Resolute Mining Limited (RSG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning, everyone, and good afternoon for those who might be in Australia, but thank you for joining us today to run through Resolute's March 2022 Quarterly Activities Update. It's certainly been a busy day in terms of reporting in Australia. So I'm sure that there's a lot to get through. This is Stuart Gale speaking. But joining me on the call is Terry Holohan, who is the CEO Designate; Doug Warden, who's our CFO; and James Virgo, who's the GM for Finance and Investor Relations at Resolute. Before I hand over to Terry and Doug to run through the quarterly performance, I'd really like to congratulate the team on delivering a very positive start for 2022 from a safety and also a production perspective. It's particularly pleasing given the shutdown that we had at the Syama Sulphide plant during the quarter. It commenced sort of towards the back end of February and was completed at the end of March. As everyone knows, this was a major project for Resolute. And thanks to some excellent planning and execution, we were able to complete the shutdown project without any injury and also to deliver, well, virtually immediate operational improvements across the entire plant. So that was a fantastic outcome, and the team did a wonderful job. In addition to that, we also had a mill reline, which was undertaken at Mako during January. Again, this was very well executed and planned. And as you can see from the results, there was very minimal disruption to our operations in Senegal. So with those 2 significant events to increase the gold poured during the March quarter relative to the prior quarter was very positive and really required an extraordinary effort from the teams thinking about how to do things a little bit differently to ensure that we could maintain that gold production, and Terry will go through that in a second. Of course, from that gold production, you can improve cash flows, which is very much a key and something that we've been speaking about a lot over the last few quarters. And that in turn supported a $54 million reduction in net debt. which, again, was very pleasing. It was also fantastic to finalize the refinancing of the revolving credit facility during the quarter. Finally, on the change out of CEO, we are very fortunate to have someone of Terry's skill and experience at Resolute. Terry joined in May last year, and much of the turnaround that we're starting to experience at Syama has been driven by Terry. And together with the support of our onsite leadership team, I'm sure Syama is set up for some positive results as we look forward. From my perspective, I'm moving on, obviously. So I'd very much like to thank the Board and the executive for their support over the last couple of years. It's been, let's just say, a very interesting period of time, and it feels, as we sit here today, that a lot of the hard work and investments that we've made across the business over the last couple of years is starting to pay off. So I wish the company all the best for the future as I move on to another opportunity in the resources space. So with that, I'll hand over, quite literally, to Terry for him to provide more details on the operations. Thanks, Terry.

