Perseus Mining Limited

Managing Director & CEO Address at Annual General Meeting - Seite 3

Managing Director’s AGM Address

Ladies and Gentlemen,

During the last twelve months, each of us who have been employed in the mining industry, have been presented with a set of challenges that many of us have never encountered before. For us at Perseus, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic meant that for a significant part of this year, we have been operating in uncharted waters, notwithstanding the fact that the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa in 2016 had previously alerted us to the possibility of a contagion posing a material risk to our business.

I am pleased to be able to report that so far, Perseus has emerged from the COVID crisis relatively unscathed and if anything, we have emerged stronger, as we continue on our path to achieve our target of producing at least 500,000 ounces of gold per year at a cash margin of not less than US$400 per ounce, and in doing so, position ourselves to consistently deliver on our corporate mission of generating benefits for all of our stakeholders, in fair and equitable proportions.

While the global uncertainty related to COVID-19 has made it impossible at times to guarantee ongoing strong performance, we have done our absolute best to deliver it, and in this regard, I think we have been reasonably successful.

Development of our third gold mine, Yaouré, which was a very big undertaking this year given the COVID challenge, is now well advanced and we expect to pour our first gold at the mine within weeks, inside our stretch target of pouring first gold by the end of this calendar year.  When fully operational, we expect Yaouré to produce on average about 215,000oz of gold per year in its first five years of operation at an all-in site cost of $750/oz or so, and have a mine life of eight years or more, based on the current Ore Reserve inventory.

It is said that “seeing is believing”, so let me now show you a short video of what our outstanding construction team, our contractors and their subcontractors had achieved at Yaouré by the end of October.

Bringing our third mine online has been an important focus this year, and as you have just seen, it has kept us very busy. Meanwhile, ticking over in the background, our two producing mines, Edikan and Sissingué, have delivered improved operational performance during H2 FY20 after a slow H1. We produced nearly 260,000oz of gold at the two mines during FY2020, with our all-in site costs of US$972 per ounce, being similar to those of the previous year. Costs were impacted by our COVID-19 measures in the second half of the year. In the June quarter, these added about US$20/ounce to our production costs, however, notwithstanding this, we were still able to generate very strong cashflows from our operations that amounted to approximately A$213 million through the year.