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Metals Acquisition Limited

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September 16, 2024 at 8:50 AM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

Mick McMullen

CEO

Mick McMullen, Metals Acquisition Limited’s CEO, brings more than 29 years of senior leadership experience in the exploration, financing, development, and operations of mining companies globally.

Mick most recently served as the CEO and President at Detour Gold Corporation, a 600,000 ounce per annum gold producer in Canada from May 2019 to January 2020. During his tenure, Mick took the market capitalization from C$2.1 billion to C$4.9 billion over 7 months, which represented an internal rate of return of 208%, leading to the acquisition by Kirkland Lake Gold Ltd. in 2020.

Prior to Detour, Mr. McMullen served as CEO at Stillwater Mining Company (“Stillwater”) from December 2013 to May 2017 and as Technical Advisor from May 2017 to December 2018, where he was instrumental to the increase in market capitalization from US$1.3 billion to US$2.2 billion against a 10% fall in platinum group metals (“PGM”) prices over the same time.

Mick’s time before Stillwater involved the identification, acquisition, development, and operation of a variety of mining assets across North and South America, Europe, Australia and Africa. These ranged from gold to base metals and bulk commodities. In addition, he has provided technical and financial advisory services to many of the larger PE funds, activist funds, and banks providing mining finance.

Mick is a qualified Geologist and received his B.Sc. from Newcastle University in 1992.

