Chrysos Corporation Limited (C79) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Chrysos Corporation Limited FY '23 Results Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Dirk Treasure, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, shareholders. Thank you all for joining us today for our FY '23 annual results presentation, our first full year as a listed company. I'm joined today by our CFO, Brett Coventry. Brett and I will give an overview of the operational and financial aspects of FY '23 as well as discussing our guidance for FY '24. Slide 3, please, operator. I'd like to start off with a summary of what we do at the company. Very briefly, we build PhotonAssay units. We deploy them to our customers, which are miners and laboratories and then we charge them a fee for use over a long equipment lifetime. PhotonAssay is a gold analysis technology, which uses high-powered x-rays to measure gold in the sample. Analysis is an entirely nondiscretionary spend for miners, and we're displacing an existing analysis method called fire assay, and we're seeing rapid adoption of our technology all over the world because it offers substantial advantages. First developed by CSIRO, PhotonAssay is significantly faster, reducing analysis time from hours to minutes. It's more accurate, particularly when miners have complex mineralogy. It allows reduced sample preparation, which reduces overall analysis cost. It's completely automated with the technician meeting only to place a sample onto an input conveyor and then remove the sample from an output conveyor post-analysis. It has reduced labor requirements. We've actually got a number of parties that run both fire assay and PhotonAssay in the same facility of a similar size, and they've informed us that they need about 1/3 of the labor to run PhotonAssay. PhotonAssay substantially improves health and safety for operators, which are no longer exposed to hazardous lead and hot furnaces. Every sample process leads to reduced CO2 emissions and 0 lead waste, which is a perennial problem for fire assay. And lastly, PhotonAssay samples are 10 to 20x the sample mass that is processed by fire assay, leading to a more representative subsample for analysis. Stemming from our acquisition of PhotonAssay from CSIRO, our technology is protected by a Mosaic, a patent on a global basis that would make it very difficult for anyone to compete with a similar technology. We also keep a very close watch for any alternative gold analysis techniques in the market. PhotonAssay has quickly become accepted by the industry. It's been used now in JORC and NI43-101-compliant releases, and we've now processed in excess of 6.5 million samples. Slide 5, operator.

Good morning, and my thanks also for joining us today. It's great to be presenting the results of our first full financial year since our IPO and to be able to confirm achievement of the Prospectus forecast. Starting with revenue, we had an 89% increase with total revenue for the year of $26.8 million, noting FY '22 revenue of $14.2 million. This result slightly exceeds our Prospectus revenue forecast. Of this, $25.6 million was attributable to PhotonAssay revenue. Our FY '23 EBITDA grew by $1.4 million on FY '22 to a final value of $3.5 million, which is notably 10% above Prospectus forecast of $3.2 million. This is in line with our intention of growing sustainably, including moving towards hub deployments and the operating platform, which we have built since our IPO, allowing us to operate a global business. From a funding perspective, we have $53 million in the bank. And during the year, signed the expanded $30 million debt facility, of which undrawn debt remain facilities remain at $21 million. At the same time, operating on a cash flow positive basis. We continue to have confidence in building further debt facilities to continue to support this growth. And with positive operating cash flow, our cash and debt sees we're well funded to continue to deploy PhotonAssay units. With 49 contracted units, 21 of which are already deployed. We have units contracted for deployment into FY '25 and expected -- at our expected deployment rate of at least 18 units per year. Slide 6, please. Taking you through revenue for the year, it's a good time to revisit our business models, remembering our customer contracts work on a long-term service and lease agreements with high-quality counterparties. Typically, these are for a period of 5 plus 5 years. Each of our agreements include a minimum monthly payment due to Chrysos by the customer. This provide secure forecastable baseline revenue. We refer to this as minimum monthly asset payments or MMAP. During the year, we had growth of 102% to $21.3 million of MMAP, and the MMAP exit rate of 31 -- at an exit rate of $31 million as of 30th of June. We can also make additional revenue when customers run samples in excess of their monthly commitments. We will refer to this as additional assay charges or AAC. During the year, this accounted for 16% of our total revenue. Importantly, this locked-in revenue continues to grow as we deploy more units. Slide 7, please.

