Metro Mining Limited ($MMI)

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us once again. We have the quarterly webinar presentation for Metro Mining to be presented by CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Simon Wensley; and the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Nathan Quinlin, who will be walking us through the finer points of the quarter just passed and the milestones hit and the outlook for the coming weeks and months ahead. There will be time for Q&A at the end. And I remind you, this webinar will be recorded and available for playback later on. I'll hand it over to you, Simon.

Thanks, Peter, and good afternoon to everybody. Thanks again for joining us and for your interest in Metro Mining. So I might just share the release from this morning so that we can do a brief run through, and we'll leave plenty of time for questions afterwards. Sorry. Okay. Can you see that, Peter?

Yes, that's come through.

Yes. Great. Okay. Well, look, this was released on the ASX this morning. And obviously, calendar first quarter of each year is from a production point of view, a slow quarter or a low quarter. Obviously, there are lots of other activity going on, and we'll talk through that. But -- so the quarter started, as you might remember, we did have a vessel ready to load at the end of December going into January. Unfortunately, the monsoon season had set in and a window did not present itself to be able to load that vessel. So we negotiated to defer with the owners and the customer to defer that vessel until the restart of operations. And that, of course, affected our, I guess, receipts, and Nathan is going to touch through the financials in a little bit. But what it did mean though, is that we had a significant amount of stock on the ground that has been ready to -- have been already mined. A lot of it had already been screened and some of it was even loaded on barges ready to go. So I guess that gave us some confidence to restart a little bit earlier than we have in the past. So our earliest ever commencement of official operations on the 11th of March. And that -- even though we're still -- we have had a very significant wet season. I was just looking at the numbers yesterday, and we've had 3 meters of rain in about 3 months and higher than certainly the last couple of years. The -- we had that stock on the ground, and that gave us some confidence to restart. Now unfortunately, just about a week after restart, we had to evacuate most of the site and put the equipment into tie-down position and mobilize the marine equipment on to cyclone moorings because of a tropical cyclone. So that did -- that passed just to the south of us. And the -- there was effectively other than a bit more rain, no real impact at the site. But we did have some pretty large waves out the front of the operation in the offshore area up to 6 to 7 meter waves. And so that did cause some impact on the channel. So -- but we're in a much better position. Those of you who've been with us for a while might recall we did have some issues with that last year, but we took some precautions at the end of last year to widen that channel, and that allowed us to maybe lessen the impact of that, this time around. And we already had the bed levelling assets on site to the Surveyor and the contract tugs supplemented by Metro and TSA tugs. So we've been going hard at then restoring that. And we were able to restart, even with the restricted channel, we were able to restart barging a couple of days after the cyclone had passed through. So all in all, we produced -- sorry, we shipped about 100,000 tonnes in the March -- in the month of March. That was -- is a record for March. And again, even with the cyclone, we've talked about a strategy to safely and in a way that is environmentally responsible to manage pushing in on that wet season to ship 400,000, 500,000, 600,000 tonnes if we can, weather permitting. So we've just been able to take a bit of a step forward even though the cyclone came in this year. And I think the ability for us to manage that cyclone safely, get everybody off, get everybody back on and get barging within a few days was, look really well managed by a combination of our team and the contractor team. So look, a very good, I guess, implementation of our crisis management processes. Look, I think the other part, obviously, then was the maintenance. We do a lot of our annual maintenance in this wet season. So both on-site as we normally do, so mobile equipment, fixed plant, camp, et cetera, all get as much attention as they can. And we've sort of probably spent a bit more money on that this year, just trying to get everything up to standard and be ready for what is going to be a very big year for us. And the other part of that, which has been well flagged was the departure of our offshore floating terminal. So Ikamba left in January to go to Indonesia and was laid up in a dry dock in Batam, just near Singapore for some quite significant maintenance and upgrade programs as well as a statutory docking, and we brought that forward a year because of some concerns over the slew bearing in one of the cranes, but we've also now completed a whole bunch of other maintenance work from sort of upgrading the boom loader, from the upgrading some of the hoppers and electrical systems and indeed, upgrading the accommodation block and -- where people bed down overnight and some of the facilities there. So a lot of focus there. That's pretty much gone to plan, and we then took the opportunity to bunker with the fuel concerns, took the opportunity to bunker. We'd always planned to do some of that, but we've effectively filled her up in Singapore to bring her back here to give us a little bit of buffer. So she cleared the -- all of the inbound biosecurity and customs in Darwin, and she's on her way back. She's got a few headwinds at the moment. She normally would travel at 5 to 6 knots. She's got some headwinds at the moment. So only doing about 3, but still arrival