Chrysos Corp Ltd
ASX:C79
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Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Chrysos Corporation Limited Q3 FY '23 Quarterly Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]
I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Dirk Treasure, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Ashley. Good morning, shareholders. Thank you for attending our March quarter [ 4C ] investor update. Once again, we've seen a record quarter for a number of key metrics, including samples processed and in our unaudited total revenue. We also continue to gather momentum in our global rollout. As always, I'll keep this fairly brief, running through our activities from the quarter. Brett Coventry, our CFO, will present the financials and we'll then both be available for a Q&A session.
Slide 3, please, operator. On the back of further deployments achieved during the quarter, we've increased the company's total revenues of $6.7 million, up 5% quarter-on-quarter or 70% year-on-year. We've processed almost 820,000 samples during the quarter, a small increase on last quarter, and an increase of 43% year-on-year. Continued growth of samples process is a key metric for the company and is a strong indicator of continued industry adoption of our PhotonAssay technology.
With regards to TCV or total contract value, we have converted $6 million of this figure during the quarter as we invoice our minimum monthly assay payments. TCV is now sitting around $708 million, which is the amount to unwind of the duration of the leases. We've ended the quarter with $66 million in the bank and undrawn debt from Commonwealth Bank for a further $21 million, putting us in good stead to continue our aggressive global rollout. We successfully deployed a further 4 units during the quarter, representing our largest quarterly deployment to date and includes units going into Canada, Africa and into Australia. As we approach FY '24 with a deployment target of 18 units, this provides us with confidence in our capability to support next year's continued growth.
We've had some delays to deployment of our 21st unit, which will bring us to our FY '23 target of 21 units, a couple of weeks behind schedule. Keeping in mind that this is still a 100% uplift on where we left off at the end of last year with 10 units.
Next slide, and I will pass over to Brett Coventry.
Thanks, Dirk. For those who have followed us for some time, you'll be aware of our business model. But those [indiscernible] we'd like to quickly revisit this year. Our customers commit to a take-or-pay arrangement with minimum monthly assay payments due to Chrysos. For any samples that are processed in addition to the customer's minimum commitment, they pay us on a per sample basis which forms our additional assay charges. The graph on this slide illustrates Chrysos' revenue breakdown. The yellow section represents the minimum monthly payments, which continue to grow with each unit that we deploy, providing us with a baseline of committed revenue for subsequent periods. The gray section above this is our additional assay charges which is driven by utilization of our deployed units. Both of these segments show further growth over the year-to-date, with both increasing materially year-on-year.
Our minimum monthly assay payments were up 14% quarter-on-quarter, and our 18 deployed units have a combined minimum monthly assay payments were approximately $2.2 million or $26 million annualized. This becomes our baseline revenue for future months, which is irrespective of utilization. These minimum monthly assay payments offer a reliable and forecast revenue. We think this chart is really the easiest way to understand Chrysos' business and the strength of our growth. Effectively, for each new unit that we deploy, we generate ongoing revenue stream as well as providing ourselves with substantial upside opportunity when the operator increased utilization. We do this with very clear visibility to our future deployments with committed contracts already entering into 2025.
With this, I'll pass back to Dirk. Thank you.
Thank you, Brett. And Slide 5, please, operator. In the last slide, Brett explained the link between additional assay charges and our deployed unit utilization. Shown in yellow on this chart is utilization for the past 18 months overlay by the black line, which is the absolute number of samples processed per month. We've had a year-to-date utilization rate of 56%, which is in comparison to our prospective forecast of 55% for FY '23, which broadly means that utilization is tracking to expectation.
In our Australian units, we do tend to see a seasonal reduction in samples over the Christmas period, which has dragged down our sample volumes across December, January and February. However, March has seen the reverse with a record month achieved by the company, and that record month is 13% higher than our previous record month.
The map on the left-hand side shows our global operations, which now span in our key target markets of North America, Australia and both East and West Africa. We've achieved concurrent installation of 4 units during the last quarter. This puts us in really good stead to manage our expanding deployment capability going into FY '24.
