Central Asia Metals plc

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us in this presentation of Central Asia Metals annual results for 2025. I'll start by giving you a snapshot of the results for the end of the year.

We have had a solid business with strong underlying operational performance during the year, and these have driven a really solid set of financial numbers. What you can see on your screen there is the production achieved at Kounrad in Kazakhstan and Sasa, North Macedonia.

We produced 13,311 tonnes of copper during the year, 17,881 tonnes in zinc and 25,156 tonnes of lead. The revenue generated from the sales of those metals amounted to $230 million for EBITDA of $102 million and an EBITDA margin of 44%.

Cash in the bank at the end of the year was $80 million, and that was generated by free cash flow of $56 million, which in turn translates into a final dividend, which we intend to pay of 7.5p, taking the total dividend full-year to 12p. Now 12p equates to $28 million and is therefore 50% of our annual free cash flow that we generated.

That is the top end of the dividend policy range of 30% to 50%. Most of you know us pretty well by now.

To give you a quick overview of our asset base and where our current operations reside. We have the Kounrad asset in Kazakhstan.

That is a copper production facility, and it remains the bedrock of our business. It has been producing copper cathode at a high profit margin since inception in 2012.

Sasa, a lead zinc mine in North Macedonia, which we acquired in 2017, has produced consistently since and has undergone modernization under our ownership. We have Aberdeen Minerals.

It's an investment in a private company. This is exploring for base metal mineralization in Scotland at its Arthrath project, and we own 33% of that.

Plus also, we have an exploration program live in Kazakhstan through CAML X and CAML XD. That is an asset that we own 80%, 20% of the remaining ownership is in the hands of the geologists.

So they are very well geared towards success there. And we're looking to drill on a couple of licenses, and I'll tell a bit more about that in a minute in 2026.

Before we get there though, Louise is going to walk us through the financial results.

Thanks, Gavin. Firstly, we'll look at the market conditions that informed our 2025 financial results.

So firstly, looking at commodity markets. Commodity markets were generally pretty supportive for us during the year.

While the lead price was down 2%, the zinc price during the year was up 3% versus 2024 and the copper price was up 10%, and we achieved an average copper price of over $10,000 per tonne during the financial year. Looking at some other important macroeconomic aspects.

Firstly, treatment charges. It was a positive year for us in terms of treatment charges.

And just to give you some comparisons, in 2024, we paid $15 million in treatment charges. And last year, that was down to $8 million.

So a $7 million reduction in the treatment charges that we incurred last year. Looking now at Sasa in terms of currencies, there was a challenge there because the U.S.

dollar weakened 5% versus the denar. The denar is the Macedonian currency, but that is pegged to the euro.

So really, we're looking at the U.S. dollar-euro exchange rate.

And the impact of that is effectively to increase our cost base in U.S. dollar terms.

At Kounrad, the story was the opposite way around where the local currency, the Kazakhstan tenge weakened 11% versus the dollar. So that helps us with our costs in Kazakhstan.

Inflation, still in double digits, Kazakhstan inflation, 12.3% and inflation for 2025 in North Macedonia was 4.1%. So if we now look at the income statement, we've reported revenue of $230 million this morning.

That's up 7% year-on-year. And that's really been driven by those high commodity prices that I mentioned on the previous slide, but also a 55% increase in the silver price.

The silver that we produce at Sasa has been streamed off, but we receive the fixed silver price from the smelters. But in cost of sales, we have to buy that exact amount of silver for pretty much the exact price.

So that number comes off in cost of sales as well. But that has been a factor in our increasing revenue.

We were also positively affected by those lower treatment charges because they're already netted off in the revenue line that we report. Cost of sales was up 14% year-on-year.

A few of the main aspects there, $4.1 million of those silver purchases that I've just mentioned. We have an extra $3 million of Sasa depreciation, and that's because we completed the commissioning of the dry stack tailings landfill and plant at the end of Q1 last year.

