Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today.

Some housekeeping items tonight. Please review today's press release for further details on our results, and accompanying presentation for today's call is available for download from the company's website at alkres.com.

For those on the webcast, please move through the presentation slides yourself as directed by our presenters. Moving on to slide 2, I'll remind everyone that this conference call contains forward-looking information that is based on the company's current expectations, estimates, and beliefs.

Continuing on to slide 3, today's presentation will use terms that are non-IFRS performance measures. Please review Alkane's disclosure materials for the risks associated with forward-looking information and the use of non-IFRS performance measures.

I will also point out that all dollar amounts mentioned on today's call are in Australian dollars unless otherwise stated. Another thing to keep in mind during our presentation is that Alkane's fiscal year ends 30th of June, so that the period ending 30th of September 2026 is our first quarter for fiscal 2027.

Please move on to slide 4. Today's speakers from Alkane Resources are Nic Earner, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, and James Carter, Chief Financial Officer.

I will now hand the call over to Nic Earner. Please go ahead, Nic.

Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. This, I think we can all agree, is going to be quite an interesting day to be putting out a quarterly report.

I fully appreciate you all being here to listen, and I expect you'll have one eye on Bloomberg as well. Let's get into the presentation.

Let me start on slide 5 by providing some of the highlights of the quarter we just completed. We've delivered a strong, steady-state first quarter, and we hit our operational targets on the schedule we were after.

This generated nearly 41,000 gold equivalent ounces in the quarter, which is 40,000 ounces of gold and just under 400 tonnes of antimony. Puts us on a pretty clear trajectory to meet our full-year fiscal '27 production guidance of 163,000 to 177,000 gold equivalent ounces.

Across the three operations, our throughput rates met our expectations, our recoveries held steady in line with plan, and our lower than previous grades were successfully balanced by higher processing volumes, and this was as we intended. Driven by our solid operational execution and our disciplined cost control, our three mines generated $102 million in cash flow for the quarter, which consolidates our strong financial foundation.

With this cash-generating capability, we have a strong balance sheet, and we've ended the quarter with $459 million of cash, bullion, and investments. As I've talked about previously on the last conference call, we're putting that cash to work.

2027 is a year of positioning Alkane for future growth, as we're looking to invest $160 to $190 million of growth capital over this fiscal year, and we spent $37 million of it in the first quarter. Lastly, as we've talked about before, we're rewarding our shareholders who've supported our growth with a shareholder returns program.

At the start of October '26, we paid our inaugural dividend of 2 cents a share, and we announced a share buyback program of up to $50 million. Let's move on to slide 6.

On a consolidated basis in Q1, we processed nearly 741,000 tonnes of ore at an average gold grade of 1.83 grams per tonne and an average antimony grade of 1.11%. Recoveries of 89.6% gold and 89.1% antimony remained consistent quarter-over-quarter.

I've talked you through the three mines' production of just under 41,000 gold equivalent ounces, and generally, as I said, these results met our expectations for the quarter. As I've said, it was consistent, it was reliable, it was steady.

We're on track, reiterate, to meet this guidance of both production and cost. As well as the investment that we have to maintain our production and expand it, maintain cost control, we're also focused heavily on exploration to expand the resources and extend mine life across all of our mines.

We're also continuing to de-risk Boda-Kaiser, our large copper-gold project. To that end, on all of these plans, we're going to be investing $215 to $255 million collectively on everything.

Let me get into the detail by operation, and then, of course, we'll answer the questions at the end. Tomingley on slide 7.

In quarter one, we processed 344,000 tonnes of ore, 6% more than in the same quarter last year, the difference being the extra crushing that I've spoken about previously that goes in before the circuit. The average grade of the processed ore was 2.16 grams per tonne, a touch lower than quarter four last year, and it's simply part of our mine sequencing.

Recoveries were over 90% as we get into our straps particularly with the fine grinding circuit. Despite the slightly lower grade, the better processing rates, the higher recovery, all balanced us out to 21,500 ounces of gold, just a little bit more than quarter last year.

