With over $4.2b in debt, NCM is heavily leveraged for a miner....

With over $4.2b in debt, NCM is heavily leveraged for a miner. Forget the debt/equity ratio they provide - that's misleading.

Sure they can meet their interest payments now with such low rates, but they need a heck of a lot of AU production to make inroads.

And further hampering efforts, the debt is unhedged in USD - what were they thinking?

So falls in the AUD increase revenues, but debt in AUD goes up. Last half, debt in AUD went up more then free cash flow.

And you can only put off essential capex for so long. The low hanging fruit has been picked.