We also have $3.5 million extra in revenue royalties. That was about $2.5 million extra at Sasa because the government doubled the rate at the beginning of last year and also higher what we call MET royalty in Kazakhstan, and that was because of the higher copper prices.

And all that at Sasa was overlaid by effectively this strong operating currency. Admin expenses, they're up 12% year-on-year, which sounds like a big percentage.

In absolute terms, that's $3.4 million. But just to highlight that during the year, we spent $3.6 million on business development.

That was mainly the New World Resources bid. We also incurred costs of $0.4 million because we disposed of the Copper Bay entity, which we've written off some years previously in the first half of last year.

And also, we incurred some additional exploration-related admin costs in Kazakhstan for the CAML X business. So taking those things into account, this morning, we reported EBITDA of just under $102 million at a margin of 44%.

Looking at some of the other important factors in the P&L. Key to these results has been the impairment that we've announced this morning of $117.5 million for Sasa that was flagged in our announcements on the 3rd of March.

And there's also a very small impairment of $0.3 million for one of the CAML X exploration licenses that we're no longer interested in. It's also important to highlight almost a $10 million negative swing in foreign exchange from 2024 to 2025 as well, and that obviously adversely affects our profitability.

Tax, that's down and that looks lower than -- that looks considerably lower than 2024. That tax number has been positively impacted by the impairment because we're reflecting lower deferred tax liability effectively within that taxation line.

And that impairment related positive tax number is about $10.9 million. And then just finally to point out EPS.

We've stated our EPS there as a negative $0.4256 while we adjusted the EPS to $0.1851. That's stripping out the impairment, stripping out the -- sorry, the impairment for Sasa and the impairment for CAML X and also $1.2 million of unrealized hedges.

We -- right at the end of December, we put 2 hedge positions in place for Sasa was a 50% hedge of our zinc production for 2026 and 50% of our operating cost exposure to the euro. And we put those hedges in place because we put them in place within 2025, we've effectively got to value them and report this unrealized loss at the end of 2025.

If you look now at the cost base for the 2 operations at Kounrad, that was a very positive year for us in terms of costs. Our costs in absolute terms were up by only $0.2 million or $0.02 per pound from $0.80 to $0.82 per pound.

And that was reflecting strong cost control, but also the tenge devaluation, which helps our cost base. We have $0.4 million lower cost of reagents and electricity.

Those are variable costs, and they're reflecting the fact that we produced slightly less copper in 2025 than we did produce in 2024. We've got a little bit of an increase of payroll costs of $200,000 and that was inflation-related salary rises, but that was in large part offset by the tenge devaluation as well.

And we've also reported a slightly higher Traxys offtake fee of $0.01 per pound. And taking all that into account, we reported an EBITDA margin for the Kounrad business of 75% for 2025.

If we look now at Sasa. During the year, our run-of-mine costs were up $5 per tonne.

That's really related to 3 key factors, which is an increase in payroll costs about $2.5 million, an increase in the costs for us to dispose of the tailings in the 2 new methods, the dry stack tailing and the paste backfill. That was an increase of $1.5 million versus 2024.

And there was also a rise in some key inputs for reagents, power, et cetera. Those are the main aspects that increased the unit cost base by $5 per tonne for last year.

But if we look at our C1 costs in absolute terms for Sasa, they were lower year-on-year by $0.4 million. That's reflecting the lower treatment charges, which I mentioned previously.

That's within that realization figure and that's $6.6 million lower year-on-year. For Sasa, we've reported an EBITDA margin of 26% for 2025.

If we look now at our capital expenditure, group CapEx for 2025 was $19 million. That's down by $1.8 million versus the previous year.

At Sasa, we spent $14.1 million, $11.3 million of that was sustaining CapEx and $2.8 million was on concluding the capital projects that we've been running for some years, and that was the dry stack tailings plant and the landform. Going forward, we do expect some additional costs on the landform in particular as we continue to expand that in the next few years, but we're going to be treating that as sustaining CapEx now.

