse.
First question from me, really, is about the sort of controllable things. Obviously, you can't control zinc prices, you can't control TCR fees. In terms of the performance of the plant, forgetting the sort of recovery challenges along the way, but in terms of the cost performance compared to what your feasibility study indicated and the ore body performance, has there been any challenges with ore body performance compared to the distribution level compared to expectation or underlying cost performance in a, say, $1 million per period compared to what you have expected?
Yes, thanks for the question, Michael. I'll answer the geological performance question, and then I'll hand it over to Barry to discuss the cost performance to date. Pleasingly, we've had -- we've got essentially no issues really in terms of our geological performance. So as expected, the ore body that we're mining, we have a 100% proved ore reserve over. That's the highest category rating that we could possibly achieve in there. And the reality is it's a stockpile. It's not really an orebody, so we don't have grade variations and strip ratios and that sort of things to deal with. It's at that surface already mined, crushed and ground with no cutoff grade and no strip ratio. So grade reconciliation, which is obviously an important topic for ASX-listed juniors, is not an issue we have to deal with, and that's been incredibly strong for us going forward. So I think the average grade of the ore we mined was 2.92% last quarter, and we fully expect that to continue in the coming quarters. And as we get into some of the lower benches on the tails dam, that will pop up to 3.05 sort of thing. So we really don't have [ dense ] grade or grade swings inside the ore body itself as we complete the hydro mining process. I'll hand it over to Barry now to talk about the operational cost control going forward.
Thanks, Pat. Michael, you did also mention about the performance of the plant itself as well. And I'll just touch on that before I talk about the OpEx side of things. We are actually seeing really good improvement in our plant performance across the board. And that's largely can be attributed to the condition monitoring and the maturing of the maintenance structure that we have on site. So the con-mon, which is looking at your vibration, your thermography and your lube analysis has been highlighting things that we need to change out and fix at the next shutdown, which has reduced our unplanned downtime a huge amount across the board. The other part of it is we've got an RtDUET system that we put in on PI which live -- tracks the darter and everything else with all the various different parts of the plant. So all of this data gathering and feedback loop is improving the actual performance of the underlying plant itself. That is the way when you start up a brownfields plant, you can -- you have an assessment of where the various different pieces of infrastructure are along their actual useful life. And the only way that you build up that is through properly -- is through operations and gathering that data. So we are seeing continued improvement in that space. The other side of it as well is that with the OpEx side of it. Our OpEx, the first budget that we did going into FY '19 was based off the restart feasibility study. And what we actually found is that we were coming in slightly under in various different areas of our OpEx. So for H2 FY '19, we went and reforecast that budget and have been pretty much in line with our OpEx on the various different components that make up that OpEx every single month. So month in, month out, we're very, very accurate on our OpEx side of things. And we've still got some areas that we can actually improve as well with optimization and cutting costs. At the moment, we're largely focusing on the ramp-up and putting all our efforts and energies into that. But there are some things that we're working on in the background to reduce that OpEx. The pleasing thing is though that it's very, very predictable, and it lands within tolerance every single month.
That's helpful. So second question, an extension to that, so you described the process of plant remediation, additional cells for cleaning and scavenging and so on at the various intervals through the -- down for the financial year. Given that you talked got about 70% fixed cost base and costs being very, very reliable, all things being equal, if zinc prices don't change, if TCs don't change, well obviously, you'd expect that will, but if they don't, what does that sort of cash generation profile look like through the year as you increase your production against that sort of fixed component of the cost base?
Thanks, Michael. It's Pat here, I'll answer that. And obviously, as we execute that -- the ramp-up process where there is cash spend associated with that, we absolutely have a growing EBITDA base on that. And that -- as we increase our production, we get to leverage that 70% fixed cost base. So our costs don't go up in a linear fashion as they would with a lot of other producers and that sort of thing. And we're only talking about C1s here, we don't even have the C3 costs of a traditional underground or open-pit miner, so we're only really focused on C1s as being a relatively true reflection of the operating -- underlying operating cost of the business. We will see a significant increase in the EBITDA profile, which ultimately translates into free cash flow generation as we execute this process in the -- through this financial year.
Yes. That's great. And then the third and final question from me, Pat, is with respect to the $40 million from Varde, the conditions precedent there. When do you expect to be able to meet those conditions? And does that fit in with the deadline? I think, it was 31st of this month if I recall. Does that sort of fit well with your planning or not?
