Strickland Metals Limited

And thanks everyone for coming and listen. I'm gonna tell you a bit of a story today about our Rogozna project in Serbia and what we're trying to do there at the moment in terms of growing this into a tier one gold project. So a little bit of an overview on Strickland, so you know, Strickland's been around in one shape or form for the last 20 years. Used to be just your stock standard West Australian gold explorer, and a couple of years ago sold a project to Northern Star for about $60 million. Then it became cashed up and thought, oh, what do we do with this cash, how do we grow this business even further, so. Strickland then went looking around the world for sort of potential assets with real tier one potential and and that's where they came across the Ragosna project and so fast forward to now, Strickland acquired this project last July and really hit the ground running last year. So where we sit today, we're a bit over 300 million Aussie market cap, so we've had a nice bit of growth over the last 12 months as we've really got stuck into Rogosna. Recently we just sold our legacy position in Western Australia., the Yanle Gold project, we sold that a couple of weeks ago to a company called Gateway Mining, sold that for $45 million in Gateway script, and, Knowing that this asset was well loved in the Australian market, it's already been justified. Two weeks have gone by since we sold that asset, and the value of those shares has already doubled to over $90 million. Importantly, we gave most of those shares to our shareholders, so we are one of the few companies, junior companies on the ASX that actually gives back rewards to the shareholders for their loyalty. So, you know, our project Re Gona, 7.4 million ounces, to put that into context, this is the second largest resource base on the ASX amongst sub-billion dollar non-producing gold explorers. So it's a, it's a monster project. It's attracted a lot of interest over the last sort of 6 months, including recently Zygen Mining, who have invested in us through a strategic placement in April. Why is that important? Well, Zygen Mining is obviously one of the largest in the world, but more importantly, they are the largest operators in Serbia where they're producing about 300,000 tons per annum of copper and a 250 million ounces of gold. So that's a they're a fantastic partner to have on board as we look to grow this project and take it forward through to development. This year we're currently drilling about 50,000 m. We got 8 drill rigs on the ground drilling round the clock, so we are one of the most active juniors on the ASX. A little bit of a corporate story, so top 20 shareholders have a bit over 50%. As I said, we've got about $50 million in cash and liquid assets, so we are one of the better funded companies on the ASX as well, and that's what allows us to be drilling around the clock with those eight rigs. So Regosna, you know, I say this in the land of giants because the Western Tethian belt, you know, is essentially Chile or or South America in Eastern Europe, we've got giant porphyry related deposits in this neck of the world. And where we are is in the southern part of the country in the old Trepcha Mineral district. So this was once Europe's largest lead zinc silver mining areas, and then on the eastern side of the country is where you have the giant copper gold porfreys where Zigin have invested multiple billion dollars over the last 5 years to build that production. In Serbia, mining is a big part of its economy, currently contributes about 2.5% of GDP and there is an active strategy within the Serbian government to see that grow to about 10% GDP over the next 20 years. So what is Rigosna? So this is an absolute beast of a project, it's a magmatic system, it's a porphyry related system, but we've currently got 7.4 million ounce gold equivalent spread across three deposits. Shanatz being the biggest one, and then Mdenovas and Copper Canyon. Gradina is another deposit which currently doesn't sit in resources, and all of these deposits are slightly different, so they all have a slightly different metals mix. Gold is the dominant metal across the board, gold is 60 to 70% of the metal, and copper about 20% with about 10% zinc, lead, silver. But each one separately has its own characteristics, and one of the key characteristics of this project is we have a lot of optionality, not just because we have multiple deposits that are all relatively close together, but within each deposit we get a lot of optionality on the grade tonnage curve, which I'll show you now. So Shanatz is currently the big, the big brother of the deposits. This was discovered by Eldorado Gold back in the sort of around 2015 times. And it's a giant scan deposit through the core of the deposit we get about 300 m of continuous mineralization running about 2 to 2.5 g. Lately we've been focusing our drilling on the western side of the deposit towards the southern end where we get most of the high grade mineralization. And you can see from these drill holes here, we get basically around 200 to 300 m and of continuous mineralization and sort of 60 m of the higher grade mineralization within that. So here's what what it looks like in cross section on the left and long section on the right, and you see you can see the grade variation within it, and that's what gives us the optionality. So you get the optionality to go sort of sub-level cave, large bulk tonnage style underground mining, the these resources are optimized using sublevel stopes. And, but what we're really focused on is demonstrating a pathway here that, you know, more like an Adriatic metals start off at about 1 to 2 million tons chasing the higher grade mineralization zones. So these higher grade zones on average are about 30 m thick, but up to 90 m thick, and they comprise about 30% of the resource. So about 1.8 million ounces sits in these higher grade zones. Gradina, so this is a pretty important deposit for us this year. This one, there's been 40,000 m of previous drilling. It's been tracked around 1 kilometer of strike, and we've got about 900 m of