currently around the 30th of April, possibly into the 1st of May. So look at weather permitting. And at this point, we're still very much on for our guidance of 6.6 million to 7.1 million. So I'll just touch a bit more on the market, and then I'll just sort of hand over to Nathan just to talk a bit about the finances. And I think, obviously, we had a lot of inbound questions on the impact of the hostilities in the Middle East. And you can see the impact of that on the aluminum sector. Now I went into a bit of detail on this at the AGM last week. So if you're interested, please do log in to the website and have a look at the video of the presentation at the AGM. But effectively, there's about 6 million tonnes of smelting in the Middle East, 6 million tonnes per annum of smelting in and around the Emirates and Oman, Saudi, et cetera. So it's pretty strong. Outside China, it's probably the largest production area for aluminum metal. And so we've already seen 3 smelters being affected by the war. And prices were already on the march anyway in aluminum because of a deficit coming into this year of roughly 2 million tonnes, and this could create another annualized deficit of maybe another 2 million or 3 million tonnes. And at the AGM last week, I did flag, well, look, I mean, that's going -- if that occurred, then prices would go at least to $4,000, maybe higher. And I think that what we may see here, and we're already seeing a little bit is that the cap on smelting capacity in China is probably likely to be breached, and we can see that on a monthly basis in the last few months that China has been producing roughly annualized 46 million to 47 million tonnes of aluminum, which obviously is good for demand for alumina. I mean alumina is oversupplied, and you can see prices have been relatively weak in alumina since the spike that occurred at the end of 2024 coming into 2025. So we're still seeing prices -- pretty weak prices with a lot of the aluminum -- sorry, alumina refineries around the world struggling to make money. So there needs to be a shakeout for sure. This has been coming for a while, and you've got some of these older refineries, particularly inland China that are sort of hanging on by their fingernails at the moment. And I think that this year, there will need to be a bit of a shakeout there. That will affect bauxite demand, but a lot of it is based on a lot of that smelting -- refining capacity is based on domestic bauxite. So we'll probably see a bit more of Chinese domestic bauxite coming out with those domestic alumina plants probably curtailing temporarily or closing permanently. We've seen a bit of an uptick in alumina. I think that's mainly just due to, I guess, reactions from the hostilities in the Middle East to do with freight and fuel, et cetera. I don't think it's a fundamental change in the supply-demand balance. Look, with respect to bauxite, similarly to alumina, we've seen sort of oversupply at the back half of last year into the first quarter of 2026. And we saw prices sort of drop to just above $60 a tonne for Guinea and below in the low 50s for the Australian benchmark. I mean, that's as low as they've been there. And you can see certainly for the Australian benchmark, that's as low as they've been since the beginning of '24. And in the case of Guinea since the beginning of '23. So look, we did see though some, I guess, reaction, some elasticity reaction there. We saw some declarations in February from a couple of producers in Guinea saying that they couldn't make money at that level, and we're going to look at curtailing production. So I think what we've been talking about over the last year or 2 from a cost curve perspective, that the costs of the marginal supply in Guinea around about that sort of $65 per tonne. I mean I think that's been borne out in now. We've got proof of concept there. Again, in the AGM presentation, I've updated the cost curve -- the cost curve analysis that we received from CM Group in a slide there, and you'll see an outlook where we see that cost -- that marginal cost out of Guinea probably rising up above $70 per tonne over the next few years. So I think long run, the structure of the supply in bauxite is running in our favor and in terms of costs. And of course, at the same time, Metro, with our expansion is heading down the other way towards -- more towards that USD 30 per tonne. Now unfortunately, for us, I mean, the results of the Middle East crisis from a bauxite perspective, there's really little impact in terms of the supply-demand balance. There is some bauxite consumed obviously, in the Middle East, but not that much about more like sort of 5 million, 6 million tonnes in a market of over 250 million tonnes in the Asia Pacific, Middle East area. So it's not a huge amount. So that's not going to really affect the -- either the supply or the demand for bauxite. We have seen freight rates rise considerably. And the freight from Guinea, for example, has risen from around about USD 26, USD 27 per dry tonne equivalent before the Middle East war to around about USD 36 to USD 37 per tonne now. And so that will flow obviously into the cost of delivery and therefore, the cost -- the total cost of delivery for Guinea and other West African bauxite into China. At the moment, though, there's still a fair amount of stock of bauxite on the ground in China, particularly based from the oversupply that's occurred in the last sort of 6 to 9 months. So the situation is very different from the end of '24 when just some small changes in the market caused some quite hefty spikes, as you can see there on the chart, the situation now is that we've got a fair bit more stock in the supply chain. And so this fuel or the freight shock, if you like, the freight price shock has really not yet been fully reflected. We have seen the price jump up. It was about $68 per tonne for Guinea at the end of the quarter coming into April. So we've not seen a full reflection of that freight change being passed on, and that's