That Europe faces in critical metals. So yeah, if we go down to, if you can go down to page four. Okay, yeah, so there's the location. So we've got the two major projects there. The first one I'm going to talk about is Austria. It's fully permitted. We have mining approval. We're going to start construction phase later this year. The lithium price obviously has taken a battering. We've done quite well, though. Most of the companies have fallen between 70% and 90% over the last 12 months when lithium prices were at the high of about $7,000 a ton. It's now about $1,000 a ton. But all reports, when you look at the Roskill, when you look at Benchmark, when you look at Fastmarkets, all believe by 2028 the lithium prices will increase quite substantially. The biggest driver of that obviously is China.
China takes 80% of the world's lithium from mainly Australia and Chile, countries like that, and Africa is starting to be a part of that. So the supply chain for Europe and for the U.S. and other developing countries is difficult. So the EU, through the Critical Metals Act, is really trying to help the five or six lithium projects that are available in Europe. Most of them are stuck with local problems in getting their environmental approvals through. We've been lucky. The Wolfsburg mine was opened up in 1983 by the Austrian government, and the mine is fully built. If we found that deposit today, there would be no way that it would be able to be commissioned because you wouldn't be able to put the. It's underground, so you wouldn't be able to put any of the resource in there.
So if we go to, you can actually just see the mine itself. So if you can go to just page 13, I just want to show you the mine itself. Underground, page 13. Yeah, it's an underground mine. It will produce 800,000 tons of material, which will produce 65,000 tons of concentrate. Okay, that concentrate, because of the energy prices in Europe, a lot of the costs in production. You find that in Germany, especially with BMW, Mercedes, and that. The cost of energy. So what we decided to do, we're going to produce the spodumene, which then converts into a hydroxide, and then that hydroxide then converts into a battery. Once it's in the battery, it converts into your EV. The project is underpinned by BMW, with the only group that BMW straight from mine to be able to produce.
But the spodumene, the hydroxide process is a chemical process, not highly toxic, but a little bit more toxic. So getting an approval to build one of those in Europe, in the heart of Europe, especially in Austria, would have been difficult. So what we're doing to save money and increase profits is build the hydroxide plant in Saudi Arabia. Give you some metrics: $0.30 per kWh for power in Austria. In Saudi, it's $0.05 per kWh. So we've already saved six times our energy costs by building the hydroxide plant there. We're 7 km away from the new rail line that's going from Italy right through the Alps right up to Berlin. So it's a freight train as well as passenger train. So we'll put it straight onto the train, one and a half hours to Trieste. The Saudis will pick it up.
We will own 50% of that project and the Saudis 50%. Not only do we get the savings on energy, but the tax rate is 15% cheaper, and the borrowing rates in Saudi are a lot cheaper as well. Right now, we've finished the bankable feasibility study. We're at the Project Finance stage. Because we split the plants from one in Wolfsburg and one in Saudi, we're just updating two DFSs right now, and they'll be complete by the end of March. We go for Project Finance, and then we will start building in probably late fourth quarter this year or early first quarter next year. That's a very, very good advanced project. The second project is in Greenland. It's rare earths, a massive rare earth deposit. 97% of the world's rare earths comes from China.
And at the moment, China has banned the sale of those rare earths to the U.S. and to the E.U. So if you look at what's been happening in the world, rare earths are primarily used for the Defense industry, the Rocket Space industry. Elon Musk would not be able to produce a rocket or send a rocket into space. More missiles have gone off in the last three years and then the last 60 years, mainly through the Ukraine war and the Israeli war. All those missiles have special guidance systems in them, which come from rare earth. So it's strategically very, very important. And as you can see by Mr. Trump or President Trump's actions, he wants to buy Greenland. So the reason he wants to buy Greenland is twofold. One, for the rare earths. Two, obviously, for the strategic importance of its location for the Northwest Passage.
Just in case the Panama Canal closes, there is a passageway that you can get through, and it's a lot cheaper to send goods from the U.S. right through into Europe, so there are two reasons. They've already got a military base in Greenland at the moment. This particular deposit is the biggest rare earth deposit in the world outside of China and Russia, and it is in a location that is fantastic. It's in Southern Greenland. If you look at that map earlier, the temperatures aren't. It's not full of ice. Most people think of Greenland, it's just got that massive ice glacier on the top. No, not so. The glaciers from this part of Greenland, hundreds of thousands of years ago, they've disappeared, but when the ice retreated, it gouged out these beautiful, magnificent gorges.
Two m from the edge of our deposit into the fjord, it's an 80 m drop. That's because the ice just gouged it out. We don't need to build a port. We're going to be able to just use a floating dock, if you like, and the Panamax ships, a 60,000 toner, can come straight in off the North Atlantic, turn around. We're at the end of the fjord, so there's no passing traffic, fill up, and then send out. Rare earths come in two categories. We're very lucky in our category. It's the heavies. The heavies are the most expensive. The lights, which there is a U.S. producer at the moment. And ironically, that U.S. producer, MP Materials, it's got a market cap of $5 billion.
They export that and send it to China for processing, and then it comes back into the U.S. or in the EU, so we will be able to supply Europe for at least 1,000 years with this deposit. It is massive. The State Department of the U.S. has been up there several times. We've been in discussions with the State Department, with the Department of Defense mainly. The Department of Defense has introduced us to companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, who supply the De fense industry, if you like, for NATO and for the U.S. The U.S. government, just like the EU, has a Critical Metals Act, and they are encouraging companies like ours to go out and find these rare earth materials. There are subsidies available, so we've asked for a subsidy. It is a $1.5 billion fund. We've asked for $150 million of that.
The mine itself will cost around $150 million to develop. We will be choosing three rocks. Two of the rocks are building material type rocks, and they will be exported into Europe. So just on those two materials, forgetting the rare earths, you probably are making a profit on the mine by just selling those byproducts, if you like. The rare earths then will be excavated, separated, and then sent to either the U.S. or the EU, depending on which jurisdiction helps with the subsidies to fund the mine. In Europe, in the conversations we've had, they'd like to build the plant in Iceland, the processing plant. That's a day trip from Greenland. It's just straight onto the boat, straight across the North Atlantic to Iceland. Iceland, as everyone knows, has got the geothermal power, so energy is very, very cheap. So that's one avenue.
The other avenue is obviously, if we get the funding from the United States, we'll build the processing plant in the United States. So two huge projects that are in critical metals, of which European Lithium owns 70%. If you go back to slide four, please. Yeah, if you look at that, 70%. Now, the value on the close of the market yesterday, you can see, is Australian there. And our market cap of AUD. So just our 70% interest in the listed company shows that it's close to AUD 400 million in value as of close of market yesterday. AUD 400 million. The market cap of European Lithium is only about, what is it, around AUD 75 million. So there is a huge arbitrage opportunity. That's happened because the European Lithium shares are locked up. We can't sell them at this stage. But that lockup will eventually end.
Once the lockup ends and we start to trickle down, we don't want to sell a lot of the investment. The investment's only going to go higher and higher, mainly because as we develop the mine, as we find out more of the different types of minerals that are there, we will be able to increase the value of Critical Metals. Therefore, the huge value chain is in the shares of EUR. So at some point in the next six months, they will equate. If they do equate, the share price of EUR will go up 5x-10x . No doubt about that, just on this one investment in Critical Metals, which has those two massive projects. The other huge project, if you go through and look at slide number, is the Ukraine asset. We bought that asset in 2003. It's on page number nine. Yeah.
We bought that three months before the war started. It's a fantastic deposit. It's 90 million tons of lithium going 1.36%. To give you an idea of value, Pilbara Minerals is one of the largest producers of lithium in Australia. They just bought a Brazilian listed company as well called Latin Resources, a Brazilian lithium project for 60 million tons at 1.25%. So we're 30% bigger than that deposit. That transaction changed hands at AUD 550 million. So if you put it into perspective, the asset in Ukraine, and if you look at the map, it's on the western border, not on the eastern front where the war's been taking place. So even if there is a peace deal, even if Ukraine does have to cede some ground, our deposit will be quite free and easy to work.
It's near a nuclear power station, so that's very good news for us for low energy costs. But just doing the numbers, 90 million tons at 1.36% compared to 60 million tons at 1.25%. So using those numbers, it should be worth between AUD 700 million and AUD 800 million. Now, that transaction only happened last month. So even with the lithium price drop, the bigger companies, Rio Tinto, one of the biggest miners in the world, just bought another lithium project for $5 billion or $6 billion. So there is going to be a huge uptick in the lithium price, as I mentioned earlier, the three houses that look at the long-term prices of all metals all believe that the lithium price will rise. So our Ukraine asset is extremely important to us.
Again, President Trump looks like there will be a breakthrough at some point in the next few months. We will go straight in and start developing that mine again. When we first bought this asset, to give you an idea of the value, everyone in the world knows about this asset in the lithium space. Our share price went from AUD 0.04 to AUD 0.20 just on the acquisition. Three months later, when the war started and we had to pull out, the share price collapsed. So it is a very, very important asset for European Lithium. It's owned 100% by European Lithium. The other asset, if you go to page number, let's see, page seven, is the Leinster Lithium Project. The Leinster Lithium Project is very, very prospective. It's the highest graded lithium that's been found so far in Europe. It's going about 4% lithium.
We bought this asset only a few months ago. We've got a team of people already working there. The interesting thing is the largest lithium player in the world is a company called Ganfeng. They've been in Ireland for about five years. They tried to buy this deposit, but we beat them to it. They surround us. All of their tenements surround our tenement. It's a fantastic opportunity for us to maybe do a deal with Ganfeng, go out and drill it ourselves. No resources have yet been calculated. It's just mainly, this is the most grassroots of all of the projects, but it's very, very highly prospective. The grades here are just phenomenal. I've just told you a few of the numbers. The Wolfsburg asset, for example, is 1% lithium, and that's going to get the go-ahead this year. Our one in Ukraine's 1.36%.