Our all-in sustaining costs were $2,340 per ounce, or a touch lower than the same quarter last year, but please note this is just simply timing of our sustaining capex. We do still expect to be within our cost guidance for the site for full year.

The site's operating cash flow was $52 million for the quarter. Growth capital expenditure during the quarter was $25 million, primarily for the Newell Highway realignment project, which we expect to complete over the next 6 months.

As I've stated before, this alignment allows us to access that 200,000 ounces in the San Antonio open cut deposits, thereby, obviously, expanding our production sources and maintaining the cost here on the site. While the highway project takes up most of our site's capital growth project over the year—other initiatives that people should be aware of: we're purchasing mobile equipment and equipment rebuilds, and we're also have a scheduled replacement and upgrade of our carbon regeneration kiln.

Overall, a good quarter. Let's move on to slide 8, talking about Björkdal.

In Björkdal, we processed more than 355,000 tonnes of ore, higher than Q4 last year. Average grade of a gram a tonne and average recovery of 85.5%, both in line with our previous quarter.

This meant we did 10,500 ounces of gold, which is a touch higher than the quarter last year. When we compare the two, as in quarter one '27 now to quarter four 2026, the higher throughput rates basically we just scheduled a little better than we did last year over the summer vacation period, and we have continued to do a little bit of crusher optimization.

The capital focus on the quarter, the growth capital, was on two initiatives that we expect to expand production and lower unit costs with time. I've talked about this being our objective at Björkdal.

The first was pre-stripping of the Nylands open pit, with ore extraction actually now commenced in October, not in the previous quarter, but now commenced in October. The second was removing the till on the new portal to the Storheden deposit, which we expect to take our first cut in just a few weeks' time, and we already have lateral development across to Storheden from underground occurring, and we want that online within two years.

These initiatives, along with a substantial expansion of the tailings dam facilities, as well as mobile equipment purchases like we're doing at Tomingley and Costerfield, make up most of the $40 to $50 million growth capex budget for fiscal 2027. The quarter one all-in sustaining cost of $3,012 an ounce was significantly lower than the corresponding period in the preceding quarter, and this is just simply the fact that we just have more ounces over a pretty fixed cost base.

Operational cash flow therefore ended up at $20 million. We had a very good quarter delivering to plan at Björkdal, quite pleased with it.

Moving on to slide 9 at Costerfield, the gold-antimony mine, we processed over 41,000 tonnes of ore, which is more, quite a lot more, 14,000—14%, sorry, higher than the previous quarter. Various initiatives have resulted in this: slightly improved mill utilization rates and blend control.

However, also there, we are pre-crushing again. We have a pre-crusher to spread the load out of the crushing circuit, and that gives us a better size feed, which gives us higher throughput rates.

In quarter one 2027, the gold and antimony grades were 6.5 grams a tonne of gold and 1.1% respectively. Now, yes, this is lower than we intended, particularly due to overbreak in the hanging wall in the Youle-Shepherd area, but it's also just a scheduling issue as well with the higher-grade nuggety ore body that we have at Costerfield.

Overall, our gold and antimony recovery rates were 93% and 89% respectively, both slightly lower than the previous quarter, mostly due to the head grade. As a result, we produced nearly 8,000 ounces of gold and just under 400 tonnes of antimony.

All-in sustaining costs were $3,194 an ounce, higher than the preceding quarter, and this is primarily just due to the lower ounce production. As well as that, just to be completely clear, when we talk in equivalence, the decline in the antimony price has also had an impact on the ounce equivalence production contribution from antimony.

I'm sure we'll take questions on that, but roughly US dollar antimony price is about $13,000 per tonne at the moment on the Shanghai Metals Market. Capital plans of $30 to $40 million at Costerfield throughout financial 2027 are focused on the development of Brunswick South as well as equipment replacement, and both of those things are occurring.

Our cash flow, after all of the things I've said, was 21—$29 million in quarter one. Going on to slide 10, the mineral resource and the ore reserve.

People have heard me speak, we're trying to drive organic growth by increasing our mineral resources, and we have quite an aggressive exploration program across the operations. During the quarter, we released our annual mineral resource and reserve statement that showed the initial results for that plan.

