CA - Centamin plc (CELTF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-04-19 18:02:09 ET
Centamin plc (CELTF)
Q1 2024 Results Conference Call
April 18, 2024 03:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Martin Horgan - Chief Executive Officer
Michael Stoner - Head of Corporate
Conference Call Participants
Marina Calero - RBC Capital Markets
Jason Fairclough - Bank of America
Richard Hatch - Berenberg
Daniel Major - UBS
Yuen Low - Liberum
Presentation
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Centamin Q1 2024 Results. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded.
I will now hand over to Martin Horgan, CEO. Please go ahead.
Martin Horgan
Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody, and thank you for taking the time to join this first quarter update of Centamin's activities. A busy quarter successfully navigated. I think as we flagged a couple of times during the quarter, a planned softer quarter than the previous Q4, but importantly setting up for the balance of the year. In terms of the open pit, we start there at Sukari, a period of mining and processing some lower-grade oxide material from the Stage 7 area of the open pit. It meant that we were slightly down on grade than usually the case.
But gladly, that's substantially behind us now from a processing perspective, although we do anticipate mining some more lower-grade material over the balance of the year, that we'll report to stockpiles and dump leach. An underground perspective, as you know, we've been signaling the expansion of the underground production all rates up to 1.4 million tonnes from 1 million tonnes that we achieved last year as part of our future life of mine expansion plans.
As part of that overall work stream, we undertook a ventilation upgrade program during the first quarter. That has largely been successfully completed. Commissioning is actually occurring this week and that significantly improves our ventilation requirements as we look to expand that production rate, as I mentioned....
Centamin plc (CELTF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript