A bout of plant and equipment failures at Northern Star Resources’ WA operations in recent months has forced the heavyweight gold miner to dramatically slash its expected output for the year.
The Stuart Tonkin-led group dropped the extent of the production disruption to the ASX on Friday — the first day of trading in 2026 —revealing full-year guidance would be reduced from between 1,700-1,850koz to 1,600-1,700koz.
NST’s share price plummeted more than 8 per cent in early trade to $24.51.
It follows what the miner said were a “number of isolated negative events coinciding” at its operations in WA and in the US during the December quarter.
This included faults with its primary crusher at the Super Pit that has in turn been dragging down throughput at the plant for the past four weeks and isn’t expected to be fixed until early January.
Even after that Northern Star has said throughput is expected to be unpredictable for the next six months. It comes as the miner gets to the business end of a $1.5 billion mill expansion at the Super Pit that will lift its processing capacity to 27mtpa.
Adding to the issues at its anchor KCGM operations the miner has also had to fix a wall slip also in October that occurred in the open pit at South Kalgoorlie.
Northern Star told the market on Friday that the site had returned to normal underground mining in December.
There’s also still headaches for Northern Star at its Yandal operations further north, with the impact of a structural failure in its crushing circuit at Jundee from the start of October not expected to be fully fixed until the March quarter.
A previously anticipated 10koz hit to production from that incident has risen to 20koz.
And at Thunderbox, gold sales have been hampered impacted by low grade ore from the Orelia open pit as well as fixing carbon-in-leach tank failures.
Gold sales over at its Pogo operations in Alaska have also been dragged down due to grade issues.
Total sales were about 348koz by the end of the December quarter, taking the the miner’s output for the first half of the 2026 financial year to about 729koz.
The lower gold sales across the three production centres are likely to result in a hit to the group’s operational costs, the extent of which is set to be confirmed during the quarterly update on January 22.
The miner will brief investors on the downgrade before that on an unplanned call on January 5.
https://thewest.com.au/business/mining/northern-star-slashes-2026-output-amid-litany-of-mine-headaches–c-21183880