Our mineral resources increased nearly 8% net of depletion, measured and indicated, and now starting to approach 9 million ounces of gold, it's at 8.7 million ounces of gold, a million tonnes of copper, and 42,000 tonnes of antimony. Inferred resources are nearly 4 million ounces of gold, 450,000 tonnes of copper, and another 13,000 tonnes of antimony.

The largest growth has been at Björkdal, with the new Storheden deposit the largest impact there. A reminder, the inferred resources, of course, include Boda-Kaiser.

On slide 11, you can see the exploration focus at Tomingley for the quarter was expanding near-mine mineral resources, with the area between Roswell and Wyoming 1, bullet one, as well as extending the newly discovered mineralization west of McLeans resources, is our bullet three on the picture. Drilling was also undertaken to further investigate a mineralized monzodiorite package immediately to the north of Roswell, which is bullet two on the picture.

Beyond the near-mine work, of course, we have a larger goal of finding the next million-ounce deposit near Tomingley, focusing on El Paso and Peak Hill as well, bullets four and five. I'm going to take a moment just very briefly, and obviously take questions on if people want, to discuss Peak Hill and the objective and results of the deep hole that we drilled at the Peak Hill historic gold mine.

As we announced on October 15th, the drilling was testing for a potential copper-gold porphyry system, which we hypothesized to exist below the high-sulfidation system we previously mined. While the drilling didn't fully resolve this porphyry target, it did successfully intersect the continuation of the mineralized high-sulfidation epithermal system approximately a kilometer below the Proprietary open pit, historically mined by Alkane in the late '90s, demonstrating significant vertical continuity of this alteration and mineralization.

Key results, you can see there on the screen: 6.4 meters at 0.42 grams a tonne gold from 1,000 meters to 153 meters at 0.11 grams per tonne of gold from 1,427 meters. Look, the takeaway from this is this confirms this system remains open at depth, and it may transition toward a deeper porphyry source.

The results also highlight substantial exploration upside beneath the existing resource, above these holes and below these existing resources. We have a further 6,600 meters of follow-up drilling planned in this quarter, the current quarter we're in, to test for high-grade extensions and better define the scale of the mineralized system.

Obviously, all with the objective of saying: can we put Peak Hill into the potential feed future schedule for Tomingley? Let's go to slide 12, exploration at Björkdal.

The focus here at Björkdal is to expand the resources whilst fully utilizing the plant and thereby extend the mine life further and reduce costs by delivering higher-margin ore. During the quarter, 29 diamond holes totaling nearly 16,000 meters were completed at the North Zone and Eastern Zone near the mine, near our existing underground mine.

Drilling confirmed strong grade continuity, extensions of mineralized vein systems, and several high-grade gold intersections were returned. The infill and extension drilling on the North Zone, and that's bullet one, included over an ounce a tonne of gold at 0.85 meters, and the Eastern Zone, bullet two, included 81.3 grams a tonne over 4.4 meters.

Now remember, here we're exploring narrow veins that we mine in bulk, and we have the expertise to mine this efficiently. These results just simply show, as we've often communicated, the Björkdal mineral system remains open both along strike and at depth and supports ongoing resource growth and further mine life extension opportunities.

Our current and planned exploration drilling, we continue to target along strike and down-dip extensions of this known mineralization. Then, of course, we want to further expand the resources and find the highest-grade feed.

Exploration of the Storheden deposit, bullet three, which is an exciting new prospect 700 meters north of the Björkdal mine, which we are already developing to as you heard me talk about cutting the portal and developing laterally, still has very significant growth potential. 16 extensional diamond drill holes completed in early '26 extended this high-grade gold mineralization and confirmed the mineralized system now is defined over 2.7 kilometers strike length and a depth of 460-plus meters, with mineralization open in all directions.

We're going to aggressively explore this target. Let's move to slide 13 at Costerfield.

Similar to Björkdal, our goal is particularly here to extend mine life and also reduce costs with higher grade. During the quarter, close to the current mining operations from the central corridor, drilling was primarily directed towards extending the mineral resource at Kendal, Brunswick South, and Cuffley deposits, bullets two, three, and four.