vertical extent. It's the most gold rich of all our deposits, so because it's the most gold rich, it has the best metallurgical recovery, over 90%. Into a high grade gold concentrate and you can see on the on the left-hand side here we get some really high grade hits here. It is the highest grade of all our deposits. Importantly, all the mineralization is open. The gravity anomaly which corresponds to the scar and ore body is totally open to the north, and as we see on. Section all the mineralization is open in every direction, including upd towards surface where historically it hadn't really been drilled, and we've been putting in tracks up the hill. As you can see on the left hand side, those holes to the right, we actually had to put new access tracks up that hill to drill the up dip position and we've now got a fairly good handle on the geology and the controls. You see a number of dikes running through it and the high grade mineralization sits adjacent to those dikes. Mdenovates, so this was discovered a few years ago, this is a slightly different again, it's a bit more base metals rich, about 50% of the metal here is copper and zinc, with about 40% gold and about 10% silver. And what we've got is an anticline sitting at the base of the volcanics. We drilled through the guts. The discovery hole there had 350 m at 2 g gold equivalent, and within that we hit 100 m at 5 g gold equivalent. So it's really chunky. It doesn't have a big footprint in terms of what we've currently defined as the resource, which is roughly 1.3 million ounces, it's just shy of 2 g. But importantly, we've also made a discovery just 300 m away from it last year called cotlivy, and we just put out some results on that where we hit almost 300 m of continuous mineralization at cotlivy as well. So combined it's looking like cotlivy together with Modenovates is going to be a pretty meaty deposit as well. This is what it looks like in plan view, you can see Mdenova's on the right-hand side, relatively compact footprint because you get so much metal per vertical meter. And this is fairly similar to what you see with Dundee precious metals with their chocarakita deposit. You don't need a big strike length to get serious ounces in this neck of the woods. We've also drilled it a few 100 m further to the north. We've got ore grade mineralization in those holes as well. We just haven't done the infill drilling needed to extend that mine or the resource. And you can see cotlivy to the left, there's a valley in between them. That's where we're getting the surface projection of the high grade gold mineralization at colvi, so we've got several 100 m of strike to play with there. And then just in terms of the bigger picture of this project, as I said, this is a beast of a system. We own 90% of the system here, the magmatic system, it does extend across the administration line into Kosovo, where Newmont have an exploration project adjacent to us. But you can see on this image, you know, this is a combination of geochemical anomalies and our geophysical anomalies as well. almost all of the historical work is on the right hand side there on that main license where the resources are. Very little work has been done to the west. Now you can see the all the geochemistry that wraps around the license around to the south, and then to the west and north of that, you don't see much of a geochemical response and that's because in that area, the geology at surface is a younger volcanic. Sequence about 1 million years younger than the mineralizing events, so it's masking the underlying prospective geology and the geochemical response you get from these systems, but we have flown that whole area with Z 10 and we've got a number of very large anomalies and. In the south at Jarskareka, we've drilled a couple of exploration holes and hit porfreystyle mineralization, so very different to what we get over at Shanatz and Copper Canyon, which is scan. We do have porphyfree veining at Jarskarika, and we got, you know. Last year I think we reported a hole that had roughly 500 m of palfrey veining only running about 0.1 gold, so we haven't hit the mother lode there yet, but certainly signs that we are in a porre system over there and we're currently just doing a heap of geophysics to the north of that and trying to get some extra anomalies to target and hopefully start drilling in the next month or two. So in terms of our key deliverables for this year and moving forward, we, we're in the midst of a 50,000 m program, we're a little bit over halfway done, and we'll be doing a couple of resource upgrades, starting with Bredina, which will be the maiden resource and Shanat's upgrade roughly around late November, early December. We'll be drilling up to sort of mid-December with with our 8 rigs, then we'll take a little bit of a break over, You know, January and then come back in February and get stuck into the drilling again next year. Next year will likely be bigger again, I think probably 9 or 10 rigs. We're gonna be doing the pre-feasibility study work next year in terms of the resource drill outs for Shanatz and Gredina. And we'll hopefully deliver our scoping study into what a stage 1 development looks like for this project in roughly April, May. When I talk about stage 1, what I'm really referring to is which of these four deposits makes the most sense to develop first. Our current work suggests it's going to be either Gradina or Schnatz, as I said, we're really focused on a more selective higher grade, start project, probably 1 to 2 million tons per annum. And so yeah, we'll hopefully deliver that in April-ish next year. Importantly, all of this work with our $50 million war chest is fully funded., one of the key areas for us and key focus areas, you know, particularly over the last 5 years, but especially over the last 12 months since the project is now in public company land has been the work we do in our local communities. In Serbia we've got communities within sort of 10-15 kilometers of this project, which we are up in the mountains here and this is a historical mining district, but we are very focused on what we can