We have here today the CEO of Metro Mining, Simon Wensley and the CFO, Nathan Quinlan to talk us through the recently published quarterly report. There's some great numbers in it and I'm going to have to hand it over to Simon to talk us through. We'll have a few questions at the end. Over to you Simon. Hello everybody. Thanks everybody for their support and the time that you're taking to join the webinar. Look, I think a very pleasing quarterly report this quarter. Really starting to deliver on the expansion, the 7 million tonne expansion, the ramp up profile. This quarter has been as we had initially planned, albeit it's taken probably a couple of months extra to get up to those rates. But we really did ramp up strongly during this quarter and you know, we ended up with a record in September of 780,000 tons. And I know I'd like to say, and I'll touch on it later that we've continued that momentum through to October which is also very pleasing. Its a 2.13 million tonnes for the month, and I think the, you know, if I was to pick out one number from this in terms of the outcome, it's the reduction in the site cash costs to, you know, a 26% reduction, and that's been driving up the margin this quarter. We've had some price appreciation, but the majority driver has come from the cost side, and that's been, I guess, from a long term perspective, when we look at the strategic positioning of Metro in this industry, that cash cost position is going to be critical, and I think that we're now well on the way to heading towards that. The DFS forecast or the DFS sort of study that said, yeah, we're looking at sub AUD 20 costs onto ship, and I think that is; it's now well achievable if we start to hit these 7 million ton rates, you know, month after month. So look, we're not, we're not quite there in terms of, you know, the cost efficiency. There's still, as many of you would know if you're associated with the mining industry, that takes a bit of time to optimize and get everything all working properly, particularly around the interfaces between your different elements of the flow sheet. But you know, I think that shift this quarter has really demonstrated what we've been trying to say all along that you know, with this relatively high fixed cost business, this scale, you know, will deliver a very, very competitive cost position. I'll get Nathan to touch a bit on the corporate finance side a little bit later with respect to, you know, the debt paid and also the cash flow and cash in bank etc, so don't worry about that. Look, I might then touch a little bit on the market, and during the third quarter we saw a continuing tightness in the market. The demand coming from the alumina sector, particularly in China but also in other parts of the world was quite strong. We're certainly seeing aluminium's position in this energy transition indeed in transportation and electrical grids, in power generation, etc., you know, is really sort of coming through and that's been despite a lag in sort of construction demand, one of the, you know, more traditional sectors for the demand for aluminium. So certainly, you know, that has been moving. I'd encourage anyone who wants to know a little bit more about, you know, the demand for aluminium and how that flows through to bauxite to have a look at the webinar that we did a couple of months ago on that. And you know, that tries to explain, you know, a little bit more about how the sector, the industry structure and how the sector works. So we're still seeing that flow through new aluminium demand. Alumina refining demand is high. In fact it's, you know, the alumina price through this quarter and indeed in the last week or two, you know, has shot up again. So there's a, you know, a very tight position in the aluminium space. The demand from aluminium is strong but the supply from bauxite is tight, and so we're seeing that alumina, you know, that intermediary product of alumina being, you know, the price is really going through the roof there. So we're almost at record levels at the moment around about $700 per ton of alumina. So that's a good environment to be in that will also continue to pull through bauxite prices. We've seen, we saw a steady rise in Q3 and just before the end of the quarter we saw a nice big jump of AUD 2 or AUD 3 per ton which we've tried, we've tried to get into the pricing for this coming quarter, so you know, we should see a relatively, you know, a reasonable amount of that flowing through into our contract pricing and not all of it will flow through to contract pricing and we, from the spot, the spot market, but you know, we try as hard as we can to negotiate as much of that through as possible. In, in the last quarter, pricing was, was up, but it was, it was offset a bit by our contract position in terms of having some legacy contracts that were at lower prices. So we didn't ship any of those cargoes in Q2, so we did ship a number of those cargoes in Q3 and that brought the average price down. And we also saw, look, it's always a bit difficult to know. Expansions, in my experience never happen in a nice smooth line. They're always a little bit jagged and you never quite know when things are going to take off. But you know, we saw we've had to try and plot and predict about a month out what shipping rates would be and that means that there's a bit of an imperfect match between shipping and production. So we've seen a bit of demurrage flow through into those net pricing elements. So, but look, the market is still very strong and I'm expecting to see bauxite prices continue to go. In fact, there's a constraint in Guinea at the moment, one of the producers, and that's providing even more tightness in this market, so I expect to see spot prices continue to