Work also included follow-up testing of the newly discovered mineralized trend located to the west of Brunswick South. We are now calling this Bentley because we're even confusing ourselves with the directions that we're talking about, and this continues to demonstrate potential for additional high-grade mineralization.

At True Blue, bullet one, we put 33 additional drill holes consisting of 19,000 meters there, and the high-grade intercepts confirmed the continuity and economic potential of the system. As I've talked about last quarter, we've got greater structural complexity, we're doing step-out drilling in and around True Blue.

At the Brunswick South deposit, which we're developing towards it at the moment, we did an extensive 91-hole infill and extension drilling program, and there's confirmed continuity between two principal mineralized domains: an upper, antimony-rich gold shoot and a lower, gold-dominant zone extending over approximately 400 meters in strike. A reminder, this is just 200 meters from existing development, and we're commencing development before it with allocated capital to it, and we want it to be a primary production source at Costerfield.

Exploration at Cuffley in the Sub-KC, is it KC system, which is bullet four, resulted in the discovery of another high-grade mineralized domain between the previously mined high-grade panels at Cuffley and continued expansion of the emerging Sub-KC deposit at depth. This newly defined Cuffley mineralization, it's readily accessible from existing underground infrastructure, and we've incorporated this into our life of mine.

An ongoing drilling at Sub-KC continues to demonstrate strong potential for further resource growth and new mineralized repetitions along strike, and so we continue to do structural analysis to work out well where exactly should we be drilling here, because it's quite tantalizing. North and east of Costerfield, drilling recommenced on the Northern Dykes, which is bullet five, and there we're targeting mineralized igneous intrusions similar to Sunday Creek, which you might be familiar with, owned by Southern Cross Gold, and depth extension testing at the Browns deposit in bullet six.

Slide 14, I'm just going to touch briefly on the Northern Molong Porphyry Project that encompasses our Boda-Kaiser gold-copper project and Nyngan. At Boda-Kaiser and the Northern Molong Porphyry Project in general, we did soil sampling, which will aid in defining a planned 4-kilometer RC drill program, and there we're testing just scale potential in and around.

Then other lower-cost activities, which are very very intensive but not costing us that much, include the continuation of environmental baseline studies. We're doing stakeholder consultations.

We're negotiating with property landholders. We're selecting sites for infrastructure.

We've got the purchase underway of additional tenements in and around our prospects, and we're negotiating on infrastructure. We're on path for a project approval application at the end of next year, the end of calendar 2027, midway through financial year 2028, and a subsequent investment decision on approval.

Let me take a second to talk about Nagambie project, where we have an earn-in joint venture. This project's 40k from Costerfield, and it might play, hopefully, an important part of that future of Costerfield.

During the quarter, nearly 6,000 meters were drilled beneath the historic Western Pit of Nagambie, confirming continuity in the high grade of the epizonal gold-antimony system. We put out the results just earlier this week, and some highlights included a hole including 3.3 grams per tonne of gold and another with 2.5% antimony.

Results continue to highlight strong similarities with the Costerfield gold-antimony system, and they demonstrate significant resource growth potential with mineralization remaining open at depth and along strike. We still have two drill rigs going there, and that's focused on further defining the extended system and assessing further exploration upside across the project.

With that, I'm going to hand over to Jim to provide a review of our financial performance.

Thanks, Nick, and hello, everyone. Here on slide 15, group revenue for the quarter was just under $206 million.

That was on sales of just under 38,000 ounces of gold and 172 tonnes of antimony, average gold prices of $5,128 an ounce, which is about 9% lower than the June quarter. I think we're all familiar with the gold price movements.

Average antimony price in the September quarter was just under 24,000 Australian dollars per tonne, or just under 17,000 US dollars a tonne. That was 22% lower than the previous quarter, and Nick touched on that earlier in the presentation around gold equivalent ounces, and perhaps people might have a question about those markets.