do to ensure that we keep this social license to operate. So over the last 12 months it's you know it's really. We've doubled the size of our team. Over 2/3 of our team are from the local communities. We've been investing pretty heavily in a lot of community projects. We support a lot of community initiatives, sports teams. We've been working with the forestry department to do reforestation on the Rogosna Mountain. And this is all related to, you know, having that social license to operate, so currently we're about 2% of our budget goes into environment and community relations and and and as as we sit here today, really proud of this team, not only am I proud of them for, you know, all the effort that they put in on a day to day basis, but just the contribution that they make both on the project and within the local community, we're starting to see real dividends in that. So just in summary, you know, why invest in Strickland and why do I invest and what do I think is is a great story, going forward, you know, one of the largest resource bases on the ASX, you know, in Australia. We don't have a lot of companies that have these sorts of assets, they're more common in North America, but in Australia we are a stand out both in terms of the scale of our resource, the quality of the resource, the amount of funding we have, the team we have, the backing we have, and we think this is a pretty good story to follow moving forward. Thank you. Thank you very much, Paul, we have a little bit of time up our sleeve if there's any questions in the audience., I maybe have a couple, a couple for you, Paul. you may have mentioned, forgive me if if I've missed it on the Preso, but what's, Ziggin's shareholding at this point in time? So Ziggy currently have about 3.3%, so they initially invested in us in April, and they acquired 2.4% at that point. It was a strategic placement, so we weren't looking to raise capital, but Zigin reached out to us to make that placement, and we thought it was a really important, Investment to give validation to the to the story and it certainly was received as such by the market and then recently they acquired just shy of another 1% off market. And you mentioned they're a pretty significant operator in country. I mean, do you have a sense of their Of their motives in future, they're there to see what you find or you know, you anticipate they might be keen to own more of your business going forward. Yeah, I don't want to sort of put words in their mouth or anything like that, but certainly in Serbia they have some pretty ambitious targets. You know, you've got to remember Serbia is a pretty important country Zigian. It's one of their leading production centers for copper. And they are looking to expand that production now by you know, developing the lower zone of Chiara Peki, which they acquired off Freeport a few years ago. That's gonna be a giant block cave, roughly about 15 million tons per annum. So they're they're heavily invested in Serbia now, they're planning to invest even further and and then when you think well why would they have invested in us, we are the largest gold project in Serbia, but importantly we've also got copper and we've also got zinc, and and they're also one of the largest zinc producers globally as well. So our metals mix makes a lot of sense for them. The style of mineralization that we have, you know, the big bulk tonnage perspective, they're not afraid of that., so it just probably just makes sense for them to have a piece of us moving forward and keep an eye and, you know, see what happens. Sure. and, and maybe one more question if you'll indulge me, keen to know your experience with, Fortescue exploration, prior to, prior to this role. So maybe just some observations on some, on some differences, you know, I guess exploring somewhere like Serbia, which feels a little bit unconventional for perhaps Western investors. yeah, some of your observations there. Yeah, so I, I was pretty fortunate. I started at Fortescue in the first sort of 6 months. So I was there back in the days where it was a bit like the wild west, and, you know, it was pretty crazy early on. I actually left after about a year and then came back a few years later after a lot of the hard work had been done. And then, you know, it'd obviously grown a lot since then, but you know, Fortescue was a great place to learn, you know, we had great leaders in place, obviously Andrew Forrest, you know, Graham Rowley, you know, and exploration, we had a guy called Eamon Hannan who was very, Instrumental in driving the culture of the business, which was, you know, probably the most successful exploration company ever, you know, when I was there it was $10 million market cap, so, you know, that's what happens when you can have a really, a really strong team all pulling in the same direction. So if you sort of fast forward to now and you know I I left Fors here a bit over a decade ago, set up a private equity business and we acquired Serbia and and now it's in Strickland. Probably the key learning I've taken from Fortescue to what we're doing in Serbia is all about the team. So we built that team in Serbia when we acquired the project from the private equity business. We built that team from 5 people when we bought it off Eldorado. And the first people I put in place were people I trusted implicitly, people I'd worked with for 20 years, and we've built that team out based off trust, and we've thrown a lot of resources to bring the right skills in and train everyone up. And now when you go there, you look at all the different moving parts to this team and it's quite something to behold, like it's a major project now, over 100 people on the ground. And it's, that's that's why I'm so proud in that team because not only have they made 4 discoveries in the last 5 years, but they've done it at a time where they've been able to build out and bring in people from other communities and and create, you know, we are like a family business there, so it's been really good, fantastic, it's always about the people. thank you very much, Paul, I appreciate that. No worries, thank you.