Getting grades about 4%, this is an extremely good asset, but this is more of a medium-term asset. We've got to go in there and start drilling. Lastly, on our investment side, again, if you go to page four, we have 10% interest in a company called Cyclone. Cyclone Metals has a massive 15.3 billion ton iron ore project in Canada. Only two weeks ago, we finalized a deal with Vale. Vale is the Brazilian conglomerate that is the biggest transporter of seaborne iron ore in the world. They control 60% of the world's pellet market, which is basically green steel. The difference between normal steel and green steel is it's a different technique in how it forms the steel. So in normality, Australia just gets iron ore, ships it to China. They use coal, turn it into steel with coal to heat it up.
With pellets, it's a different technique. They use gas, natural gas. So they produce the pellet, put the pellets into a gas furnace. Because it's a magnetite ore, there's a lot more oxygen in it, and you need a lot less energy. So that's why they call it green steel. Green steel is very, very important. For example, all steel imports into the EU have a $60 a ton carbon tax. This will attract only a $9 a ton carbon tax because in Canada, where we are, we're using hydropower to power up our plant. And again, we're using natural gas to turn the pellets into steel, so in short, we believe we're severely undervalued.
Just on our investment in Critical Metal , which holds the rarest deposit in Greenland and it holds the Wolfsburg asset in Austria, we've got the Ukrainian asset, which we obviously can't work on at the moment. So that's huge upside when the war finishes. Your guess is as good as mine when that happens, but it looks like things are moving quickly. Then you've got the Irish asset, again, 100% owned by European Lithium, which has got one of the highest grades that have been found in Europe on lithium as well. Lastly, it's the 10% interest in Cyclone Metals, which has got the big iron ore deposit in Canada. I'm sorry about the, it's 4:00 A.M. here in New York, and my laptop blew up, so I didn't do the slide.
So thank you very much over there for helping me with the slide presentation.
Hey, thank you very much for the great presentation, Tony. It's really appreciated. It's, yes, very early in New York, so thank you for still joining in. I think it's a very, very important time right now for European Lithium. A lot of developments are going to be coming soon. For everyone that is watching right now, you do have the chance to submit your question in the Q&A box. I will be reading all questions to Tony. So let's start with the first one. Mr. Michael is saying that, can you comment on the transport of the ore to Saudi Arabia that will lead to a higher CO2 footprint on the lithium produced? And maybe go back on explaining again the reason you're going to Saudi Arabia.
That might be counterintuitive for Europeans that are right now watching the presentation. But obviously, there's a lot to be done with banking, with financing the project and making sure on long-term energy costs, I guess. So if you can talk a bit about that.
Yeah, very good questions. I'll touch on the second one first and go on the transport second. Yeah, we had talks with the Austrian government and the EU. Because the product is coming back into Europe through our offtake agreement with BMW, they saw no problem. The issue that we had is it probably would have taken maybe up to three years to get permission to build the hydroxide plant in Europe. So that was one negative.
The other, as I mentioned earlier, is the huge savings we're going to make on the energy cost in Saudi, the tax rate in Saudi, and the interest rate in Saudi. So those three alone, we think will increase the NPV of the project by at least $600 or $700 million. So that's only going to help shareholders. But the key for Europe is it's a European supply chain. We're getting the raw ore, we're turning it into a spodumene. So we're already creating wealth in Austria for Europe. And then the product, for example, if we were going to sell that product to China or somewhere else, the European Union and the Austrian government wasn't going to allow us to do it. But because the product is coming back to BMW, they were very, very fine with that.
Because of the constraints of our mine, we can't expand. So the maximum we're going to get in hydroxide is about 10,000 tons per annum. That leads into the second question. The first question, sorry, on the transport. So that train line is already built. I think it's opening later this year. It goes the longest tunnel in Europe, 56 km through the Alps. It's 7 km . There's a station near our mine, 7 km away. We'll put it into a container. It's not very big, guys. When you look at it, it's not like a bulk material. We're only going to be producing 65,000 tons per annum. So really, we're only transporting 5,000 tons or 6,000 tons per month. You put that into perspective, that's only about two or three containers. The train is going up and down, as we know.
So you're not going to increase any footprint. The only footprint that you will increase is a two-day trip from Saudi when they pick up the ore in their boat from Trieste down through the Suez Canal to Jeddah. So that'd be the only extra increase. But the savings that we're making, the carbon footprint, sorry, that we're making, we're making probably our hydroxide will probably produce 300,000 EVs. So the savings on the EVs more than compensates for the extra ship ride between Trieste and Jeddah.
Okay. And one more question. With the agreement with Critical Minerals Corp, when they do raise money, do you have to also raise money? How do you protect your equity position in the other two plays you have or three?
Yeah, that's a very good question. We obviously have the right to participate.
Our board, European Lithium Board, has three members on the Critical Metals Board. So we're very, very aware that we do not want to lose our position of strength at the moment. Over time, though, the U.S. don't really like companies that are controlled by foreign entities, and they see European Lithium as a foreign entity. So we want to get our position down to about 25% over the next two or three years. And we don't want to do that by dilution. We want to do that by selling blocks of our shares to long-term investors in the U.S. and Europe. So at some point, once we come out of lockup, we will not sell any on the market, so it won't depress the price. So for example, Critical Metals is on the Russell 2000. We've got BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard already on our register.
But because we're part of the index, as more volume goes through, they have to buy more shares on market. So we may be able to go to a BlackRock or to a Fidelity and say, "Look, we've got a block of 2 million shares here. Do you want to take it off market?" You're not then driving the share price up and paying a higher price. And we think we'll do that in an orderly fashion over the next two or three years to get down to about 25%. And that will put a lot of cash, though.
Yeah, that was going to be the point. Exactly.
Help fund the Ukraine and the Irish assets.
Okay, exactly. So both on the block-selling blocks and then financing European Lithium.
So basically, at the end, Critical Minerals Corp. will act like its own entity, and European Lithium will continue existing in the long-term?
Yeah. So once we get under about 40%, we will lose a board member, and we'll put on another board member. So it'll become more independent. At the moment, there's four, say, five members on the Critical Minerals Board, of which we are three. So we control it at the moment. But over time, as we reduce our shareholding, and we will do that naturally anyway, because we don't want to do an equity raising anymore in EUR itself. So we won't dilute our shareholders anymore. What we will do is sell our holdings in European Lithium in an orderly fashion. And I've made a commitment to all the other shareholders in Critical that we won't be doing it on market.
We'll do it in block trades.
Well, perfect, Tony. So it comes to an end. So thank you very much for the great presentation. I will close the presentation with a personal note. I do live in Vienna, Austria. I went to see your project two times in Wolfsburg. I think it's great that you guys were able to fast track. You're going to surely be one of the projects that all eyes are going to be on to restart mining in Europe. So we all wish you the best of luck. Hope you're going to succeed, and we'll be there to follow your story. And I hope that attendees will go have a look and see the opportunities that lie in Euro pean Lithium and critical minerals.
Fantastic. Just one thing, that little white dot in the background, that's our mine site in Greenland. So that's a shot from the side of the mountain. But that little white dot is our light for our drill rig. So it's a fantastic area in Greenland, and you can see the beauty.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Tony.
Thank you. Bye.
Thank you so much, Tony. Thank you, Julian. Up next is Marcus Wagner of the International School Augsburg. And with him is, ooh, Marcus, hello.
Dr. Jessamine Koenig, my pedagogical leader, because we are always a team of two.
Excellent. Yes, teamwork always is good. So you're welcome to start sharing your pre sentation, and then you're good to go.
I'm happy to share our presentation, and I'm also happy to share ISA to present ISA today together with Jessamine. And we separated the presentation into two parts. As we are two people, we have a pedagogical startup. Jess will talk more about how ISA has developed until today. And I will then start talking about the financial side of things. So let's start off with our ISA of today.
All right, welcome. We've been really excited about just the growth that we've had in the last few years. And as a school, we primarily function to support students who are looking for a program that doesn't exactly mirror the typical German system, but it meets students' needs for those who are coming from an international background or who are potentially looking to move internationally at some point in the future.
We are an accredited school, and we are accredited by a variety of different organizations, but our curriculum follows the International Baccalaureate program, especially for our younger students at the Primary Years Programme, and then also for our diploma students at the diploma in grades 11 and 12. The benefit of this is that it's recognized globally, that all around the world, students and schools and even universities recognize the kind of learning that our students are doing. It's very much focused on heavy understanding of content, but even heavier understanding of application. How do they take what they're learning and actually use it to do something? We're focusing on preparing for the future. We don't neglect the student at the heart of it all.
And so we really focus a lot. It says here, our IB `Learner Profile, and we look at how students can grow and can learn and can develop their understanding, not only of content, but of themselves as well. So you can see in these pictures, they're not lying. They are real smiles of real students in the classroom. And I think that's the benefit really of who we are and what we do here at ISA. Our vision statement as part of the program is all about we see, we care, we act. And we really do try to put this into place. So students focus a lot on Sharing the P lanet, especially within our lower school. We have a whole unit in each grade that's called Sharing the Planet. But we also look at how do we support each other?
How do we ensure that as a community, because we really are a community school, and how do we take care of ourselves with well-being? And these are elements that are built into our curriculums. And I think as we look at this program, we started the school with 63 students, as it shows here on this slide. And now we're at over 380, but we've really worked to keep that community aspect alive. We have students that have gone to our school from when they were three years old, and they've graduated when they were 18. And as they leave us, they feel that they have been supported. They have been helped along the way. They are not going alone into the world. They know that they have a solid background of success that guides them along that way.