We also delivered 7,800 ounces of gold hedges during the quarter, and that's at that average price of just under Australian $2,900 per ounce. That only leaves us 21,000 ounces of gold to be delivered in forwards for the rest of this financial year at around $2,850 per ounce, or roughly in the order of about only 15% of our production over the next three quarters.

All-in sustaining costs for September quarter on a group basis were $2,805 an ounce, just under US $2,000 per gold equivalent ounce produced, and that was 7% lower than the June quarter. Operations at that mine operating level generated pretty good margins at $2,323 per gold equivalent ounce over the all-in sustaining costs.

Sustaining capital during the quarter was $13 million. Most of that is expenditure across the three operations on underground decline and other associated capital development.

Just turning to growth capital, that was $37 million for the quarter. We've talked about this before, but the major expenditure there really is at Tomingley on the Newell Highway realignment project, some mobile equipment purchases and rebuilds at Tomingley and Björkdal, and also that's the lifting and extension of the tailings storage facility at Björkdal.

Exploration expenditure, about $9 million. Nick went through those slides earlier on the presentation.

We're still at the point we expect to meet sustaining capital, growth capital, and exploration targets for the financial year. We had previously guided in FY '27 that this really is a year of reinvestment to grow our business, and so naturally we should expect the timing in sustaining and growth capital and exploration spend to vary across the quarters.

We do expect subsequent quarters we're going to reflect that, and you should see slightly higher all-in sustaining costs. That's why we haven't changed our full-year cost guidance, despite a really good quarter in September.

I'll turn to slide 16 now and just we'll talk about cash flows, and we've got the cash flow waterfall there. September operating cash flows from our three operations were $102 million.

Some items of significance that we haven't already discussed was we did pay our Alkane's maiden dividend, that was $24 million. A bit of a timing issue there, we'll have about $4 million which was paid in the very beginning of October, and that was to holders on the TSX, you'll see $4 million cash outflow in December quarter.

$13 million for normal corporate income tax installments, and $21 million in the column there for corporate and other expenses. That does include $9 million for corporate, and some of that's business development as well; $2 million for Boda; Lupin, $11 million of Lupin, planned expenditure during the quarter there over the summer period at Lupin, which is going really well; and $4 million of interest revenue.

We have a net inflow, which is the receipt of $8 million of cash returned from bonds, which we previously used to have cash backed. Just to guide for the next quarter, which everyone in this industry in Australia will have, is that we should expect in our December quarter to make our final true-up tax payment for financial year 2026 of around $55 to $60 million as we just go through and finalize those tax returns.

During the quarter, we launched a share buyback program, that was up to $50 million over the next 12 months, which I guess at a share price of around $1.70 represents about 2% of the shares on issue. To date, we haven't initiated any purchases as part of that program, but we do expect to opportunistically throughout the financial year, or really the next 12 months.

At 30 September, financial position remains really, really strong. We've got $459 million of cash, bullion, and listed investments, and if you include the undrawn line of credit facility, total available liquidity is just under $570 million.

That's a strong overall final position really underpins the foundation to continue to reinvest, which is what we're doing, and fund growth opportunities across the three operations, including the development of Boda-Kaiser, allows us then to, after all that, provide for shareholder return program with dividends and opportunistic share buybacks, and but it's still got a lot of flexibility on the balance sheet, should we see any opportunistic strategic or value-accretive opportunities as they arise. With that, I will turn the call back to you, Nick.

Thanks, mate. Leveraging that financial strength Jim's outlined, we believe we have a very good foundation to deliver on our two-part strategy: number one, continue steady-state production whilst maintaining or ideally lowering costs to drive overall margins.

This increases our cash-generating capabilities to fund growth initiatives and shareholder returns. To this end, I think people can see we're meeting our production and cost targets, we're delivering our capital programs on time and on budget, and we're aggressively drilling across the entire portfolio.

We are meeting that objective, and we believe that we'll be able to release long-term value for that. Hey, why don't we just get in amongst the Q&A?

Hand back to you. Thanks, Maggie.

Please.

Morning, Nick and Jim. Maybe just starting off with exploration side of things, wanting to get a bit better understanding of that tenure increase at the Northern Molong Porphyry Project.