because buyers are really sort of less sort of -- not yet concerned that they have to -- enough that they have to sort of take all of that cost on board in buying the bauxite. But I think it does mean that I think we've hit the bottom. We are going to see prices move up. And I think the other element here is that if those prices can't be passed -- if those -- sorry, if the cost for freight can't be passed on through price, that will just see the net FOB netback in Guinea drop even further than it was in February. So -- and the Guinea government, which has taken over some of the leases that it canceled last year is now a producer of bauxite. It's going to be looking at its bottom line, and it's not going to be making any money. So we have seen declarations from the Guinea government about setting quotas, and we see that -- I mean, the rumor is that they're looking to do it relatively quickly. The number of 150 million tonnes has been mentioned, that's probably about a 50 million tonne reduction out of Guinea, and that would, of course, obviously cause a significant supply reduction in the market. I mean they're effectively like the OPEC of the bauxite world now, and they'll be targeting a certain price. And I've heard a mention of $90 to $100 a tonne for Guinea bauxite. So look, we'll see how that plays out. I think that there's definitely a direction here. And certainly, I'd be expecting in the second half of the year for sure that we're going to see some higher prices in the bauxite market. So I might stop there. And then, Nathan, I'll just pass over to you to have just a quick run through the financials.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Simon. Just wanted to touch on the financial position at the end of the quarter. So you'll recall from a cash position, we ended the year just shy of around $60 million, which was -- which was very, very close to that net cash amount. I think we fell short by about $1 million or $2 million. But that essentially end of year cash balance was really important to us for a couple of reasons, but essentially being able to make the right value decisions, particularly around shipping activities. And so you'll see from -- in terms of our net cash and operating activities, you'll recall in the previous period, we had extended our season much further into January than what we did in the season just passed by about 2 weeks. And the product of that was the rolling stock of around 165,000 tonnes essentially got carried through to the start of the year. And what that meant for us is with a strong cash position and a strong balance sheet, it's effectively allowing us to not necessarily chase tonnes towards the end of the year where that weather gets a little bit more changeable and the incremental cost of that loading is certainly more expensive and not guaranteed of success in terms of finishing off the vessel. So really important to be in that position to essentially be able to make a good value decision around probability of completing those shipments and then essentially be able to carry that rolling stockpile forward into the start of the year, which has then allowed us to effectively underwrite the beginning of the season. And like Simon said, have that confidence to start as early as we ever have knowing that with that stockpile on hand, even if we did get the rain that we did from a -- that interferes with the mining production side of things is that we have the confidence of, as we did in this particular quarter, a meaningful result. So even if we -- you fall short of exactly what it was you intended, you still had a record March even in spite of a tropical cyclone. So that's certainly, I think, very much vindicated that particular approach around ensuring that from a production perspective, that we do allow ourselves that confidence of an early start, knowing that if we do commit, and we bring our -- and remobilize our force back on site, that we do so with the confidence of having stock on hand so that if we do see an extension of the wet season like we did this year where it was particularly rainy and caused some flooding in our pits that we can still do something meaningful. So I think that's been very much vindicated as the approach and will be something we want to keep exploring even further, like Simon mentioned earlier, of even starting to challenge much higher sort of stockpile levels. So I think -- so that's been good. In terms of debt, it's been -- we've been able to pay down debt during this quarter and be able to maintain that amortization profile, which is fantastic. As you might recall, we did do a restructure of that Nebari senior facility just at the end of February there, where a significant proportion of that facility was deferred from 2026 into 2027. So that was, I think, a reasonable and prudent thing to do just to manage short-term leverage in of itself. But also what it did was provide us with that flexibility to actually implement our capital management policy, which we've done in the form of this buyback that we announced. So that buyback, now with the share consolidation otherwise executed and a couple of the recent headwinds in terms of the tropical cyclone, we're now in that position to be able to move forward with that 12-month program. In terms of FX exposure, so we've spoken about this a little bit before, but we're in a reasonably good position at the moment with $165 million of our net USD exposure hedged at the moment at a realized rate of $0.64. So well in the money relative to current price or current rate. That represents probably about 75% of our exposure for the year. So we're well placed at the moment and won't necessarily be looking to rush in to open any further positions, particularly with where the USD rate is at the moment. We obviously, very closely tracking an inflated crude price. So until we see that crude oil price start to settle down and then hopefully, the USD follow, we'd be looking to probably stay out of the market for a little while. Thanks, Simon.