Those students who come back to us as alumni really talk about being well-prepared for their universities. They talk about the fact that they feel connected and grounded at ISA. I think that's one of the big parts of who we are as a school. Our curriculum supports students for the Primary Years Programme on our ELC, which is ages three to five, and then our primary years program all the way up to grade five. Our middle school program supports students from grades six to eight. It's a little bit different from the German system of primary goes up to grade four, and then you've got your Gymnasium or your Mittelschule go from grade five on. We really look at our primary program going until grade five to ensure that the students are well developed. We have our middle school.
We do the IGCSE, where students are able to attain a Mittelre Reife equivalency, and then after that, they move into their IB Diploma Programme, and they're preparing for an equivalency and a recognition of the Abitur, so all of these are very important for our students because parents and students want their child to be able to leave our program and be successful. So I can let Marcus talk a little bit more about the history of the program here.
Well, as you can see, we went to the stock exchange in 2021 because we think education is core for the future of not only Germany, but in general, and the state on its own won't make it himself, and so we started to invest in our education by asking you to invest in us, and so far, we gained a lot of shareholders, as you can see.
So I'm switching over to the school today. Today, we are around about 385 students coming from 40 nationalities. The IB Diplomas, or as the Germans would say, the Abiturs, are always excellent. We're around about 90 people. And as I said, more than 600 students. And the very interesting thing, of course, is the fact that we started to hand out shares to our alumni. So we are also making our own alumni shareholders of our school. [audio distortion]. Yeah, absolutely. They are definitely very proud of it. And some of them already increased their present as a share to a major position in their stock account. And so we also think that it's important that the economy and companies are involved and invested.
So as you can see, more than 30, in the meantime, more than 30 companies and institutions are invested in ISA and hold around about 68% of our shares as well. On top of that, we'll talk about that a little bit later, the role of ISA in the greater Augsburg area and for internationals and local businesses. But first of all, maybe Jessamine continues with our achievements.
Sure. We are visited and accredited by a variety of organizations, one of which is the Council of International Schools, and then also the IB Diploma or the IB World Organization. And as part of this, they visit us. We do a self-evaluation, and then we excuse me. Then we have a chance to share with them, and they share then what our strengths are and some areas that we maybe have to work on.
But we've actually had very positive accreditation visits, and the projects and the prog that we have been able to work on have been really valuable. We've also been recognized as a top innovator here in Germany. One of the first schools, really, to be recognized is that, in part because I think of the excitement about who we are. We're a company, but we're also a school, and we're working to make this not just profitable, but beneficial for students that are going out into the world. We also, as a school, are the only Google Reference School in Germany. So we use all of the Google Workspace. All of our platforms are done through this, and we have a lot of emphasis on tech within the school. We've been really excited about, as we'd say in our vision statement, we look after the planet.
We've been aiming to be carbon neutral, and everything that we do in terms of decisions to support rebuilding and looking at our new campus are emphasizing how can we decrease our carbon footprint. We've also been working as an eco school to involve students and parents in that process. Students learn about, and they take part in a variety of service-oriented projects that really aim to support the environment.
Coming back to the companies we are supporting and who's benefiting from ISA today. As you can see, a lot of companies are making use of our services today for international families, international mobile families who have to move for their companies from place A to place B, change countries, and the academic continuity for their children. This is the core business of our school.
And as you can see, a lot of local and big companies like Airbus are making use of that. In general, our shareholders really promote an innovative educational concept, but maybe that's also something more you can talk ab out, Jess.
Sure. We don't look to just drill and kill students. We want them to be able to try new opportunities, to try new skills. And that's one of the things that we did this year, really. We looked at the fact that if we were able to move into a Ganztagsschule concept, it meant that we could expand the excitement and expand the opportunities available to students. So we've been really excited about the possibilities of creative opportunities for learning, much more physical and active opportunities for learning, and looking for ways that students can also give back.
So we aim to teach not just the minds, but the whole body and the character of the student as well. And so we spend some time with intercultural development, helping them understand what it means to be part of a global community. We also help them to think about what is the future and what does it hold for students and how might they find their place in it. So we do some support with career development. And we also recognize the fact that our students are going to strong universities all around the world. So whether it's here in Germany, whether it's in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, even the Netherlands, we have students that are going all around the world. And we keep the emphasis on how can they do something that has a global reach, even if what they're doing is focusing here on the local.
But we're helping them to see that both of those are important.
That leads us to the next point of our presentation. What's the potential of ISA for the future? And that leads me back to where are we situated? And if you look at that, Augsburg is situated rather interestingly in the South of Germany, close to Munich, close to Stuttgart, and close to Austria, which we heard of just a few minutes ago. And it's one of the top 10 technology centers in Germany in general.
This is rather important, I think, if we're talking about actual situations, then you can see that Augsburg, with this huge tradition of leading business as a leading business location for Defense and Arms, we can see that this is already taking a completely new dimension at the moment because of the fact that companies like Airbus, like Premium AEROTEC, like the Rocket Factory are situated in the greater Augsburg area, are asking already for more and more students. This is also just a little bit of an overview where you can locate ISA. You can see that Augsburg and the Bavarian state are investing more than EUR 1 billion in the new medical faculty as well in the greater Augsburg area.
The Innovation Park is a rather important project, which, of course, is connected with the Defense and Arms industry and the innovative companies in the greater Augsburg area.
And I would also add just a little bit here, Marcus, in the sense that many families who are moving to the Munich area for business find that they have better opportunities for their house and their home and their life.
Very good point.
They're living closer to Augsburg. So we are having more and more families who say they want a different kind of space and they want a different kind of environment. And so therefore, Augsburg is very popular with many families in that situation.
Being only 30 minutes away from Munich, it is a rather very good asset. And having a mid-sized company sometimes is nicer for families than living in a huge city.
That leads to the point that our potential for growth is there in many areas. As you can see, the development of enrollment is already ahead of the potential analysis we did two years ago. And so we are ahead of this. The potential analysis says there's an enrollment in the long-term of up to 600, as you can see it on the chart, but we're planning for 550 students in the future. There are, Jess mentioned it, additional subsidies for the new status as a Gebundene Ganztagsschule, which is rather ridiculous, of course, on the one hand, because ISA always was a Ganztagsschule, but there are specific political and legal requirements in Germany which you have to fulfill to gain this status and gain more subsidies, which we achieved last year. And of course, there are also options of additional facilities. Boarding is a rather interesting thing.
A lot of international schools in Germany started their boarding businesses as well. And last but not least, of course, there's also the idea of, in the long run, starting new destinations. There are cities like Würzburg in Bavaria or other cities which might have the potential for an international school in the long run, which is a potential for us to invest in as well. So how do we want to realize our vision, especially sustainable and in a profitable way? The first step for us, maybe you want to talk a littl e bit about the campus and our new campus.
So we've been working on this, and I have to give kudos to Marcus and actually a strong team of people that have been working on this for quite some time.
But the idea is that we can, as we talked about before, make it a green campus, make it something that is carbon neutral as much as possible. So we're looking at a space that's already been a school previously. Actually, Marcus, it was your gymnasium back in the day. And he's looking at then how can we keep some of the main structure in place, but then how can we renovate the inside really to meet the needs of what we're doing? And one of the things that, as a school, we focus a lot on collaboration. And that collaboration is two teachers working together to support the needs of the students. Sometimes it's three or four as needed. It's students working in small groups.
It's students being able to have an opportunity to find the space that they need to be able to accomplish the work that they're doing, and that's part of what we've built into this campus. There is dedicated learning space, but then there's also opportunities for community, our common spaces, and it's a chance for lots of collaboration and thinking and creative opportunities to move forward, so we're excited about this green campus and the opportunities for play, for learning, and community events that are going to be coming up forward.
Maybe you're now waiting for the financials, and so I'm trying to start off with the financials for the campus.
As you can see, we're looking at the campus with around about 18,000 sq m in the inner city of Gersthofen, with predicted costs of EUR 42 million, which are subsidized by the state, which go directly as an asset to our shareholders because it's a non-refundable subsidy, which we don't have to pay back between around about EUR 22 million. We build up our own capital. We'll talk about that in a second. And we'll need loans and donations in a category of EUR 10 million-EUR 11 million. But how is the sustainable approach for this financing? So from the very beginning, ISA was developing rather quickly this base capital. Of course, that we went to the stock exchange, added another EUR 1.8 million to our base capital, which really helped to speed up the project as well.
As you can see, up until today, we talk about EUR 10.3 million in our balance sheet, which is a rather interesting base capital and equity on the balance sheet side. Our current assets, I think that's a rather important point as well to consider. We own the actual plot, which means there are two buildings. They are all evaluated. And if you sum it up based on the base capital of EUR 4.6 million, we own real estate assets in the size of EUR 7.2 million, which is a real big security for our own project in the future. On top of that, as you can see, since the very beginning, ISA was a profitable running company and school.
From the very beginning, there were only positive results, with the exception of one or two years where the subsidy regulation changed, and that had the impact that subsidies had been postponed to the next year, which caused some upheaval during this time, but since then, we had always been rather positive, had a continuous growth of revenue and up to EUR 7.3 million and always an EBITDA of 8%. We can confirm this already, although the general meeting will be in April. We can see that 2023 and 2024, we can't say too much yet, of course, but both revenue and operating result for the last year were rather positive as well. Yeah, so now I'm using the last five or 10 minutes why ISA is a real ESG impact investment. I'll go through it rather quickly and then focus on the share as well.
On the one hand, ISA is a real ESG impact investment because we focus on, and that's also confirmed by the, as you can see, by the GBC Annual Research study in 2024 that we contribute to all the 17 UNESCO sustainability goals, as well as we are fulfilling ESG standards in environmental issues. The new school campus will be, as we already heard, carbon neutral, will be DGNB certified as well. We are a member of the Economy for the Common Good and an eco school. We are fulfilling social and governance standards. On the other hand, there is, on the one hand, as I said, we are balancing for the economy for the common good. We are checked and audited by Sonntag & Partner. Also on the pedagogical side, maybe you want to say again a few words about the governance.