At Kounrad, our CapEx was higher than our usual at $4.9 million. And one of the more notable aspects for that is we spent $1 million relocating a portion of Dump 15.

Our CapEx at Kounrad will be back to much more normal levels around the $2 million mark for 2026. And all in all for 2026, we're expecting CapEx giving guidance between $14.5 million and $17.5 million.

We've also capitalized more exploration this year in 2025 versus 2024. And that's really largely because these projects in Kazakhstan through CAML X have matured to the point where the specific projects which we've done dedicated exploration work on.

So not dissimilar to previous years, we spent $0.3 million on Sasa capitalized exploration. We spent $1.4 million on CAML X during 2025.

And actually, in 2026, we expect to increase that between $3 million and $3.5 million. Looking now at the balance sheet, probably the key factor to point out again there is that, that impairment for Sasa of GBP 117.5 million, that comes through the PPE line that you can see there.

We've reported strong cash balances of $80.1 million. That includes restricted cash of $0.4 million.

The investment in associate, that's our investment in Aberdeen Minerals. At the end of -- sorry, post the period end in January this year, we exercised a portion of our warrants GBP 850,000 or $1.1 million.

And so we've now increased our ownership from 28.4% to 32.6% in Aberdeen Minerals. The only other aspect I wanted to point out on this slide is we have had a prior year adjustment and restated our 2024 account.

This was due to an error made when we had inventory movements between our 2 Kazakh subsidiaries. These should have been reversed out on consolidation into CAML plc, but they haven't been doing.

So this restatement increases inventory, reduces costs and therefore, increases our retained earnings, which occurs within the equity and reserves line. It increases the retained earnings by $3.6 million.

That's because these minor adjustments have been added up over the years. The actual change to 2024 itself in terms of cost of inventory is about $500,000.

I move to my final slide, which is to look at our cash flow and our free cash flow. So starting on the waterfall chart on the left-hand side, we started 2025 with $67.6 million of cash in the bank.

We generated $89.6 million of cash from our operations. During the year, we paid $31.4 million of dividends.

That represents the 2024 final dividend of 9p and H1 2025 interim dividend of 4.5p that was paid in the year. Our income tax and withholding tax of $25.9 million, that was up considerably from $19.6 million in 2024.

That's pretty much all related to Kazakhstan, $5 million increase in corporate income tax and around about $1 million increase in withholding tax. We've talked about CapEx and capitalized exploration.

The $4.1 million you can see there in the middle of the waterfall chart, that's our break fee of $1.6 million for the New World Resources transaction, which didn't conclude. And also, we made a gain on selling the shares that we acquired as part of that process of $2.5 million.

At the interim stage last year, when we announced our results in September, we announced a $10 million share buyback. We've undertaken $5.2 million of that in 2025, and we've concluded that program in 2026.

Taking all that into account, we've ended the year with cash in the bank of $80.1 million. That does include an overdraft of $0.9 million and also that restricted cash of $0.4 million.

That leads to an adjusted free cash flow for us for the year of $56 million. I'll hand back to Gavin now to run through the operations.

Thanks, Louise. So let's start with Kounrad where -- which is our in-situ leach operation in Kazakhstan, which produces copper cathodes.

We've produced, as I said earlier, 13,300 tonnes of copper in 2025, which is right in the middle of the fairway for guidance. Guidance was 13,000 to 14,000 tonnes, and we're guiding 12,000 to 13,000 tonnes for 2026.

We produced around 178,000 tonnes of copper since we started producing in 2012, which is enough to use in over 3 million electric vehicles. And each one of these takes about 50 kilograms of copper.

So in the context of today's world, whilst we're a small producer, we are pretty significant in terms of the electrification story. We're also exploiting an area roughly the size of 1,500 football pictures.

Just to give you an idea of the scale of the operation, you can see on the top right-hand side of your slide there, the open pit in the top center, that's about 2 kilometers north to south. So the dumps on the East, which is to the right and down to the Southwest bottom left, those constitute 600 million tonnes of material, which contain around 600,000 tonnes of copper.