Thank you, Stuart, and thanks for the introduction there. I'd just like to say thank you to yourself for your leadership over this last couple of years. We've gone through some soul searching and some very tough decision making on the operations to take the whole plant down for 30 days. It was a bold decision, but we're already seeing it was the right decision. And I think, again, thank you for your support there, and we wish you the best of luck in your new venture. Okay. What I'm going to do is take you through the operations, as I normally do on these calls. I'm going to start with Mako, take you through an update there, the Syama Oxides and Syama Sulphides, talk a bit about the shut, and I'll also give you a little bit of color on what's happening on the sulfide plant over this month given that we brought it back online virtually on the 1st of the month, from the 1st of April. Then I'll hand over to Doug. He'll take you all look through the corporate issues and the finances, et cetera, and then we'll do a bit of a wrap probably after the questions. Okay. To move to Mako. As per expected, we had a very steady performance there in production. Very pleased with the performance. We actually pushed out 33,000 ounces, which is a good number for the quarter given, as Stuart said, we had a mill stoppage right at the front of the quarter, first, second, third, fourth. That was essentially delayed from the previous quarter because our mill slicer is now accurately predicting when the lines need to be changed, and it was spot on when we opened it up and measured it compared to the information we're getting from the mill slicer. The major benefit we're going to have for this year as a result of that is that we now expect to only stop the mill 3 times this year instead of the traditional 4 times. We've also got some slightly higher -- we've retained a slightly higher grade material that is coming out of the cutback that we've engineered last year. And we're getting slightly higher recoveries because of percentage of felsic material slightly softer. We're able to put slightly more tonnes through the operation, and it gives us slightly better recoveries, but we're also still using peroxide in the leaching to increase the dissolved oxygen and get a better recovery, so we're up a couple points on the recovery there as well. We'll keep doing that until early next year when we get the oxygen plant in place that we've placed on order. At this point in Mako, we're comfortable where the mining is going. We're comfortable where the plant is. We are still ramping up the mill. We think there's still a bit more space on that to ramp up, and the bottleneck on the milling circuit at the moment is the cyclones. We've already designed the size of cyclones we need. They're on order and we have to change out the manifold at the top of the cyclones, but we're expecting over this year to keep inching up that plant in terms of tonnage. And we don't think there's a problem with ore supply, but we've also got significant stocks in front of the plant to keep it full. So the trick there is really just to try and increase units systematically through Mako, but you'll pick up that's a common theme throughout our operations. I'll talk first about the Syama Oxide circuit. Mining and processing went well. And with a focus on production there, we've actually been mining in the first quarter in the bottoms of the pit, slightly lower grades than the averages, and we've actually opened up a new pit, Beta 4 pit, so now we've got 3 pits operating. It's the first time in a long time that, that has happened at Syama. And that gives us a lot of flexibility. As a result of what was happening on the sulphide circuit, because we actually found quite a lot of material locked up in the circuit and we released that, we took an opportunity here and stopped the Taba and the Beta pit for 2 weeks each and went in there and did extensive grade control measurements. This does improve our modeling and therefore, our grade control actually in the pit when we're mining. So that we feel now we're very well set up for the rest of the year through the rainy season. And obviously, at the time we were doing this, we did process some slightly lower grade stocks as well through the plant and you'll see that in the grade of the plant. But over the next 3 quarters, we're going to see a systematic step-up in grade in our operation. And you'll also notice that we're actually pushing the plant now about 6% harder than we did last year, retaining the same grind, and we're getting more through that plant. So again, we're chasing that and getting those production units through that operation. And that plant is continually breaking records in terms of tonnage treated, et cetera. That brings me to the sulphide circuit. As Stuart mentioned, we had the major shut, which is the plant was down for over 1/3 of the time in the quarter. Let's go up to the mine first. We made some significant improvements there, focused mostly on productivity. As you remember, mid last year, we took over owner operator and we spent a lot of time now with the trucking guys and the bogging guys underground and improving the truck factors, the amount of material that we're taking out per truck. We've managed to get the truck factors on how many tonnes you're putting in a truck from 47 tonnes now to an average of 50 tonnes plus. And obviously, over time, we expect that in the next 2 quarters to get that close to 60 tonnes, because that's the size of the vehicles. When you start getting to the top end at 60, you're obviously concerned about the roads underground, but I can promise you we've got now some of the best roads I've seen in declines. So we'd be comfortably able to handle the 50 -- sorry, the 60 tonne loads without damaging tires. So again, we're expecting improvements in the underground mine. We're also expecting, because of the configuration in the pit -- sorry, in the underground workings themselves, in the stoping, that we're going to start seeing that increasing grade over the next quarter, which I mentioned last year, I'd expect to see from March this year. And I can see it's starting to come now. Grades at the moment in the mine are as per expectations. And if we swing to the mill -- the milling circuit, it milled as planned, given we had the major shut. And when we took the whole plant off, the comminution circuit actually came back online a little bit earlier than we expected, 4 days early, although we did some huge improvements on the operation there. And we started the plant without the roast to stockpiling concentrate. So we ended up with about 10 days of concentrate stockpile in front of the roaster by the quarter end. The roaster, when we stripped it down and opened it up, we virtually rebuilt the machine there. If you remember, back in 2019, we trialed some spray refractory, and that took a little bit longer to take out, which is a good sign, because now we've coated the whole inside of the machine with that refractory. It was in excellent condition, given it's been in place 2.5 years, and that bodes well for the future because we're really pleased with the spray refractory that we've put inside the roaster now. So overall, the shut was better than expected, and we also had the opportunity, it was part of the plan, to clean out all the tanks' ancillary items, obviously, taking the bricks out of the roaster, and the bricks are not grouted in between, they sort of rise and fall with the expansion of the unit. Given the unit was slightly on a slight decline, we were finding gaps on one side not closing up, but we found a lot of gold actually locked up in that unit. So we managed to clean out all the tanks of quite a significant amount of inventory and also from the roaster body itself. We don't think that's going to be a future issue given that we've now got a spray refractory, which is one solid block inside there. And just a bit of color on where we are now. The roaster is performing exceptionally well. We're getting -- for the last 12 days, we've had 100% availability. And we're running at the moment at 26 tonnes an hour. I'll be specific about numbers here. The previous record throughput on that roaster was 24 tonnes an hour, and the mills have been delivering maximum of somewhere about 19 to 20 tonnes per hour over the last year. So clearly, the roaster has now got quite a significant amount of capacity in it. We expect that still to take it up to about 28. That's the number that I was mentioning last year where we think we've modified it to be able to accept. So far it's going well. We're not pushing it. We're slowly ramping it up. What was happening now, we've just managed to recover the 10 days' material that we've stockpiled on top of the material coming forward. So that machine is literally vacuuming up all excess concentrates that we've had around the site from the shut, from the cleanout. And also, now we're looking at other materials that we can put through that roaster. So I think that given if you look at that circuit now, the crushing, with some of the modifications that we've done on the crushers, previously, in the previous quarter, I was concerned that the crushing circuit would be the next bottleneck after this shut. However, the crushing plant is also performing exceptionally well. In fact, we've broken a couple of records already with 10,000-plus tonnes in a day and actually had to shut it down because it was, the stockpile was coming up to the head fully feeding it. So it looks like the crushers are operating a lot better than we expected, and that puts the bottleneck in our circuit squarely on to the mills. Same as Mako, the mills are operating at about 75% to 80% of capacity in terms of power input at the moment. So we're now focusing on the cyclones around those mills to see how we can get more units through that. And again, if you look at that circuit, we do have 2 months of stockpile in front of the plant. So if we can ramp up that mill, we're going to be able to push more units through the system quite easily. As Stuart mentioned, just looking at that safety record, we're at the lowest numbers now on our frequency rates that we've seen for 12 months. That is quite gratifying given that we've had 64,000 man-hours operating on the shut. And 90% of that labor was local contractors, and we were really pleased with the performance of those and the skills that they demonstrated. So if you look at where we were last year, the whole of last year, where we did have a record roaster throughput, we only had a roaster availability of 85% on average. However, I'm expecting big things this year, I'm expecting about a 10% improvement over that. And if we look at availability plus the extra capacity we think we can get out, it's just going to be units gain this year, to try and get as many units through that plant as possible. But I think we're in an excellent position there. Let us talk very quickly about the exploration. They also had a huge quarter. We've put out the release on the mineral resource and the ore reserve at Taba. The ore reserve now is at 766,000 ounces at an average grade of 4.7 gram a tonne. And at those sort of numbers, if you're a junior, you'd be looking for capital then to start building your plant and your mine. So as a brownfield operation, we're very excited about that. But more importantly, what we are excited about is with all the wire frames we're looking at, there's definite opportunity to look at open pitting first. Our previous PFS that we did on that assumed we go straight underground, but some of the high-grade drilling that we reported on last year is fairly shallow. That means we can open-pit before we underground, which will soften the CapEx burden on that project. So we're redoing those numbers and we should have some better numbers towards the middle of the year. The other interesting development on the exploration is we've gone back to look at our northern open-pit mines that we're not mining at the moment. And we're looking down dip on there, and we're picking up some interesting mineralization. It's too early to talk about numbers at this stage, but I will expect a release on that in mid-quarter. And if that comes to book, then it's only a couple of kilometers away from the site, and this will complement the sulphides coming from underground. So again, that will give us a lot more flexibility, and it's relatively low strip ratios as well. So that's the operational summary at this stage. With that, I'll hand over to Doug.