The chart on the left here illustrates our global operations. And for those who attended the presentation last year, you might remember that this map had only 1 pin in each of our key regions. It's shown very clearly here that the company's plan to cluster units and to make use of the infrastructure that we continue to develop in each of our key regions is taking place. The location of these clusters is very intentional. Western Australia around Kalgoorlie and Perth are one of the most prolific gold mining regions in the world. We're operating here with 3 of the world's biggest laboratory companies. Eastern Canada is home to the Abitibi region, which spans Timmins and Val-d'Or. Both of which now house PhotonAssay units. In Western Canada, we have the Golden Triangle, which can be serviced by our deployment in Prince George. And in West Africa, we're now operating a number of commercial hubs with MSALABS and now Intertek across Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana. FY '24 will see us further consolidate our operations in these regions. We're very well supported by both our laboratory partners listed on the right-hand side here as well as those mining companies with which we work very closely. Over the medium term, Chrysos intends to see a higher proportion of our units, deployed either directly to or in support of our mining customers. Slide 8, please, operator. On the left-hand side, this chart should now be familiar to our shareholders. We continue to see sustained utilization of our units and are repeatedly hitting-record volume quarters. This last year has seen industry salable volumes soften. However, even in the face of a smaller overall number of samples in the industry, we continue to see increased volume uptake for PhotonAssay. [ Oscillating ] sample volumes are a normal part of the mining industry and relate to the wider cyclical nature of mining, and during what has been a bit of a lull in the industry, we've established ourselves in key mining regions as I laid out in the previous slide. This provide latent capacity to achieve additional revenue from our units once the cycle returns to the uptrend. On the right-hand side, we illustrate application of the technology, both current and potential for the future. We're currently offering analysis of gold, silver and copper on a commercial basis. And in particular, our operations in Tanzania have successfully been providing this wider suite of analysis to Barrick for over a year. We also have the ability to broaden market application of the technology to expand our total addressable market, having identified that the technology is also applicable to a range of energy metals and rare earths. Next slide, please, operator.

As we've spoke to throughout the year, revenue has continued to grow in line with our deployments, which saw us grow revenue 89% to $26.8 million. During the year, we've invested in building our global operating platform as we outlined in our Prospectus, and this includes growing to operate in 8 countries. This growth saw us deliver an EBITDA of $3.5 million. Note in the growth in travel and employee costs, which were in line with expectations as we build our global operations and deploy each units around the [ road ]. We would expect for some level of this growth to continue over the foreseeable future. Slide 11, please. I spoke earlier around being well positioned for continued growth with total available funding of just under $75 million, and the business operating on a cash flow positive basis. Our key spending item is deployment of PhotonAssay units. And during the end of the year, we invested $44 million in this, with this expected to step up during FY '24 as we move to deploying at least 18 units. Of course, remembering that when we deploy a unit, it is immediately generating its MMAP and contributes to positive operating cash flow from that time. Slide 12, please. Our balance sheet is well positioned for continued deployment of PhotonAssay units. We expect to see continued growth in noncurrent assets as we deploy more units. The changes in payables and receivables remain reflective of our growing business. Overall, our financial results are reflective of strong growth in deployment, building a global business and provides for confidence going forward. Next slide, please.

With the onset of FY '24, we provided company guidance for revenue, EBITDA and number of units deployed. As we've already provided these in our 4C, I'll provide a condensed summary. Our FY '24 revenue guidance is a range of $48 million to $58 million, which is an increase of almost 100% on FY '23 at the midpoint. We're removing provision of consumables from our forecast and are instead facilitating direct relationships between our jar suppliers and our PhotonAssay customers. Accordingly, our revenue range reflects only PhotonAssay revenue, which is made up of the minimum monthly assay payments and the additional assay charges. The revenue forecast reflects an increase of 115% on FY '23 PhotonAssay revenue at the midpoint. Our FY '24 EBITDA range is from $7 million to $17 million, and the breadth of this range is directly aligned to the breadth of the revenue range. Our costs are well controlled. However, the variable revenue related to additional assay charges, which is in turn driven by market forces, provides a considerable swing factor to our revenue and hence, to our EBITDA. Finally, from a guidance perspective, we've outlined that we expect to deploy at least 18 units during the coming financial year. This will bring us to at least 38 operating units by the end of the year. Importantly, we start FY '24 with the right teams in the right places to deliver on this target without any additional growth required within Chrysos' deployment teams or by our key manufacturers. Slide 15, please. By way of a summary, Chrysos has closed off FY '23 with a year of strong and sustainable growth. We've continued to increase our deployed unit base from 10 to 20 during the year with each of these units add revenue going forward. We've achieved full year revenue of $26.8 million, exceeding our Prospectus forecast of $26.6 million. We've achieved EBITDA of $3.5 million through the year, roughly 10% higher than our $3.2 million Prospectus forecast. We remain operating cash flow positive to a total of $4.7 million for the year, all of which we are reinvesting for growth. Our FY '24 deployment schedule is well supported by our 49 contracted units, which with 21 units currently deployed means an additional 28 outstanding deployments, extending well into FY '25. We continue to expand our relationships within the mining and laboratory industries to support our future pipeline growth. We remain well funded for sustained growth with substantial cash on hand and available debt totaling almost $75 million. In closing, it's been a great year for Chrysos and an outstanding first year as a listed company with our success testament to the quality and depth of our growing global team. I'll close there, and we can move to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question we have comes from Josh Kannourakis from Barrenjoey.

Just first one, in your sort of release, and you talked a little bit about pivoting more and more to mine sites. And additionally, to that, in the response to the ASX crew the other day, you obviously said you're focused on pivoting more that way with some ongoing discussions that you called out, can you please give us a little bit more context of maybe just the pipeline and in terms of that focus on the mine sites and how you're sort of thinking about that pivoting to that further to that in this next year?