We do an awful lot to help support our students getting out into the community, to help support different projects, and to find ways to give back because we recognize that in a private school environment, sometimes we are privileged, and so we want to find a way to ensure that they understand all of that, but we are, as we mentioned before, we are accredited by a variety of different organizations, and they have found us to be strong, and they have continued our association and said, "Way to go."
So probably you might wonder how to profit from an ISA investment as a not-for-profit company, but there are several ways to benefit from ISA. On the one hand, continuously, we're emitting a convertible bond with a 3% interest rate at the moment until 2029.
In the long-term, we think that the investment in education is not only an ESG and impact investment, it's also a profitable investment. If you look at those not-for-profit companies already based on the stock exchange for a very long time, like the Berlin Zoo, where the huge development of its company value and therefore share price. There's a good reason why this is a real potential for the share price. If you look at some numbers for the revenue and the profits a company makes, you can see that a public for-profit company only a little amount remains after taxes and dividends, whereas a not-for-profit company has the full amount of profit, and that's in our case 8% EBITDA to invest back into the company itself.
This at the end also, of course, means together with the subsidies that there is a potential for our shareholders to benefit from a long-term growth in our company value because there's a tax relief. T here are no dividends, yes, but there's a tax relief. There's additional sources of revenue, subsidies. We mentioned it. There are tangible assets like our buildings. So our investments typically go right into real tangible assets. So there's a high level of security in investment in education as well. And if you look at it in a more general way, you can see that where ISA is situated. I think if you look at ESG impact and profit, so ISA is, of course, not as profitable maybe as a social media company. But on the other hand, if you look at the ESG impact, ISA is very well positioned in this chart.
And even if you look at the share price, there is a huge potential just now expecting the subsidies in the next few months for the new campus project. So there is a huge potential. And I think we are really, we heard it from the last presenter, we are of the same opinion. Looking at our assets and our company value, I think the share is definitely undervalued, and there's a potential of significant share price growth. Last but not least, also the politics is definitely supporting our school and is convinced that our school is a very important asset for the greater Augsburg area and for our investors. So thank you for listening. And of course, we are happy to answer questions if there are.
Yes, thank you so much. We already have two questions. So first of all, what are the next steps regarding the new location?
And is everything going according to plan?
Absolutely. We are totally in time. So what I mentioned in the presentation, 2027, 2028, it's still the goal, and we are still in time of that. The next steps will be tearing down parts of the old building, of course, to start the renovation process. We're expecting the subsidies round about March, April, May, the subsidy confirmation, which I mentioned. And so then the real hard work, if you want to say so, goes ahead. And we're turning the old building into a new one.
Okay. And can you tell us a bit more about the current financing situation of the new campus? Because it's a huge amount to raise.
Absolutely. Yeah, that's the big challenge, of course. There's no doubt about it. So as you saw, we're expecting between EUR 22 million and EUR 24 million of subsidies.
We are planning with a KfW loan of EUR 10 million, which is, by the way, has a 30% because the building we are renovating is a worst performance building. We gain another 30% of discount, so to say. We only need to pay back EUR 7 million out of EUR 10 million of the loan, which is rather interesting as well. It's like a subsidy, if you want to say so. So if you count it together, we are between 25 million and 28 million of subsidies. On top of that, as I said, as I described it, we have our building, our campus, which is in the process of selling with valuing around about EUR 7 million. The loan, which is committed and is actually at the moment committed, so we have a signed amount of EUR 1.5 million. There's EUR 1.5 million left.
So this is how we think we are fine to finance the whole building.
Maybe one last question. Is there still a big demand from international families? Because currently, Germany is in a bit of a recession. So maybe you can talk about the current demand for the school.
Yes, I can actually. I just came to this meeting directly from giving a tour. It's been really interesting to look at where and why families are coming to ISA. As we mentioned, some of them are moving to Munich and planning to work in Munich, but Augsburg is a nearby area that is beneficial for them to live. We also have quite a few families that are not necessarily coming for large companies, but are coming for, maybe they are doctors, maybe they are coming for small companies because they have specialized knowledge or specialized skills.
That brings them and their whole family to the area. So it's been very interesting seeing the number of international families really that have been coming in, especially in the last two years. We're still continuing to receive applications for them as well.
We also see impacts from the medical faculty as well. As I mentioned it and described it, we also already see a growing demand from Airbus, Premium AEROTEC, and the local Defense and Arms companies. If we're talking about 3% or 3.5% of defense investments in the near future, Augsburg will benefit, as I said, hugely from it. As these are all international companies, international school will be core for a lot of these families to come to Augsburg.
Perfect. Thank you so much. The time is already up. Great presentation.
Thank you so much. Have a good time. Bye.
Bye. Up next is Advanced Blockchain AG with Mike Lasker, the CFO, and Hatem Elsayed, the COO. I think you're both logged into the same account, so you're both called Mike Lasker here in Zoom, but that shouldn't be a problem. Yes, if you could start sharing the screen and the presentation, then the stage is yours.
Sure, happy to do that. Yep. Now, is it visible?
This looks perfect. The stage is yours.
All right, let's get started. Yeah. I mean, first of all, thanks everyone for attending our virtual presentation today. Hope next time we will be making it in person. My name is Hatem Elsayed. I'm the CEO of Advanced Blockchain AG. And together with my colleague, Mike Lasker, who is the CFO of the group, we will present you the recent industry update.
Where does our company stand and what's coming up for the company this year and in the short and midterm? So yeah, our company name is Advanced Blockchain. So as the name says, our business is in the field of blockchain technology. And usually when you hear the word blockchain, cryptocurrency, or Bitcoin, especially if you are not familiar with this sector, you would hear lots of buzzwords or complex terms, which I personally found difficult to relate to in my early days in this industry. So long story short, we are here to rather simplify things and not make it more complex than it already is. So yeah, where do we stand as an industry in terms of numbers? As of today, we stand at around $3.1 trillion market cap with Bitcoin dominance around 60%, meaning that Bitcoin market capitalization alone is contributing to around $1.9 trillion.
The blockchain technology acceptance is growing exactly like the internet in the 1990s. Like last year, Q4 last year or Q4 in 2024 marked an interesting phase of the market. As for the first time ever, we crossed the $3 trillion mark, $3 trillion mark. This was primarily due to the U.S. presidential elections, which took place in November 2024, and the shift in general in the regulatory environment reaching an all-time high later on around the end of the year of $3.9 trillion. This was the first time that we reached such a market cap in the market. In parallel, Bitcoin ETFs witnessed also a net inflow all-time high just one day after Trump's inauguration.
So like on the 21st of January, 2025, in just one single day, we had or we witnessed over $1 billion from the capital market as an inflow, and that basically floated into Bitcoin, leading to a net flow lasting for around four days afterwards, which underscores an increased interest from institutional investors, but also a remarkable onboarding event of retail investors simultaneously. As we can see from the numbers, there has been a quite increased interest in the industry. On the regulatory side, several important events took place, which helped in establishing the momentum for what will come in the next years. For example, like President Trump signed the Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology executive order on January 23rd, 2025. This directive basically underscores the new administration's commitment to fostering innovation in digital asset sectors while also safeguarding economic liberty.
The order also ensures that individuals and private entities can lawfully access and utilize open public blockchain networks, engage in software development, mining, and maintaining self-custody of digital assets without undue interference in the U.S. Complementing the executive branch directives, the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has undertaken significant measures to align with those pro-innovative stance. Last month, the SEC announced the creation of a dedicated crypto task force led by Commissioner Hester Peirce. This task force aims to develop a clear and comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets in the U.S. and moving away from an enforcement-centric approach to the one that provides clarity and fosters innovation. Last but not least, excuse me, the SEC has also recently dismissed high-profile lawsuits against major cryptocurrency platforms and exchanges.
It also agreed in principle to dismiss its lawsuits against Coinbase, which is one of the largest exchanges in the world right now. And the SEC also concluded its investigation into Robinhood's crypto trading division without pursuing any enforcement action, signaling basically a more lenient regulatory approach under the current administration. So all those events mark a vital stage in terms of regulations and further adoption for the years to come. And the U.S. has not been the only country working on establishing more crypto-friendly regulations and seeing more value in establishing Bitcoin as a reserve. Countries, for example, like the U.K., El Salvador, belong to the top countries that use Bitcoin as a reserve at the moment. And then back to the U.S. right now, we can see on the right-hand side the positive developments towards basically the regulations.
You will have, or you can see there that more than 30 states filed official bills proposing to allocate a portion of their reserve into Bitcoin. While acceptance and passing of such bills to become a policy may take a lot of time, it just underscores the increased interest and traction of Bitcoin as an asset, but also underscores the relevance of other coins in the market, like the so-called altcoins, which, for example, Ethereum, Solana, and other assets belong to. Bitcoin, as of today, is considered as the seventh largest asset in the world, outpacing recently Facebook and Silver, among others, and well-known institutions such as BlackRock, Grayscale, Fidelity. They launched their own Bitcoin ETFs earlier in 2024, and this contributed to also significant inflows. To mention also, BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF surpassed its gold ETF in terms of market cap, which was launched in 2005.
To date, the market cap of all Bitcoin ETFs reached more than $110 billion. Beyond Bitcoin ETFs, we expect that there are more ETFs to come for the altcoins, for example, like Solana, Polkadot, among others. Now that we tapped into the market development and opportunities that are ahead, I would like to shed some light on Advanced Blockchain's role in the industry. Our company was established in 2017, and since then, our focus has been on incubations and investments. We have been primarily involved in early-stage projects, either by incubating our own projects, such as Panoptic, peaq, and you can see from the right-hand side here, those are companies that were incubated by Advanced Blockchain, or basically getting early access in leading protocols, such as Polkadot, which I will elaborate on about it in terms of numbers and how profitable such an investment was.
