Our next speaker is Duncan Gibbs, Managing Director and CEO of Gold Road Resources. Duncan has 37 years of mining industry experience. Prior to joining Gold Road, he held senior positions with AngloGold Ashanti, Acacia, and Shell Billiton. He led the exploration, discovery, and development of the 10 million ounce Tropicana Gold Project and was the project's Inaugural GM. Duncan also served as GM at Sunrise Dam, one of the largest underground gold mines in Australia. Duncan has overseen the agreed acquisition transaction with Gold Fields, announced in May of this year, which we look forward to hearing more about. Most likely, our guest, Gold Road Resources' swan song at Diggers. Thank you, Duncan. Thank you, Duncan, and thank you to Diggers and Dealers, as you say, for the opportunity to present today and almost what is almost certainly our final appearance at Diggers and Dealers as Gold Road. I'll start with, of course, the main theme, which is really around the Gold Fields transaction or the scheme of arrangement that we've entered into. I'll just provide a bit of overview. On the 4th of May, we entered a binding scheme of arrangement or a scheme implementation deed with our JV partner at Gruyere, Gold Fields, under which Gold Fields has agreed to acquire 100% of Gold Road by way of a scheme of arrangement. On the 5th of May, the date that the scheme was announced, the offer from Gold Fields valued Gold Road at AUD 3.7 billion or AUD 3.40 per share. At the date of the announcement, the proposed acquisition represented a 43% premium to the share price prior to the Gold Fields approach and is 12% higher than the initial proposal from Gold Fields. In line with details on this slide and other slides in the presentation, the implied offer price and premium will continue to move in unison with the Northern Star share price. The Gold Road Board has unanimously recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the scheme in the absence of a superior proposal and subject to the independent expert continuing to conclude that the scheme is in the best interest of Gold Road shareholders. Importantly, Gold Road intends to declare a fully franked dividend should the scheme become effective, and the final amount of the dividend will be determined by the franking credit account balance at the relevant time. Based on the franking credit account balance at the time the scheme was announced, the dividend would have equated to AUD 0.35 per share. Gold Road, of course, continues to develop or generate franking credits from the positive cash flows from Gruyere, and that will continue up until the time of the scheme becoming effective, which provides a further upside to the size of that dividend. The payment of a portion of the fixed cash component of AUD 2.52 by way of a fully franked dividend provides additional value in the hands of many Australian resident shareholders from a tax perspective. Just to sort of touch on where we are with the scheme, the key dates, as I've indicated, is the project is or the scheme has been done through a scheme of arrangement. For those of you not familiar with that process, it's quite an intensive process where Gold Road basically prepares all the key documents, the scheme booklet, and manages the process through the key milestones as illustrated on this slide. That includes the scheme document drafting and commissioning the key independent expert and technical expert reviews. We're very well advanced in completing that work, including the relevant regulatory reviews. There were a number of conditions to the scheme, which of course included Gold Fields obtaining FIRB approval. As announced at the ASX, Gold Fields have obtained that FIRB approval, so that condition is now satisfied. I anticipate we will provide some further update details on the scheme process in the next couple of weeks. However, in summary, the scheme is progressing in line with the schedule announced within the scheme implementation deed. To give you a bit of color, we anticipate the first court hearing will be held in about mid-August, after which the scheme booklet will be distributed to shareholders. That will then lead to the scheme meeting and, of course, the second court hearing likely to be in late September, after which the scheme becomes effective or effectively legally binding. Because the scheme includes the payment of that fully franked dividend that I spoke to, it does mean there's a little bit of a lengthy process at the back end, but that is quite tax favorable to at least Aussie shareholders. We anticipate the implementation date, which is effectively when control of the company transfers to Gold Fields and Gold Road is to be delisted, will occur around about the middle of October. We can just touch on the share price performance of Gold Road since the offer became public back in March, illustrating as well on the right here that the relative price performance and valuation ratios if the transaction were to have concluded, of course, back on the 1st of August. As I've just indicated, we've got a bit of time to go, so it depends on how the market kind of transacts over the next month or two. Gold Road share price, of course, is tracking closely in a very small discount to the implied offer price made by Gold Fields, with the market really signaling an expectation that the transaction will close under the agreed terms. While the consideration offered by Gold Fields is cash, the variable pricing component of the offer arises from the Northern Star shares held by Gold Road. Of course, that shareholding arose from Gold Road's initial investment in De Grey and the more recent acquisition of De Grey by Northern Star. As you can see from the chart, Gold Road has significantly outperformed the market as a result of the takeover offer. The share price has also been more resilient than the ASX 200 Gold Index, which has declined in recent weeks, despite the relative undermarket performance of Northern Star. From the perspective of Gold Road shareholders, our price is now closely correlated to Northern Star, with the value of Gold Road's business now fixed as a consequence of the takeover proposal. Accordingly, my presentation today really doesn't focus on operational performance and short-term outlook, like you'd see for most producing companies. The production and costs in the first half of the year have been somewhat disappointing, and guidance is currently tracking towards