Brightstar Resources Limited (ASX: BTR), Part 1 of 3

Abstract

Brightstar Resources Limited (ASX: BTR) is a Western Australian gold developer assembled by acquisition. Five transactions in three years (Kingwest Resources, Linden Gold, Montague East from Gateway Mining, Alto Metals and Aurumin) built a group Mineral Resource of 4.46 million ounces across three hubs. Shares on issue rose six times over in two years to fund it.

The company is now building. Construction of a 1.5 million tonne per annum carbon-in-leach plant at Laverton started in May 2026. Carbon-in-leach is the standard Australian gold plant, which dissolves gold out of ground rock with cyanide and collects it on activated carbon. The build started under a A$110 million lump-sum fixed-price contract with GR Engineering, and first gold is targeted for the June 2027 quarter. That date has not moved across nine statements over seven months. The project is funded through to first gold by a US$120 million senior secured bond and A$193 million of equity raised in February and March 2026. The bond pays a 12.5 per cent coupon, which is the annual interest rate on what is borrowed. The bond carries no warrants, no royalties, no streaming and no mandatory hedging, so the gold price upside stays with shareholders. Samso has not surveyed comparable development debt and offers no view on how common those terms are.

The funded plan is deliberately small next to what the company owns. DFS 2.0 mines 9.42 million tonnes of ore at 1.7 grams of gold per tonne for 457,000 recovered ounces over about six years, roughly a tenth of the group resource. The Ore Reserve is 351,000 ounces. That is 8 per cent of every ounce the company owns and 26 per cent of the Goldfields ground its feasibility study actually covers, a difference worth understanding and one Section 13 explains.

Of the contained ounces in the production target, 30.5 per cent sit in the Inferred category, the lowest confidence class in the JORC Code. The Code is the rulebook every ASX-listed miner must report its gold under. At A$5,000 an ounce, which is the one gold price both feasibility studies publish, DFS 2.0 returns a slightly lower net present value than the June 2025 study, and a materially lower rate of return. The headline improvement from A$316 million to A$606 million is the gold price deck moving, not the plan improving.

Sandstone is what the case beyond six years rests on. It holds 2.87 million ounces across fifteen deposits in a greenstone belt that has produced over a million ounces historically and was never explored as one system. Brightstar has drilled over 146,000 metres into it. The 2026 results at Two Mile Hill and Bull Oak are the longest intercepts Brightstar has published, including 305 metres at 1.8 grams of gold per tonne. Reading them properly means understanding two things. They are downhole lengths rather than true widths, and in several cases a single metre of core carries most of the contained metal. Sandstone has no Ore Reserve, no plant, no completed study and no published metallurgy on Two Mile Hill or Bull Oak. A Pre-Feasibility Study and maiden Ore Reserve are due in the December 2026 quarter.

The margin is also more geared to the gold price than the headline economics suggest. DFS 2.0 holds its C1 cash cost at A$2,581 an ounce at every gold price it publishes, so almost all of any price move lands on the margin. At A$5,000 an ounce, the bottom of the published range and a sixth below the base case, the operating margin falls 32 per cent and the net present value falls 50 per cent. A blended head grade of 1.7 grams of gold per tonne, and ore trucked to one mill from seven deposits, three of them 223 kilometres away, are what leave the margin thin enough for that to matter.

The funding holds at the bottom of the published range, where the study's peak funding requirement rises to A$205 million against the A$282.9 million the company holds. That sets an ungeared project figure against a company cash balance which also has to carry the coupon, the put premium and Sandstone, and A$160.9 million of that cash is escrowed. Section 4 works through all of it.

Two things a reader should carry through this document. Brightstar has no gold revenue between the March 2026 quarter and mill commissioning in mid-2027. The ore purchase agreement with Genesis Minerals ended, and both underground mines are in care and maintenance, meaning mining has stopped but the mines are kept able to restart. And the company has never published an achieved all-in sustaining cost. That measure is the direct cash cost plus royalties plus the capital needed to keep the mine running, and the DFS figure of A$2,998 an ounce has no operating history behind it.

Samso's call is that it is time to look at taking a position. The reasoning is asymmetry rather than certainty. A funded project, a conventional flowsheet, light debt covenants and 60,000 ounces of put options, which are contracts giving Brightstar the right to sell that gold at a set price if the market falls below it, bound the downside. The bound has limits and they are stated. The puts do not begin settling until FY2028, and while DFS 2.0 gives capital and operating cost at plus and minus 10 per cent in a chart, it runs nothing at all on recovery or grade.

The upside is less constrained, because the market is not yet paying full price for Sandstone's Inferred ounces. Two things do bound it. A takeover at these levels ends the mid-tier plan, and a Sandstone plant is capital the company has not raised. At roughly A$116 per resource ounce Brightstar is the cheapest company in its peer group, or the second cheapest at A$152 an ounce if the escrowed bond money is left out of its cash. Either way the discount is the market declining to pay for Inferred ounces until they are drilled out.

Contents

1 Why This Company Warrants a Full Workup	4 The Goldfields Project and DFS 2.0
2 What Brightstar Is, and How It Was Assembled	16 References and Sources
3 The Three Hubs	17 Disclaimer

Snapshot

Prices below are as at the date in the meta line above, the point this workup was compiled from. This is a living document. The share price and market capitalisation will have moved, up or down, in the time since. Check a live quote before acting on anything here, and see the note on data currency in the disclaimer.

Metric	Value
Share price	A$0.570 (ASX, 18 September 2026)
Market capitalisation, being every share on issue multiplied by the share price	about A$629 million
Shares on issue	1,104,179,941 (18 September 2026)
Enterprise value, being the market value of the shares plus borrowings less cash	about A$515 million (Samso calculation)
12-month range	A$0.275 to A$0.650
Cash	A$122.0 million (30 June 2026)
Restricted cash, held in bond escrow until conditions are met	A$160.9 million (30 June 2026)
Debt	US$120 million senior secured bond, A$168.7 million at an exchange rate of 0.7114 US dollars to the Australian dollar, 12.5 per cent annual interest, matures March 2030
Gold hedging	Put options over 60,000 ounces of gold at a strike price of A$5,809 an ounce, settling FY2028 to FY2029
Mineral Resource	99.9 million tonnes of rock at 1.4 grams of gold per tonne, for 4.46 million ounces of contained gold (15 July 2026)
Ore Reserve	6.9 million tonnes at 1.6 grams of gold per tonne, for 351,000 ounces of contained gold (30 June 2026)
Share of the resource in the Inferred category, the lowest confidence class	56.8 per cent
Production status	No producing mine. First gold targeted June 2027 quarter
Funded mine plan	9.42 million tonnes of ore at 1.7 grams of gold per tonne, for 457,000 recovered ounces over about six years
DFS 2.0 economics	Pre-tax net present value at an 8 per cent discount rate A$606 million, and an internal rate of return of 74 per cent a year, at A$6,000 an ounce. All-in sustaining cost A$2,998 an ounce
FY2026 revenue	A$64.1 million
FY2026 net loss after tax	A$76.9 million

Substantial holders (FY2026 Annual Report, as at 1 September 2026): Brightstar reports no substantial shareholders, meaning no single party holding 5 per cent or more of the shares. That is the level at which the Corporations Act requires a holding to be announced. The largest lines on the register are nominee and custodian accounts. They are Citicorp Nominees at 13.74 per cent, J P Morgan Nominees at 6.93 per cent and two HSBC Custody lines totalling 9.12 per cent, each of which aggregates many beneficial owners rather than representing one party. Named holders in the top 20 include Lion Selection Group at 2.48 per cent and Genesis Minerals at 0.76 per cent. The top 20 hold 50.88 per cent and there are 14,343 shareholders. Directors hold 6,355,806 shares between them, 0.58 per cent of issued capital, on the directors' interests table in the FY2026 annual report.

Share price context. Brightstar closed FY2026 at 29.5 cents, down from 45.6 cents a year earlier, having raised A$193 million at 50 cents in February and March 2026. The stock traded around 36 cents at the end of July 2026 and around 43 cents on 19 August 2026, closed at 56.5 cents on 9 September 2026 and last traded at 57.0 cents on 18 September 2026. The 12-month range is 27.5 cents to 65.0 cents, and the high was set earlier in the period rather than recently. Most of the move came in the six weeks after the FY2026 result and the Sandstone drilling results of August and September, and the stock has been broadly flat since. Every valuation figure in this document is struck at 18 September 2026 and none of them survives a material move in the share price.

1 Why This Company Warrants a Full Workup

Brightstar Resources is building a new gold processing mill, which the Western Australian gold sector talks about constantly and delivers rarely. Construction started at Laverton in May 2026, first gold is targeted for June 2027, and the money to finish the job is already in the bank.

Most ASX gold companies of this size are still at study stage. Brightstar is in construction with the capital already raised.

The company also carries an unusual shape. It holds a Mineral Resource of 4.46 million ounces of gold across three project hubs in Western Australia. The mine plan it has funded will produce 457,000 ounces over about six years. So the funded plan uses roughly a tenth of what the company owns. Managing director Alex Rovira put the question to himself in August 2026 and answered it directly. "Do we want to have a six-year mine life doing 75,000 oz? Absolutely not."

Figure 1. The funded plan is a tenth of what the company owns, and a third of the plan has no reserve behind it. Every Measured and Indicated ounce in the DFS 2.0 production target is already an Ore Reserve ounce, and the 154,000 Inferred ounces are the whole of the gap between the two. Source: Samso, from Brightstar Resources, "Sandstone Mineral Resource Grows to 2.9Moz", ASX announcement, 15 July 2026, Table 4[R2], "Updated Goldfields Feasibility Study", 29 January 2026, Tables 1 and 2[R1], and FY2026 Annual Report, 4 September 2026, Table 1[R3].