Beyond being involved in those projects, basically we have held historically Bitcoin and other major blue-chip tokens, and blue-chip tokens are any other tokens, or like the blockchain, the blue-chip tokens are the top crypto tokens in the market, basically. As part of our new strategy, we are revisiting this like revisiting to establish also our own reserve of those altcoins on also Bitcoin, which Mike will shed some light on later on in his part of the presentation. Yeah, notable industry VCs that we invested with include like Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, Binance Labs, and all those VCs have a multi-billion-dollar portfolio. Our portfolio as of today is quite diverse. We started primarily to invest on infrastructure or the so-called like DePIN. This stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks.
Basically later on, we started to also invest in decentralized finance, privacy, and interoperability, among others. One of our key incubation projects is peaq, which is like a protocol in the field of IoT and decentralized infrastructure. I usually call peaq the backbone of the machine economy through its role in providing the essential infrastructure for applications like Silencio. This is just one example of a project built on peaq, and peaq provides a relevant infrastructure for. So Silencio is an app recording noise pollution data, and what Silencio does is that it offers its community and applications that they can use to share noise pollution data.
They act as data providers, and Silencio aggregates this data and then stores it in the data warehouse, sells it then later on to data buyers, which includes or which are like data aggregators and hotel booking services, and they basically sell it to those large enterprises. peaq comes into place here to provide the relevant infrastructure to enable Silencio to operate in a decentralized manner. This is just one example of a use case. As you can see from the ecosystem, peaq ecosystem map, we have as of today more than 40 projects, more than 40 DePINs built on peaq, and large enterprises such as Deutsche Telekom, Lufthansa, Bosch, they are already collaborating with peaq and running their own nodes, which enables further adoption to the technology that peaq is building. Advanced Blockchain holds 2.1% of peaq tokens.
We have 88 million peaq tokens, which are worth $14 million as of today. And in Q4 2024 alone, the value of those tokens was actually $50 million, but since it's a highly volatile market, the value can significantly change in such a short time frame. So we are the largest equity, we're one of the largest equity and token holders in the project. And peaq launched in Q4 last year, and they reached more than $1 billion in fully diluted valuation directly after the launch, and the value of the devices that are actually operating is around the same number. So yeah, peaq is not the only incubation project. We have also other examples such as Quasar, and it's a DeFi protocol. It's involved in the DeFi protocol.
We have exited the project in 2022, and we made around $4.5 million in profit by selling the IP tokens and also from the services that we provided for the incubations. Over the years, we have built a solid track record with deal sourcing and investing in early-stage projects. As I mentioned earlier, Polkadot was the first investment of the company where we invested $50,000 and leading then later on to realizing a profit of $5 million. This was basically from the token sale and also staking activities. Along the same line, we have now peaq tokens, which we are actually actively staking, and we are generating every month around 220,000 peaq tokens, and their value is in the range of $30,000-$55,000 every month.
There are other projects displayed that are also great examples where we had an average multiple of 17x, and we have exited those positions over the past two years. To conclude, we'd like to conclude before we dive into the strategy. I personally consider Advanced Blockchain as the bridge to Web3 for institutional investors who are not familiar with this new sector. I would say relatively new sector because I still believe we are quite early. This is because of several reasons. We have been early in investing and identifying high-growth verticals in sectors like DeFi, DePIN.
We have built a strong track record by building also multi-billion dollar companies such as peaq, and we have a rich network of fellow investors that we co-invest with, and last but not least, a diversified portfolio of more than 30 companies right now. I've touched base on what has been happening in the industry, what we have been doing in the past years, and now I would hand over to my colleague Mike to give an update on the new group strategy and the exciting opportunities that lie ahead.
All righty. So thanks, Matthias, for organizing this event, and thanks, Hatem, for this review and the outlook that you just, or basically the review on our company that you just presented. It's now my intention to outline to you the future strategic steps of Advanced Blockchain.
As you possibly might know, Hatem and I have just taken over our board positions in August and November 2024, respectively. When we first thought about developing the new corporate strategy, we were reflecting on the company's recent history, meaning, as Hatem just outlined, its long-standing expertise as being a profitable investor in the Web3 blockchain sector and what we can learn from that. Secondly, we thought about the market trends and how we can best benefit from it. And thirdly, we questioned ourselves what we have to do to improve the perception of Advanced Blockchain AG. All in all, this can be easily summarized under our strategic objectives, meaning rebuild credibility with our top priority these days. So meaning rebuild credibility both into the AVAC brand as well as into the company's governance and its people.
Secondly, we aim to become the go-to place partner for investors which want exposure to international superior technological protocols in the Web3 and blockchain space. Thirdly, we want to close the gap between the company's net asset value and the company's capital market valuation because simply, and I will come to that a bit later, it's simply not understandable why we are valued with currently just, let's say, something like EUR 15 million of market cap while our underlying portfolio has a value which is significantly higher than that. Maybe if we move to the next page, Hatem, all this one can be summarized under our mission statement, meaning growth, diversification, transparency, and compliance.
Or in other words, we'd like Advanced Blockchain to be the gateway to blockchain and Web3 technology investments, but in a transparent and in a compliant way. And I'm sure, and I'm very certain, this will happen based on the company's long-lasting experience in this market, actually since 2017 and its broad international network. So next page, Hatem, maybe page 18, right? So our new business model will be based on four strategic pillars. First one, and Hatem also elaborated on that a bit earlier, early-stage investments in fast-growing verticals such as decentralized finance, DeFi, real-world assets, and currently, most importantly, DePIN, meaning decentralized physical infrastructure networks, as outlined by Hatem earlier on when he referred to peaq. These are all areas where we know best, where we have a broad international target and investor network, and where we understand the technological protocols behind that.
We tend to monetize on our investments within a three to five-year time horizon. Secondly, active treasury management. You might ask yourself, why should treasury be part of a company's strategy? The answer is because it wasn't simply in the past. We aim to monetize our holdings much faster, much more professionally, and with higher returns. We intend to increase the liquidity ratio of our portfolio significantly with a clear objective to ensure stable returns and to maintain sufficient liquidity reserves also in a bearish market. I mean, if you have seen where the Bitcoin is today, it's quite important that you can rely on a partner who is managing its liquidity and its treasury very actively. Thirdly, as we have successfully demonstrated with the tremendous success of peaq, we are really, and I mean really good in incubation and venture building.
While the company had downsized these activities in the recent past, we aim to carefully nurture this, meaning supporting, building, and creating synergies within our network. Finally, strategic consultancy. We will be offering expert service in portfolio management via our Swiss platform, ABX Analytics, which will be revived in 2025, and other financial solutions. We understand the crypto and blockchain market dynamics. We have long-lasting experience and a broad international network. Summarizing all this, we aim to create recurring revenues, earlier and higher monetization, and we aim to intensify the connections, relationships between our investment. All these strategic features complement each other. For us, this is a very important factor. Next one. Leaner organizational structure. We have been criticized for our somehow complex and intransparent corporate structure, and rightly so. This will be addressed or actually is already going to be addressed.
Going forward, we will reduce the complexity of the group and thereby aiming to increase transparency for investors, reducing general G&A or general administration expenses and enabling the group to better address our strategic objectives such as early-stage investments, incubation, consultancy, and financial services. We are progressing with our work on this and aim to halve the number of entities throughout this year. I mean, just to be precise, we have about 10 entities, and we are currently in the process of analyzing and to some extent already starting to liquidate some of the dormant or non-necessary entities within the group. What's even more important, we are globally active, not only with our investments, but also with our operations, i.e., we are based in Cyprus, in Dubai, in Switzerland, and of course in Germany. So truly globally, truly focused. Next page, please, Hatem. So liquidity outlook.
When analyzing the value of our portfolio, we figured out that the ratio of liquid to illiquid assets is rather distorted. However, illiquidity does not mean that those assets cannot be monetized. That is certainly not the case. It just takes longer and maybe a higher discount. We aim to improve the relative liquidity within our portfolio from currently 8% of our total holdings to above 30% by end of 2025. We have set ourselves clear liquidity targets, and we will manage our portfolio much more actively with a clear monetization and value objective. We will further diversify revenue streams, hereby minimizing any sporadic ad hoc illiquid asset sales at a higher discount, which is what basically happened in the past. We are very certain that this will give our shareholders and creditors comfort about the company's financial situation and future financial flexibility. Next, please.
To give you a snapshot about our value creation expertise, our investments at acquisition costs, so according to German GAAP, account for circa EUR 7 million of initial expense. External partners such as AVS Valuation and also GBC Equity Research assess the value of our holdings, excluding FinPro, where we have an equity stake, at almost EUR 41 million as of 30th of June 2024, meaning a multiplier of 6.5x . This also indicates that there are significant silent value reserves within our or hidden value reserves within our portfolio once asset is disposed. We are currently in the process of obtaining an updated external valuation assessment of our non-listed holdings.
Please be aware that those 41 million that you see there are before the token generation event of peaq that took place in November last year. Next page, once again. Our future investment thesis. We have identified up to six core verticals where we believe most value for investors and the company will be created. These have been mentioned earlier on, and they are again mentioned here. DePIN, meaning Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. Interoperability, meaning what is there a common language between various blockchains. Artificial intelligence, real-world assets, next level of Bitcoin protocols, meaning layer two and modular blockchains. And what is even more important, we will complement this future targeted investments by further blue chip, by further liquid blue chip investments such as into Bitcoin and Ethereum and the proceeds and synergies within our existing portfolio.
We aim to offer investors an attractive investment route into the crypto and blockchain market via multiple highways. So our projected financial group targets for 2025, we have identified three key financial factors that determine the value of the Advanced Blockchain stock. And that is revenue from sales, focus on new investments and incubations, and the minimum cash position. A focus on just revenue, just EBIT or EBITDA or indirect revenues of our holdings simply don't make sense for the valuation of the company. As you can see from this chart, we aim to become increasingly active in 2025 on all aspects and hereby providing investors both an attractive outlook into the future, but also comfort as to the financial situation of the group. And quite honestly, we are confident to achieve these objectives as outlined here.
