Welcome to the Executive Series. Well, we know that gold has been on quite a journey in recent years. In fact, in 2025, it rose by more than 60%. That's the gold price, which was very helpful for mining profits and also margins. It also saw a bunch of ASX-listed gold miners more than double in share price in just 12 months. Now, this year so far has been quite a different experience. Gold prices have dropped back sharply. This is partly because of the conflict in the Middle East. But has gold lost its sparkle, or is it just a temporary dip? Well, today I'm joined by Wayne Bramwell, who is the managing director and CEO of a large Aussie-listed gold miner called Westgold Resources. Thanks so much for joining me today, Wayne.
Well, Westgold is well established already, but for those who don't know, can you give us a bit of an intro into what you do, where your key assets are, and what sets you apart from others?
Gladly. Westgold is an ASX 100 gold miner. We are well funded, unhedged, and have got a business now which is producing circa 400,000 ounces of gold from two of Western Australia's best goldfields. ASX code: WGX.
And you've just released your quarterly update as well, about a week or so ago. But this is ahead of the official full-year results, which are due in August, and they seem to be well received by the market. I mean, what are you proudest of in those results?
Everyone in the business is really proud of the FY26 results. It really was a year of records. We finished the year with record gold production, 387,000 ounces. But most importantly, we delivered those ounces inside our guidance range. It was a record on another basis: we built now over $900 million of cash, bullion, and liquid investments up to June 30. And so the balance sheet has never been in better shape. Overall, the business is starting to operate with great momentum, and that's really due to the efforts that we've put into the business over the last four or five years.
So you mean the fact that you're debt-free and you've got almost a billion in cash and liquid assets — I mean, how much work has been necessary over the past few years to get you to this point?
A significant amount of work. Really, the business has been in turnaround phase for the last four years. And four years ago, this was a very different business. We changed the culture within the business. We really focused on safety and started to focus on safe and profitable ounces. What that has done — that, along with significant investment into drilling of our assets, has seen the business start to become more predictable in its mine outputs, and our financial inputs have improved as well. So full credit to the team that I've got behind me. I mean, they've really leaned into this business, and in the last four years, we've effectively doubled the scale of Westgold's operations.
And there has been a bit of a flurry of M&A activity as well across the industry. There's been the back and forth between Genesis and Volt and Regis. Evolution just a couple of days ago came out with their own small purchase as well. And of course, Westgold, you had your own merger a couple of years ago as well. Do you expect that type of consolidation to continue in the years ahead? Is it gold price related or something else?
M&A has been a hot topic in the Australian gold sector since 2023. And you spoke to some of the more recent deals. I think this thematic will continue, and what investors can probably expect to see is more consolidation of companies of like scale, seeking bigger scale and trying to crystallise cost synergies. They'll also see another thing. I think they'll see larger, well-funded producers start to look down the production scale for opportunities to bolt on smaller assets to their business. At the bottom end, I think you'll see a lot of the smaller, well-funded producers, the single-mine operators, starting to look at each other to get together to try and get operational scale and become more attractive to investors. So I think the gold price has certainly catalysed a lot of this. Particularly if you're a gold producer, there's very few that don't have healthy balance sheets now that can look over the fence and plan how they grow these businesses.
Something that I think is a little misunderstood as well is the fact that there are gold miners that are hedged, and then there are others like Westgold Resources, as you pointed out there, that are fully unhedged, which means you're fully exposed to the movements in the spot price. I believe you're one of the largest unhedged producers on the ASX as well. For those who don't understand this, I guess, what are some of the pros and cons for both?
Literally, we could talk for four or five hours about hedging, but the potted summary is really like this. And this is how investors should think about it. Hedging — there's lots of different ways to hedge gold. But often you are either forced to hedge because of the nature of the debt you've taken from debt providers. And in some circumstances, companies like us have no choice but to be hedged. Westgold has a debt facility, but it's unhedged. We negotiated this facility from a position of strength, and we had plenty of cash. So we have a debt facility undrawn, no hedging attached. So there's a scenario where often the debt providers force you into a scenario. We didn't get forced into that. The flip side is hedging is really specific to your investor base. Westgold has got a large institutional investor base. A lot of North American and European investors, and the message from them to us is very clear. They want full exposure to the gold price. Hence, they don't see hedging as something we should do.
And look, even though the gold price has obviously come off a bit recently, 20% to 30% from the record levels. But I think it's easy to forget as well that it's way higher now than it was a few years ago. I mean, five years ago, it was half what we're seeing at the moment, around 4,000 or so US dollars per ounce. But if you aren't hedging, do you still look to other methods to perhaps give you some protection if there is a move to the downside?
Yeah, very much. And there are lots of ways to protect the downside. For us, we really think about downside protection with three levers. First, maintain a strong treasury. Cash is king, and the position Westgold is in now gives us this cash buffer to make sure we can weather any volatility in the gold price. The second thing we do in terms of protecting the downside is have a granular understanding of the cost drivers within each one of our mines. Each one of these mines is different, and understanding what drives the costs within those assets gives us the ability to adjust that cost base when we can. The third thing is really about being disciplined in how you approach these assets. On that basis, we can talk to divesting assets — gold assets which we previously owned that didn't meet our corporate objectives. And we've divested three groups of gold assets over the last 12 months which didn't meet our targets because they were quite small or high cost. But by doing that, cleaned up our portfolio and crystallised value for our shareholders in both cash and scrip. So really, being nimble and being disciplined are really the key ways of focusing on the things that you can control, and don't worry so much about the things you can't.