Next slide, please, operator. We currently count 3 of the world's largest laboratory companies and a number of the world's largest gold miners and PhotonAssay customers. MSA is continuing its rapid expansion strategy accounting for 2 additional units during the last quarter, one which was deployed into a central facility in Prince George, which has quickly picked up sample volume from the region. And the other MSA unit was deployed into Kibali Gold Mine, which is the second unit deployed to a Barrick mine site, illustrating continued adoption by Barrick.
The March quarter also represents SGS' first deployed units in the market, and we hope that will be the beginning of a long-term relationship, such as we enjoy with both ALS and Intertek. Hopefully, everyone is now familiar with our measurement of total contract value, but just as a refresher, we consider total contract value or TCV to be the sum of minimum monthly payments due to Chrysos' under our committed contracts calculated across the expected term of the contracts. This value then converts to revenue on a monthly basis as we invoice the MMAP against those contracts. So during the quarter, as I commented before, $6 million of TCV has been converted into minimum monthly asset payments, and we ended the quarter with a further $708 million in TCV to unwind over the duration of the committed contracts.
Next slide, please, operator. We've had another quarter of strong and sustainable growth. We've substantially increased our deployed unit base from 14 to 18 during the quarter, with each of these units adding to our minimum monthly asset payments going forward. We're pleased to reaffirm guidance for EBITDA and revenue for the full year, each of which represents substantial growth on FY '22.
As we come to the conclusion of FY '23, our proven ability to accelerate deployment gives us further confidence on our ability to deploy 18 units during FY '24. Our target of a 15- to 18-month pipeline of committed deployments is well maintained, and we have a further 31 units contract beyond the 18 that we have currently deployed. So that remains the 49 in total.
Upcoming deployments will create customers in each of our key markets, helping us to reduce unitized operating costs and make use of the local structures that we've implemented from our initial deployments. This will support our expanded deployment capacity as we enter FY '24, simplifying our installation requirements and logistics.
Finally, we've closed the quarter with $66 million in the bank, and our long-term committed revenue from Tier 1 counterparties provides ample opportunity for financing, as shown by our expanded facility with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, $21 million of which remains undrawn. We consider the company to be very well funded to support our ongoing growth.
Thank you for attending today, and both Brett and myself are happy to take questions from the line.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Josh Kannourakis with Barrenjoey.
Just first one, in terms of, I guess, strategic priorities for the company, how are you balancing up looking at the multiunit deals with the strategic partners, both on the mining and on the lab side versus the sort of current rollout trajectory? Just be keen to hear where you're adding some of those more strategic deals? And how you're sort of planning to balance out your pipeline that's obviously already pretty committed over the next couple of years?
Absolutely. Look, great question. So the pipeline is always an interesting one for us because we do want to maintain this 15- to 18-month pipeline because if we go significantly beyond that, you're trying to sell a product where you're saying to the customer, you can have this product that it's going to take you 2 or 3 years to actually get access to it. So there's an equilibrium of sales, price per sample, commitments, where we're placing these units that drive into our overall sales model. And to your point around the strategic deals, absolutely. What we are looking for and what we've disclosed quite publicly is, for us, it all comes back to the miners. Every single sample that the company processes originate from a miner, whether that's in a laboratory or from -- or on a mine site itself. So really, it's about educating the industry, getting out there, showing people the value of converting over from Fire Assay to using PhotonAssay instead, and then really driving the long-term value proposition here. So in addition to just you look straight into the miners that like-for-like interchangeability of Fire Assay to PhotonAssay. We also have a team internally that is looking at expanding application all of the technology for those units where we're directly on mine sites. And this is looking at things like optimizing process plants where you can improve your recoveries or reduce your reagent consumption, each of which adds directly to the bottom line for the miners. So that's really sort of the big focus from the pipeline perspective. And from the point of view of upcoming sales and number of units, what we really want to do is just stick to this 15- to 18-month pipeline. So when you've got a manufacturing capacity of 18 units per year going into the next financial year, with 31 units that we still need to deploy at this point in time. We're quite comfortable with where that sits. And that gives us the opportunity to really determine, okay, where are the next units going that make the most sense for the company, either building that profile, clustering our units around the world, opening up more and more of these big miners. And obviously, the holy grail for us that we've talked about previously is having a minor come across completely to PhotonAssay in all of their global operations. That remains an absolute key focus for us.