A reader who only looks at the funded plan will see a mine that is small and short-lived and costs a lot per ounce. A reader who only looks at the resource will see 4.46 million ounces and assume it is all coming. Neither reading is right, and this document sets out how much of the resource the published evidence currently supports.

There is a third reason. Brightstar was assembled by five transactions in three years. Kingwest, Linden Gold, Montague East, Alto Metals and Aurumin all went into the same pot. Roll-ups of this kind are common in the gold sector and they are hard to judge from the outside, because the resource grows without anyone drilling a hole. Working out how much of Brightstar's growth is discovery and how much is purchase takes a full workup, which is what this document does.

This document works through all three in turn, and says where the evidence supports the claim and where it stops short.

2 What Brightstar Is, and How It Was Assembled

The listed company dates to December 2003, when it came to the ASX as A1 Minerals[R4]. For most of that history it was something else. A1 Minerals mined the Alpha and Beta pits south-east of Laverton between March 2010 and September 2011, and changed its name to Stone Resources in 2011. Offshore financing then left the company carrying debt it could not service. Rovira describes the period plainly.[R34] "For a period of about 10 years there wasn't a whole lot happening with that company in that assets basically... It was arguably uninvestable in terms of the amount of debt it had on the balance sheet."

On Rovira's account the company then sold a project to Regis Resources around 2020, cleared the debt, and renamed itself Brightstar. At that point it had a market capitalisation under A$10 million and about 400,000 ounces of resource. In Rovira's words, it "hadn't drilled a drill hole in 10 years".

Rovira became managing director in January 2023, after nine years as a mining and metals investment banker at Canaccord. He has been open about how the job came to him. "I was actually just chatting with the board and the MD at the time and he asked me a few times, hey, do you want to be MD, and I thought that's a terrible idea. I don't want to do that." He took it on the condition that the company would be built to scale, and he wrote an acquisition plan before he started. "So, really kind of worked up this whole M&A strategy playbook about what we wanted to own, why we wanted to own it."

What was bought, and what it cost

Five transactions built the company that exists today.

Kingwest Resources was a merger announced in late 2022 and completed in May 2023[R4]. It brought the Menzies Gold Project, which is the whole of Brightstar's Menzies hub. Menzies now holds 718,000 ounces, 16 per cent of the group resource, and it supplies two of the four deposits carrying an Ore Reserve, Lady Shenton and Yunndaga. Kingwest is the transaction that is easiest to overlook, because between them Lady Shenton and Yunndaga carry 164,000 of the 351,000 ounces in the Ore Reserve.

Linden Gold Alliance completed in July 2024 and brought the Jasper Hills assets at Laverton, which is where the Second Fortune and Fish underground mines and the Lord Byron open pit sit. Consideration was 152.2 million shares, or scrip, valued at A$2.284 million[R3], plus a further 312.5 million deferred consideration shares valued at A$5.0 million in April 2025. Linden's managing director Andrew Rich came across with the assets and is now Brightstar's Executive Director, Operations.

Montague East was bought from Gateway Mining in October 2024 for 466.7 million shares valued at A$7.0 million. Gateway remains entitled to a further A$2 million if a JORC-compliant resource of at least one million ounces is delineated on the tenements, or if a mine there reaches commercial production. Neither milestone had been met at 30 June 2026.

Alto Metals completed in December 2024. Brightstar issued 2,959,092,688 shares, four Brightstar shares for one Alto share, at a closing price of 2.5 cents. Total consideration transferred was A$78.758 million.[R3] This is the transaction that brought Brightstar into the Sandstone district in a serious way.

Aurumin completed on 2 December 2025 by scheme of arrangement, which is a court-approved takeover voted on by the target company's shareholders, one Brightstar share for four Aurumin shares. Brightstar issued 128,002,115 shares and 28,094,929 options, for total consideration transferred of A$73.883 million.[R3][R5][R6] Aurumin consolidated the rest of the Sandstone ground. The vote carried with almost no opposition. Rovira reports 99.8 per cent in favour on a turnout of about 60 per cent of the register, with "two shareholders that voted against it, two out of like 7,000".

The Mikado tenements are being acquired from Panther Metals under a binding sale agreement signed on 15 September 2026, for A$350,000 in cash[R35][R36]. Completion is subject to customary conditions, including third-party approvals. This is a tenement purchase rather than a company acquisition, and at this size it does not move any number in this document. It is here because of where the ground sits. The five exploration licences are immediately adjacent to the Laverton plant and cover the land the planned haul road needs, which Section 4 returns to.

Rovira summed the price up at Diggers and Dealers in August 2025. "We've acquired three and a half million ounces over the last 24 months, all on granted mining leases, all in Western Australia, all previously disturbed, previously mined projects with significant exploration upside for $45 per ounce. Comparing that to the non-Brightstar average of well over $100 an ounce, we feel we've been very successful in targeting key opportunities."

The A$45 an ounce figure is his and it stands up on its own terms. What it cost shareholders was dilution, which the next table sets out.

What the buying cost shareholders

Brightstar carried out a 25-for-1 share consolidation in April 2025, so the raw share counts across this period are not directly comparable. On a consistent post-consolidation basis, shares on issue rose six times over in two years.

Issued capital went from A$108.9 million to A$549.6 million over the same period, which is five times. Of the 625.4 million new shares issued in FY2026, 385.0 million came from the February and March 2026 placement and share purchase plan, both priced at 50 cents, and 128.0 million came from the Aurumin scrip.

Rovira has not ducked this. Asked directly in May 2026 whether the market was still worried about dilution, he answered "yeah, look, absolutely. Like, there's no getting away with it. The share price has certainly underperformed some market peers. It's underperformed the gold indices, the GDX and the GDXJ. Essentially, we're pretty much flat over the last 2 years, which is frustrating from a personal investor perspective." His argument is that the dilution bought assets that will look cheap later. The rest of this workup tests that argument.

How the Alto and Aurumin acquisitions were accounted for

The Alto and Aurumin acquisitions were both accounted for as asset acquisitions rather than business combinations. In plain terms, that means the company treated each deal as buying a bundle of exploration ground rather than buying a going concern. Goodwill is the premium a buyer pays over the value of the identifiable assets. The practical effect is that no goodwill was recognised, no purchase price was allocated across identifiable operating assets, and the transaction costs were capitalised into the asset rather than expensed through the profit and loss account.

The Aurumin judgement was the sole Key Audit Matter in the FY2026 audit, which is the item an auditor names as having needed the most attention in forming its opinion. Alto completed in FY2025 and is not in it. KPMG flagged it because of "the Group's judgement and complexity in determining the accounting approach of the acquisition constituted an asset acquisition or a business combination". The audit opinion is unqualified and there is no emphasis of matter or going concern paragraph. Nothing about it is wrong. The auditor identified this judgement as the one requiring the most attention.

The result on the balance sheet is a deferred exploration and evaluation expenditure balance of A$206.0 million at 30 June 2026, against total assets of A$636.5 million. About a third of the company's assets are capitalised exploration spending, and most of that came in through scrip rather than through the drill bit.

3 The Three Hubs

Brightstar's ground sits in three separate places in Western Australia. Two of them, Laverton and Menzies, are treated together as the Goldfields Hub because they will feed the same mill. The third, Sandstone, is a standalone district roughly 500 kilometres north-west of Laverton.

Laverton

Laverton sits in the north-eastern Eastern Goldfields, in ground the company describes as part of the Laverton Tectonic Zone. That zone is a set of large faults trending north to north-north-west. The Yilgarn Craton is the ancient block of crust that underlies most of the southern half of Western Australia, and in it those big structures are what carried the gold-bearing fluids upwards during mountain building. Deposits formed where those fluids met a rock that would break rather than smear. This deposit style is called orogenic gold, and it is the style that accounts for most of Western Australia's gold production.

Laverton holds 15.8 million tonnes at 1.7 grams per tonne for 873,000 ounces.[R2][R7] The deposits are Cork Tree Well, Lord Byron, Alpha, Beta, Fish, Gilt Key and Second Fortune. Second Fortune is a narrow, very high-grade underground vein reported at a 2.5 gram cut-off and a grade of 13.4 grams of gold per tonne. Fish is hosted in banded iron formation, an iron-rich sedimentary rock that is brittle and commonly hosts gold in the Yilgarn, and it is reported below the existing pit at a 1.6 gram cut-off.

Laverton is the only hub where Brightstar has actually mined. Second Fortune and Fish both operated during FY2026, and both are now in care and maintenance, meaning mining has stopped but the mines are kept dewatered, ventilated and able to restart.

Figure 2. Brightstar is building a mill inside a district where five larger companies already run one. That is the context for the haulage costs in Section 4, and for the takeover question in Section 14. Brightstar tenure and deposits at Laverton and Menzies are shown with the new BTR plant site marked, against the neighbouring operations of Northern Star, AngloGold, Genesis, Vault Minerals and Regis. Source: Brightstar Resources, Diggers and Dealers Presentation, ASX announcement, 5 August 2026, slide 10.[R9]

Menzies

Menzies lies within the Norseman-Wiluna greenstone belt, along a broad zone of intense deformation the company calls the Menzies Shear Zone. The rocks there have been metamorphosed to mid to upper amphibolite facies, which is a way of saying they have been cooked and squeezed harder than the average greenstone belt. A greenstone belt is a long strip of ancient volcanic and sedimentary rock that has been squeezed and altered, and it is the setting for most of the gold mined in Western Australia. Menzies holds 14.8 million tonnes of rock at 1.5 grams of gold per tonne, for 718,000 contained ounces of gold, in Lady Shenton, Yunndaga, Aspacia, Lady Harriet, Link Zone, Selkirk and Lady Irene.[R8]

Menzies has a long production history that matters for reading the current resource. The district produced 787,000 ounces historically, of which 643,000 ounces came from underground at 22.5 grams of gold per tonne. Yunndaga alone produced 270,000 ounces at 16 grams of gold per tonne from 526,000 tonnes between 1896 and 1943, and the historical workings there reached a vertical depth of 630 metres. Both the Lady Shenton and Yunndaga resource models today stop at about 335 metres vertical. At Yunndaga that leaves nearly 300 metres of documented historical mineralisation below the modelled base, which supports saying the deposit is open at depth rather than asserting it.

