Colour me cynical about huge reductions in capex more than 12 months on in an inflationary environment...
"We are in an environment where fiscal discipline is the first line of defence to cyclic trends"... of course, reduction of costs in an inflationary environment is as simple as telling suppliers to stick price rises where the sun don;t shine, because you don't argue with fiscal discipline!
More likely the answer lies in shuffling pre-production capex out into sustaining capex... "Pre-production operations costs have been adjusted to reflect staged operations onboarding and the associated operational readiness requirements."
Seeing more DFS updates recently with reductions of capex, especially projects in the wrong commodity at the wrong time. HAS REE project worked some capex reduction magic of their own last week. Absolutely some costs can come down through clever optimisation of the plant design etc, but in the scheme of things relentless inflation across the lot is a strong headwind to battle. Seems all the ASX is a stage, and every company a magician...
(20min delay)