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Ok. Ok. Yeah. Ok. Yeah. Do you have any mics? It? Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Ok. Got. And with our next session, we have metals acquisition company which is a copper producer focused on the Cobar or CS A mine in Australia. Here today is Ceo mcmullin, Mick mcmullin. And he's here to discuss M AC. Thanks. Sorry about the set up with our first question. I wanted to really touch on the Cobar mind in general and just get a quick overview of the transformation efforts. M AC is making there. Sure. Look, I think most people understand or know the business but if you don't know the company, we bought a mine. Hi, very high grade copper mine off Glencore in New South Wales about 15 months ago. It sat inside Glencore for a generation. It's incredibly high grade, so 5% copper grade in Western New South Wales been running since 1967. So it's a well established operation. and the resource grades about 5% right? So it's it's a bit different to sand's last presentation. incredibly high grade and it's a, it's a known quantity, but it's sat inside Glencore for a generation. Ok. And so I guess for better or for worse, My team and I are seen as turnaround specialists. And so grade is king, but grade can also be a bit of a curse cos it allows, you know, sub optimal performance to to survive. So, you know, the things that we've done at the mine are, you know, we've reduced headcount by a couple of 100 people. We've significantly reduced. The C one by a third, roughly, we've doubled the reserve life. So, again, if you're sitting inside Glencore, you're not getting paid anymore for having a long reserve life. Now, this is a mine that has a, a very large open down dip, extent of the ore bodies and actually up dip in some cases. And so we've taken a reserve life from 5.5 years which it's had for the last 50 years. to, we're now sitting at an 11 year reserve life. So, you know, it's, it's a pretty basic sort of story. It's one of these assets that sat inside a very large company for a long period of time. at the time was doing about 33,000 tons a year. We're currently running in a bit over 40,000 tons annualized. We've put guidance out to get it to about 50,000 tons. And I would say we're getting increasingly more confident with our knowledge of the ore body, and our productivity improvements to actually punch well through the 50. So it's a pretty simple story. It's, you know, we've done this many times before. A few of you would know me from my, my exploits at Stillwater and Detour. Ah, and it's so, you know, fix your resource, fix your culture, right size the head count and then grow, grow profits through extra productivity and production, right? So that's where we are excellent. Yeah, thank you. And with that, I just wanted to touch on the deposits of QTSN, the North or QTS Central as well and how those developments are going. Yeah. So I'll just go back here. We this is the abridged version of the slide deck, but that little graph on the bottom right over there. The big blob is the main or body kit here North. That's about 75% of our total tons still open at depth. The reserves we're currently have the decline to within about 50 m now of the bottom of the reserves for the next 11 years. We know that thing carries on for another 3 to 400 m. With inferred resource we've been quite successful. Again, noone at Glencore is getting bonus up on on exploration success. So we've been throwing quite a bit of money into exploration bit like shooting fish in a barrel when your all body is open and it's running 10% which that main high grade core of QTS North, is broadly 20 m at 10 to 15%. Everyone gets a bit blase about it. But if we were just a normal explorer and we start announcing 20 m at 10 to 15% the stock would be a double. Ah, but because we're a producer, everyone forgets about it. So we've been very successful at extending the strike length of that ore body. Now, we've added about 25% to strike length. We, which means that we've picked up a lot more tons for vertical meter, which then means that we can do less development for the same or tons or we carry on doing the same development and we get more production. We have a very big hungry processing plant. It'll do 2 million tons a year at the front end, 80,000 tons of copper at the back end. Again, it was running at under a million tons annualized when we got it. We've been running at around about the 1.21 0.3 million tons run rate. June was a very strong month. We we actually ran at 80,000 tons annualized in June of copper. So we have all the infrastructure if we can get more out of the mine, We can actually fill that infrastructure up, right. So again, come back to that point about, we're feeling increasingly more confident on our ability with our knowledge of that ore body now to to produce, you know, well, north of that 50,000 tons, Kia south upper is right up near surface. It's a very, it's a narrow but very high grade. Typically in the 10 to 25% copper range over a few meters. And we're about to go and start mining that ourselves probably in the next six weeks. That's not in our current guidance, the bulk of that has been in inferred category. And obviously with the rules in the US, we're listed in the US as well as Australia. we can't put that in our guidance, but, you know, you can sort of see where you can see on that graph there where we've got a few things to get us to that 50,000 tons magical number. Again, we've been running at that actually. And then we have a few things like QIA South Aper that sort of get us a bit. Well, north of that, I would say so, we have lots of opportunities on the immediate mining lease for us to grow production. We have a big hungry plant, we have a lot of excess capacity in the shafts. We have excess capacity in our sort of concentrate handling. part, it's all about the ore body and getting more out. Yeah, absolutely. I also wanted to touch on the how much exploration you're actually what, how many meters you're drilling for? you down, down plunge as well as QTS south and what type of cost goes into developing that and getting that into reserve? Yeah. So in the 24 years that Glencore owned the mine, they spent around about $62 million in total on exploration and reserve replenishment drilling. which for an ore body like this where we, we can go to places where there's no more data, but it's running 10% copper, right? So, we have a lot of upside in that, right? So we'd be spending around about $15 million a year on exploration. It's not true exploration, it's really just extending those known, you know, those known ore bodies. Ah So you go from spending 62 million over 24 years to about 15 million a year, right? So that's driven you know, the big increase in the resource and reserve base, everything is still open. And for us, the biggest bang for our buck we can get right now is drilling out this stuff. And then as you say, the second part of your question, what's it gonna cost to develop it? So QIA South upper for argument's sake. It's only 600 m off the current decline up on the two level. So 200 m below surface, very shallow. That's about a $20 million development cost,, to get out there. And that'll add, you know,, around about 6000 tons of copper unit to our production. It's about a 10 month development,, schedule., we're about to start that in the next six weeks. Right., we have some interesting high grade zinc stuff. This mine started out as a very high grade zinc mine 60 years ago., and we've been announcing some things. It's, it sort of sits right at the very top of the ore body. They chased the copper left a lot of the zinc behind. So in the top of upper parts of our mine, we've spent a few million dollars drilling some or reconfirming the historical data. We have a, a huge amount of historical data doesn't comply with JK because it's old. We don't have the Q A QC. So we've been twinning a pile of holes to see how it comes out. We have a 10 12% zinc ore body sitting up there, which we won't treat ourselves. We'll truck it up the road to poly