head up as we go towards the end of the year and into 2025. I might just sort of share the quarterly report and I can then get the chart on the screen, the production chart, so there you can see the alumina price I was just talking about, and the last few weeks, indeed, you know, very strong growth again after a relatively stable middle of the year. And that's obviously flowing through into the spot bauxite prices I just mentioned. I'll get Nathan to come back onto the financials in a second, so look, there's the, you know, the chart we've been showing in various forms through the year. You can see the black line. The green was our plan. Seven, you know, just under seven million tons plan for this year. The black line represents the ramp up. You can see, you know, during this quarter, July, August and September, you know, we've seen that step up in production and that's very similar to the profile in the green. But it is a couple of months delayed from where we thought it would be, you know, starting, you know, in April, May, we were hoping that we would still get to those ramp ups, but it's been a little bit delayed. But you can see also then in October, now that we've been working after a gap. We had a gap in shipping and a day of planned maintenance so that I saw that V shape drop there at the beginning of the month. But since that we've seen production rates and shipping rates sort of above our plan level. So certainly in that, you know, sort of 28-30,000 tons per day average. In fact I had to change the scale on the left hand side of this graph to be able to get the data in, which is always a nice thing to be able to do. Okay, well look, I might pause there and then. Nathan, maybe do you want to just have a quick chat about the financials? Yeah, sure thing, sure thing. Thanks, Simon. So as mentioned from the outset, you know, from our perspective, the really pleasing, really pleasing thing to see here is the 26% reduction in site costs on a unit basis. And so for us that's a very important validation of the overall expansion thesis. So that's excellent to see. As you can imagine, the first time you're hitting these expanded production levels there is the potential for it to be expensive or a little bit value erosive. So to see us do it well and deliver value at the margin level has been very satisfying. Having said that, we still see lots of opportunity there for further optimization. So this is an area in Q4 that will continue to sweat and we'll continue to get into the minutia on the site cost to make sure that we're doing it as efficiently as possible. But very pleasing to see those economies of scale come through and drop down into a much improved margin. So obviously what that's doing for us is then delivering what's been a pleasing operating cash flow for the quarter. So near on AUD 30 million for the quarter, which has allowed us to make a sizable repayment of our junior debt of AUD 12 million and put us in very good shape to be able to repay the remainder of that in Q4, which will be about AUD 12 million again. That leaves us also in a very good position in terms of our cash balance at this point, which I think is just under, just under AUD 17 million as at the end of September. Overall a very well rounded financial result I think for us for this quarter. I'm very pleased. Still a bit of work to do on the site costs, but definitely trending in the right direction. Great, thanks Nathan. Look, I think one thing I want to call out this last quarter is, you know, the performance we've seen out of the new trans-shipping asset that we purchased last year and took it to dry dock and mobilized this year. So Ikamba, the floating terminal, you could just see the scale in that picture. You know, it's about four times bigger than the single floating crane, the TSA Skardon that we've had. That makes it a lot more resilient to weather. We've had one weather event in this quarter in July, and we did see, you know, the difference in the operating parameters of the two assets, so TSA Skardon being a smaller asset had to shut down for almost four days. But that Ikamba was operating for, you know, two of those four days. So look, I think that's again some validation of the, you know, the rationale as to why we got this asset. It's also been ramping up through the quarter. We've been cautious to, you know, get used to its operating parameters for the bauxite obviously hasn't loaded this kind of bauxite prior to this year. So we've been, you know, working out, you know, modifications of chutes and conveyor belt speeds and working out, you know, how to safely unload barges. They're a little bit smaller than what it would have been used to unloading in, you know, in Africa in previous years. So this is all part of the ramp-up process and part of the experience curve. And pleasingly we're now, you know, we're operating at close, close to the, the parameters that we've set. So we're seeing, you know, 1800 ton per hour on a sustained basis across, and that's an average across the barges. And we're seeing, you know, 2500 ton per hour, you know, in terms of peak digging rates, which is what you get for about, you know, about 70% of the barge before you start having to sort of clean around the edges of it. So, and it's been extremely reliable. So we've seen, we've seen a good reliability, good reliability out of it. And so you know, that's really been a good validation for it. The crews, you know, we're getting settled now with the crew, we're getting settled with the operators, and they're getting into a rhythm etc. Look, we're, you know, we've got, we've still got a few things to tweak and to manage and that'll happen over the wet season shut down, but look very, very pleased with the performance of Ikamba and