Yes. Thanks, Nathan. Yes, and I'm sure there'll be, I guess, sort of confronting head-on the questions about the buyback. And I think as we announced that at the end of February, that's when the hostilities in the Middle East took off, that was quickly followed by, I guess, the realization within weeks that the Straits of Hormuz would be held hostage here and creating this sort of fuel crisis. And I think with the cyclone there and with waiting to understand how Ikamba was faring on its maintenance program and return towage back, I think we thought it prudent just to pause and delay the implementation of that. I mean I think the nature of that buyback is still exactly -- the objective is still there. I mean we still feel the company is significantly undervalued, and we'll be embarking on that at the right time. But certainly, now that when it comes back and we're ready to go, I think that is the opportunity for us to start that program. So yes, look, just to kind of -- I guess, as we've tried to do since -- over the last number of years is to be prudent and pragmatic and risk aware around these positions and making a decision -- making decisions in the full nature about what's going on in the external environment. Okay. Look, I might pause there. There's obviously more in the report around -- around operations, around ESG, around exploration, et cetera. So I encourage you to sort of have a good look at that. Some excellent stuff going on inside the company as well. So look, please take your time to read through the whole thing. But look, Peter, happy to take some questions.

Thanks, Simon. Yes. And there's always one about the Ikamba. It's a fascination for the ship, which I know you love as well. The question here is, is there likely to be no need for Ikamba to leave for any wet season maintenance in the next few years?