And our original forecast was to take around 270,000 tonnes of that copper out of these dumps. So as I said, we've taken 178,000 tonnes before.

That is actually slightly ahead of forecast. And the next slide will show you why.

If we look at that leach curve, the dotted line represents the forecast leach curve and the solid line is the actuals. So we're actually receiving or recovering a little more copper than we first expected.

So what that indicates is that as we go towards the mature end of those leach curves towards the right, the rate of recovery will be going a little lower, but the ultimate final recoveries are going to be a little higher. During 2025, as Louise said, we were fortunate enough to receive some of the highest copper prices or record high copper prices, in fact, towards the end of the year, and that leveraged the strong operational performance that we achieved there.

In terms of cost, the solar plant on the top right-hand photograph, that was something we've had in place since 2023. That has -- is now producing consistently just shy of 16% of the power requirement for the plant and generating a useful saving at the same time.

Somebody told me that's enough to drive one of those electric cars I mentioned earlier, 45 million kilometers, which means you need a lot of charging infrastructure and hence, more copper. So a good story all around there.

If we move on to the next slide, please. Getting on to Sasa.

This is a much more conventional mine where we mine underground, crush and grind material, put it through a flotation plant to produce 2 concentrates. These are not metals themselves, but a metal-rich material, which are then sold to the smelters.

And in 2025, we did meet our revised guidance. Those of you will remember from our -- I think it was back in July last year, we revised our guidance down in response to some of the production problems that we were having there and produced 17,881 tonnes of zinc and 25,156 tonnes of lead, which was slightly below guidance.

Guidance this year, we've moved up again to 18,000 to 20,000 tonnes of zinc and 26,000 to 28,000 tonnes of lead, which is much more to the normal end of the range that we've experienced in the past at Sasa. This is because we are in the final quarter of 2025, had really good production statistics coming through and managed to actually produce at a rate higher than the 800,000 tonne annualized rate that we achieved for 2025.

Now back a year ago, we were talking about the 764,000 tonnes we produced of all throughput in 2024 and how we were targeting getting to the 800,000 tonnes. So we're pleased to say that we did achieve that.

On the other hand, unfortunately, geological variations impacted the amount of metal we produced. And this is both in terms of geometry, which is the shape of the ore body, but also the grade, which is the concentrate of the metals in the rocks that we encounter underground.

Despite this, as I said, we achieved that revised guidance, and we've also now completed the capital projects at Sasa. And as Louise said, from now on, we'll be looking to return to a much more stable sustaining capital run rate at Sasa.

So -- let's talk a little bit about some of the issues at Sasa. Last September, we talked about this review that we've undertaken, one of several independent reviews that we thought was necessary to start turning Sasa around that we conducted last year.

And 2026 is all about implementing a lot of those recommendations. So far, we've made good progress on controlling costs.

And as Louise was talking about in 2025, and that will continue into 2026 and also managing staff levels. We've to date lost around 11% of our colleagues at Sasa as we try to rightsize the workforce for the mine going forward.

We've also focused on improving production efficiencies and also improving the geological understanding. That's going to be key.

And in doing that, we are doing a lot of what we call infill drilling, much more drilling to understand the ore body and drilling on a closer spacing, improving the laboratory performance so we get quicker turnaround of assays to inform our decision-making. And also digitalization of all the stages of mine planning, so making sure that the systems and geologists use speak to the mine planners without having to go through a stage in between and saving time and also improving decision-making underground.

We've got many technical projects underway to look at mine life extensions. So nobody here is thinking we're going to be shutting the door at Sasa in 2034, certainly with these narrow underground vein ore bodies that do tend to extend the life from time to time.

And we're doing that through 3 methods. One is this drilling I was talking about, not only we're doing infill drilling, but we're also exploring for new material around the Svinja Reka ore body, which is the ore body we're currently exploiting.