At Lady Shenton the same argument does not transfer, because the historical underground workings there reached only 200 metres and the old open pit 80 metres, so the model already sits below everything that was mined.

Sandstone

Sandstone is the largest of the three and the most recently assembled. It holds 69.3 million tonnes of rock at 1.3 grams of gold per tonne, for 2,868,000 contained ounces across fifteen named deposits. Sandstone is 64 per cent of the group resource.

The ground sits in the Sandstone Greenstone Belt, a triangular belt at the northern end of the Southern Cross province, where two large crustal faults meet. The company describes mafic volcanic and intrusive rocks with subordinate ultramafic rocks, banded iron formation and sediments, all metamorphosed to greenschist facies. Greenschist is a lower grade of metamorphism than Menzies, which in practice means the rocks are less recrystallised and structures are easier to read.

The belt has produced over a million ounces since the late nineteenth century, from underground and open pit. Troy Resources mined there until 2010. Brightstar has assembled a district that was mined in pieces by different owners and never explored as one system. Brightstar bought its Sandstone ground from three later holders, being Alto Metals, Aurumin and Gateway Mining.

Rovira set the case for the district out in August 2026. "You look at that 100 km radius around Sandstone, and prior to Brightstar entering the district, there was 7 or 8 million oz of gold controlled by junior companies. At the same time, there's not one operating mine. There's no established mills. There's no mid-tiers. There's no majors. I couldn't find another greenstone belt in WA where you've got this level of endowment, this level of access to infrastructure, clearly a very prolifically mineralized district and camp characterized by fragmented ownership."

The observation is accurate, and it is the reason the company exists in its present form. At this stage it is an observation about ownership, and not yet one about economics. Sandstone has no Ore Reserve, no processing plant, no feasibility study and no final investment decision. Section 7 goes through what it does and does not have.

How the three fit together

The plan is sequential. Laverton and Menzies feed one mill at Laverton, which is the project now under construction. Menzies ore is trucked to that mill over about 180 kilometres of sealed Goldfields Highway and a further 43 kilometres of unsealed haul road[R1], and Section 4 sets out what that haul costs. Sandstone is too far from anything to truck, so it needs its own plant, and that plant is the second project. Cash flow from the first is meant to help fund the second.

That sequencing is also why the company financed the way it did, and Rovira is explicit about it. "For us, we wouldn't have gone down this pathway if we didn't have Sandstone in the portfolio. Like it made sense as a financing structure for business that wants to move two projects forward. And by that I mean, it's very difficult for a bank to give you money to go build project A, and before you pay back that debt, you're spending more on project B." Section 10 deals with what that decision cost.

4 The Goldfields Project and DFS 2.0

The Goldfields Project is what Brightstar has funded and is building. It combines the Laverton and Menzies deposits, a new 1.5 million tonne per annum carbon-in-leach plant at Laverton, and a mine schedule that runs about six years.

Carbon-in-leach, usually shortened to CIL, is the standard way Australian gold plants recover gold. The ore is ground to a slurry, cyanide dissolves the gold, and activated carbon in the same tanks picks the dissolved gold out of solution. Ahead of the tanks sits a gravity circuit, which catches coarse gold by weight before any chemistry happens. It is well understood technology and there is nothing experimental about the flowsheet Brightstar has chosen.

The flowsheet is conventional. The sizing is less well demonstrated. DFS 2.0 changed the grinding circuit from the ball mill of DFS 1.0 to "a single-stage SAG mill comminution circuit", and raised throughput by half, from 1.0 to 1.5 million tonnes a year.[R1] A SAG mill grinds rock using the coarse rock itself as most of the grinding medium, topped up with a charge of steel balls, which makes it the mill type most sensitive to how hard the ore is. The study gives four reasons for the choice and only one of them is about the rock. The ore types "were assessed as the most appropriate option based on comminution modelling and independent third-party reviews". The other three are operational flexibility, a proven circuit and a change of stockpile type. It publishes no model, no result, no grinding energy and no hardness index for the new circuit.[R1]

The only hardness data in the record was gathered for the circuit that was replaced. DFS 1.0's Table 24 gives Lady Shenton fresh rock a Bond ball work index of 15.1 and Cork Tree Well fresh rock 18.3, against the 19 DFS 1.0 used as its design figure.[R4] The Bond ball work index is a laboratory measure of how much electricity it takes to grind a tonne of rock, and a higher number means a harder ore and a slower mill. Lord Byron oxide is recorded as not determined on every comminution test in that table, and Fish, Yunndaga, Alpha and Aspacia do not appear in it at all.

DFS 2.0 says IMO's recent Yunndaga testwork "confirmed metal recovery, leaching times, reagent consumption, mill work index etc aligned with the assumptions and costs utilised", and publishes no number for any of it.[R1] The company's own cost table prices fresh ore at A$34.04 a tonne to process against A$26.80 for oxide, and names mill power and grinding media as part of the reason.[R1]

Tailings are the ground-up rock left over once the gold has been leached out of it, and they have to be stored on site permanently. Tailings storage is the one physical item DFS 2.0 says did not change. It states there has been "no material update to the tailings storage strategy since the June 2025 DFS".[R1] That earlier strategy was sized for a 1.1 million tonne a year peak and about 6.5 million tonnes of tailings over the life of the mine.[R4] DFS 2.0 mills 9.42 million tonnes at a 1.5 million tonne a year design capacity, which the industry calls nameplate. The in-pit facilities hold about 4 million tonnes. The paddock dam that takes the balance is built in year two or three and carried as sustaining capital. That is the same line that fell from A$404 an ounce to A$216 between the two studies.[R1]

One cost inconsistency belongs with the metallurgy rather than the mining. The pit optimisations in DFS 2.0's Table 6 used a processing cost range of A$27.62 to A$31.75 a tonne across oxide, transitional and fresh rock. The study's own Table 16 prices fresh ore at A$34.04 a tonne.[R1] So the fresh portions of all three pits were shaped at a processing cost below the study's own estimate for that material. Both figures are as published.

Nothing in either study states that the 1.5 million tonne nameplate holds on fresh rock. This section works its ounce arithmetic holding the mill at 9.42 million tonnes over the life of the plan, because that is the study's own figure. A reader should know the tonnes have the same status as the 91 per cent metallurgical recovery set out below, which is the share of the contained gold the plant is expected to capture. They are a blended plan number, not a demonstrated one.

The current study is the Updated Goldfields Feasibility Study released on 29 January 2026, which the company calls DFS 2.0. It replaced an earlier study released on 30 June 2025.

What the study says

Three things about that table need saying.

The 91 per cent recovery is a life-of-mine blended figure. It means that across the whole plan the plant is expected to recover 91 per cent of the gold contained in the rock it treats, being 457,000 recovered ounces out of 505,000 contained. The other 9 per cent goes to the tailings dam. It is an average and it describes no single deposit.

Two terms are needed to read the detail. Grind size is how finely the rock is crushed before the gold is leached out of it, written as P80. A grind of P80 106 microns means 80 per cent of the ground rock passes a 106 micron screen. Grinding finer exposes more gold and lifts recovery, and it also costs more power and slows the plant, so every study names the grind its recoveries were measured at. Oxide, transitional and fresh are the three states of the rock as a pit gets deeper. Oxide is the weathered rock near surface, soft and crumbly, where the gold is easiest to free. Transitional is the partly weathered middle layer.

Fresh is the hard unweathered rock underneath, where the gold is often locked inside sulphide minerals and harder to get out. Pits mine oxide first because it is on top, so recovery is highest early in a pit and falls as it deepens.

DFS 2.0 Table 12 gives the 24-hour recoveries deposit by deposit and weathering state, all quoted at a grind of P80 106 microns. Read each number as the share of the gold contained in that ore that the plant is expected to recover. Cork Tree Well is 96 per cent in oxide, 95 per cent in transitional and 90 to 94 per cent in fresh rock. Lady Shenton is 93 per cent in oxide, 93 per cent in transitional and 89 per cent in fresh rock. Yunndaga is 92 per cent in fresh rock and Fish is 94 per cent in fresh rock, though the study applies 93 per cent to Yunndaga wherever it puts the number to work. Lord Byron is 89 per cent in oxide, 84 per cent in transitional and 71 per cent in fresh rock.

The Cork Tree Well range is published and then not used. Fresh rock there is not one thing. DFS 1.0 measured the dolerite at 94 per cent, the shale at 90 and the chert at 91.[R4] DFS 2.0 puts a single number on Cork Tree Well fresh rock in two places, the pit design inputs of its Table 6 and the recovery factors of its JORC Table 1. In both it uses 94 per cent, the top of the range.[R1] The study publishes no split of Cork Tree Well's fresh tonnes between the three rock types, so how much of that pit sits in the lower band cannot be worked out.