Yes. The current expectation and plan is that we now have about 5 years with her on station here. Look, I mean, the -- we have to keep a really strong eye on some of the corner critical parts of her operation, the 2 cranes, the boom loader, et cetera, being probably the 2 -- the 3 largest pieces of kit that we need some help in working with. You can bring large cranes to the site to help, but that's often more expensive than towing her to a shipyard. There are closer shipyards in PNG, et cetera, if we needed to do some urgent stuff. But right now, the full expectation is we don't need to go for another 5 years, but we'll be monitoring all of those aspects. And there are kind of, I guess, hybrid alternatives to her having to go as far as Batam to get the -- and that was a combination of, I think, both cost and schedule and quality from the shipyard. So we were looking at a number of different factors when we chose that option. And of course, having the ability to load with the floating crane and with the geared vessels that's allowed us to still get going even with Ikamba's absence.

Next question is, the report notes that the March ship loading was disrupted by tropical Cyclone Narelle with related customer receipts delayed. Can you give us a sense of April to date progress? How many vessels have been loaded and departed and roughly what level of customer receipts have landed in the month so far?

Nathan, do you want to -- I mean, look, we normally -- I'll let Nathan sort of get a bit more specific. But at the end of each month, we publish a bit of a short summary of the previous month. We're not far away from that at the moment. So we'll give you sort of full disclosure on what's being loaded. And that's not just about vessels that have departed, but ones -- the amount we've actually mined and shipped. So we'll give -- usually within 3 or 4 days at the end of the month, we'll put something out that covers that. We didn't actually have a ship leave during March. I think the 1st of April, we actually -- the first vessel departed. But Nathan, do you want to add any more color to that?

Yes, sure thing. So particularly the first of the Capesize vessels was the one that was probably the most delayed. Like Simon said, we'll come out with a good production update very shortly as the month closes out. But otherwise, from a customer receipts perspective, very normal collection activity just in terms of -- as most of you know, we'll collect on letters of credit. So as soon as those vessels are completed loading, we're more or less able to turn that into cash and liquidity. So the impact of March has otherwise been addressed in April, and we're in sort of normal collection routine now.

And Nathan, feeding on from that, there's a question here regarding outstanding receivables from Q1. But are there any that we yet to see? Or is the low cash on hand just reflective of the delayed sailing of a number of vessels into April as you...

Yes, certainly impact on the delay from the cyclone. There was a modest amount of receivables, very similar to sort of year-over-year around a couple of million. But I think from a cash balance perspective, like I mentioned, the value was really in being able to start as early as we did. But even as importantly as -- and obviously, we track and forecast these things, also being in a position to be able to fully execute the wet season maintenance program, including a lot of optimizations that we were able to perform on the Ikamba. So not having to necessarily make sort of value impacting decisions or things like that to try and manage to a cash balance. So we've been able to sort of get maximum value out of our year-end cash position.

I think we've been able to prepay some fuel as well during this period. And the cost of the program has been higher than maybe we initially had thought, but that's been more about extra scope than it has been about anything else. So we've just taken the opportunity to do things that we think we need to do to make sure we're as ready as we can be for what is going to be a big year.

Perhaps this is still related. Nathan, could you please provide some clarity on the expected reduction in FOB pricing from quarter 1, '25 to quarter 2, '26? Is the FOB pricing received referenced on a realized price or index basis? The impression of this questioner was that the reduction in legacy contracts would offset the decline in the bauxite price index.