Got it. No, that's great. And just final one for me. In terms of understanding the OpEx bridge, I guess, into '24, not expecting you to discuss it now. But how should we think about, I guess, news flow and commentary as we sort of go forward over the coming months into '24?
Look, I think in the first instance, and I'll pass it to Brett afterwards as well. In the first instance, what we would be looking to do is provide guidance to the market, specifically around revenue and EBITDA, that obviously gives the revenue forecast and the cost forecast for the company. We are also getting close to the point where we need to provide guidance for number of units going into FY '25. We've talked about the manufacturing timeline here being quite long. So right now, we're starting to make decisions about FY '25 looks like for us as well. So we will be coming out with guidance to that effect. The plan at this point will be to come out with guidance for those 3 in July of this year at our next 4C.
With regard to the sort of specifics around how you model the company going forward from an OpEx perspective, I don't know if Brett got any comments on that?
I think -- yes, there's no rule. Obviously, we're going to provide some guidance at the next 4C to assist. Obviously, the last quarter gives a bit of an indication of where costs are running at to sort of model from. We've always spoken about they start to decelerate in terms of the rate of acceleration into next year, but there will still be continued growth in some of those costs as we continue to grow in these new regions. But part of what we come back to is we're looking to cluster units, which slows down market entry costs and actions like that. So there's a bit of a balance going on across the business and certainly don't expect to be growing at the same rate next financial year.
Let me -- we've gone from 1 to 7 countries over the last 18 months, so there's been a lot of expansion in there. I certainly appreciate that unpicking that is complicated until after the fact. So we'll try to provide the information if we can.
Your next question comes from Lachlan Rogers with One Fifteen Capital.
I just wanted to get an update on where the company headcount is up? And sort of where the hires have been over the last quarter, would be good.
Yes. No, no worries, Lachlan. So headcount is now running a little bit over 90 people. So tracking below what we put into the perspective as to expected headcount. Look, a lot of that is around sort of improving the efficiency of the headcount as opposed to not being able to get staff or anything like that, but I think a lot of other companies are struggling with. For us, while that is a common theme in Australia as a global business, particularly with our focus at the moment on Africa. We actually haven't had that much difficulty getting staff. So we get really good, well educated, generally with a background in the mining industry as well, engineers over in our African operations. So that's been really good. And with regard to sort of where does our headcount sit, a lot of it does sit in actually supporting the units directly. So we've talked about, as we go into these new countries, we basically over maintain the units. So you have a larger number of maintenance engineers per unit as you start to have more units in the same country or local to one another, those maintenance engineers can now cover multiple units. So all of this is kind of built into the way that we're entering all these countries at the moment, a lot of our growth that has taken place outside of Australia. And then as we go forward, you have a lower incremental growth per unit going into a country that we're already operating.
Yes, sure. Great. And just one other one for me. Can you just give a bit more color on the reclassification of this expense and sort of how that happened?
Yes. Thank you. As we formalized our international entities, we're now in a position to recognize those inventories in their appropriate locations. So it really is just having those structures in place to be able to move forward and have them accounted for in the correct locations.
[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Treasure for closing remarks.
Thanks, Ashley. Look, once again, we're pleased by the company's ongoing performance and are very happy to be in a position to reaffirm our prospectus guidance for EBITDA and for revenue for FY '23. We anticipate providing those forecasts for revenue and EBITDA for FY '24 during our July release, as I discussed before to answer Josh's question. So look, thanks for attending today and look forward to providing you that next update in July.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.