Larvotto Resources (ASX:LRV) - Hillgrove Hits Production, Midas Discovery Adds Upside

Ron Heeks (0:00)

Hi, Ron Heeks, Managing Director of Larvotto Resources at the Hillgrove Gold Antimony mine in New South Wales.

Crux Investor (0:07)

Ron, good to see you. I think I saw you last October.

There was a long list of things to do. How have you got on?

Ron Heeks (0:13)

Oh, we've got on really well. We officially fired up the processing plant earlier this week.

We said we'd do it in August, and we did do it. So we didn't leave too many hours to spare, but we got there. And so that was a spectacular achievement by the team who have done a truly wonderful job to get us there on time and on budget.

Crux Investor (0:33)

Right. And into first production, what's that actually mean in real time? So you've got to kind of scale this thing up, don't you? Yeah.

Ron Heeks (0:41)

It'll take, well, we've programmed four months into the scheme of things. I think we'll do it considerably quicker than that. But that's to build up to full production, full production being 500,000 tonnes per annum and to produce 40,000 ounces of gold and 5,000 tonnes of antimony, metal.

Crux Investor (0:59)

Right. Okay. So you put the order through the plant, the concentrate produced, sellable concentrate, and you produce revenue. I guess that's the kind of key thing that people want to see, a route to market. Any sort of issues with the guides to that whole commissioning process, or was it largely as planned?

Ron Heeks (1:16)

Just the normal feeding problems that one has with these things, just endless amounts of silly little things that you budget for. So, we've been very happy so far. The plant has actually run for more hours a day than what we thought. In fact, nearly double the amount of hours that we thought it was going to run for.

So pretty happy with that. And the guys are working through the problems one by one to tweak this and tweak that and get this up for, you know, there's a lot of moving parts in this plant. We're producing two concentrates plus gold dore, so a lot of moving parts.

Crux Investor (1:48)

Okay, and obviously, I guess folks will be interested to sort of see. I'm looking at your share price, right? It's moved about 25% since we last spoke, so obviously it's moved positively, but in a very, very strong metals market, but it kind of feels like you've not really kind of captured the value that I certainly, I thought you would have.

What's missing here? Were you not on budget, or you weren't ready?

Ron Heeks (2:17)

What's going on? No, we were on budget, and we were on time, and we've done absolutely everything we said we were gonna do. We found a new ore body, the Midas Zone, which didn't exist last time we talked, and that looks like it's gonna be a cracker. It's only 50 meters away from where we're currently mining. We just didn't know anything about it. So life doesn't get much better on the exploration side of things. Now we've hit all the milestones that we said that we would.

You know, we've been smashed around a bit with the gold price, but the gold price is more than double what it was when we started this, and the Antimony price is two and a half times what it was when we started this. You know, do I look at a $4500 gold price and think, oh, that's terrible, not when it was $2200 when we started. So, it's going pretty well, but, you know, it's a tough market out there, a tough world. We get controlled by factors that are well outside anything that we control. You know, doing the build and getting to where we did with a bit of a wall that popped up in the middle is tricky because some of our big kit came from the other side of the world, so getting it here became a bit of a nightmare when only 40% of the world's ships were operating. So, we got through all that, and from where we're sitting now, expiration is going really well. The team on site, they are spectacular, second to none. They're all doing really big days at the moment to just get through the commissioning hurdle.

It's all good news for us.

Crux Investor (3:51)

Let me come on to the expiration upside. I mean, everyone lives a bit of a bliss guy.

In terms of the development process that you've been through, in terms of or currently stockpiled, what grades are you seeing? Is it as expected? And how much plant feed is there? I'm just trying to say, in terms of this ramp up process, can you maybe explain it a little bit more?