As I have said before - the biggest thing that has let this...

As I have said before - the biggest thing that has let this project down over the past year is the copper recoveries/production from the mill:
They were meant to be having 80% Cu recoveries from the feasibility study but they only achieved 38.2% in FY’18 and 45.3% in 1H’19 (CYQ3-Q4’18).

Let’s calculate how much revenue was lost: 

FY’18  = (80%-38.2%) x 1521dmt con produced x 25.3% con grade x avg price of $6800 during 2H’17-IH’18 CY) = $1.09M

1H19FY(CYQ3-Q4’19) = (80%-45.3%) x 1142dmt x 28.3% x $6100/mt = $684k.

So roughly another US$1.7M (A$2.25M) profit missed (since the additional cost to produce the additional cu con would be marginal). This also doesn’t factor in the much higher Au/Ag grades in the copper con which seems to be associated with the improved copper recovery which was in the latest quarterly. 

This lack of copper production also affected the C1/C3 costs over the year since you would be missing these by-product credits.

Now looking forward:
- The latest quarterly has copper recoveries in Dec at circa 73% so they seem to have made significant improvements on this front. Assuming it continues it will result in big improvements on profitability and cost.
- Development ore from Far west with high copper will be processed in CY1H’19 and stoping ore from CY’2H’19.
- Another big factor was that copper and zinc price are down 10-20% vs where they were 12 months ago.
Commodity prices are now improving.