There is also a gap in what was tested. DFS 1.0 published cyanide and lime consumption alongside every recovery, and the numbers are neither small nor uniform. Cork Tree Well shale and chert consumed 1.69 and 1.46 kilograms of cyanide a tonne against 0.25 for its fresh dolerite, nearly seven times as much.[R4] DFS 2.0's Table 12 carries the same title, "Overview of 24-hour gold recoveries, cyanide and lime consumptions", and contains no cyanide and no lime at all.[R1] Operating consumables are A$10.26 of the A$29.65 a tonne processing cost, so those are not decorative numbers.

What the company has actually recovered, and what it proves

Brightstar is not starting from nothing on recovery, and it has published its own record. Between March 2025 and March 2026 it sold 384,000 tonnes at 2.2 grams of gold per tonne through Genesis Minerals' Laverton mill, and it publishes what came out. The average recovery across the five campaigns was 88 per cent of the contained gold, or 91 per cent leaving out the one parcel with a problem.[R23] Table 3 sets the five campaigns out. The company describes the last of them as "trending to long-term average metallurgical performance of previous processing campaigns".[R23]

The FY2026 Annual Report gives it deposit by deposit for that year. Second Fortune recovered 87 per cent of the gold contained in its ore, Fish 81 per cent and Lord Byron 91 per cent, for 84 per cent across the group.[R3] Fish sits in the DFS 2.0 plan at 94 per cent.

Three things stop that being a straight indictment of the study. The mill is somebody else's and its grind size is not published. An ore sale reconciliation is a commercial settlement between two companies rather than a plant metallurgical balance. And a toll parcel is blended with other people's ore. But the feed grade was 2.2 grams of gold per tonne against the plan's 1.7, which should have helped rather than hurt. And the 91 per cent the company reached across the four clean parcels is the study's own blended figure, achieved on 301,000 tonnes of its own ore. So the question is not whether this ore can yield 91 per cent, because through somebody else's mill it has. The question is whether Brightstar's own plant holds that figure when the feed moves from narrow vein underground ore at 2.2 grams of gold per tonne to open pit ore at 1.7.

Lady Shenton, the largest deposit in the plan

Lady Shenton is 2.72 million tonnes of ore at 1.5 grams of gold per tonne, holding 132,000 contained ounces. That is 26 per cent of the 505,000 ounces in the whole plan, and the largest single deposit in it.[R1] Cork Tree Well is next at 114,000 ounces and Lord Byron third at 112,000.

None of Lady Shenton's three recovery figures, for oxide, transitional and fresh rock, was measured at the grind it is quoted at. DFS 2.0 says so itself, in the same section that prints the table. "No additional metallurgical testing has been completed since the previous DFS release on these deposits."[R1] So the only Lady Shenton testwork in the record is in DFS 1.0 of June 2025, and that study tested it at a grind of 150 microns rather than 106.

Lining the two studies up shows what moved. DFS 1.0's Table 27 gives Lady Shenton at 93 per cent in oxide, 93 per cent in transitional and 85 per cent in fresh rock, at a 150 micron grind.[R4] DFS 2.0 prints 93 per cent, 93 per cent and 89 per cent of the contained gold under a 106 micron heading. The oxide and transitional figures are the older numbers reprinted unchanged under a finer grind. Only the fresh figure was moved, from 85 to 89.

There is a second difference, and it runs the other way. DFS 1.0 leached Lady Shenton under weaker chemistry than the other deposits, because the ore was going to somebody else's plant. Its Table 26 gives Lady Shenton 300 parts per million of cyanide initially and 200 maintained, with dissolved oxygen at 8 to 10 milligrams a litre. Cork Tree Well and Lord Byron were leached at 500 and 300 parts per million, with 15 to 20 milligrams of oxygen a litre.[R4] Brightstar's own plant will run the stronger condition, which should help rather than hurt. The point is that the 89 per cent is a transfer across two changed variables at once, not a measurement.

One more thing sits behind the oxide and transitional numbers. DFS 1.0 tested a single combined sample, listed as "LS Oxide-Trans Master Composite", assaying 1.16 grams of gold per tonne.[R4] So Lady Shenton oxide at 93 per cent and Lady Shenton transitional at 93 per cent are one test result reported twice, on material about a fifth below the 1.5 grams per tonne the reserve carries for that deposit.

DFS 1.0 explains why, and the reason is that the ore was going somewhere else at the time. "It is understood that Lady Shenton ore will be toll treated at a gold plant that operates at a grind size P80 of ~150 microns."[R4] Toll treating means paying another company to process your ore through its plant. At that grind the measured recovery was 85 per cent. The same paragraph gives a second measurement. "At this grind size, the Lady Shenton Fresh gold recovery was 85% however the optimum grind size for Lady Shenton Fresh was 75 µm and at this grind size the gold recovery was 93%."[R4]

So two points exist for Lady Shenton fresh rock, 85 per cent of the contained gold at 150 microns and 93 per cent at 75 microns. There is no measurement at 106 microns, and the 89 per cent DFS 2.0 prints sits between the two where a straight line between them would put it. Drawing that line is ordinary engineering and the number is a reasonable one. The point for a reader is that Table 12 presents it alongside figures that were measured, without saying which is which.

The ounces at stake are small. If every tonne of Lady Shenton were fresh rock and it recovered 85 per cent rather than 89, the plan would lose about 5,300 of its 457,000 recovered ounces, a little over 1 per cent. Not every tonne of Lady Shenton is fresh rock, so the real figure is smaller again, and the study does not publish how Lady Shenton splits between the three weathering states, so it cannot be narrowed further. This is an evidence question rather than a valuation one.

One discrepancy inside DFS 1.0 is worth recording, and DFS 1.0 explains it. Its metallurgy section gives Lady Shenton fresh rock at 85 per cent at 150 microns. Its own pit optimisation table, Table 7, uses 86 per cent at the same grind.[R4] The footnotes to that table say the figures were "correct at time of optimisation (prior to full DFS level metallurgical results being received which confirmed the parameters)", and that the fresh rock recoveries were "reduced in Fresh due to selected processing pathway with coarser grind size, reflective of the Paddington Processing Plant flowsheet".[R4]

That second footnote matters beyond the one point of difference. The reason Lady Shenton was ever tested coarse has since gone away, because DFS 2.0 sends the ore to Brightstar's own 106 micron plant rather than to Paddington. The oxide and transitional figures were carried across unchanged anyway.

Grind size as a lever on the ounce count

The 8 percentage point spread on Lady Shenton fresh rock, 85 per cent at 150 microns against 93 per cent at 75, is the company's own measurement of how much recovery moves with grind alone on one ore type. That makes grind size a lever on the ounce count, and a plant that runs coarser than designed recovers less gold. Coarse running is common while a new mill is being brought up to speed. Later in this section we return to what an ounce shortfall costs, and grind belongs on that list alongside grade and throughput.

Lord Byron is the other deposit worth pausing on, for a different reason. Its fresh rock recovers 71 per cent of the gold in it, twenty points below the 91 per cent blend and the lowest figure in the study. DFS 1.0 offers a cause and hedges it. "Lord Byron's lower gold recoveries (<90%) were potentially caused by gold locked within arsenopyrite, as suggested by head assays and leach data."[R4] Arsenopyrite is an iron arsenic sulphide mineral, and gold locked inside it does not come out in a conventional leach however long it is left or however finely it is ground. Freeing it needs an extra processing step that is not in this flowsheet and not in this capital estimate.

Note the word "potentially", and note what it rests on. That is an inference from assay results and from how the ore behaved in the leach, not from anyone looking at the mineral under a microscope. Neither study publishes a mineralogical study, a diagnostic leach or a finer grind test on Lord Byron fresh rock, so whether any of the missing 29 per cent could be recovered by grinding harder is untested. If the company's suspicion is right, the 71 per cent is a property of the ore rather than a shortfall that can be worked back.

One company figure sits against that. The FY2026 Annual Report records Lord Byron recovering 91 per cent of its contained gold through the toll campaigns, twenty points above the study's assumption for its fresh rock.[R3] That material came from a historical low-grade open pit stockpile rather than from fresh rock in the pit, and no document states its weathering state, so it does not test the 71 per cent directly. It is also the only Lord Byron plant data anyone has.

One more detail from the same testwork, and it points the other way. Lord Byron oxide carries 0.24 per cent organic carbon, roughly ten times anything else tested in the study.[R4] Natural carbon in ore can grab dissolved gold back out of solution before the plant's own carbon does, which is called preg-robbing. Neither study tests for it. The mitigating point is that carbon-in-leach, which is the circuit Brightstar is building, is the right flowsheet for mild preg-robbing, because the plant's carbon is in the tank competing for the gold from the start. That is a point in the project's favour.

That matters because of where Lord Byron sits in the plan. It is one of only four deposits carrying an Ore Reserve and it holds 83,000 of the 351,000 reserve ounces. It is also the first pit in the schedule and the only source of Proved material in the whole plan. Note also that DFS 2.0's JORC Table 1 states that "no deleterious elements are known to exist", while DFS 1.0 attributes the worst recovery in the study to gold locked in arsenopyrite.[R1][R4] Both are the company's own documents and we state both.