So if you allow me to conclude this presentation, we aim for flexibility and certainty. We will rely on our long-lasting expertise and our broad network and some of our network partners, meaning also the members of our supervisory board are displayed here. We aim for a solid compliant fundament for future growth and value creation, a basis which is properly governed and compliant with regulations. We are a small team with only minimum overhead costs, but with a broad experience and even more importantly, with a clear drive to bring the value of the company onto a new level, to participate in early investments, to identify attractive and clever ways of value and revenue generation. And we know we can rely on our network also in the Supervisory Board. With this, Hatem and I are asking for your support and trust into the company.
I see that some of the participants in this call are also shareholders in our company already, and we are thankful for that. We are asking for your support and trust into the company. We very much welcome any question, but also any hint and relationship inroad and intro into the attractive investment opportunities. Now it's time for Q&A.
Thank you, Mike, and thank you, Hatem. We already have a couple of questions in the chat. First of all, do you work together with tokentos or coinIX in some of your participations, or are these pure competitors?
I always believe in blue ocean strategy, meaning you always find ways to work with competitors. To outline, we have invested recently part of our staking rewards from peaq in XMAQUINA.
XMAQUINA is, I mean, coinIX has invested also with XMAQUINA. I'm in very close communication with Omri, the CIO of coinIX. When it comes to tokentos, I met Lisa from their team in a Global Blockchain Congress in Dubai last month. I, as I mentioned earlier, blue ocean strategy, find ways to work with competitors and learning from each other and developing together. I don't see it really as competitor. We have to work against each other, but rather work together.
There is a question regarding the peaq tokens, where you have about 88 million. Do you plan to monetize these or will you hold on to them?
Of course, because you will have a centralization risk. You have one asset that contributes to a significant value of your portfolio. Right now, this is highly risky to maintain.
Right now, we are checking opportunities either by OTC deals with not a significant discount because usually OTC deals can go up to 70% or 60% of discounts, which is something we will never accept as this is not really beneficial for our shareholders. W;e are checking right now covered calls to also basically monetize before like the token unlocks that is planned for August. But once we come to have the first unlocks in August up to the 36 months ahead, which will be 2028, we plan to take part of our peak position, monetize it, and put part of this capital in blue chip tokens and then diversify the portfolio further. And there will be a part that will be also reinvested in other early stage projects.
We have a concrete plan on how we will do that because right now, as I mentioned, we have very high risk in having a big high bet on one asset. Even though that there is the portfolio is still diverse, you have interesting projects like Panoptic, you have Polymer, you have many other interesting portfolio companies, but still, it's a very good question and we are working on that together with the Management team and the Supervisory Board.
Yeah. So we have only 30 seconds left. Maybe can you wrap it up with what's the investment case for Advanced Blockchain, but try to keep it really short.
What was the question again? Sorry, one more time.
The investment case for Advanced Blockchain, 30 seconds, why to invest because time is running out.
Why to invest? Because we make it easier to do all the due diligence for you. If you are not familiar with this sector, we have all the know-how. We have a proven track record to find those early stage opportunities. I would love to have one minute or two minutes to elaborate more, but we have 30 seconds only, but happy to chat directly and have to have a call later on virtually to meet also offline.
Thank you so much. Yes, too bad, the time is already up. That was Advanced Blockchain again. Thank you, Hatem. Thank you, Mike.
You're welcome. Thanks for having us.
Bye.
Excellent. Up next is The Now AG with Dr. Thomas Wolfensberger and Karl Fleetwood. I just promoted them to the stage.
Hello. Hello. How are you?
Very well.
You're already sharing the screen. Excellent. So yeah, the stage is yours. 30 minutes. Here we go.
Hi. My name is Thomas Wolfensberger. I'm the Founder of naoo. And I'm accompanied by Karl. Maybe you introduce yourself.
Yeah. Hi. My name is Karl Fleetwood. I've been with naoo pretty much since the beginning, and I'm currently CFO and COO of the company.
Fantastic. Thank you very much. In the next few minutes, I will take the joy to guide you through what naoo does. We're very interested in also hearing from you and your comments. Maybe let me start with a few investor highlights. naoo is a next generation social media platform. You will see in a minute exactly how it works, but basically, it's a combination of a very powerful AI-powered, machine learning-powered social media platform with an own loyalty points ecosystem that works in harmony.
We have a very novel approach to integrating local business, and you will see how that works. We think that the investment case has very strong growth opportunities because we're operating in a market that's very large and still growing. Social media advertising sales globally, $233 billion annually with an annual growth of over 6%. On the back of this, you know, strong market indicators, we also have experienced some very strong growth. We just added a few indicators from, you know, the Q3 to Q4 growth. You know, we have more indicators, but only the comments, for example, already increased 117% in the fourth quarter and downloads increased by 59% in the last quarter. Our business model is very proven, very standard, but also very scalable. We have two revenue models.
One is programmatic advertising, which is basically the model that all the social networks use, where we sell our ad inventory through ad bidding platforms globally, where we assume a CPM, so a cost per mille, cost per thousand impressions between $10-$20. And then on the other hand, we have a SaaS model, which is the new business model, which basically allows businesses to use the platform for marketing purposes, for loyalty purposes, etc. And that follows more of a SaaS logic, so more functionality logic. And we combine both business models in one. We have a team that's very diverse in expertise. So I will talk a little bit more about myself in a minute, but we have a lot of expertise in technology development, app development, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, community building, etc. And we'll talk much more about that.
So currently, share price is at EUR 1,640. The analyst price target is at EUR 41. So we have some room to grow here. The best thing is to, what we found out is to acquaint people with the platform by showing them what it's able to do. So if you allow me, on the left, you see the first sequence that explains user profile. You can post, you can like, you can message. So there's an integrated messaging tool. So users can message each other. They can search for content and they can basically, yeah, do everything that you would expect in a social media platform. Then the second small sequence is about polls. We have a way of asking people for data by giving them points, and that results in a much higher participation rate.
These points can be used to play with, to win more prizes, to win more points. For example, here, we just won 100 points in a spin and win feature. We have other games like the one-arm bandit that we're going to roll out soon, which is a game where you can basically put into your social media feed. This is something that no social media platform has where you could say, okay, you can play this once in 24 hours to keep people coming back to your social media feed, basically. That's very unique on naoo, and there'll be more in this realm. Then we have, you know, the question is what to do with the points. So basically, we have the businesses that can make offers and that can put those offers onto the map.
And then other people will see them on the map. They can buy these offers and they can get points for that. So we use the exact same point-based logic to run a loyalty basically infrastructure right into the same environment. And that's really the new thing. So we can create user journeys from online, from social media to offline to the physical shops. And then the community can see these offers on the map, as you see here. So there's a boost by a restaurant called On Restaurant. You see where those offers are. You see what you're getting and how many points you're getting. And yeah, that's basically this flow that goes from online to offline and back. And then what to do with these points? There's a point wallet. There are vouchers. You can use these points basically to buy products from our partners.
In this context, what you see here is we have a lot of choice here from partners that participate through our partner Twint in this case. So you can basically take your naoo points and get a voucher from Google Play or Spotify for the other partners. So that's in a nutshell what we do today. We'll get into what we will do in the future a little bit later. I wanted to give you a little bit of background about myself for those who don't know me. So I started out my career in Business and IT, but I was very interested and very drawn to the subject of social interaction in virtual communities. I wrote a book about that. That was my PhD thesis. And I'm only saying it because it's exactly the thing that we're working on right now.
I was then working for IBM and Accenture and then started my first fintech business called Swiss Risk Financial Systems, which I sold with 120 employees a few years later and a global client base. Then I started a real estate company called Peach Property Group, which I built to about 2.6 billion in volume, over a billion in market cap. I have a lot of experience in capital markets, capital markets issuances, and I want to use this experience to also forward the case of naoo. We've been listed since the 5th of December last year, and it's been going quite well. Yeah, so that's a bit of background about the company. Obviously, we have more people in the company than just me. So here are, you know, some of the main guys in the management, Karl, Gabriel, and Benjamin, and board member Michel Pola.
You see that we are based in Zug, Switzerland. You see the last share price. Yeah, we're listed on the Düsseldorf Exchange. Let me mince a few words about social media as a basically advertising space. This has been growing at an incredible rate, and there's no signs of this stopping. A large and growing market, we talked about that. This social media platform, sometimes people think there can be only one or two or three big platforms, but that's not the case. There are literally dozens of platforms of different sizes. The ambition that we have is to get to about 18.75 million users by 2028, which means that we will still be a relatively small and niche platform compared to those big ones. That's our ambition, just so this is explained.
We think that social media and retail in marketing, they have a lot of unsolved problems. And we think that we have some ideas how to address those problems. So for the user, good content is not systematically rewarded. And we try to change that. On the creator side, we see the problem that only the largest creators really get, you know, significant compensation, not the smaller ones. And we really try to introduce an element of democracy, let's say, also giving back to the important, let's say, smaller influencers, nano influencers that make up the fabric actually of social connection. Then very important for the brands, the reach is constantly going down on social media for most brands. So it's very difficult actually as a brand to run an, you know, for example, an Instagram account that reaches a lot of people.
And we have very good recipes how to increase the reach through gamification that you saw before. And then for retail, there's really not a system that gives incentives for people to actually go and shop somewhere. And we have built that. So you can think of naoo as something that gives retailers a way to systematically attract people into their shops in a new way using social media. So the solution is Now, a global social media platform with an integrated reward system to provide users and local businesses with the new and fundamentally improved interaction opportunities. And we dubbed this social media as it should be because that's what people say when they see it. In order to do this, we had to combine four key technologies into one product. Those are extremely important: AI, mobile and geolocation, social media, and a reward system.
