Bellevue Gold boss Darren Stralow defends surprise $150m-plus equity raise, says move was proactive

Bellevue Gold’s Western Australia project has been delivered on time and on budget, but it has been a bumpy road to get there. Picture: AFP

Bellevue Gold boss Darren Stralow has defended the company’s move to raise $150m through a placement last month and says lenders did not apply pressure to tap the market.

Investors in the $1.8bn mid-tier gold miner were caught off guard on July 25 when the group said it would raise $150m at $1.55 per share by way of a placement and up to a further $25m by way of a share purchase plan, after the company had earlier said that a raise was off the agenda.

The funds were for its Bellevue Gold project 40km north of Leinster in the Northern Goldfields region of Western Australia, which started production in the fourth quarter of last year on time and on budget.

However, production forecasts for its gold are not as high as expected and at a lower grade than anticipated.

“The underlying data for the project actually changed,” Mr Stralow said.

“It was only after we did the technical work, it stood out as the right pathway.”

He said that the company could have funded the project without the raise, but it was a decision taken to de-risk the company, he told DataRoom on the sidelines of the Diggers and Dealers conference in Kalgoorlie on Monday.

Mr Stralow said that the company was focused on exploration, development, infrastructure and paying back lender Macquarie all at once.

“We went to Macquarie proactively,” he said with respect to the raising, adding that the bank had not pressured the company to replenish its coffers.

He described it as “a hard decision that surprised the market”, with the raise sending its share price down by at least 20 per cent after the news when shares resumed trading after being halted.

Mr Stralow would not comment on whether the group had received any buyout approaches on the back of the share price decline in the days after the equity raising.

He said if there was the choice to do so, Bellevue Gold would have invested more into project development but it had a limited budget and the group did what it could.

The focus was to provide plenty of data to the market about the project to offer reassurance to investors it was on track.

Bellevue offered production guidance for the 2025 financial year of 165,000 to 180,000 ounces project at all in sustaining costs (AISC) of $1750 to $1850 an ounce, with the production profile weighted towards the fourth quarter of the 2025 financial year.

The five-year growth plan sees progressive mine and processing ramp up over the next three financial years to a steady state of 250,000 ounces per annum production rate in fiscal 2028 and fiscal 2029, reducing to a project AISC of $1500 to $1600 an ounce.

At June, it had $219m of bank debt and $143m of net debt.