Pyrrhotite is the sharper case, because it is a loss the company has already taken and costed rather than a laboratory inference. Pyrrhotite is an iron sulphide mineral that soaks up oxygen in the leach tanks, and the gold needs that oxygen to dissolve. In November 2025 Brightstar's fourth toll parcel recovered 75 per cent of its contained gold. The FY2026 Annual Report gives the cause and the bill. "The drop in recovery was related to an increase in the mineral Pyrrhotite, which consumed oxygen in the leach circuit which was subsequently addressed in the fifth parcel through milling practises and ore blending."[R3] The company puts the shortfall at about 1,650 recovered ounces and A$10.5 million of revenue from that one campaign.[R3]

Pyrrhotite is not exotic at this project. DFS 1.0 describes Cork Tree Well's host rocks as carrying "pervasive pyrite, pyrrhotite and magnetite mineralisation".[R4] Cork Tree Well is 114,000 of the 505,000 contained ounces in the plan. The company's stated fix, milling practice and ore blending, is an operating answer rather than a change to the plant, and blending stock is the thing a new mine has least of in its first year. DFS 2.0's flowsheet does show an oxygen line feeding the leach tanks, but its text never mentions oxygen, and no oxygen plant capacity, consumption rate or leach oxygen demand is published anywhere in either study. That is the one reagent the company has watched a parcel fail on, and it is the one with no published number.

The 91 per cent blend is therefore an outcome of the mining sequence rather than a plant design figure, and it holds for as long as the sequence stays weighted towards oxide and transitional feed and towards Cork Tree Well. The study describes that weighting, "a stronger focus on oxide and transitional material to enable early creation of ore parcels".[R1] It publishes no year by year split of feed by weathering state, so how long the weighting lasts cannot be read from the study. If the schedule moves towards Lord Byron fresh rock, the blend moves with it.

One further inconsistency, and it runs to four sets of recovery figures rather than two. The first extra set is in DFS 2.0's Table 6, which holds the inputs used to design the pits. It gives Lady Shenton fresh rock at 90 per cent of the contained gold against Table 12's 89 per cent. It gives Cork Tree Well fresh rock at a flat 94 per cent against Table 12's range of 90 to 94 per cent.[R1] The second extra set is in Table 9, the design inputs for the Yunndaga underground stopes, which applies 93 per cent against Table 12's 92.[R1] The third is in DFS 2.0's own JORC Table 1, which differs again from its Table 12 and in more places than one. Table 4 sets all four side by side.

Lord Byron oxide appears at 91 per cent and transitional at 88, against 89 and 84 in Table 12. Cork Tree Well oxide appears at 95 per cent and transitional at 94, against 96 and 95. The JORC table answers the question of which recovery factors were applied in the model, so on Lord Byron the figures used are higher than the figures tested. That JORC set has a traceable origin. It is DFS 1.0's Table 7 reprinted with the two fresh figures updated, identical on Cork Tree Well and on Lord Byron oxide and transitional, which is exactly where it parts company with Table 12.[R4] DFS 1.0 footnoted that table as "correct at time of optimisation (prior to full DFS level metallurgical results being received which confirmed the parameters)".[R4]

So on Lord Byron oxide and transitional, the recovery factors DFS 2.0 says it applied to the Ore Reserve are the earlier study's optimisation figures. DFS 1.0 footnoted those as struck before the full results were received, and as confirmed by them. They are higher than the figures its own Table 12 tests. All four sets are in the same announcement, and the study does not say which of them produced the 91 per cent blend.[R1]

Every financial number in DFS 2.0 is pre-tax and ungeared, meaning it is struck before company tax and as though the project were paid for entirely in cash with no borrowings. There is no post-tax NPV, no post-tax IRR and no post-tax cash flow published anywhere in the study or its presentation. The company gives its reason in a footnote, that it held A$209 million of tax losses at 31 December 2025 which it expects to shelter early income. The reason is legitimate, and Brightstar labels the figures correctly in the study itself. A$606 million is not an after-tax number and cannot be compared with a peer's after-tax NPV.

Three separate gold prices are in use and they do different jobs. A$4,500 an ounce is the price used to optimise the pits, set cut-off grades and state the Ore Reserve. A$6,000 an ounce is the base case for all the headline financials. A$7,000 an ounce is the spot case. The conservatism in this study sits at A$4,500, and it applies to the reserve, not to the NPV.

Where the money goes

Two cost terms run through that table. C1 is the direct cash cost of getting an ounce out, covering mining, haulage, processing and site overheads. All-in sustaining cost adds royalties and the capital needed to keep the operation running. Neither includes the capital to build the mill in the first place.

The 10.2 to 1 in Table 2 is the operating strip ratio, which is the waste the study expenses. Strip ratio is simply the tonnes of waste rock that have to be moved for each tonne of ore. DFS 2.0 also publishes a total strip ratio pit by pit, in its own Table 7, and it is higher. Total strip is 13 to 1 at Lady Shenton, 19 to 1 at Cork Tree Well and 12 to 1 at Lord Byron. Operating strip is 11 to 1 at Lady Shenton, 10 to 1 at Cork Tree Well and 8 to 1 at Lord Byron.[R1]

The difference between the two is pre-strip, the waste stripped before ore is exposed, which is capitalised rather than expensed, and it is widest at Cork Tree Well where roughly half the waste is capitalised. That is part of why A$346 million of the A$479 million of life-of-mine capital is capitalised mining rather than plant, though A$84 million of it is underground development at Yunndaga, Fish and Alpha rather than pre-strip. The study does not itself explain the gap between its two strip ratios, so the reading of it is Samso's.

On 15 September 2026 Brightstar contracted to buy the ground over which it plans to build a new short haul road at Laverton[R35]. The five Mikado exploration licences are coming from Panther Metals for A$350,000 in cash, with completion subject to customary conditions, and Panther has already consented to access ahead of transfer. The company says they carry the route for a new short haul road connecting the Fish underground and Lord Byron open pit operations to the plant, along with footprint for water and for tailings capacity. Brightstar states the road will reduce haulage costs across the Laverton Hub over the life of both operations. It publishes no figure for the reduction, so the A$56 a tonne in the study is still the only published figure for the saving.

The A$56 is better defended than a bare number looks. DFS 2.0 builds it from about ten quad road trains a shift, running 110 tonne loads at 80 kilometres an hour to move 84,000 dry tonnes a month, with a road maintenance allowance on top.[R1] The route it affects is Jasper Hills, being Fish and Lord Byron, where DFS 2.0 already costs haulage at A$15.74 to A$17.31 a tonne. Any saving therefore comes off the smallest of the study's three rates, not off the A$56 that applies at Menzies.[R1] What the purchase removes is the risk of not controlling the corridor, which is a different thing from a cost saving and is worth more than A$350,000. The A$350,000 buys the ground. It does not build the road, and the road appears in no published capital estimate, because the purchase postdates DFS 2.0. No construction cost, no timing and no saving has been put on it.

Cork Tree Well is the pit to watch on three counts at once. It carries the highest total strip ratio in the plan at 19 to 1 and the largest capitalised mining allocation at A$98 million. It is also one of the two reserve deposits for which no mining approval is disclosed anywhere in the record.

Haulage and processing at A$577 million is the single largest line in the cost build, larger than all mining combined. Per ounce it is A$1,262, second to underground mining at A$1,579. Geography explains it. Menzies ore travels about 223 kilometres by road to reach the mill, and DFS 2.0 costs that haul at A$56 a tonne including road maintenance. Rovira put the arithmetic in plain terms in August 2026, costing the milling at "30 bucks a ton, $31 a ton to process it through our own mill, plus 50 to haul it.

So, you're talking 80 bucks a ton in terms of all-in from the ROM pad at the ... mine site to the mill." At the study's 1.7 gram head grade and A$6,000 an ounce gold, A$56 a tonne of haulage is worth about 0.32 grams per tonne of head grade, consumed before the ore reaches the plant.

Capital is A$479 million over the life of mine, of which A$133 million is infrastructure and A$346 million is capitalised mining. Peak funding, the largest amount of money the project is out of pocket at any one time, is A$188 million at the base case. One line is absent from that build. DFS 2.0 resolves the A$188 million into A$133 million of infrastructure and A$55 million of net capitalised project cash flows, being pre-strip mining, administration and working capital.[R1] There is no owner's cost line anywhere in the study. No owner's team, no first fills of reagents and consumables, no capital spares, no insurance and no commissioning or recruitment allowance, while the company's own investment decision announcement confirms an owner's team has been mobilised.[R20]

On a lump sum contract those costs sit with the owner by definition. They may be inside the A$55 million or inside administration. The study does not say, and on a A$188 million funded number that is worth knowing. The processing plant is priced at A$118.0 million. That is A$110.9 million for the mill itself and A$7.1 million for bulk earthworks and buildings, with a 10 per cent contingency of A$11.8 million on a separate line beneath the total. Four months later the mill was contracted at A$110 million on a lump-sum fixed-price basis, which Section 9 sets out in full.

The contingency line needs a note. In Table 17 of the study the contingency sits below the "Total Processing Capex" figure of A$118.0 million, and the A$118 million that carries into the peak funding table is the pre-contingency number. In the DFS presentation the contingency is likewise listed below the A$188 million peak funding line. Read literally, the A$188 million excludes the A$11.8 million contingency, which would make the funded number A$200 million. The study does not say either way. We state what is published and leave the resolution to the company.

Contingency is disclosed on the processing infrastructure only. There is no contingency stated on the A$15 million of non-processing infrastructure, on the A$346 million of capitalised mining, or on operating costs. The study states its accuracy as plus or minus 15 per cent for Lady Shenton, Lord Byron, Cork Tree Well, Yunndaga and Fish, and plus or minus 30 per cent for Alpha underground and Aspacia open pit. Its own Important Note on page 2 places Fish in the plus or minus 30 per cent group instead, alongside Alpha and Aspacia. We quote both as released.