We're also looking at upgrading some of that material within Svinja Reka from one resource category to another resource category, which gives you higher confidence and you can then put it into the mine plan. And there's a satellite ore body called Golema Reka, we're going to be starting a full-blown scoping study on that to ascertain how many of the 9 million tonnes of resource that we have at Golema Reka can be brought into a future mine plan.

Part of that will be application of different technologies again. For example, ore sorting.

This is something that effectively upgrades your head grade and discard some of the lower-grade material in the ore body and allows the plant again to run profitably, which is the key that we're trying to aim at here. And last but not least, with the dry stack tailings plant, which is the photograph on the right-hand side up and running since March last year.

We've managed to put 75% of the tailings or the waste that we've generated either back underground through the previously constructed paste backfill plant or on to the dry stack landform where we dewater all this material and put what's called a filter cake onto the dry stack landform with the benefits being no future CapEx on another wet tailings facility, a much smaller footprint, a much more environmentally friendly way of disposing of the tailings and fewer social issues. If we did expand the footprint, we'd have to get into discussions with the local communities around land acquisitions and potential relocations of dwellings and the like, which we obviously want to avoid, which brings us nicely on to sustainability.

We have 5 key pillars of sustainability. Simply because it makes good business sense to do so.

On the left-hand side, it's pretty obvious to maintain health and safety standards. And it's first and foremost in our minds every day.

We want everybody home safely at the end of every shift. And we've had independent reviews conducted for us, and we're currently implementing some of those findings.

The review itself was fairly positive. But clearly, we wouldn't have done it if we didn't learn anything.

So happy to make the workplace much more safe for all of our staff. We've also instituted an alarm system around the tailings stands and that alarm system has actually now been integrated into the national alert network in Macedonia.

Secondly, we value our people. I won't go through this in exhaustive detail, but what struck me as the Chief Executive that we spent 44,000 hours training our people.

So continuous development of the people will ensure that we have a sustainable business that people are well trained and highly motivated to generate the profit margins that we're looking for. Clear, we care for the environment.

That should go without saying. And as I said earlier, 75% of the tailings we put back underground or on to the dry stack landform last year exceeds the target that we have of 70%.

We also continue to create value for our communities to ensure we have a social license to operate. And we do that via our 2 foundations to which we contribute 0.5% of our revenue every year.

And these foundations focus on educational initiatives, business start-up initiatives plus also some of the needs assessments, things like upgrading clinics, helping with schools, those sorts of things just to make sure that we are good corporate citizens within the communities that we operate in. And last but not least, ensuring ethical practices.

Again, emphasis here is on policies that ensure that we are not doing anything untoward as a business, and this involves training and regular reviews as well. And we've also ensured that our staff has access to a whistleblowing channel, which we tested last year to make sure that these things are all working properly and the messages we're getting to the group of right people.

So as shareholders, you're obviously going to be very keen to hear about our capital allocation and outlook. And I'll start by talking about the exploration activities I touched on at the beginning of the presentation.

CAML X and CAML XD have done a fantastic job in moving from target generation in a lot of desktop studies to securing licenses and doing some field work on licenses. And in the last 2 years, we've advanced to the point where now we have drill targets on 2 of our licenses.

And I can assure you that's very quick from a pure greenfields perspective from what is effectively just those fields you see in the background, no previous workings to generating drill targets is a fantastic result, and we've got 2,000 meters each to be drilled at our Otyar and Yuzhnoe licenses in the summer this year, and we look forward to receiving the results from those. Third license Shaindy, we've advanced to the point where we're going to be doing a number of line kilometers of geophysics, again, with a view to establishing drill targets either late 2026 or early 2027.

Aberdeen, both the reasons I've spoken about, the funding that we've put in is going to finance 6 new drill holes, and that is really to hone in on where we think the feeder zone or the higher grade portion of this mineralized system is. So far, we've hit mineralization in several holes.

