The low-key producer, led by former Regis Resources chief operating officer Morgan Hart, has been a quiet achiever, building its Okvau open pit gold mine in Cambodia on time and on budget during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The stock has gained around 350% over three years, resulting in Emerald being added to the S&P/ASX 200 index in November 2023.

In June, Canaccord Genuity analyst Paul Howard initiated on Emerald with a buy, describing the company as “the low-cost producer everyone wants to be”.

Since commissioning in September 2021, Okvau has produced 324,000 ounces of gold at eye-wateringly low all-in sustaining costs of just US$796 an ounce.

The feat earned Emerald the Digger Award at Diggers & Dealers in Kalgoorlie last week.

Okvau produced a record 114,000oz of gold at AISC of US$818/oz in the 2024 financial year, generating pre-tax operating cashflow of A$218 million.

Guidance for the 2025 financial year will be announced once Emerald has a better idea of the underground opportunity at Okvau.

The underground has a resource estimate of 305,000oz at 6.29 grams per tonne gold, which will be updated during the current quarter.

Okvau remains underexplored, with hits like 8m at 19g/t gold and 9m at 6.6g/t within 1km of the plant.

Hart said the company had been so busy it hadn’t yet had time to follow up those results.

“That clearly becomes incremental feed for the Okvau processing plant going forward,” he told Diggers last week.

Beyond Okvau

Emerald also holds 100% of the Memot gold project, 100km southwest of Okvau.

Memot has a maiden open pit inferred resource of 8 million tonnes at 1.84g/t gold for 470,000oz of gold.

Memot is the same size as Okvau with the same geology.

“What we liked about it is that the illegal miners had already found it which is exactly how Okvau was found,” Hart said.

Recent results include 6m at 348g/t gold.

Emerald will be drilling at Memot through to the end of this year.

“We certainly expect to come out with a very large resource from that, which we expect to be a plus-5 gram, possibly 6 gram open cut,” Hart said.

“We should be building that processing plant, we expect, by the second half of calendar 2025.”

Emerald also has growth potential in Australia, following the recent close of the drawn-out takeover battle for public unlisted company Bullseye Mining.

Bullseye took about two years for Emerald to secure due to a legal battle with a minority shareholder.

Hart, who, along with his team, also worked at Samantha Gold and Equigold with Nick Giorgetta, had good reason for wanting an asset closer to home.

“We’ve always been dividend-paying companies. We intend to be paying dividends here,” he said.

“It’s much better to be dividend-paying if you have Australian franking credits and that’s why we wanted an Australian asset.”

The takeover bought Emerald the Dingo Range gold project, which spans the entire 900 square kilometres of the Dingo Range Greenstone Belt and is surrounded by large gold deposits including Plutonic, Darlot and Wiluna.

“It’s one of the remaining underexplored exploration provinces in Australia,” Hart said.

Recent results from a 98,000m resource definition program have included 4m at 22.77g/t gold from 67m, including 1m at 88.7g/t, and 6m at 8.01g/t gold from 356m, including 1m at 44.55g/t.

“We’ve got drill rigs running day and night to allow us to come out with a resource, which we expect to be able to announce in September/October,” Hart said.

“We expect the resource and reserve for this to come out closer to 2 grams, when we finally announce it, which will be nearly double what the average seems to be in Western Australia at present.”

Canaccord’s Howard expects to see a 500,000-700,000oz resource, growing to 1Moz over time.

Feasibility studies are running concurrently with a view to making a final investment decision by the end of this year.

Importantly, the resource definition area sits on granted mining licenses.

“We fully expect to be in a position to be mining this next year because it’s got current works approvals,” said Hart.

Emerald had A$162.3 million of cash and bullion at the end of June and expects to self-fund its next two operations, which will be executed by its in-house build team, which has been responsible for building five mines in the past 16 years.

“We’ve got an organic pathway to become a multi-mine 300,000oz-plus per annum producer over the next two years,” Hart said.