Thanks, Terry, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll just take a few moments to walk you through the cash flow for the quarter, the net debt position at 31 March, and a brief update on the status of the hedge book. So as per the waterfall in the quarterly, just to step you through some of the salient items there. Operating cash flow for the quarter of $39.1 million. You'll note that we've simplified this chart from previous quarters and operating cash flow now includes the royalties, VAT and taxes and working capital previously split out, but they're provided for you there in the footnote. CapEx of $16.1 million for the quarter, 75% of which was sustaining and the remainder nonsustaining. The sustaining capital largely associated with Syama tailings facilities and the stripping at Mako, with the nonsustaining capital largely related to the roaster shut. Exploration of $5.2 million constituted brownfield exploration drilling programs at Syama and Mako with some greenfield work in Guinea as well. The asset sale proceeds of $43.7 million for the quarter, $30 million of which was the second tranche of Bibiani and $13.7 million from the sale of our stake in Orca. Debt repayments of $40 million in the quarter, $25 million of which was the 6 monthly amortization on the term loan, and the remainder was $15 million paid down as a voluntary payment on the revolver. So turning now to the net debt. At 31 March, after taking into account cash and bullion balances, the net debt decreased by $54.1 million in the quarter to $174.7 million at 31 March. This reflects those asset sales that I talked about, $43.7 million, with the remaining $10.4 million of cash flow generated by the business, net of debt service. As previously announced in the quarter, we extended the revolver by 12 months. And that revised amortization profile that is now associated with the revolver was included in that announcement back in early March as well as in the quarterly for your review. Hedge book update. So a reminder that our banking facilities require us to have a minimum 30% of the next 18 months' production hedged. Accordingly, at the end of March, we had 238,000 ounces hedged at an average price of $1,845. That's all from me. And with that, I'll hand back to Terry to wrap up and take questions.