The sensitivities DFS 2.0 publishes

Gold price is the only sensitivity the study tabulates. It publishes two more in a chart rather than a table. Figure 13 on page 29 is headed "Sensitivity Analysis (+/- 10%)" and prints the pre-tax NPV8 at plus and minus 10 per cent on three variables. Gold price runs A$432 million to A$789 million, operating cost A$521 million to A$690 million and capital cost A$568 million to A$644 million, against the A$606 million base case.

That chart supports the study's own statement that "the Project is more sensitive to volatility in operating costs rather than capital costs". The operating cost swing of A$169 million is more than twice the capital cost swing of A$76 million. The variables the study lists as tested are the exchange rate, gold prices, variable costs including mining rates, diesel price, power cost and grade control, and fixed costs. Grade control there is a cost input, charged at 60 cents an ore tonne in the study's Table 6, and not the head grade.

What is absent is narrower than the gold price table alone suggests, and it still matters. There is no recovery sensitivity, no head grade sensitivity and no case that excludes the Inferred material. The capital and operating cost ranges are given at plus and minus 10 per cent only. The chart prints the net present value at each end, but no intermediate points and no cost inputs, so a reader cannot rebuild the series. A reader who wants to know what a 20 per cent operating cost overrun does, or what the plan is worth on reserve ounces alone, cannot get there from what is in the announcement.

Why the gold price does so much of the work

The AISC row of Table 6 runs from A$2,965 an ounce at A$5,000 gold to A$3,049 at A$7,500. That is a movement of A$84 an ounce across a A$2,500 an ounce range in the gold price, and the whole of it is royalties, which are charged as a percentage of revenue. The C1 cash cost underneath does not move at all. The study prints A$2,581 an ounce at every one of the six gold prices.

That is a modelling choice rather than a discovery, and it has a consequence. If the cost stays still, every dollar the gold price moves lands on the margin.

Figure 3. The cost does not move, so the gold price move lands entirely on the margin. Across the six gold prices DFS 2.0 publishes, the all-in sustaining cost varies by A$84 an ounce and the operating margin varies by A$2,416. The C1 cash cost underneath is A$2,581 an ounce at every one of them. Source: Samso, from Brightstar Resources, "Updated Goldfields Feasibility Study", ASX announcement, 29 January 2026, Table 21[R1]. The margin shown is the gold price less the published all-in sustaining cost, which is Samso's subtraction of two company figures and is not a cash flow.

From the A$6,000 base case down to A$5,000, the gold price falls 17 per cent. The operating margin falls from A$3,002 an ounce to A$2,035, which is 32 per cent, or 1.9 times the price move. The pre-tax net present value falls from A$606 million to A$301 million, which is 50 per cent, or 3.0 times the price move. The rate of return falls from 74 per cent to 41 per cent and payback stretches from 17 months to 32. All of those are the company's own published figures, read across its own table.

Two counterweights belong here, because a flat cost line is an assumption and not a finding.

The first is that the assumption cuts against the company as well as for it. Holding the cost still makes the upside look better than a correlated cost base would, and it also makes the downside look worse, because in practice a falling gold price tends to take contractor and labour rates down with it. Figure 13 gives the size of a 10 per cent operating cost move but says nothing about whether costs and the gold price move together, so the direction of that effect is still untestable from what is published. Samso's view is that the direction is arguable and the size is not knowable, so the published gearing should be read as the shape of the exposure rather than a forecast of it.

The second is more concrete, and it sits in the same table. Peak funding, the most the project is ever out of pocket, rises as the gold price falls, from A$188 million at the base case to A$205 million at A$5,000 an ounce. Brightstar held A$282.9 million of cash and restricted cash at 30 June 2026, of which A$122.0 million is unrestricted and A$160.9 million sits in bond escrow against conditions Section 10 sets out. So at the bottom of the published range the project still costs less to finish than the company holds, on the combined figure. The margin compresses at A$5,000 an ounce while the funding position holds.

Why a 1.7 gram head grade makes that gearing worse

Grade decides how many ounces a tonne of rock has to pay for. At the plan's blended head grade of 1.7 grams and 91 per cent recovery, one tonne of mill feed carries 0.0497 of a recoverable ounce, or about one twentieth. At A$6,000 an ounce that tonne generates about A$298 of revenue and carries A$146 of all-in sustaining cost, from Table 5, leaving about A$152 a tonne. Note that the study's own tonnes and ounces do not quite reproduce its own grade. Its 505,000 contained ounces over 9,420,000 tonnes is 1.667 grams, against the 1.70 printed. On the lower figure the revenue is about A$291 a tonne and the margin about A$145. Both are as published, and the difference does not change the point.

Because every per-tonne cost is divided by a twentieth of an ounce, small movements per tonne become large ones per ounce. A cost overrun of A$10 a tonne, which is under 7 per cent of the A$146 cost base, is A$201 an ounce on the AISC. A head grade 10 per cent below plan, 1.53 grams instead of 1.70, takes revenue from A$298 a tonne to A$269 and the margin from A$152 to A$123, a fall of 20 per cent for a 10 per cent miss. That is the same doubling effect the gold price has, arriving through the other side of the equation. Section 5 sets out why grade is the number most likely to move. Thirty per cent of the contained ounces in this plan are Inferred, and the Inferred share peaks at 41 per cent of ore mined in FY2030.

What the distances cost

No ore in this plan is mined at the plant. The study sets out the haul distances[R1]. Cork Tree Well is about 75 kilometres away and the Lord Byron and Fish mines about 60. The Menzies deposits, being Lady Shenton, Yunndaga and Aspacia, are hauled about 180 kilometres north on the sealed Goldfields Highway and a further 43 kilometres on unsealed haul roads. Seven deposits feed one mill across two hubs, and the furthest of them is more than 220 kilometres out.

The study prices that ore movement pit by pit, and it publishes two sets of numbers. The pit optimisation inputs in its Table 6 give haulage to the Laverton mill as A$56.00 a tonne from Lady Shenton, A$19.23 from Cork Tree Well and A$17.31 from Lord Byron. The haulage scheduling section of the same announcement gives operating estimates of A$56 a tonne from Menzies, A$16.38 from Cork Tree Well and A$15.74 from Jasper Hills, being Lord Byron and Fish. Both are as published. The Menzies figure is the same in each, and it is the one that matters here. Those numbers are easier to judge in grams than in dollars.

At A$6,000 an ounce and 91 per cent recovery, one gram per tonne of head grade is worth A$175.54 a tonne. So haulage alone consumes 0.32 grams per tonne of Lady Shenton's grade, against 0.11 at Cork Tree Well and 0.10 at Lord Byron. Lady Shenton's reserve grade is 1.5 grams. About a fifth of what is in the rock is spent getting it to the mill, and Lady Shenton carries 117,000 of the 351,000 ounces in the Ore Reserve.

None of that makes the plan unviable at A$6,000 gold, and the company has priced the haulage honestly and disclosed it pit by pit, which many studies do not. It does mean the margin on a third of the reserve starts a fifth of a gram behind, and that the ore furthest from the mill is the ore that stops paying first when the gold price falls. The Mikado tenement purchase of 15 September 2026, which secures the corridor for a short haul road from Fish and Lord Byron to the plant, is the company working on exactly this problem. It has not yet put a number on the saving, and the rates the study publishes for that route are A$17.31 a tonne for Lord Byron and A$15.74 for Jasper Hills rather than the A$56 that applies at Menzies.

There is one further gap in the published economics. The sensitivity stops at A$5,000 an ounce. The Ore Reserve is struck at A$4,500. Between those two prices the reserve is still a reserve and there are no published economics at all.

DFS 2.0 against DFS 1.0

The company's own comparison table sets DFS 1.0 against DFS 2.0 on eight measures and shows an improvement on almost all of them. It shows production up 35 per cent, mine life up a year, ore reserves up 66 per cent and mill throughput up 50 per cent. Peak funding is up 56 per cent, which the company attributes to "a change in scope" rather than cost. All of that is accurate.

The comparison table leaves out NPV, IRR and the gold price assumption. Those three moved as well, and they moved together.

The headline moved from an NPV8 of A$316 million in the first study to A$606 million in the second. That looks like an increase of A$290 million. The A$316 million was DFS 1.0's spot case at A$5,000 an ounce and the A$606 million is DFS 2.0's base case at A$6,000 an ounce, so the two are not the same measurement.

At the one gold price both studies publish, DFS 2.0 produces a slightly lower NPV and a materially lower rate of return than DFS 1.0. Building a bigger plant produces that result arithmetically. More capital is spent earlier, so the return on it is lower, even though the total cash the project generates over its life is higher.

This is not a criticism of the decision to build 1.5 million tonnes a year instead of one million. A bigger plant with room to expand to 2.5 million tonnes is very likely the right long-term call for a company that wants to add Menzies, then expand, then build a second hub. The criticism lands on a comparison table that shows eight measures, improving on almost all of them, and omits the two that did not. An investor reading the January 2026 announcement would reasonably conclude the project got better. At a constant gold price the company's own figures show a larger plan on a slightly lower net present value and a materially lower rate of return.

Cost per tonne and cost per ounce across the two studies

The bottom half of Table 7 is Brightstar's own evidence for what Section 4 has just argued. Between the two studies, seven months apart on the same ground, the cost per tonne milled did not move. C1 went from A$126 a tonne to A$125, and all-in sustaining cost per tonne actually fell, from A$157 to A$146. Over the same seven months the C1 cost per ounce rose 8.1 per cent, from A$2,388 to A$2,581.

