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 [Music] welcome to CEO insights I'm Marilyn De Guzman with investing news.com I'm speaking with Mark duckler managing director of Astral resources a gold exploration company in Western Australia hi Mark how's it going good good to have you yeah thanks very much for having us on so let's start our conversation with just an overview of the company what are the key things you want investors to know about astral resources yeah well astral resources is a gold U focused exploration and

development company and we have two of our key projects which are pretty much in the heart of the West Australian gol field so you've got that Cy katti cada area where it's a prolific region for for gold exploration and development and our projects are located one is 14 k from Kuli and one is 70k from Cala so we've been drilling there at the project for four years now we have grown the project to 1.5 million ounces and in September last year we put out a scoping study which talking in Australian dollar terms

was done at a very conservative go price so we used $2,100 Aussie gold price when the gold price now is well over 4,000 to do our mind optimizations excuse me and we Ed $2,750 for Revenue uh for our financial model again when the gold price is now over $4,000 and and not withstanding that we still had a project that showed an internal rate of return of over 70% we were producing uh a net present value of $440 million and that's a2750 you move it to the gold price today and we have a project that has 1.2 billion in that

present value and uh is capable of presenting or providing over $285 million wor a free cash flow every single year so that's that's what astral resources is about and we're now moving from scoping to pref feasibility onto DFS and then looking to develop our project can you talk a little bit more about that so um what's the strategy for developing where do you take it um how do you take it further so one of the things we've been focusing on is obviously as you want to develop that

project there's some Financial realities that you have to come across in terms of you have to have a company that is strong enough from a register perspective to actually raise the necessary funds to take your project into development so uh a year and a half or no probably only a year ago we were a $50 million market cap company we were 5% institutionally held and when you need to raise between equity and debt somewhere in the vicinity of $200 million off that 50 mil base with a largely retail investor Network it's it

looks quite difficult so we've focused on strengthening our register strengthening our balance sheet so today we have a market cap of over $150 million we are 24% institutionally held and we have $28 million in the bank so we're in a very strong position to be able to just do the necessary technical work that's required to advance through those study phases and we also expect with that money that we have in the bank to continue to explore so we'll have a dual strategy of advancing the

projects technically but also growing by addition by adding additional resources so that we have a mind life uh at the moment the mine life was 7 and a half years of mining 10 and a half years worth of processing I'd expect by the time we get to pref feasibility which is dueing the June quarter of next year we would expect to be mining for well over 10 years in processing for 14 years so certainly and will continue to grow as we move towards DFS so is it your intention to go to move towards when everything is said and

done with uh all the uh pre visibility to study DFS um to take it to production or find a partner what's the are you able to talk about sort of the goals in in through that Our intention is absolutely to take it through the production um you you can't have a strategy strategy that's reliant on someone else and and and so our strategy is to is to run through the production and again that the peak negative cash flow at scoping was $191 Million uh when you have a market cap of 150 million I

don't see a significant hurdle to being able to fund that project ourselves so we certainly aren't in the business of looking for a partner and giving that value away I wonder if you could provide your take on the current uh Gold Outlook uh what are you seeing in the market and how is that the current gold market influencing your exploration strategy right now look it's it's certainly a strong go market I think asking a managing director of a gold expiration company to comment on gold is going to give you a

very biased opinion um but as a result of it being strong and as a result of the the institutions looking to gain exposure in this sector um it's it's assisted our strategy in that we are confident of our ability to take the project through to prod ction and there is a lot of reward on the ASX at the moment for those producers I mean there's those producers are worth well over a billion dollars in market capitalization we have 150 mil in market capitalization a successful pathway through to development will see us move

into that billion dollar market capitalization which provides a tremendous amount of runway for our shareholders and for any new shareholders so the gold price is facilitating us thinking in that way now if you want me to uh talk about the macro with respect to Gold uh I guess my I'll limit my comments into the to the point where I think Western governments will continue to be fiscally irresponsible they've been fiscally irresponsible for a long long time and in that environment uh holding their IUS as a large part of

your wealth in terms of their treasuries doesn't sound like a sound thing to do and therefore gold should continue run strongly and be this yeah this store of wealth that will Outlast many other stores of wealth is my view on gold so as we close out the uh you know 2024 what are your plans for 2025 uh so we are still drilling on site so and we we've recently completed programs at uh so we have four deposits at mandilla so we've recently completed programs at Iris uh EOS and theia um we've also completed

another program at camperman which is that project right next to Carly called feville so we will have those results coming out in the leadup to Christmas and then early in the New Year we expect the diamond drill rig to return early in January and we'll continue to drill with that diamond rig we will reestimate our resources at both mandilla and feville and do that in the first quarter so that we can then work towards delivering the pref feasibility in the June quarter of this of of 2025 once that prees is done we will

immediately commence work on the DFS and that will kick off ongoing expiration but then multiple technical streams and we expect to be able to submit our environmental applications to the government departments here in Western Australia probably in the September quarter of 2025 so we're certainly going to be very busy and what's encouraging is we have that runway in terms of the cash in the bank with $28 million to to be able to fund all of that work and Beyond definitely a good place to be in thanks

Mark uh for joining me today and taking the time to give us an update on the company no wores thank you very much and thanks everyone for watching join us again next time for another edition of CEO insights if you like this video like or leave a comment below we'd love to hear from you and if you haven't already done so subscribe to our YouTube channel for more exclusive interviews and update [Music]