Okay. And I think the general gist of it is, as Stuart mentioned right at the opening, we feel that we've have a really good quarter. This is not something that's happened overnight. It's been 12 months of hard work to get to this point. We know we are, as an industry, facing some headwinds on cost pressures with the energy prices. We have not yet really felt that coming up, but we're budgeting for it going forward. But our answer to all of this is that we've put our plants and our mines in a very, very good position now to be able to squeeze out more units for our fixed costs. So that really is our hedge against the cost increases. And I'll also add that we're very happy with our guidance that we put out early this year, and we expect to give you updates on that, obviously, over the quarters with some good results we hope or we expect. Thank you.

Okay. So I've got the questions here on my laptop. So I'll just read them out and Terry can answer or direct them back at me as appropriate. First one is that can you set out how much gold was recovered from the roaster and circuit in connection with the shutdown? I think that one is covered in the quarterly...

I can put a little bit more color on it. It was about 8,700 ounces we had, of which just under 50% actually came out from the roaster bricks, which was a surprise to us. And given that we don't have bricks in the system, now we've got a spray, we don't expect to sort of lose that back into the system. And about 50% was cleanup in ancillary equipment, some of it were agitation, corners of tanks, et cetera, so we've actually reengineered a lot of our tanks accordingly. We've put heavier motors in for agitation, et cetera. But yes, it was about 8,700 ounces and 50-50 split through the circuit.

Okay. Next one relates to Ravenswood or the sale of Ravenswood. Do you have any visibility on the performance of Ravenswood? And what should Resolute get from the deferred consideration from that and when? Well, I can certainly take that if you like, Terry.

Yes.

So the 3 components of the deferred consideration, just as a reminder, there's $50 million associated with a promissory note that yields a 6% interest rate that's payable, including the interest by -- in 2027. Secondly, there's a -- and this is, sorry, AUD 50 million. A second tranche of AUD 50 million contingent upon certain gold price hurdles and the Ravenswood mine achieving 500,000 ounces of production from the change of controlling, March 2020, and that's to be achieved by March 2024. And both of those -- both the gold price contingency and the production threshold have to be met for that AUD 50 million note to be payable. And the final tranche is AUD 150 million, which is associated with the potential liquidity event should the acquirers of Ravenswood, or the current owners, I should say, seek to liquidate that asset. And depending on certain formula, we could earn up to $150 million associated with that. So look, no real update on it. Obviously, from a gold price contingency perspective, that component of that particular $50 million promissory note remains deep in the money. The production is still a couple of years to go. So early -- well, relatively early days. Still, we think it's achievable if targets are hit from now. And the other 2 -- well, one is 2027, there's nothing contingent upon that other than it's the credit risk of the current owner, and then the $150 million depends on the liquidity event. So hopefully, that covers that question. That would appear to be all our questions at this point. I'll give just a few moments if there's any further questions to come through. If not, Terry, you might like to just wrap up. It doesn't appear that any more are coming through.

I'd just like to say, thank you for your time, and as I say, what we're looking for this next 4 to 6 quarters is just steady growth improvement in units. And obviously, we're going to focus really heavily on the cost as we think we're seeing a possible spike in operating costs over the Q1 -- sorry, Q2. But I'd say our answer to that is increasing units. Good. Thank you very much.

All right.