It's tantalizing, but we've taken a lot of advice and a lot of interpretation and think that the 4 holes that we've got sited right now are going to give us the best chance of intersecting this high-grade portion of the mineralization, which hopefully will constitute a discovery. We've got 2 holes in the back pocket just in case we miss with those.

But this just shows the disciplined approach that CAML has in terms of financing exploration where we've churned through the licenses of CAML X and at Aberdeen, we're making sure that the money is being injected in a stepwise fashion and each step is going to give us more information and hopefully more results going forward. So looking forward to an exciting 2026 on the exploration front.

Now we still continue to look at larger scale growth opportunities after the disappointment last year of missing our New World, the strategy remains the same. The Board has reviewed the strategy and discussed it exhaustively over the last 2 Board meetings, and we continue to look for an acquisition of a material size that will populate the area between those 2 exploration assets plus the production assets that we have right now.

And that will allow us as a business drive a huge amount of value into these projects as we develop them from, say, a resource through to the engineering studies through to a final investment decision. We'll move them up what we call the [ P/NAV ] curve and get close to the full value of these assets through that.

We're doing it in a way that we're comfortable with using our skills, our sort of ethos of between low cost at high margin and engineering the assets exactly where we want them to. So watch this space.

We have, however, got a long-term track record of creating value for our investors. CAML has generated extraordinary returns for a small mining company so far.

We've paid over $420 million in dividends and buybacks since inception, and this is against the total amount raised from the market of $214 million. Our full year dividend, I mentioned earlier of 12p represents 50% of the free cash flow that we generated in 2025.

That's at the top end of the range. And we will continue with this disciplined approach to capital allocation.

In terms of the business case, we are producing base metals that are essential for modern living. And I think that is key now with the wider community, the wider investment community, governments and everyone across society is now beginning to understand the importance of critical minerals, and we are right in the middle of that with our copper, lead and zinc.

So we'll continue to look for assets producing those base metals, things that we know a lot about. We'll continue to generate strong free cash flow.

Our free cash flow yield is over 14%. Our dividend yield is over 7% and resilient margins of 44% that we reported today give you confidence that the business is strong going forward as well.

We're committed to value-accretive growth. We're building a pipeline of assets that we're looking at right now.

Every single one of these is looked at the lens -- looked at through the lens of shareholder returns and shareholder accretion. And we're going to do that by exploiting our experienced and capable team and our strong sector knowledge and operational expertise within that business.

And off the back of a very strong balance sheet, as Louise said, $80.1 million in cash, minimal debt and the ability to provide impetus to our exploration efforts to our growth aspirations and also ensuring continued returns to our shareholders. If we look at ourselves in the context of the market today, we can clearly say and the statistics bear this out is that we are undervalued.

If we look at our typical market metrics of EV/EBITDA, EV to free cash flow, we're well below the sector or the peer medians. And as I said earlier, our dividend yield of now above 7% is well in excess of what we get from the average from the FTSE 100.

So again, a great investment case for [ CAML ]. So to summarize, our financial position remains strong.

It's underpinned by 2 cash flowing assets. Our guidance at Kounrad is 12,000 to 13,000 tonnes, at Sasa for zinc and lead, we've increased those from where we were in 2025.

And our priorities in 2026 remain to implement all the improvements at Sasa, maintain focus at Kounrad, ensure production efficiencies and high profitability there. We want to identify and structure a material transaction.

And we're all looking forward to the results of those drill programs, both in Scotland and Kazakhstan and at the same time, remain disciplined in terms of how we allocate capital across the group and to you, our shareholders. And on that note, I'll conclude and invite any questions from the floor.

All right. Okay.

And our first question was presubmitted. It appears that we are now closer to an acquisition and have a problematic mine in Sasa and one that will run out of reserves at some point.

Isn't it time to ensure that shareholders are given the opportunity to decide whether the company simply returns cash to shareholders and stops looking for acquisitions, which seems like more of a distraction -- which seem like more of a distraction for management other than anything else more productive. In my view, there needs to be a strategic review regarding the future of the company.