I might start that, Peter. So look, I think the pricing falls that we saw up to the end of February were probably larger than we might have hoped sort of sitting in December, January when we were sort of looking at the market. So the price continue to fall continuously right the way through until the end of February. So -- and I think the -- I guess the impact of that is that we -- around about that end of February, that's when we are pricing end of February, beginning of March. That's when we are pricing the Q2 sort of numbers. So the -- you can see there from when we were -- we priced, obviously, Q4 around about September time when we had Guinea price was sort of above $75, and we're pricing sort of our Q2 numbers when the Guinea price is close to $60. So it's sort of been quite a significant fall in price over that period. So I think at the time, we've been hoping that as the questioner alluded to that we -- the legacy pricing removal would offset that, but it's not been quite that way. So yes, look, we've tried to represent in that number a price received rather than an index basis. So looking -- we obviously have all of our Q2 customers priced. So it still depends on the sales mix, which cargoes -- at the end of June cargoes, we still -- we run a schedule about 20, 21 days out. So the precise number of cargoes to the customer are not yet fully understood. And there will be a little bit of a trade-off. It also represents some higher freight costs in this quarter because of the Ikamba not being around. So we've used a number of geared vessels in April. And so their freight is significantly higher than a Capesize vessel. And look, we've been -- obviously make the trade-off. We're still making money out of those cargoes, but the margin is just reduced. So on a like-for-like basis, we're seeing a number of moving parts for that FOB netback price to be guided as to what we have.

Demurrage, Simon or Nathan, is there any impact from demurrage for cost impacts for quarter 1 that's worth discussing?

Yes, happy to answer that, Simon. There'll be a marginal amount. I think the most sort of important implication for us, particularly with Tropical Cyclone Narelle was that the harbor master actually closed the port for a period of time, which is an important element, essentially as a protection for us on demurrage, similar to sort of a force majeure type condition within those standard charter party contracts. So we're afforded a good deal of protection there on a number of those. And the other impact for us is Simon just mentioned the geared vessels as well. We were pretty conservative and modest in sort of some of the loading rates that we're expecting out of those gears at the start of the year. And so what that essentially means is with the more conservative loading rates under those freight contracts, is that you essentially bear the higher cost of that freight upfront within the freight invoicing itself and then reduce the risk of demurrage. So for the most part, we would expect the cost of those vessels to have been realized.

Thanks, Nathan. And Simon, that concludes our questions here. So any final comments or something for the forward-looking activities for the company and the shareholders?

Yes. So look, I think we -- 2026 has always been our target for the 7 million tonne demonstration. That is still firmly on the cards for us. We obviously now seeing at the end of April, much more stable weather conditions. Ikamba will be back within a few days and so -- and operating pretty soon thereafter. So look, it's all about to start to ramp up. The sweet spot of the year is sort of normally August, September, October, November. That's when we have the best tides, the best weather, et cetera. So that's always our strongest point. But we know we need to get off to a good start, and that's what we're planning. I think the operating changes we've made are bearing fruit, and we've got a really good, I think, sort of integrated planning process now that's starting to bed down and the execution on site very focused, a lot of cost-saving ideas coming through as well as the productivity stuff that we've been driving. So a stable environment now from May onwards is what we're after, and that will enable us to use the foundation of what we've done in Q1 in April to hit those targets. So that's absolutely what we're planning. And if we can do that, our costs will be -- we're looking for that heading towards that USD 30 a tonne. Look, fuel is about 10% of our cost roughly. So we're about $3 a tonne last year. I mean we've hedged -- the fuel for most of our freight is already hedged as part of our contract. So we won't be seeing escalation that we touched on for Guinea and even some of our Australian competitors may see fuel escalation in their cost. But most of our freight, 80% to 85% of our freight is already covered. And so -- but our site-based fuel is not hedged. So we may see $1 or $2 in costs from -- depending on how it goes for the rest of the year with this sort of Middle Eastern hostilities. And -- but I think most of us are thinking that the -- even if the war was to stop tomorrow, it's still going to take several months for the fuel systems to reorganize themselves. But we're well supplied at the moment, working very closely with our suppliers. We've got and expect -- as expected stock on the ground for that. And so that's how we are thus far. So look, in pretty good shape.

Tremendous. Thank you very much, Simon. Thank you, Nathan, and thank you for everybody joining us here today. The recording of this will be available once we've loaded it and distributed the link, and we look forward to seeing you again next time. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.