Yes, absolutely, Josh. Thanks for the question. So really, at the end of the day, we need to remember that all of the samples that we process, whether at the moment, on a mine site or through a laboratory, all of those samples originate from the miners. So it's no accident of where we've put these centralized laboratory hubs, really, in those prolific gold mining regions. And then that allows us to leverage those hubs to really gain more and more traction with the miners that's around those hubs. Certainly, the long term here is then to deploy directly to those miners ideally with the laboratory partners that we're already working with to make sure that we have a network of PhotonAssay units in those regions. That allows us to have both the clustering but also the closer relationships with miners as well. The other piece here about the relationship with miners is really unlocking the further value add of PhotonAssay in comparison to fire assay. We are not just a like-for-like replacement from an analysis point of view. There are all sorts of things that we're starting to see miners do with the technology that literally just haven't been possible before. I think I flagged actually during the 4C that the company has come out talking about sampling raw RC samples, for example, straight into sample jars straight through into a unit after that, basically removing all sample preparation. And as such, reducing a pretty significant aspect of the cost for them by moving over to PhotonAssay. So again, looking there, how do we work with miners to really grow the application and advantages that PhotonAssay offers?

Got it. That's really helpful. And just drawing through the accounts, I noticed you incorporated a couple of new subsidiaries in North America, in the U.S. and in the U.K. Any -- and is that any read-through of potential activity picking up -- or the sales pipeline picking up in those areas in any way, shape or form? Or how should we sort of take that on board?

Yes, absolutely. And we've released previously a couple of the parties that we're working with, so the U.K. should make pretty clear sense. And as we go into North America, we're making sure that we're ahead of our deployment. During the 4C as well, we did release that we're moving into the United States, and we're also moving into South America as well. So while we haven't released the specific parties and locations that we're working with there, it's certainly part of our near-term future or part of the plan for this financial year.

Okay. That's great. And final one for me, guys. Just in terms of the, I guess, your capability if demand permits to step up above and beyond the 18 units per year, can you just talk us through a little bit about how you'd go about that, the lead time, the sort of process of securing the linear accelerators, like what should we consider? And is there a possibility that, that does happen?

I'll have this question actually. And when it comes to this being a company that sort of doubles in size every year for the past, I think it's 6 years now comes to deployment capacity, we are readily able to continue to trend with the market as and when we choose to. And we continue to reevaluate the number of units that we'll be deploying on a forward-looking basis. So certainly, we've come out this financial year and said that we're going to be deploying at least 18 units. Again, I talked at the last 4C that the reason that we've gone with that language is really that is the number of units that we are confident of deploying and not sort of the absolute maximum. Going forward from there, it's really a case of continuing to balance really 3 aspects here. So you've got the capital outlay and manufacturing capacity, the sales pipeline itself and then finally, that operational capability of having the requisite operations in each of these key regions and more specifically into each country to really support an ongoing growth in the units in those regions. And that's something we focused on a lot in this last financial year and still in this coming financial year. If you go back to the same time I gave this presentation last year, we were operating only in 4 countries. We've added another 4 during this financial year. There's a few more to come, but you can see that we're really starting to consolidate our operations into those key regions as well. So as we continue to balance those 3 things, we'll continue to identify the best growth rate going forward. And obviously, we'll announce to market when and if any decisions are made there that are different to what we're currently doing.

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from Lachlan Rogers from One Fifteen Capital.

I just wanted to get an update on where the head count is at currently and plans for that -- or how the outlook looks over the next 12 months?

Sorry, can you -- I missed the start of that. Sorry.

Sorry. I just wanted to get an overview of where the head count is currently and how that looks over the next 12 months.

Good question. Look, head count for us is currently sitting around about where it was in the Prospectus, actually. Certainly, going forward from here, with the company doubling number of units deployed over the coming 12 months, we are starting to see a number of operational efficiencies coming through that mean that we don't expect the number of head count to double over that same period of time, but there's still substantial growth in that space. A lot of the growth that we see is less so around HQ and Australian head count. It's really looking at those African operations and North American operations as we continue to expand in those regions.

Sure. And maybe just specifically going into buckets, I say with FY '24 guidance, it's quite a significant uplift in OpEx, where as much of that going within those regions?

We haven't probably set by region, but a significant amount of that obviously is our people cost. And obviously, we had a significant year of growth last year. You start to annualize that cost, and then the ongoing growth in people and continually starting towards more and more operational roles as opposed to the head office costs, but there's a big uplift in people costs for the coming financial year, which is associated with our annualization and the operational growth.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Mr. Treasure for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks very much. We're really pleased with the performance of the company this financial year. It's been a particularly big one for Chrysos, and we're now focused on deploying additional units around the world and further growing our customer base. And I look forward to providing further update. So thank you very much for everyone who came today.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that then concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.