the crew. Credit to them and I think credit to the whole marine team. Similarly, the wobbler screen, which I know I get a lot of questions about the wobbler but when you see it in action you can see why it's called a wobbler. Look again, we've got a video out there which if you'd like to have a look, we did a bit of a special on that one and you can see why, you know what the oversized rocks sort of wobble off the end of the bars. That's really exceeding expectations at the moment. We've actually blown past the nameplate capacity on that and that's sort of now operating in the sort of 1,600-1,700 ton an hour sort of rates. We've been really happy and you know, it's taken a few optimization steps and we've added a couple of you know Teflon type boards to reduce some of the sticking in the chutes. We put in some vibrators and et cetera to you know manage sort of buildup in some of the areas. Had to strengthen the stacker to manage the speeds that we're getting out of that that goes into our apron feeder to the barge loader. Look, we've been working but again credit to the teams on site to be working through that and getting into a rhythm of really loading these barges as fast as they can when they come in. So, look, I think maybe at that point we might stop. I know there's always a lot of questions, so why don't we stop there. And Peter, if you want to coordinate some questions, that'd be great. Thanks, Simon. We have a good audience here. Probably a few Money Miners joined us perhaps given the recent pricing environment. A question on that actually. Are you seeing what's your visibility on seeing the recent spot prices being reflected into upcoming contract and long term contract pricing? Can you talk about that? Yeah, sure. It's always a bit of a, you know, in the bauxite industry, you know, we haven't yet got to a liquidity level where we can, you know, there is a liquid index or even an, you know, an over the counter trading platform. I mean it's a bit like iron ore and coal was, you know, back in the 90s and you know, where bilateral negotiations are the order of the day and it took a while for those Platts index for example in iron ore or the Newcastle index in coal to sort of take hold and to become you know, more to provide more transparency. So we're not there yet. And so this spot prices are really indicative. So they are, you know, indicative cargoes. There's a bit more liquidity in the West African volume. So we see the Guinea price sort of equivalent go up and down a bit more. But, you know, the, the Australian price has also rallied and you know, strengthened, you know, much closer. You know, I would always expect the Guinea Australia benchmark spot benchmarks to be within $8-$10. And you know, they have been closing and then the Guinea price tends to go on a run, on a run again after that. So look, we negotiate some of our, most of our contracts now quarterly. So every quarter we take into account the spot price. But obviously Metro has other, you know, this is an individual negotiation between a buyer and seller. Our product is a bit different to say, Rio Tinto's products or to products that are coming out of Guinea or Ghana or, you know, Jamaica or Brazil. There are individual elements where the customer finds more or less value than maybe one of the benchmark. And that may be to do with, you know, the chemical properties or the physical properties or indeed, you know, they might get more or less out of our service from a, you know, larger vessels or, and if they've got bigger, a bigger port or, you know, and so on and some of the things that they've got, for example, they might have a particular type of technology that can treat, you know, organics better than someone else. So they might have their own in-house caustic soda plant which, you know, which helps them deal with with silica. So these are all factors when we come to negotiate. And so we obviously try and get as much of that spot price rise in a percentage way into our contract price. But it is in an individual negotiation and each contract and each customer is different. So as I said earlier, we also still have some, you know, legacy contracts which are running at about, you know, roughly a million tons, you know, per annum for this year and for next year still to work our way through. And that will obviously still have an averaging. There'll be a contract mix element every quarter, which means you don't quite see all of the price sort of coming through. But I'm confident that we saw probably a 5%-10% rise in the spot price in the last quarter and we should be able to get a good proportion of that coming through into our fourth quarter contracts. So to the extent that we are negotiating those quarterly contracts and they're flowing you know, we're shipping it into those contracts, then we'll get the. I think we'll get a good proportion of that. Flowing through some more financial questions here. As mentioned in the research from Shaw and Partners recently, what progress you see with securing Nebari refinancing? Do you want to take that, Nathan? Yeah, sure thing. Thanks, Simon. So, short answer. We've been very pleased with the response in the refinancing process at this stage. Naturally. The objective there is from our perspective, you know, we're in a very different place than where the company was at a couple of years ago when we originally essentially achieved FID on the expansion. And so really the impetus for us in this refinance is to go out and improve our cost of debt ultimately. So obviously I won't go into too much detail on the refinancing process itself in terms of specifics, but otherwise that's a core strategy for us over the next few months. And I've been really pleased with the market's response. Got a