There's 2 components to that. The -- first and foremost, I mean we have, really, for 3 out of the 4 months been achieving those sorts of hurdles, so really around 45% recoveries and [ 7.5 ] million tonne per annum run rates through the operations itself. We certainly see the cleaner circuit coming online as the ability for us to stabilize well above those minimum hurdles there. And we've been working proactively with Varde on that process around that deadline, if we're already at those sort of levels that, that deadline has obviously a strong potential to be extended with very strong support from our friends at Varde through that process. So we fully anticipate that over the rest of this quarter, we'll execute on the process of having that facility fully available and sitting there, ready for a drawdown as required.
[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from [ Adrian Wyking ].
Pat, my question is in relation to the capital raise process. If you could just explain a bit more about the book bill, particularly for sophisticated investors and the share purchase plan. And how do we get comfort that you think [indiscernible] 23:56 there should be capital raises?
Yes, thanks, [ Adrian ], I appreciate the questions there. So the first part is the placement itself, the placement is fully underwritten. And so we're fully underwritten by Credit Suisse, they've completed previous raisings for us in the past. So we obviously -- we know that, that's going to be executed for that amount. There's an official book-to-bill process going on at the moment for the course of today, and we anticipate closing that book off tonight, allocating it to the relevant accounts and then resuming trading tomorrow. In terms of the share purchase plan, full details of that will be provided over the next few days around the -- around how that share purchase plan works. So effectively cap that $5 million gives all the existing shareholders a chance to invest up to $15,000 if so. If you are -- whether you hold 1 share or 1 million shares, you can invest $15,000 at the -- what will be effectively at the same price as the placement occurring there. There's obviously a direct reason why it's a $42 million raising. It's $40 million after the cost of the raising itself and that allows us to execute on this -- on the cost of our ramp-up schedule there. So we have a $40 million budgeted cost for execution of the ramp-up to 12 million tonnes, so refurbishing the remainder of the plant. And we have a strong degree of confidence that, that is a cost that is well controlled. So that's both from some very good budgeting and planning processes, but also the fact that we've done it before. Now the turning on the other half of the plant, which we did effectively over 2018 and started in September, while we were a much different business back then, we probably had half of our team in place. We've now got a full team in place, we've got experience in refurbishing the same plant. There's nothing different about it, it's the same piece of kit, we got a lot of learnings on how to do it better and more efficiently as well. So a strong degree of confidence that, that is the amount, and we remain there. We've arranged the capital via this fully underwritten placement for that, and we still maintain our conditional debt facility, which again, fully expects to remove conditions on revolver drawdown for the end of this quarter in place. So it puts us in a very strong position from a liquidity perspective.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Walta for closing remarks.
Thanks, Jennifer. I just thought I'd close and just talk for a minute quickly just about risks and business risks. So the -- And while it's disappointing that we had to do a capital raise, we weren't anticipating to do the capital raise here, it's a significant -- it provides us with a significant liquidity position where we can ultimately deliver on our goal of being a top 10 zinc producer and a very low C1 cost and generating very good margins in there. And when we think about the perceived risks of our business and the derisking events that have occurred, while our share price has obviously dropped significantly over the last 12 months, the level of derisking that the team has achieved has been absolutely substantial. It was only -- I think it was about 2 weeks ago -- took over a year ago that we didn't even have grid power on to the site. We hadn't produced a tonne of concentrate. Lots of questions about our ability to do hydro mining, floating [indiscernible] material at all, produce a soluble concentrate and attract a decent Board, short mine life, human resourcing. And in that, in 9 months in that process there, we've developed Australia's largest hydraulic mining operation, which continues to expand. We've had metallurgical results up to 55% recovery. That's almost I think 86% of design, and we fully expect to get them back up to there and above over the long run. We've produced over 50,000 tonnes of zinc metal inside 100,000 tonnes of concentrate, delivered it up the entire logistics chain of the original Century operations, we've shipped over a dozen -- over dozen shipments into 3 different continents, into 7 different smelters, developed our long-term power gas supply contracts. We've expanded and delivered our team, extended the mine life and also evolved the Board. So there's been a material amount of derisking that has occurred in our business over the last 12 months. And we fully expect that to continue over the next 12 months and beyond, ultimately with the sole focus of creating value for shareholders, and we look forward to executing our ramp-up, delivering on that, generating earnings and that will then start to flow into free cash flow, and then we can look at options about what we do with that cash flow in terms of returning value to shareholders. So we think it's an exciting 12 months. The capital raising does allow us to knuckle down, focus on that delivery and ultimately generate the value for shareholders going forward. So thank you, everyone. I appreciate the time. I'm always available for a call or anyone of our team's available for call, if you'd like to discuss things any further.