I'm just trying to get a better sense of the strategy here and maybe how you're thinking about growth more broadly. I know you'd kind of touched on exploration to extend mine lives at the existing ops, but thinking more about longer-term growth.

Absolutely, mate. We're in the process of picking up this, there's document exchange, all this sort of stuff, tenure from Alice Queen to the east and then curving around to the north of the tenement package.

There's a two-part strategy here. This is not so much looking for supplementary resources, but making sure that the potential infrastructure footprint that we expand over, we can do sterilization drilling and all this sort of other stuff without impacting other tenement holders.

That's, to be frank, driving this a lot more than looking for exploration potential up to the north, even though, of course, we will do that.

Thanks, Nick. Just to be clear, is that, incrementally, you guys are thinking a bit more positively about Boda-Kaiser development longer term?

Is that a fair read?

That's, mate, very fair. We are at the moment, we have biologists on the ground doing all the flora and fauna studies across this summer.

We have modeling occurring of different water supply and tailings dam options. We're back revisiting the pit designs in more detail, all with a view to having these applications in next year.

Absolutely, that is the read, yes.

Yep, awesome. That's great.

I suppose just thinking about the buyback, based on my valuation and consensus valuations, it would be very accretive to buy back stock at current levels. I suppose how are you thinking about balancing that with those growth plans you kind of just mentioned?

We believe, and this is all assuming the gold price doesn't just completely collapse back another 1,500 bucks an ounce US from where it is, right? We believe that we're more than funded to meet the full $50 million buyback as well as meet all the growth programs that we have and maintain an incredibly robust cash position.

It will be the gold price and the free cash flow, particularly in the next financial year, that drives how much we look to increase those distributions by the two methods. We believe we're absolutely set.

Awesome, mate. Maybe just finally before I queue up again, just to clarify that the Peak Hill high-sulfidation epithermal mineralization hit, just wanted to clarify: did you say that could go straight into the Tomingley mill if you proved it up?

Look, yeah. Thank you, that's a good clarifying question.

Underneath Peak Hill, the ore that is there is refractory, we will need, should we mine it, we will need to do some sort of oxidative treatment, be it pressure rocks, BIOX, Albion, one of those type of approaches. A potential scenario, of course, is establishing an underground crushing and transporting up to Tomingley, which obviously we'd need all approvals for external haulage, it's a fair way away from that, to then, we'd have to do an oxidative step there.

Yeah.

Just to be clear, is the plan still to kind of target the porphyry potential under Peak Hill, or do you feel like it's moving more towards that high sulfidation?

Both. Immediate, obvious production plan to assess is what I just described.

Long-term exploration potential, we continue to look for what on earth has fed this system. One is an immediate thing that we're studying, working through, running the economics on, seeing what the approval pathway needs to be for that.

The other is just purely, effectively greenfields exploration.

Awesome, mate. I might just sneak one more in besides queuing up again.

Just on the Nagambie earn-in, I think the first hurdle's $12.5 million. How much is that through are you so far?

God, I'm sorry, I didn't prepare that number to have, but look, it'd be a couple of million dollars. Yeah.

We got two rigs two rigs running, probably so that's 12.5 over three years though, don't forget. Sorry, mate, but we've only got two rigs running and a modest team there, it'd be a couple of million.

No worries. Awesome.

Thanks heaps for that, Nick, appreciate it.

Cheers.

Thank you. Good morning, Nick.

Good morning, James. Congratulations on a good quarter, and thanks for the call.

Just a couple from me. A little bit technical: the low grade, or the lower grade, in the dilution that you had, are they low grade sort of associated with softer ground, or is that just a bit of a coincidence and yeah, something working your way through, or should that be something we should be cognizant of in larger parts of the ore body?

Sorry, David, certainly is not something that I'm trying to steer or guide people to being a continue and ongoing thing. Just at different points within Youle-Shepherd, the ore body turns over sort of even 60 degrees, in some very small sections even 45.

We can't effectively cable bolt that hanging wall in any kind of cost-efficient manner, and so we do get overbreak. Because our host rock is not mineralized in the slightest fashion, all overbreak is pure dilution.