the bottom end of production and the top end of cost. Perhaps it's another reason for why the interests of Gold Road shareholders are best interested by accepting into the scheme. While my slides do not focus on the current operational issues for Gruyere, as I've outlined, I would like to cover a bit of history as to how Gold Road has created value and what the future long-term value of Gruyere is, both to Gold Fields and to the wider community. Just tracking through a bit of the history and value creation achieved by Gold Road with some key milestones summarized on this slide. Gold Road has made one of what I would rank the best three greenfields gold discoveries in Australia in the last 25 years with the discovery of Gruyere. The other two being Hemi and Tropicana. By greenfields, I mean where there was nothing there before, no head frame, no previous mining activity. Those are the kind of harder discoveries to make, but also the higher value discoveries that have been made during that period. The Gruyere discovery and the rapid progress made resulted in the maiden resource being declared in 2014, and very much a defining milestone for the company. The formation of the Gruyere joint venture was very widely recognized across the industry as being very innovative and a lower-risk approach to a major project development. That recognition, of course, includes Diggers and Dealers, who recognized Gold Road in 2017 as the Dealer of the Year. Diggers and Dealers, of course, also had the foresight to award Gold Road the Best Emerging Company in 2011, and that was well prior to the discovery of Gruyere. Gold Road recognized the value of the Hemi discovery at a very early stage. Gold Road, in fact, was both a very early investor in De Grey and had conversations with De Grey management in early 2020, immediately after the very first discovery holes were placed into that deposit. Unfortunately, the proposal we made to the board and management at that time didn't progress, but it did ultimately lead to a conversation with DGO Gold and ultimately the AUD 300 million transaction that we did with DGO Gold to acquire the initial 14.5% interest into De Grey. Through subsequent on-market purchases and using some quite sophisticated derivative structures and participating in various equity raises, we increased our position to 19.9%, which we thought, of course, gave us a pretty strong position to be in, you know, what I would rank as probably the best discovery in W.A. in the last 25 years. However, unfortunately, you really look at it, the size and scale of Hemi and the market cap of De Grey was fundamentally too big and too good and got beyond us. If it had been anything less than that, then the future, I think, or the position where Gold Road is today would have been quite different. However, we have, of course, created significant value for Gold Road shareholders with where we have landed with our total investments into De Grey around about AUD 400 million, and we're sitting on at least a double of that value if you look through a sort of see-through value of that shareholding. The value creation by Gold Road has largely become as a result of new mine exploration, both through the discovery of Gruyere, obviously some of our other deposits in the Yamarna Belt, and, of course, through the exposure we've had into De Grey and the Hemi ore body. It's really quite a different story in terms of value creation from most of the presentations you'd have heard from other producers in the audience and even some of the presentations in this session. There have also, of course, been some fantastic success stories in the M&A space through the likes of Northern Star, Evolution, and I'd call out Ramelius. However, there's been a lot of M&A that's resulted in larger market capitalizations, but with very little share price capital growth creating value for shareholders. The best way to kind of look at the share price or the value creation over time is through simply a share price chart, which is a chart that we actually prepared back in May for our AGM. It's really just a 10-year window, and it increases the growth in value that long-term shareholders in Gold Road have enjoyed, including some of the same milestones that the company has gone through over that period. The chart here starts at AUD 0.43 10 years ago and actually ends at AUD 3.24, which is where it was on the date of our AGM and is almost exactly where it is at the moment. If you'd invested AUD 1,000 back at that time, your investment would be now worth about AUD 7,500. If you'd wisely selected the option of a dividend reinvestment plan, your total holdings would be worth around about AUD 7,700. Of course, we've had some pandemics and other speed bumps along the way, but the general trend of what you see here is, of course, what every investor wants to see in their portfolio: a chart that goes up. Clearly, we've massively outperformed both the ASX 200 Index and the gold price, and that's despite many of gold stocks underperforming the gold price. Lots of market commentators have been quite critical of returns from gold equity investments versus physical gold. The origins of Gold Road started well more than 10 years ago, and if you were astute enough or perhaps lucky enough to have invested in Gold Road with only AUD 0.03 in 2013, so that's immediately prior to the Gruyere discovery, then congratulations, you've made more than a 100-banger return. To my friends that were out in the small tent out the back here, who've been struggling to gain investor interest into exploration, I hopefully provide you with some encouragement in highlighting the value that you can achieve from making a world-class discovery. My previous slides, of course, have provided a backward-looking lens on value creation, and shareholders have, of course, forward-looking, as are Gold Fields in their motivations for acquiring Gold Road. My next couple of slides focus on the future value, which may, of course, benefit Gold Fields as well as the wider community, including the Yilka people who are the native title holders at Gruyere and Yamarna. The successful exploration by Gold Road has delivered around 500,000 ounces in the Yamarna Belt, with the largest and highest value of those resources identified to date at Gilmore. In January, Gold Road announced a very positive pre-feasibility study and made an ore reserve for Gilmore, which clearly demonstrates the value created from