Okay. Thanks for the question.

I think I mentioned earlier that the Board sort of takes the strategy of the company very seriously, and we discuss it in detail at every Board meeting. And the most recent Board meeting was only last week where we reiterated the strategy as we set out today really where we need to grow the business.

Now the reason you do that as a mining company is because you're constantly reducing the size of your asset base. So every day we produce, we're taking the material out of the business and converting it to cash.

Now we've got to reinvest some of that to keep those assets going and we've got to pay some of that back to the shareholders as we've done through the dividend today. But in order to sustain our levels of production and hence profit, we do need to invest in new assets and to replace the ones we're now.

As I said, the Board sort of acts on behalf of shareholders. They have, as I said, conducted several strategic reviews over the year, most recently a week ago.

And I suppose that shareholders have the ability to make their views known at our AGM, which will be held in May as well, if you wish.

All right. Our next question.

Does the high silver price have any bearing, either positive or negative on the company given that we have a streaming agreement in place with [ ore ] royalties?

Sadly not. I think the previous owners of the mine had streamed the silver and the agreement there is that we receive $6 an ounce for the silver that we produce, which is a little bit going given where the silver price has been this year, but unfortunately, it is a contractual obligation that we have been stuck with.

So no, sadly, we don't get any benefit from the silver. And as Louise was pointing out, we have to -- there's a bit of admin that we incur in terms of fulfilling the obligations under that contract.

Next question. You've reduced your production guidance for Kounrad for 2026 by about 1,000 tonnes of copper per annum.

What kind of a drop-off in production are you modeling for the rest of this decade up to 2030 and thereafter from 2030 to 2034. What can we reasonably expect Kounrad to produce in its last few years of life?

We don't give production guidance beyond the year and partly at Kounrad because it is -- we learn every year as we go as to how these dumps are going to perform. What you're right in pointing out is that there has been a reduction in the guidance, and that reflects that leach curve that I showed you in an earlier slide, which means that a lot of the dumps that we are leaching and the cells that we're leaching moving towards the more mature side of that curve.

So you can expect production to drop down. And I think I mentioned the other key number there was that we originally forecast around 280,000 tonnes -- 270,000 tonnes, sorry, of copper that was recoverable from the dumps and we had 178,000 now.

But also, I also said that the production so far has actually exceeded expectations and the theoretical leach curves are actually underestimating what the recoveries are and what we've achieved. So a little bit of a woody answer, I'm sorry, but we can't give much guidance beyond the sort of end of the year.

But again, this is a highly profitable asset that will be producing to 2034. And the expectation given what I showed you is that there is an opportunity to extend that production beyond 2034, but that's going to take a study on our side.

We'll have to submit that study to the authorities to extend the license as you would anywhere in any jurisdiction, and that would also be an associated environmental study as well. So quite a lot of work to do in order to do that, but it's certainly something we think is [ worth doing ].

Next question. Having missed on acquiring additional resources, does the Board favor a takeover of the company or a managed wind down?

Thanks for the question. I think it's from Neil.

Look, as I said, the Board is in favor of us growing the business. Now if somebody came along with a good offer, clearly, the Board would be obliged to take that seriously and look at whether that would generate more value for shareholders today than continue down the growth path.

So that's, I don't know, potentially on the table, who knows? I mean it's not up to us.

But I think the wind down of the business and running it for cash, look, it is something that we've done the math on. It's another thing that's easier said than done.

One thing I would point out, the minute you do that, you end up with all sorts of production issues because the best staff will leave to go somewhere else. And retaining staff will become expensive.

And ultimately, you'll end up getting to your terminal value probably a lot sooner than you originally forecast. So it's not something that we would elect to do because we think there are more value-accretive things to do as a business for our shareholders.

Our next question is from Mike. Prior to the Sasa announcement, and I assume he's referring to the one about the impairment charge in early March.

The share price had performed well. How much of this can be attributed to the share buyback?

And how much to the general critical metals market?