couple here, more here for you, Nathan, if you'll just hang on. It's great to see the cash flow coming through and the repayment of some of that debt was almost AUD 12 million paid in the quarterly. How much cash do you need on hand to get through the wet part of the wet season? Generally, what we expect to see, and a lot of that will just depend on maintenance programs that we set and that can change a little bit year in, year out. But typically, what we expect to see over a wet season is somewhere around a cash burn of around AUD 15-20 million. So obviously, you know, we managed to have some breathing room obviously above that, but that is generally what I expect going into the wet season, about AUD 15-20 million. Thank you. And further with you, Nathan, while you're here, the company's margins are now improving. Could you say what quantum of tax losses the company has on its balance sheet? Are there any off balance sheet, and when do you expect the company to be paying cash taxes? Yeah, sure. So in terms of carry forward tax losses, we don't recognize any on balance sheet currently. But in terms of off balance sheet carry forward tax losses, we've got about AUD 250 million. So in terms of the timing around cash tax, I would expect probably in the second half of 2027 to be in a paying tax. But obviously having said that, with the rising price environment at the moment, that could be even earlier. All right. Paying taxes, hopefully on better profits operationally. Simon, the site cost reduction is a significant improvement. Obviously part of that is through increasing scale. What other areas have you seen that you can attribute to those lowering of site costs? Look, I think at this stage it's pretty much all in the scale. The optimization part we're in a sort of cost reduction in our industry tends to happen in different phases. One is a sort of revolutionary phase where you change the flow sheet and you do something different. That's where we are at the moment. So we're in a sort of revolutionary change in cost at the moment. And you know, we should be as I said, heading, you know, towards. I've got every confidence that we will be heading towards that sort of inflation adjusted level that we've set out in the DFS. Then we'll enter, you know, next year we'll be more in an evolutionary sort of cost phase. So we'll be, you know, focusing much more on I guess sort of improvement of individual processes within that flow sheet and in the value chain. And so we look at every single part of our value chain from you know, mining from the haulage, etc. You know, screening tugs and barges and the trans-shipping side and of course the freight. So if I look across that and I take a sort of more of a, an 18-month view, you know, we will by the end of this quarter have a full fleet of nine, you know, large Scania haul trucks with four trailers. So that will have our full fleet running at around that 230-240 ton per load. And so from a fuel, from a maintenance, from a sort of labor productivity, all of those things go towards a lower cost haulage environment. You know, we're currently running the screens, you know, until the wobbler. You know, we're literally this month starting to back off the supplementary screen because the wobbler is picking up almost all of the required capacity. So when we shut that supplementary screen down, you know, the electricity costs, labor costs, maintenance costs. And so we'll be running, you know, aiming to run pretty much all the way through that wobbler, that wobbler system. So you know, that will be again an incremental reduction. You know, we're looking to try to, as we get better at loading barges faster, we should be able to get more tons on barges. So we're not, you know, we're optimizing for every single tidal constraint, you know, that will, you know, reduce the cost of our tug and barge operation, you know, from a fixed cost basis. So you know that will, that will flow through to there and the same with the transshippers. So you know, the more tons we can put through that fixed cost system, the better, the better we're going to be. And look, one of the biggest ones next year is going to be freight. So you know, at the moment we're running you know, roughly around sort of, you know, $12 or so US per ton in our freight to China. So you know, we're already negotiating contracts for next year in that sort of $8-$9 basis. So that difference between the CIF and the FOB costs will, you know, there'll be a step change in that, in that sort of cost to market. So all through that value chain we're working in each area so that you know, during 2025 we're going to see, you know, what economies of scale kick through this year incrementally. So more next year but then we'll be looking at that more evolutionary change in each area of both equipment and labor productivity. It seems better and new equipment is contributing to those better margins and lower costs. They're fairly new. Can you see better efficiencies coming as you, as the team learns to use that equipment? For instance, do you see a reduction in your loading rate from seven days? Can that improve? And the barge bed leveling campaign, is that somewhere where you can see improvement? Yeah, so yeah, good question. Look, absolutely. Look, we've already demonstrated this year that we can load a bit of a spoiler for the end of month report. But our record this month for daily loading is now 34,000. I think it's 34,600 by my memory, Nathan. I think so. So look, you know that just demonstrates the sprint capacity that we've got in the transshipping space now. And obviously it's about then ensuring the supply of those barges at the right tempo and the right level. So you know, absolutely we can get the rest of that interface and