our sustained exploration activities at Yamarna. The details of that study outcome are outlined on this slide, and we competed with what is quite a conservative gold price versus today's price of, of course, around AUD 5,200 an ounce. The rigs are still turning at Gilmore. We are in the midst of about a 30,000 km or AUD 10 million drill program, which aims to upgrade the inferred resources and continue to grow the resource at depth, including testing of a 100,000 ounce- 150,000 ounce exploration target, the details of which were released to the ASX back in mid-April. The ounces we have discovered to date at Yamarna we would see as really offering incremental value. Like many mines in the Goldfields, the best exploration target is often just sitting under the mine that you have. That is really the way that Gold Road sees the underground mining opportunity at Gruyere. Gruyere is a relatively low-grade deposit, 1.3 g reserve grade, and that tends to get the instinctive reaction of, "That won't work as an underground." I have heard that lots of times. While I would say that is generally true, what it does not recognize is the unique scale and continuity and geometry of the Gruyere ore body. Gruyere is unique and it is approximately 2 km long, up to 140 m wide, and there are likely kilometers in vertical extent. The ore body has an endowment of around 10,000 ounces per vertical meter where it has been fully drilled. If you like some simple math of that, it is about 10 million ounces per kilometer extent. There are not too many deposits with that kind of scale of endowment. The unique scale and geometry provide the option to consider high tonnage, low-cost, bulk underground mining methods such as sub-level caving. Now, there clearly are other mining methods that need to be considered or perhaps combinations of mining methods, and that should be part of the work done in future studies. Gold Road has been reporting an underground resource at Gruyere since 2020, and that was based on some early conceptual studies that we did to support the reporting of those resources. Of course, under the JORC Code, we have to meet the criteria of reasonable potential of eventual economic extraction. We've done a kind of high-level scoping study to be able to support that. I would remind you that, of course, the gold price back in 2020 was a mere AUD 2,000 per ounce. While costs have gone up, it should give you some insight into how we see the potential operating costs and therefore margins from the underground at Gruyere. With considerable persistence, Gold Road has persuaded Gold Fields to consider the underground mining opportunity at Gruyere with a conceptual study completed by SRK for the joint venture and provided to Gold Road in final form in April, in the middle of the takeover proposal for the company. The SRK study demonstrated that bulk scale mining via sub-level cave, coupled with the right capital investment on ore leach and other infrastructure, means that an underground mine is likely viable. In fact, the results were more than just viable. They were much better than Gold Road anticipated and at a conservative long-term gold price assumption and potentially quite spectacular at current gold prices and costs. The SRK study is based on both the inferred resources that have been drilled off to date below the pit, as illustrated on the slide, and the assumption or an exploration target, if you like, that the ore body will continue at depth. As part of that study, a block model was constructed of both the inferred and that exploration target with a comprehensive mining study completed. There has been a significant level of rigor and analysis on mining methods and costs, of course, made upon that made-up exploration target. The next logical step here is to drill out the deposit, and there are five rigs doing that with about a AUD 26 million program for this year in progress, and that will continue into next year. The results, as I would see them, are pretty unsurprising and in line with the expectation. The opportunity to extend the life of Gruyere is for many years beyond the current open pit life, which extends to 2032. We, of course, wish Gold Fields success in realizing the opportunity created by Gold Road and the benefits that can flow to the service providers and the communities of the Goldfields and, of course, the Yilka native title holders. As I explained to Yilka in a recent community meeting, we kind of need to put things in simple terms. I think you should think of the benefits continuing to support your community, your children, and your grandchildren, and I mean the ones that aren't born yet. With the journey of Gold Road likely coming to an end, the board and management of Gold Road has clearly created value for shareholders to date, and the wealth will likely continue for generations to come. We are, of course, very proud of that. While the transaction is a great deal for shareholders, people, of course, are often forgotten in these circumstances. While I've received many congratulations very widely on a great deal, I also remind people that it's commiserations for many of our staff. We continue to be, it is yet to be determined, I guess, as to who in our team may transfer to Gold Fields, but, of course, many Gold Road employees don't have great expectations of continuing employment. Most of our employees, of course, are quite realistic and understand that takeovers are just part of business. Many of us have been through multiple transactions, so it's, of course, just a fact of life. What I do know is we've built a great team at Gold Road, and it's rare to have a group of people that work hard, create value, and enjoy doing it together. It certainly hasn't always been that way within Gold Road. I've personally found it quite humbling to be told by many individuals that they would like to both continue working together and with me. I'm sure that you'll see many Gold Road people progress to be industry leaders in their future roles, and I'm personally committed to working with them to find the right opportunities, either together or helping them make their next steps. There's a high degree of mutual loyalty behind that statement. I thank you, and that concludes my presentation. I'm, of course, happy to take a couple of questions. Thanks very much, Duncan. We've just run over time, so I might hold the questions, and well done on your tenure at Gold Road.
Loading workspace