Cost per tonne did not inflate in aggregate, though the parts moved a long way. Underground mining went from A$70 a tonne to A$124, a rise of 77 per cent, offset by open pit mining falling from A$43 to A$41 and administration falling A$17 to A$10. The head grade of the plan fell from 1.81 grams to 1.70, about 6 per cent, and on the studies' own tonnes and ounces the recovered ounces in a tonne of mill feed fell 8.3 per cent. Fewer ounces had to carry the same cost per tonne, and that is the whole of the movement.

The headline AISC held at about A$3,000 an ounce across both studies for a separate reason. C1 rose A$193 an ounce and royalties rose a further A$37, while sustaining capital per ounce was almost halved, from A$404 to A$216. Almost all of that royalty rise is the gold price deck moving from A$5,000 to A$6,000 rather than a cost moving. The rate is effectively unchanged, at 3.32 per cent of revenue against 3.38 per cent. Had sustaining capital stayed where DFS 1.0 put it, DFS 2.0 would have printed an AISC of about A$3,186 an ounce. Two large changes moving in opposite directions produced a flat headline, and only one of them was a cost saving.

The lesson generalises. The gap between a study AISC and an achieved AISC in this state has been large. In two of the three cases where a cause is named it opened up through grade and volume rather than through the price of anything.

What a shortfall in ounces would do

Section 14 sets out what has happened to other Western Australian gold miners when a study met an operating mine. Of the three in that table that publish an achieved all-in sustaining cost, only one named input prices as the cause. The other two named productivity, weather, access to ore and ounces. A fourth company, Black Cat, publishes no achieved cost at all. The fair question to ask of Brightstar is what a shortfall of that kind would be worth here.

The answer follows from the cost structure already described. C1 sits in dollars and is driven by tonnes milled. Sustaining capital is a fixed programme. Royalties are a fixed share of revenue. So a shortfall in recovered ounces and a fall in the gold price of the same percentage cut revenue by the same amount and leave the same cost base behind. In dollars they are the same shock arriving by different doors, which means the company's published gold price sensitivity can be read as an ounce sensitivity.

That reading carries one assumption worth naming, because the last three rows of the table below depend on it. It assumes the shortfall is spread evenly across the schedule. A gold price fall is even by construction. An ounce miss need not be, and the peak funding row is the most exposed to that, because peak funding is set in the first two years rather than over the life of the mine.

Ounces come from three things multiplied together. Tonnes of ore milled, the grade of that ore in grams of gold per tonne, and the share of that gold the plant recovers. Hold the tonnes at 9.42 million and a shortfall has to come from grade or from recovery.

On its own, a 10 per cent shortfall is the head grade of the plan falling from 1.70 grams of gold per tonne to 1.53 with recovery unchanged. Taken the other way, it is the plant recovering 82 per cent of the gold in the rock rather than 91 per cent, with the grade unchanged. A 15 per cent shortfall is about 1.45 grams per tonne, or a recovery of 77 per cent. Those recovery figures are struck on the study's printed 91 per cent. On the recovery its own ounce count implies, 90.5 per cent, the same shortfalls are 81.5 and 76.9 per cent.

How grade and recovery interact

Setting the two out as alternatives is how the arithmetic works. The rock does not behave that way. Some of the gold in any ore is locked inside other minerals and will not dissolve in a normal leach however finely the rock is ground. That locked gold is roughly a fixed quantity in each tonne. So when the head grade falls, the locked portion becomes a larger share of what is there, and the recovery falls as well. The two losses stack on top of each other rather than standing in for each other.

Which means the grade leg above is the mild version of a grade miss. A real 10 per cent drop in head grade would cost somewhat more than 10 per cent of the ounces, because recovery would slip with it.

The study does not have to be taken on trust here, because DFS 1.0 publishes the grades it tested. Cork Tree Well's 96 per cent oxide figure was measured on a sample averaging 3.61 grams of gold per tonne and its 95 per cent transitional figure on one averaging 5.58 grams.[R4] The open pit plan runs at 1.5 grams of gold per tonne. Those are the two highest recoveries in the study. They are also the two least transferable to the rock the plant will actually see, because a roughly fixed tail of locked gold is a far larger share of 1.5 grams a tonne than of 5.6. Lady Shenton and Lord Byron were tested near plan grade, between 1.03 and 1.97 grams of gold per tonne. Fish and Yunndaga test grades are not published at all.

The company says the same thing, and says it has not yet worked out the size. DFS 2.0's JORC Table 1 states that "more work can be done to understand the impact of grade variation on recovery within the respective weathered packages".[R1] Neither study publishes a design tailings grade or any bulk sample or pilot scale testwork. The JORC criterion asking about bulk or pilot scale work is answered only with "rock chip and core samples have been tested for each lithology".[R1] So the relationship cannot be modelled from what is published, in either direction.

One design figure that is published is worth pausing on. DFS 2.0 says the plant will run "at a 1.5Mtpa throughput with P80 passing 106&micro;m, with a 24 hour residence time".[R1] Residence time is how long the ore sits in the leach tanks with the cyanide before the slurry is pushed out the other end. The recoveries in Table 12 are 24-hour bottle roll results, meaning ground ore tumbled with cyanide solution in a laboratory bottle for 24 hours. So the plant is designed to give the ore exactly as long as the laboratory gave it, and no longer. That leaves no spare residence time.

A tank out of service, a surge above nameplate or slurry short circuiting through the train all shorten the actual time below the condition the recoveries were measured at. DFS 2.0's Figure 11 draws two leach tanks and six adsorption tanks, the same eight-tank train DFS 1.0 specified for the 1.0 million tonne plant.[R1] It publishes no tank volume and no slurry density for the new plant, so the 24 hours cannot be checked against the equipment. DFS 1.0 sized the smaller plant at 28 hours for 1.0 million tonnes a year.[R4]

One arithmetic note on combining the two. They multiply rather than add. Five per cent off the grade and five per cent off the recovery is a 9.75 per cent shortfall in ounces, not 10.

The evidence behind the grade case and the recovery case

A 10 per cent miss on head grade is an ordinary outcome for this plan. Of the contained ounces in the production target, 30.5 per cent sit in the Inferred category, the lowest confidence class in the JORC Code. The Code is the Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves, and it is the rulebook every ASX-listed miner must report its gold under. DFS 2.0 applies 10 per cent mining dilution at all three open pits. Underground it applies a 0.5 metre allowance on the stope designs for wall rock breaking into the void, a stope being the space left where ore has been blasted out. It applies 14 per cent development dilution to the ore drives, which are the tunnels driven along the ore body.[R1] Dilution is waste rock that gets mined and milled along with the ore, and every tonne of it lowers the grade going into the plant.

A blended plant recovery of 82 per cent is not an ordinary outcome. Every ore type tested in the study recovers 84 per cent of its contained gold or better, except Lord Byron fresh rock at 71 per cent. For the plant to average 82 per cent across the life of the mine, most of the schedule would have to perform worse than almost anything in the testwork.

Take the worst case the study actually contains and it still does not get there. Lord Byron is 112,000 of the 505,000 contained ounces in the production target.[R1] If every tonne of it ran as fresh rock at 71 per cent rather than the 91 per cent blend, the plan would lose about 22,000 ounces, which is a 4.9 per cent shortfall. That is half of the smaller case above, from the single worst deposit running entirely at its worst state.

So the grade leg is the one the evidence supports and the recovery leg is its arithmetic counterpart. Both belong in the table. A reader should weight them differently.

On when a Lord Byron problem would show up, the study is less help than it first appears. It describes its approach as "a stronger focus on oxide and transitional material to enable early creation of ore parcels", which points to the early years being weighted to the higher recovering material.[R1] But it publishes no year by year split of mill feed by weathering state, so how long that weighting lasts cannot be read from it. Lord Byron is also the first pit in the schedule, and DFS 2.0's JORC Table 1 says each mine generally has a two to three year life, which puts its fresh ore early rather than late.[R1]

Peak funding is deliberately left out of that table, and the reason is worth setting out. Peak funding is not a life-of-mine total. It is the deepest point of the cash hole, and DFS 2.0's own Figure 12 puts that point in FY2027, before the first full year of production.[R1] Its Table 18 shows A$133 million of the A$188 million is pre-production infrastructure, A$118 million of which is now a fixed lump sum price that does not move with ounces at all.[R1] The A$55 million balance is pre-strip mining, administration and working capital, net of whatever the plant earns during commissioning. So the gold price row for peak funding in DFS 2.0's Table 21 is a sensitivity on a few months of ramp-up revenue, not on life-of-mine ounces, and it cannot be converted into one.

The honest statement is narrower. An ounce shortfall during commissioning would raise peak funding by more than the published gold price row suggests, because the shortfall would land entirely inside the small revenue leg. The study publishes no month by month ramp-up cash flow with which to size it. What can be said is that only A$122.0 million of the A$282.9 million of cash held at 30 June 2026 is unrestricted. Release of the A$160.9 million in bond escrow is conditional on commissioning on time and on budget and on ramp-up at budgeted costs. That is the same thing a shortfall puts under pressure. Section 10 quotes those conditions in full.

One counterweight does belong here. The operating margin does not reach zero until recovered ounces fall by about half. On the same straight line the pre-tax net present value reaches zero at about a third, which is an extrapolation below the published range and should be read as a direction rather than a figure.

Grind size belongs on the list of ways recovery could fall short. The company's own testwork moves Lady Shenton fresh rock 8 percentage points, from 85 per cent of the contained gold at a 150 micron grind to 93 per cent at 75 microns. A mill running coarser than its design during ramp-up recovers less gold, and the study publishes no sensitivity on recovery at all.