supply chain working to supply the transshipping area. You know, I can absolutely see us getting down to six-day loading. Of course at the moment, we're overlapping the ships. So we do have a, we do start one ship before we finished another one. But you know, that's absolutely the target and you can see with that daily loading rate that we've got the ability to do that. And we're also looking at bigger ships. You know, we're looking at these Capesize variants called Newcastlemax. They're about 30,000. They can load up to 20, 000 to 30,000 more tons per ship. And that means you get productivity benefits out of you know, only, you know, same number of holes, same number of moves in terms of the ships moving from the anchorage. So look, bed leveling this is, you know it, it's something that we do to maintain the depth of the channel. Part of our environmental approval is, you know, sort of allows us to move sand. It's not a dredging exercise. It's actually just sort of effectively sweeping or cleaning the channel to keep. But of course, you know, with weather, tides, wind, you know, that sand and silt tends to move. We plan on that occurring twice a year, so we do it before we start operations in March, and we also do it at one other time, and we had planned to do that in October, and unfortunately we saw the channel start to slump a little bit earlier than we had anticipated. But we had already sort of been planning to do that anyway. There were a couple of weeks there where we had to suffer with a slightly lower designation in the channel from a depth, from a draft perspective on the barges. But we do plan to do that twice a year and that'll become a little bit easier to plan and easier to execute once we have our full tug fleet fully in place. You know, additional tugs will help us execute that maybe on a bit more of a reactive basis. Okay, I've just got two more here. One is about your cargo to EGA and also what is your view on further exploration across the resource base? Was there a specific cargo, a specific question on that, on that? Just regarding timing and price? Well look, I mean look, the price is confidential. You know, it was at market, at a market price. It's a trial, it's a trial cargo. I suppose it's the first cargo that we've shipped. I think it might be the first Australian cargo that they've, they bought. It's you know the, the design of their refinery is very, very similar to the Yarwun Rio Tinto's Yarwun refinery in Gladstone. So it's designed, it's actually been designed as a tube digestion, high temperature refinery. It largely as I understand it, I think takes a Ghanaian bauxite that has a high monohydrate or higher monohydrate content than most other Guinea bauxite sites. But it is actually very well set up to take Metro Mining style bauxites. So look, you know, like, like lots of customers or you know, that we talk to. Diversity of supply is a consideration, very, very, very strong consideration for them, particularly when that's an integrated, you know, two of the most competitive smelters in the world are downstream of that refinery in the Emirates. And so, you know, they need to ensure that they're supplying good alumina on a consistent basis there. So look, it's early days there, but we hope that that trial cargo goes well and we, you know, we look forward to working with them on a longer term basis if that goes well. So, the intricacies then of the specs of ore to refinery, if yours is to be able to be processed there, that's going to be a major tick for Metro as a future customer. Oh sure, yeah. Look, I mean there's this quite a complicated sort of underlying you know, chemistry involved in refining. It's not straightforward but you know, I think you've generally got high refineries that can operate at a slightly higher temperature above 200 degrees. They can extract a bit more value out of Metro's bauxite than those that maybe operate below that. But that doesn't mean to say we do actually supply already refineries that operating at 150 degrees. So it depends on the price. Like I said earlier, each customer has a very specific set of technical drivers and our bauxite for example digests or dissolves very quickly in the autoclave. So if you've got a constraint in your upstream part of your process in the digestion area. Adding Metro bauxite even in a low temperature plant can actually derive a lot of value because you can actually get more capacity out of that digestion, the digestion units than you could before. So that it's not a simple matter of just that bauxite goes to that refinery, that bauxite goes to this refinery. You know, there is a generalization about where you can extract more value but it, you know, particularly these days and we've seen it you know in the past, you know with, I used to work in you know, in the coking coal space and you've seen that exactly with PCI coals and semi soft coals getting used in energy generation in blast furnaces, and I suppose, you know, the rules sometimes get blurred and even broken as technical groups within refineries and downstream manufacturers, they start to try to optimize their raw material uses. So, look, we're working very closely with a lot of refineries on those issues and trying to help them optimize what they're doing. All right. Well, that's been a pretty comprehensive Q&A session there with some curly ones. Sorry. And thanks for everybody that sent them in. If we missed some, because there are plenty, please email them through and we'll make sure that Simon gets them. I'm sure he'll love to answer as best he can. Thank you for joining us here today. Thank you, Nathan and Simon, on the quarterly report. And we look forward to hearing from you again soon. Great. Thanks very much. Thanks, everyone. Cheers.