We all developed this in-house into one platform. This platform consists of a product family consisting of a naoo iOS and Android app on the consumer side. Very importantly, by the way, we sent out a press release this morning talking about the fact that now from today, our Android app is on the same level as our iOS app, which was a lot of work. We're quite proud because the iOS app had quite a head start. naoo the Android app is on par. Android is very important also for our expansion in Germany because the German market is about 70% Android. So we prepared for that. Now we did today. Then on the business side, we have a business app and a web app basically that we launched at the end of last year.
And that's going to be responsible for the SaaS revenues that I talked about. So this is a business we want to build in the coming years, onboarding more businesses that can use this suite of solutions to market their products. So what's really different again from naoo to other platforms? So improved relevance is something that we're very good at because we can ask questions, we can give points for the answers. So our user profiles become much more detailed and better than with other platforms. Rewards and gamification is the second point. So we aim to be an engaging social platform that rewards people, that uses gamification all the way through the whole journey. And I think you saw some of these elements in the earlier movie clips that I showed. And then hyperlocalization.
80% of advertising income on, let's say, Instagram or Facebook come from global digital clients. Local business plays a very limited role in social media advertising. Social media advertising is the biggest advertising block, let's say, the whole advertising market in the world. There's an underrepresentation of local business in social media. We're changing that by using naoo Business to give businesses a better tool to make, you know, to place local advertising with specific incentives for people to come into local shops. This is very important. We talked about what kind of features we already have. I wanted to give you a little bit of a glimpse into what we're working on right now because we have a very strong development team that is working as we speak in five different countries on advancing our product.
We wanted to show you basically a few important areas where we're advancing. One is naoo Sense, which is our AI algorithm, which we use to improve people matching, content recommendations, search relevance, business offers, and advertising. Our dream is to connect every product in the physical world with every user that we have. In an AI best way. The best recommendations for any product, any person, any piece of content with the ideal user, let's say. That's what we're working on. We're making very good progress there. This is an extremely exciting journey. Super Recommender is a product that we developed. It's not yet launched, but it will be launched in the next two months, I would say, where users will be able to meet other people based on whatever interest. It would also be AI powered.
It's going to be a very effective and powerful tool to introduce people to each other based on mutual interests, behavioral patterns, who you know, but also, we want to make people meet in the real world because life is not only on the screen. So it's also about sharing real-world experiences and connecting people who have done the same thing. Loops 2.0 is the upgrade of our video platform. So basically, it's going to be much more exciting to see more content there. The video platform that we have today works great, but it has limitations with respect to the recommendation system, and that will be changed also very soon. Then naoo games and competitions. We are actually developing a string of games that go into the social media experience, and some of them you saw already.
And we use them to get people onto a feed, let's say a business feed. And also some of them can be activated when people actually go into a shop. So you can spin the wheel, but only if you go to that shop. Imagine what that would trigger for campaigns that aim to get people to go somewhere, shop somewhere. Dating is also something new. It is something that our members are very interested in. And it's a very good business opportunity because the market price for a dating app is about EUR 10 a month or so for a subscription. So this is a very easy, actually for us, relatively easy way to scale our revenues in the future. Polls 2.0 is basically an infrastructure where we can ask anything and we're going to compensate people for it.
We're going to use it to play games localized or overall. It will be a very interesting tool to attract people with engagement. What's the difference between naoo and YouTube or Instagram engagement options? We have more than just liking, commenting, or sharing. Much more, actually. There are incentives for everybody. There's a very strong element of local relevance. There is very high precision in the way we target audiences based on the better profiles that we have. We have a lot of organic reach still. What's the difference between, for example, naoo and Google Maps? On Google Maps, you can see basically every company, everything you want to see. On naoo social media, you would see those businesses that will give something to you if you do business with them or if you walk into their shop.
Opportunities to actually get a reward, for example. Great. This is our positioning in the market between a rewarding discovery and being part of a community. We have been blessed with very good numbers on the, for example, on the session time. So as we have added features and functionality, our session time has gone up considerably. We're very happy about that. And with all the AI that will, you know, come into the platform naoo, we expect this to continue. And we're very happy that this has worked like this. We've already been in the top 10 of the best social apps worldwide in terms of user retention. Actually, what you see here is top 10 is 15.5% retention in week four. And naoo is at 32%. So we're actually probably in the top 3% worldwide in terms of user retention already.
These numbers are very important for the future rollout of the platform. Then in January, as a result of all of that, for the first time, we have been able to reach the third place in the Swiss App Store, which in the app charts, which you see here. And we were very, of course, proud. But it also showed that what we're doing resonates with people. And we really look forward to scoring a higher place in the App Store in all the markets that we'll tackle in the future. Then we have very good feedback from our clients that we run advertising campaigns for because we know how to basically use our tools to get much higher engagement rates than is, you know, what's doable in a standard social media setting. And these are just a few examples.
Then already some interesting people in Switzerland have chosen Now, and as we speak, we're also adding more influencers and content creators, etc., and soon the same thing will happen in Germany and in Austria, so we're aiming to increase our reach into the DACH market first and then on from there, basically, so we've had now over 90,000 downloads with about 6.5 million monthly user sessions. Yeah, these are a few numbers, about 8.5 thousand active users, and that number is now expected to scale. Our business model, we talked about, it's programmatic advertising to the left and the SaaS-based model on the right. But I'm not going to go into much more detail here for the sake of time, then we have five very interesting growth levers that we're using. M&As, so we're buying small agencies to complement our offering. That's a plan. We have good organic growth.
We use influencers. We use events. And we use performance marketing. A few words about the value mechanics. So if we pay $6 for a download, we know that we'll lose a few of these users until we have a long-term user. So right now, we think that our cost to get to a long-term user is about $40. And if we look at what the value is of one of these long-term users, we see that our value proxy is about $470. So the value mechanics are very favorable for us. What does the market say about us? We have a very good App Store rating. We have very good partners that talk about us, for example, AWS, who are actually helping us, sponsoring us, etc. So we're very happy with these partnerships. And yeah, so I think I'm at 24 minutes. Thank you very much.
I think we have now time for some Q&A.
Yes, a few questions already came in. So first of all, what does Now actually stand for?
Okay. So Now stands for the moment now. We want to bring everything that's around you to you in one instance. So basically, it's a different way of spelling N-O-W. And that's to live in the now, not in the tomorrow, not in the yesterday, but to actually see and feel everything that's around you.
And the biggest hurdle would probably be to get more users onto the pl atform. So will you maybe try to win over or buy big creators that they also join your platform to promote the platform?
Yes, that is a part of the strategy. And we have already some interesting creators. And so now that the growth is accelerating, we know how to expand that.
Our marketing strategy is based on actually, yeah, getting more creators to work with us in this context.
Yeah. Could you give us a geographical distribution of the active users? Is it mostly Switzerland, Germany, and the U.S.? Or where is everyone located more or less?
We're very focused in Switzerland. We have, you know, I would say about 80% is Swiss. Then I would say 10% is German and 10% is U.S. right now. We haven't marketed either in Germany nor in the U.S. This came spontaneously.
Okay. You talked about AI. What is AI actually doing on your platform?
AI basically provides, analyzes the data that each user, you know, what each user looks at, and then decides what to show them in terms of the feed or the search or the people it recommends.
And we are in the beginning of this. So our first algorithm that we introduced showed already eight times more relevance than what we had before. But now we're working on something that is much, much more powerful. And that will be rolled out in the next months to increase the relevance and use all the data that we have that other platf orms don't have.
And how do you do the content moderation? Is it moderated at all? Is it automated? How d o you do it?
It's mostly automated. But we also do some moderation because we have some tools that tell us if something's inappropriate. So we also have filters that look out for content that we don't want to show. And so it would be not correct, I would say, we don't moderate the content.
Okay. And how much was already invested in the platform?
So to date, we invested about EUR 8 million into the platform. Yeah.
And can you tell us a bit more about the shareholder structure?
The shareholder structure is such that just over 50% is me. And then there's a second shareholder that is about, I would say, 35% or so, or 30%. And then we have a few in the group, a few smaller shareholders. And then we have a free float of about 10% or maybe now 12%.
And what's your M&A strategy? Or do you have an M&A goals?
Yeah. So the M&A strategy, so why M&A in the first place? So M&A for me is always a very interesting tool to add value to any company. So in my past job at Peach Property, I've done a lot of acquisitions in real estate, but always buying companies and integrating them.
And so the strategy here is to basically look out for companies that are very synergetic to our core business in terms of having clients, having users, having content creators and content. And so we're looking out for these businesses. And then when we buy them, we want to add value by not only the synergies, but also by managing those companies on our platform with more synergy to increase the revenue, maybe increase the multiples and reap the synergies and grow the platform altogether. So in combination, we think this is going to be a very attractive proposition. Also, it will be an attractive proposition to get into new markets. So you can imagine that most probably if we want to enter a new geographic market, we will do it with an acquisition.
Okay. So we have just 30 seconds left.
So, maybe you can wrap it up for what's the investment case in 20 seconds?
It's a very future-proof platform with a very solid technology base. We're growing at a very good rate. I think we've been introduced to the stock market very well. We have actually very good volumes. And the price is quite attractive right now. So I think a small allocation to the Now stock would be very beneficial in the coming years because we, of course, our goal is to grow this tremendously.
Okay. Thomas and Karl, thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
And up next is Terrain Minerals. And Julian will take over as a moderator. Yes. Thank you very much, Matthias. That was a great presentation from naoo. Now we are going back in the commodity sector with Justin from Terrain Minerals. Hi, Justin. Can you hear me?
Because up to now, I think, Justin, we do see your screen, but we cannot hear you. Yes, now we can hear you. Do you also want to start your camera so we can see you and present you?
There we go.