That said, it only happens every now and again in a couple of different spots of the ore body. We had anticipated dilution, but we got probably a few thousand tonnes more dilution than we'd even anticipated.

Right, it's more about the ore body orientation and geometry rather than what the sort of mineralization is.

Yes, exactly. Exactly, yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. You're just chatting about the development pathway to Boda-Kaiser.

Can you sort of run us through, I guess, what the pathway looks like to an FID?

You can hear me, yeah? Can you hear me?

Sorry.

Yep, yeah.

Yep. Sorry.

The step one is baseline environmental studies, which we are doing and we are one year into those. You have to do two years of baseline studies and so we have a lot of people going onto the ground this summer, because if you don't get two seasons' worth of data, you effectively lose a year.

We have groundwater monitoring bores in place. We have a weather station in place.

We expect also across this summer, we'll be doing our heritage surveys, Aboriginal heritage surveys, remembering, of course, that this is privately owned land. That's number one.

That will finish by this time next year. That'll be done.

Number two, we are doing studies on where we're sourcing water, water licenses, the amount of water and there's an iterative step here with engineering around potential water capture, tailings dams locations, stuff like that. Of course, intertwined all of that is talking with landholders, we own some of the land, other people own some of the land, and we're just negotiating, well, how might this look, how does this work with different individuals, and we shift and change where we could put infrastructure against that.

We think we're on track to have all of that sorted by this time next year. We would then most likely put out a pre-feasibility study, because we're doing the work on mine designs and plant upgrades and new electricity costs and fuel costs, and all the good stuff, with a view to having the application into government by the end of the year.

Then typically, and we understand the vagaries of it, but typically a metalliferous project without too many objections has a 12 to 24 month final approval process. That's been our history sort of our average as a company is around 14 months of approval for our three major projects that we've done over the last 15 years.

That would see us in the middle of 2029 getting project approval, barring no legal challenges, that would see us making an FID later in 2029. We would obviously, as we were getting signs and we'd responded and we're interacting with the process, that would see us making sort of approaches on partners and stuff through that late 2028, early 2029 period.

That's the broad plan.

Perfect. That's a great sort of high-level overview.

You guys are timing perfectly for a massive deficit in the copper market, of course.

That's right. It's funny, mate.

You sit here on a day like today where gold's taking a hammering and you think, 'Oh, come on, copper.' That's right.

Indeed. Speaking of gold taking a hammering, I imagine you guys keep a bit of watching brief on buying back your remaining gold hedges or not.

How are you thinking about that at the moment?

Mate, my pause-and-wait strategy has ended up being prescient yet again. Look, no, at this stage, mate, we still just intend to deliver into those on schedule.

That's our default plan, and anybody putting together a model should have that.

Yep, okay, cool. Just while we're on the markets, you did make a couple of comments about antimony pricing and the market.

Do you want to share give us a bit of insight?

Yeah. Look, absolutely.

People will have noticed the US dollar gold price falling for antimony, like I said, it was $13,000 a tonne. The main thing that we're seeing is internal demand within China for particularly the manufacture of solar panels has fallen as a fundamental, and so the margins of the guys refining that have been squeezed.

That's what's driving it basically. It's not so much global growth or cuz the flame retardant stuff is broadly similar, there's been a little bit of substitution in things like brake pads and stuff, but yeah, we're seeing a contraction of that pricing.

Unfortunately, I don't see really beyond, we'll call it geopolitical reasons, I don't see reasons for that market to rebound strongly in the short to medium term.

Fair enough. Great insights.

Thanks very much, Nick. Thank you very much, Nick and James.

Cheers.

Cheers, Dave. Thanks, mate.

Hi, Nick and Jim. Thanks for taking my questions.

Firstly, just on costs at Björkdal, yeah, those mining costs came down quite significantly. Is there anything specific you can point to there?

I know you sort of talked on the scheduling and also the improved production piece, which improved the denominator impact, but can you maybe just talk to mining costs on a dollar million basis there?

Look, I don't want to over-egg the omelet, mate, in that we have had quite a steady focus over the last year of increasing our developed stocks. We do have more production fronts open that are letting the tonnes flow more freely and let us balance the grade, so that's good.