One thing the arithmetic does not capture. It holds the mill at 9.42 million tonnes and assumes the ounces are lost to grade or recovery. If the mill instead runs fewer tonnes, processing and administration spread over fewer tonnes as well, the cost per tonne rises too, and the outcome is worse than the equivalent gold price shown. DFS 2.0 splits its processing costs into fixed and variable, at A$11.27 a tonne fixed and A$18.38 variable of the A$29.65 total, but it publishes no such split for mining, haulage or administration. So part of that effect can be sized from the study and the rest cannot.

What DFS 2.0 does not include

Three of the seven deposits in the mine plan carry no Ore Reserve at all. Alpha underground, Aspacia open pit and Fish underground contribute 1.17 million tonnes and 93,000 contained ounces to the production target, and A$89 million of capitalised mining, without a reserve behind any of it. Alpha and Aspacia are estimated to the wider plus or minus 30 per cent accuracy in the study's own risks section, and its Important Note on page 2 puts Fish in that group as well.

Two of those three deposits also carry no published metallurgical recovery. DFS 2.0's recovery table covers Lady Shenton, Lord Byron, Cork Tree Well, Fish and Yunndaga, five of the seven deposits in the plan. Alpha and Aspacia are not in it, and Alpha carries A$50 million of capitalised mining, the fourth-largest allocation in the study, behind Cork Tree Well at A$98 million, Lady Shenton at A$87 million and Lord Byron at A$57 million. Alpha and Aspacia carry no Ore Reserve, so the study's statement that "DFS level metallurgical testwork has been completed on all deposits as part of the reserve" does not cover them.[R1]

DFS 2.0's own text contradicts that statement in the same section, where it records that no additional metallurgical testing has been completed on these deposits since DFS 1.0. The claim also sits immediately after the statement that the plant will run at a 106 micron grind, and Lady Shenton, the largest reserve deposit in the plan, was tested at 150.

One more contradiction inside the same JORC table, recorded rather than resolved. Its environmental section says "Processing will be conducted offsite, with process residue deposited in a fit for purpose and approved residue storage facility", while the Ore Reserve statement a few pages earlier says "All ore will be hauled and processed onsite at Brightstar's Laverton Plant".[R1] It reads as wording left over from DFS 1.0, when the ore was going to a third party mill. We state both as published.

Fish is a particular case. Brightstar declared a maiden underground Ore Reserve for Fish and Second Fortune on 26 June 2025, totalling 227,000 tonnes at 3.24 grams of gold per tonne for 24,000 contained ounces.[R10] Neither deposit appears in the 30 June 2026 Ore Reserve statement. DFS 2.0 explains Fish this way. "As the Fish mine is currently in operation, no further optimisation work was completed and the remaining ore that forms part of the Mining Inventory is classified as Inferred." No document in the record explains the removal of the Second Fortune reserve.

The practical consequence is that the "+66 per cent" reserve growth claim compares two different things. The 211,000 ounce base was open pit only in DFS 1.0. The 351,000 ounces in DFS 2.0 adds Yunndaga underground, and drops the 24,000 ounces of underground reserve declared seven months earlier. Both figures are as published. We state them and move on.

16 References and Sources

Every source used in this workup is listed below with its date. Each entry carries an identifier, and the same identifier appears in the body at the point that source is used, so any number, quotation or finding here can be traced back to the document behind it in one step.

[R1] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Updated Goldfields Feasibility Study", ASX announcement, 29 January 2026.

[R2] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Sandstone Mineral Resource Grows to 2.9Moz", ASX announcement, 15 July 2026.

[R3] Brightstar Resources Limited, Annual Report to Shareholders for the year ended 30 June 2026, ASX announcement, 4 September 2026.

[R4] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Menzies and Laverton Gold Projects Feasibility Study", ASX announcement, 30 June 2025.

[R5] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Strategic Acquisition of Aurumin Consolidates Sandstone", ASX announcement, 21 July 2025.

[R6] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Aurumin Scheme Approved - Group MRE Grows to 3.9Moz Au", ASX announcement, 20 November 2025.

[R7] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Group Resource Update Underpins Future Mining", ASX announcement, 19 May 2025.

[R8] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Menzies Mineral Resource increases 22% to 0.7Moz @ 1.5g/t", ASX announcement, 11 December 2025.

[R9] Brightstar Resources Limited, Diggers and Dealers Presentation, ASX announcement, 5 August 2026.

[R10] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Maiden Underground Ore Reserves Underpins FY26 Production", ASX announcement, 26 June 2025.

[R11] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Sandstone Strategic Plan to Deliver Long-Life Production Hub", ASX announcement, 27 January 2026.

[R12] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Lord Byron RC Drilling Results and Mineral Resource Upgrade", ASX announcement, 12 January 2026.

[R13] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Spectacular 305m @ 1.8g/t Au in Sandstone extension drilling", ASX announcement, 3 August 2026.

[R14] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Wide, high-grade intercepts from Two Mile Hill drilling", ASX announcement, 27 August 2026.

[R15] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Significant visible gold in 500m mineralised intersection", ASX announcement, 25 August 2026.

[R16] Brightstar Resources Limited, "High Grade Exploration Success Continues at Sandstone", ASX announcement, 7 September 2026.

[R17] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Sandstone Drilling Reinforces District-Scale Opportunity", ASX announcement, 8 July 2026.

[R18] Brightstar Resources Limited, "EPC Contractor Engaged for Goldfields Project", ASX announcement, 17 February 2026.

[R19] GR Engineering Services Limited, "FY26 Results, Guidance and Equity Raising", ASX announcement, 24 August 2026.

[R20] Brightstar Resources Limited, "BTR Approves Final Investment Decision at Goldfields Project", ASX announcement, 26 May 2026.

[R21] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Laverton Mill Construction Advancing on Schedule", ASX announcement, 9 September 2026.

[R22] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Goldfields Project Development Update", ASX announcement, 2 July 2026.

[R23] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Record Processing Campaign Delivers 7,900oz Au Production", ASX announcement, 20 April 2026.

[R24] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Quarterly Activities Report and Appendix 5B" for the quarter ended 31 December 2025, ASX announcement, 30 January 2026.

[R25] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Quarterly Activities Report and Appendix 5B" for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, ASX announcement, 30 July 2026.

[R26] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Strategic $180M capital raising funds Goldfields development", ASX announcement, 2 February 2026.

[R27] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Brightstar Secures US$120M Bond to Fund Goldfields Project", ASX announcement, 4 March 2026.

[R28] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Funding Package Completed - Fully Funded for Production", ASX announcement, 20 March 2026.

[R29] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Clarification of production targets and aspirational statements", ASX announcement, 14 April 2026.

[R30] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Building Mines and Growing Resources Presentation", ASX announcement, 16 July 2026, and Diggers and Dealers Presentation, 5 August 2026, being the two presentations carrying the Aspirational Statements section.

[R31] Australian Securities Exchange, last traded price, 52-week range and issued capital for Brightstar Resources Limited (BTR), 18 September 2026. The share count is cross-checked against the two Appendix 2A forms Brightstar lodged on 16 September 2026.

[R32] Peer market data, 18 September 2026. Last traded prices from the Australian Securities Exchange for Astral Resources (AAR), Pantoro Gold (PNR), Black Cat Syndicate (BC8), Minerals 260 (MI6), Meeka Metals (MEK) and Ora Banda Mining (OBM). Shares on issue, cash, borrowings, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves taken from each company's own most recent ASX filing, each dated in the table. Market capitalisation is shares on issue multiplied by the last traded price, calculated by Samso, because several data vendors carry stale share counts.

[R33] gold-api.com for the US dollar gold price and Frankfurter and er-api.com for the AUD/USD exchange rate, all as at 17 to 18 September 2026. The two exchange rate sources agree to three decimal places.

[R34] Interviews and conference presentations given by Alex Rovira, Managing Director of Brightstar Resources Limited, published on YouTube between September 2024 and August 2026. Quotations are taken from the published recordings and every company, project and place name inside a quotation has been confirmed against a primary ASX document. Repeated words and verbal fillers have been removed from the machine-generated captions without ellipses, which is this publication's convention for spoken-word sources.

[R35] Brightstar Resources Limited, "Acquisition of Laverton Tenements Enables Expansion Optionality for Laverton Processing Hub", ASX announcement, 15 September 2026.

[R36] Panther Metals Limited, "Panther Advances Laverton Gold Development Pathway", ASX announcement, 15 September 2026.

[R37] Peer cost track record, Table 22. Study forecasts are taken from six announcements. Meeka Metals, "Expanded Murchison Gold Project Feasibility Study", 12 December 2024. Ora Banda Mining, "Ora Banda Completes Davyhurst DFS", 30 June 2020. Pantoro, "DFS Confirms Attractive Economics and Mine Life for Phase One Norseman Restart", 12 October 2020. Black Cat Syndicate, "Kal East to Generate Strong Returns", 9 May 2024. Astral Resources, "Mandilla Project Pre-Feasibility Study", 25 June 2025. Minerals 260, "PFS confirms Bullabulling's potential to be a High-Margin, Large-Scale, Long-Life Gold Mine", 8 July 2026. Achieved costs are taken from each company's own quarterly activities reports. Those are Meeka 23 October 2025 and 22 July 2026, Ora Banda 29 July 2025 and 16 July 2026, and Pantoro 22 January 2025, 27 October 2025, 22 January 2026, 28 April 2026 and 30 July 2026. Ora Banda's attribution of cost pressure to diesel and industry wide inflation is taken from its FY2026 Annual Report. Black Cat states in its quarterlies of 24 July 2025, 29 January 2026 and 30 July 2026 that it does not calculate an all-in sustaining cost. Its quarterly of 23 April 2026 says the opposite, that guidance including an all-in sustaining cost is expected for FY2027.

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