metals at en the Endeavour Mill. But yeah, it's, it's small amounts of capital, right? Anything we do at the bottom of the mine where we're just doing, you know, extension of the mine in terms of strike length, we've already spent all the development Capex to get there. Again, decline, we're already within 50 m of the bottom of the reserve, right? So now obviously, we know the al body carries on. So we're gonna keep pushing on, but this is not a capital intensive operation. And that's why, you know, we convert, we have about a 50% eb a margin. We convert 75% of that E BDA to free cash. Perfect. Yeah, thank you. And then with that, I wanted to segue into, you know, the balance sheet. What type of steps are you guys taking to de lever? And where do you see that? Sitting in the next coming quarters? Jewel? We like this slide because I think it just highlights how much free cash this mine generates very broadly pre financing costs. We, we'd make it four buck copper somewhere in the order of 100 and 50 million usa year free cash give or take. as we grow, production, 70 to 80% of our costs are fixed. So if we grow production, our C one comes down, you know, last quarter, we're at a buck 92 a pound, we spent 13 million us of capital. So we generate a lot of free cash, right? So obviously we bought this thing really almost as a leverage buyer. And we have deleted the balance sheet significantly since oops since we bought the mine in June of last year, I can't read that from here. But I think from memory, we're at about 45% gearing and we'd be down well into the twenties now. And our view is that we'd like to be zero gearing. I like to run my business as net cash. We're not quite there yet. So in absolute terms, when we bought the mine, June of last year, we had about 450 million us of net debt. At the end of June, we had about 2 30 million us of net debt. And we're aggressively delivering the balance sheet because we the mine makes so much free cash. So we have a couple of layers within our capital stack. At some point, we'd like to get to where we just have one layer in the capital stack. But fundamentally, maximum cash sitting on the balance sheet is the way we like to run these businesses. So this is a mine that on an all in cost basis. last quarter, we were somewhere around about 250 to 60 a pound us. So all through the cycle, you know, this thing will make free cash flow, right? We're also in a great position where we always have a very high grade core. So in curious North, in the high grade lenses, we always have a blob that's running typically 20 m at plus 8 to 10% copper and that's there for the whole mind. So if we see the copper prices roll over. We have the luxury that we can always go and mine that really high grade core. This mine always makes money through the cycle. Understood. And with that said, I wanted to touch on the free cash flow. You already mentioned how much you guys are generating. Do you have a rule of thumb for beyond just de delivering? What else do you put that toward? Yeah, I, I think my job is to make money for shareholders. So we're our focus is on generating returns for shareholders right now. The internal bid for capital is very strong. So if I can deploy 20 odd million Aussie dollars into QIA South Upper and get myself another 6000 tons of copper a year at a dollar 50 a pound C one. That's the best thing I can do. getting rid of sort of debt and simplifying the balance sheet is the next best thing I can do. The next question you'll ask me is clearly acquisition is in our name at this stage. And yes, we'd love to grow the business. We we think we've probably got a skill set that we can apply to under performing assets or sort of forgotten assets where we can squeeze value out that perhaps others can't. So they're the kinds of opportunities we look for. Ah, but we are very disciplined, right? As much as some of our shareholders would like to see us grow just to be bigger and we understand the benefits of being bigger and a more liquid name. but we also have to be focused on value for shareholders, right? So, you know, we're very active looking at stuff all the time. It's very difficult sometimes to convince myself that that's a better use of capital than some of the stuff that we can do internally. But yeah, we're clearly, we're clearly outwardly focused as well as inwardly focused as well, right? But we have to see value for shareholders. There's no point buying stuff just for the sake of buying stuff. Understood. And lastly, I wanted to touch on the acquisition or the stake that you made with poly metals and you already mentioned how that flows with your zinc reds and just wanted to touch on that briefly. Yeah. So poly metals is run by a guy I've known for over 20 years in Australia. Excellent operator. The Endeavour mine is about 40 kilometers to the north of us. So in the Cobar Basin, you know, the there's a series of deposits but the two real key ones. R CS A and historically, endeavour, endeavour has had the bulk of it mined out but still has some pretty interesting stuff left there. It's got a big processing plant 1.2 million tons a year. They probably, well, they won't fill that from their existing planned operation. It's in that part of the world, it's very easy to truck stuff, you know, 40 kilometers up a sealed road. as one of the, you know, Andre was talking about with AIS, you know, sometimes smaller deposits. You don't want to spend the capital yourself. We definitely don't want to be putting zinc through our lovely copper concentrate. We get 98% recovery into a 26% concentrate with no penalties whatsoever. We are not putting zinc through our mill. So we've done a deal with poly metals. We invested a little bit of money in there. We invested at what we think was about 0.3 times. Nav pretty u pretty good use of funds for my shareholders. I think more importantly, I've got an outlet for my zinc ore so we can truck it up there plus 10 12% zinc. And we also got some water rights off them, which were important because our processing plant will do 2 million tons a year. The mine's not currently running at that. All my infrastructure will do 2 million tons a year, but I was capped at 1.45 million tons a year in my water. So doing the deal for that. I invested, I think we invested cheaply, but I also got an outlet for a zinc, but I also got some of his water which allows me to get to about 1.7 million tons a year. We're executing a ventilation upgrade project. Glencore spent a bucket load of money on surface ventilation but didn't spend the money on the return air rises at the bottom of the mine. So I actually can't use all of the capacity they gave me or sold me. So once we do that, not un coincidentally, we think we can get to 1.7 million tons a year. And if you read our tech report, we're not saying that in that tech report yet, right? So we got a bit up our sleeve. So that poly metals deal is the kind of deals we think you can do in that Cobar Basin smart. We put our foot on what we wanted very nominal amount of, of money. He's just announced yesterday that he's got the funding to get going. We'll give him another $2.5 million subject to a couple of things, the last money basically to go in. But yeah, we, we think we can probably, you know, generate 20 or $30 million a year free cash flow. out of that for virtually no money that zinc ore body we have, there's two components, one of it's above our copper ore body that's been mined 40 years ago. It's within 50 m of development and then we have another copper load over at CIA South Upper, but there's also a separate zinc load which, which is even higher grade, so cheap options. They're the sort of things we like to do where we, where we don't have to bet the farm but we can make money for shareholders. Yeah. Excellent. And with that, I wanted to open it up to the floor for any other questions that the audience may have. And with that, I would say, thank you very much, Mick. This has been great to learn more about metals acquisition. Thank you everyone.


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