We have also started to invest when we've seen new pieces of kit arrive. We've been steadily buying equipment with arrivals over the last 6 months, new bolter-scaler, that sort of stuff.

We're a little more immune from diesel pricing up there in Scandinavia, like we've referred to before being really only the underground trucking fleet that does that, and we use a contractor with Scania trucks, like those, the road fixed-body trucks like you might see around Sydney or Melbourne delivering rock to a site. They travel much more quickly, they're very very cheap on a dollar per tonne basis.

All of those things together with a more consistent performance across summer on a slightly higher grade have just led to this result. Like I said, I don't want to over-egg that omelet yet, mate, and so we do expect while on a dollar per tonne basis, we expect the same to stay the same, we are still very beholden to making sure we get the right grades and the right ounces out of Björkdal.

I'm confident that we're steadily marching towards that 50,000 ounce per annum rate that we're looking for from there.

Great. No, that's very clear, Nick.

Then just moving to Costerfield, can you maybe just remind us on True Blue, I guess when you expect that to come into the mill and sort of how that material differs in grade relative to, I guess, the existing mining fronts?

In grade, similar, right? However, it was smaller than we anticipated, we only I think have, I don't have it right in front of me, but sort of 50-odd, 5,000 or something ounces like that that we could bring into the reserve, a year and a bit.

We have it at the end of our life of mine because we have to develop the 2 kilometers across to it. If we find stuff similar to Brunswick South or Bentley that I referred to, we expect that it will continue to substitute and push True Blue out.

What we're really looking for from True Blue is the step-out exploration we're doing up and down along strike across this 12 months. We're looking for that to give it more appeal to develop towards.

It is very similar grade in gold, and it is higher in antimony because it's higher up in the sequence.

Yep, too easy. Just staying at Costerfield and just following on with Nagambie, can you maybe just talk us through what the opportunity is there?

Obviously some good initial drill results, but yeah, how does that potentially fit into the mine plan at Costerfield?

In a massive, arm-waving, exploration-excitable-type fashion, in an ideal world there, we can expand that resource to be more substantial. See, but you can see there the grades, they're obviously high-grade stuff, but 3, 4 grams a tonne gold, 2.5% antimony.

It is slightly lower in gold than we have at Costerfield, that's not saying it's going to remain that way, but on the bits that we've discovered. In an absolute ideal world, I would like to improve the reserve base at Costerfield based on the exploration we're doing in and around Costerfield and have Nagambie as a substantial supplementary feed that we would justify the expansion of the milling facilities at Costerfield.

That's my ideal solution. Failing that, at the moment, we'll be fleshing it out and putting it later in the mine life, but trying to understand the mining extraction rate we can get from it.

I've got to admit, I think that Nagambie's quite exciting, and I don't think the market really gives Nagambie the company itself the recognition that it deserves for the asset that I think it could well have.

No, that's very clear, Nick. That's all from me, mate.

Thanks very much. Cheers.

Thanks, Paul. Cheers, mate.

We just have one question at the moment. It's: what impact does the rising cost of oil and diesel have on your operations, particularly those in Australia?

Hey, Jim, do you want to handle this one, mate?

Look, thanks, Nat, and the question for that one. Look, diesel fuel prices for us, they're around about 2% 2 to 3% of our total costs, or less than $100 an ounce, and that's really just because of our mobile underground fleet, with the rest of our Australian operations powered off the grid power by electricity.

It's immaterial. Probably more pertinent to really follow through on that question is it's around about supply, and we're not having any issues with supply.

We're not a massive consumer of diesel fuel, and we're not located in remote locations, yeah, immaterial to us, no issues.

We have no further questions, I'll hand the call back over to Nick for closing comments.

Look, thanks very much, everyone, for taking the time to join us today, particularly those who would otherwise be watching a quite interesting market open. As always, please reach out, info or mail at Alkane or alkres.com.

Look, thanks, everyone. Have a good day, everyone in Australia, and a good evening for those joining us in North America.

Appreciate your time.