That's a great question from Mike. I think -- look, I'll say 2 things about that.

I think to answer your second question first, I think there has been a lot of positivity around the critical mineral space. And I think given our metals that we bring and the profit margins that we make, we're clearly going to move up with the market as it rallied from the end of last year through to effectively the onset of the Iran war, which unfortunately, to answer your second question, coincided with the announcement of the impairment of Sasa.

Now the share price did drop in line with the market and a little bit more in response to the Sasa news. If you read the analysts reports, and I'm not sure everyone on this call has access to those to be fair.

But what since the September announcement and the performance of Sasa was effectively laid there to the market in terms of financials, the analysts and a lot of the in-situ that follow effectively marked down Sasa already as far as that goes. And this impairment effectively brings the valuation, the book valuation of Sasa in line with analyst expectations already.

So it's difficult to unpack, Mike, whether or not the -- how much of that was in the market and how much of it wasn't. If you look at our peers, yes, we underperformed our peers on that particular day.

And so therefore, the Sasa definitely had an impact.

All right. Next question is from Paul.

How do you plan to deal with short- and long-term share price underperformance at this stage?

Paul, I think the best thing we can do as management is run the business as best we can. And as Louise was saying, we've got to control costs.

And what we've got to do is find reasons for people to buy the shares. And that would entail shorter term, turning the Sasa operation back to good profitability levels.

And I think we're well on the way to doing that. And then also adding to the portfolio and replacing the resources that we leave either through that exploration I was talking about or an acquisition, that seems to jump around a bit.

Next question is from Vasily. Previously, you considered a growth potential by M&A, the Antler project in the U.S.

As of now, where do you see growth potential only through the project development at CAML X and CAML XD in Scotland? Or do you still consider M&A as potential focus for your team?

So it's a good question, Vasily. I think the answer is yes to both.

I think the Antler project in the U.S. was a really good template for what we've been trying to do, and we've been telling the market for years that, that's the kind of asset we would like that allows us to drive it up the value curve.

So we continue to look for those. Answer to your second question, I think M&A is still a core part of our strategic focus and growth is probably the key strategic objective of this business right now.

But we are expecting that CAML X, CAML XD and Aberdeen in Scotland will also deliver on that front over time. It's just a longer time frame from taking something from greenfield exploration in Kazakhstan, for example, through to cash flow, whereas we could accelerate that by acquiring an asset.

There's a question from Paul here. Do you own the rights to the Kounrad pit itself?

Afraid not, no, Kazakhmys. Those of you with long memories will remember Kazakhmys listed on the London Exchange in the early 2000s and then split into KAZ Minerals and Kazakhmys, is still a very large mining company in Kazakhstan.

It owns mines and smelters all over the country and the open pit, although it's not operated to its full extent, is still owned by Kazakhmys, who does mine some ore from there for a smelter complex that it owns about 18 kilometers [indiscernible].

Right. Well, that's all the questions.

Although there were a couple of questions here, which we believe will be more appropriately addressed to the Annual General Meeting, which is in May. So we would ask the people who have submitted those questions to resubmit those questions to the AGM.

Sure. Thank you.

Well, first of all, thank you to everybody for attending. It's always fun to have the interaction of the questions in this forum as well.

We look forward to the other feedback they will be giving us. We really do appreciate your attendance.

And I'll just leave you with the thoughts that the underlying business remains robust. We've got 2 producing assets generating a decent amount of cash.

That cash is going to allow us to continue with capital allocation, which includes investment in the project, investment in exploration, returns to shareholders and will also help finance our growth ambitions. And the priorities on the short term, as I said, are going to be solidifying the implementation of those initiatives at Sasa, turning that into decent profitability and then longer term, leveraging of that growth platform we've got into a larger business.

And in the meantime, just consider those metrics I showed you in comparison to all of our peers, we are undervalued. And I know markets are tricky out there these days, but it does look like a good investment thesis right now for CAML.

Thank you very much.