There you go. So hi, Justin. Welcome to the IIF. This is our 14th event. We're very pleased to have you presenting here for the first time. So Justin, you have about 29 minutes left. Please have a new one that has a question, just send them in the chat, in the Q&A, and I will relay them after you. So Justin, you can start.
Yeah, thanks, Julian. And thank you for everyone too listening. Terrain Minerals is a West Australian exploration company. And we're exploring for several minerals. So I'll just walk you through our projects, but we're quite excited. Some of them are quite advanced.
Standard three statements. Just move my screen to get set up. Why Terrain Minerals? With tier one jurisdiction, all of our assets are in Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland. Exploration focuses on two granted assets. They have three commodities. One was a bit of a mistake, but it's an exciting one. It's gold, gallium, and nickel. We have drilling results pending on all of them at the moment, which is very exciting for us. Look, our strategy gives our investors access to high potential, high-value exploration projects and key commodities. These are all driving any transition and focus on improving people's living standards across the world. Our Smokeb ush project has two parts of it. There's a Wildflower gold and the Larins Lane , which I'll talk to you about a little bit shortly.
Gold, we have 19 holes for 2,500 m pending RC drilling following some successful soils and Aircore drilling. Targets, none of you probably know them, but T16 and W3 and Cotta are all in the same trending shear zones oriented as the Rothsay Gold mine, just 10 km away. It looks very similar. We have another structure, which is much more advanced, a lot more drilling that we've also drilled into the Monza Lightning and Moria. Those results will be a bit later out in March. All results are probably due March at this stage. Our gallium project. We're a first mover on the gallium. There's a big need for gallium. China controls 9 out of 10 of that market. We have a JORC-compliant exploration target released in November. We've started met studies pretty well straight away.
We're part of a government study, and we're down a few other avenues as well for the metallurgy, and we'll touch base there later. We also have large nickel copper targets down southwest of Western Australia. We've done a lot of work down there. We've done ground EM after some VTEM with a helicopter. We've located two conductors at the edge of a mafic dyke feature, which is basically a volcano that hasn't made it to surface and hopefully dragged up some chunks of earth core with it, which are typically nickel and other minerals as well. We had leading geophysicists who have confirmed that the dyke feature at Lort River is a mafic intrusion. Our drilling appears to tell us that. We've hit the targets, so results are pending, and we've also got a pipeline of projects. It's important to have a pipeline of projects.
There's a lot of heritage issues in Australia. And to get things granted now does take time. And if you've got good stuff granted, it takes a bit longer. So we've got a really good copper gold project and a really cracking lithium project, one in Queensland and one here in West Australia. And I'll talk to them about them at the end. So the company profile, Terrain, has got 2 billion shares in issue. There's about 53 million options at various dates. They're mainly with management or all with management. The market cap is AUD 8 million. There's a lot of upside here. Cash to hand has just popped AUD 100 million again. We have no debt. And our share price is about 0.45%, so half an Australian cent. Our top 20 has about 38%. And I guess some interesting, we've got 1,216 shareholders, roughly.
The top 200 own 84% of the company. And the top 300 own 90% of the company. So the company's actually held in quite a small little group of people, which is good. And they're all long-term supporters. The Board, myself, Justin Virgin have a stockbroking mining background. Jason Macdonald is also mining background, but is a corporate lawyer and has a finance experience. And Johannes Lin is our Senior Brand Director and large shareholder. Their family, they've got businesses all over Asia, many employees. You can see on the map here, this is the breakdown of our projects. I don't know if you can see the cursor, but our smoke bush project is where gallium and our gold drilling has just happened. It's like a four-hour drive from Perth, which is a capital city of Western Australia.
Our Lort River project, which is at the bottom of the map of Western Australia, it's about 50 km from the town of Esperance. And that's a major regional center. Our two pending projects are up near Port Hedland and the Pilbara, and our Biloela project out of Rockhampton in Queensland. They are getting close to being granted, but it's been about a year and a half, two-year exercise to get them. And you can see our commodity suite here. So I'll jump into our Smoky Bush project. And that's the one with two parts. So we're 350 km north of Perth. It's proven to host high-grade clay oxide gallium. So we're not in hard rock. We're basically in a sand or a regolith. So that's a bit of a game changer. So in theory, it should be quite cheap mining. The benefits, close proximity to existing mining infrastructure.
There's a lot of mines in the area. There's a lot of historic gold mining in the area, and we've obviously got some nice hits on our project, which we're developing at the moment. We've done a lot of RC drilling in December and in January, and those results aren't far away, and most results should be coming out in March. That's a typical scene there. You can see the flowers. That's the wildflower season in Western Australia, but that's typical of what we see up on the site during the wildflower season. We'll jump straight into the gallium project, so gallium is a bit of a topical subject, and this is really exciting for us. We've got a JORC-compliant exploration target as of November. It's only on 5% of this area.
So, if you can see that map on the right-hand side, there is 27 sq km of gallium. There's two granites that have basically run up on each side and pushed up. And there's a big drainage channel where all the water runs down there into a river. And that's basically assisted with eroding and probably pulling out of other elements. We have it's rare earth with gallium, but the seams along the contact is where the rare earth sits. And it seems to disappear. So at one end, it goes down to about 100-110 m of sand or regolith. And up the other side, it's about 10-20. And there's seams of gallium up to 64 m wide. 70% of the holes had +1 0 m zones of gallium. You can see a lot of the holes there.
There's just not enough room to put all the grades on. But over the whole 10-meter area, we're seeing gallium in pretty well all the holes, which is quite exciting. Grades up to 54 g a ton. Interestingly, gallium is ripped out of or pulled out of aluminum processed in a bauxite. So once they've removed what they want, the slurry, they're getting gallium from between about 40 to 100 g. But they're only recovering 10%-15%. So not a lot of it's coming out. Ours is basically already been oxidized. So the met studies are ongoing now. We're part of a government study in the university. And we're quite excited about that. And we're also doing some other side studies. We want to get a processing route. We can drill a whole 27 km out for under AUD 1 million of Aircore drilling.
We want to get a processing route. There's a lot of interest out there to secure an alternate source from the major supplier of gallium, which is China. We are in ongoing discussions. We're starting to push the gallium story for our company. This is a big opportunity for Terrain. We can be a gallium-only producer where currently gallium is produced in aluminum or bauxite mining. Basically, there might be a seam that has high in gallium and the next one isn't. The gallium sort of availability varies a little bit. What is gallium? Gallium is a critical mineral. Basically, the Western world, Australia, European Union, U.S., United Kingdom. The main applications are defense, semiconductors, and computer chips, electronic circuitry, and photovoltaic cells. Basically, in your computer chips, your transistors, they're making a gallium arsenide, nitride, sorry.
And what that does, it allows the chips to switch faster at lower voltages at higher temperatures. So less heat sinks. Also, your LED lights in your house and all lasers wouldn't exist without gallium. Gallium's a key component for an LED. Furthermore takes your solar panels. A patent dropped off about three or four years ago. Now, 80% of panels out of China now have gallium in them. It's sort of the circuitry you see. The old ones basically had steel with oxygen would get in there. And they'll crowd out. The gallium ones don't. You get much longer panel life, which is important and better power. Interestingly enough, China controls 98% of the market. And that's what excites us. There's a great opportunity here for us to become an alternate supplier to China. It is used in the military, radars, missiles, fifth-generation fighter jets.
They need their components to move to switch quick and cycle, so China cut it off last August. It's now on a critical list for them, and they're restricting it, and they need export permits, and I can see, as the global government situation, I guess it's going to be a political situation that's getting interesting. That's only helping us, and we're getting interested people coming to find us. It's a non-LME market, and it's all B2B, the sales, so there's not an exchange that deals with it. We know it's around $1 million a ton. I think the price is very inelastic. If you think about how much is actually used compared to a ton, these products can probably move or gallium can move a fair way in price and not really affect the end products, so if you want AI and quantum computing, you need gallium components.
Without that, there is no AI. There's no quantum computing. It's that fast switching. As I said before, it's basically gallium chips and other electrical components. They draw less power. They switch faster. This allows for miniaturization. And they operate at much higher temperatures. So this is one of those little funny commodities up until recently into this trade war started gurgling away. The last couple of years were probably unknown. But all of a sudden, there is a major shortfall. I think from what I've researched, there's only about six months' supply of gallium outside of China at any one time, which means all our chip manufacturers stop. So there's a little bit of urgency. So this is a real big opportunity for the company. We're getting our met done now. We're looking at partnering. We've got 27 sq km.
I think it might get a little bit bigger of gallium in sand or in this regolith clay that we can pretty well go in there and start digging quite easily, and it's in West Australia, so we've got a pretty safe jurisdiction, so this is the bit of the sleeper in the company. We're pushing pretty hard to make this happen, and with China controlling 98% of the commodity, it's not too hard to see with its importance that it could really do something for Terrain. Also at our smoke bush project, we have our wildflower gold project, so we're an explorer. We're Australian. We love gold. Our stage one drilling was completed in December. We did eight holes for about 1,200 m. As you can see on that map up the top, you can see the one at the bottom actually, Laren Lane, sits down there.
That's the gallium. And up around the edge, there's a big intrusive unit there called the Mount Mulgine intrusion. And our gold sits around there. There are other gold mines around the edge of that intrusion as well. So we're in a good place. We started drilling at Kotter and T16. There's a couple of soil anomalies. We've got some nice big intersections with Aircore. For those who don't know what Aircore drilling is, I guess there's three types of main drilling we do in Australia. Aircore is where the rod goes down without any pressure behind it. It just naturally goes down and just stops when it gets to resistance. RC drilling actually is pushing down the whole way to the drill on it and hammer and blast it down into the ground so you can get through hard rock. It gives you a lot of penetration.
And then there's diamond drilling you probably hear about. And that's sort of like putting a straw into ice cream and pulling it out. So Aircore is quite cheap. And it's good passing. And on that note, my alarm's about to go off. So I better just jump off for a second and turn it off. Or we're going to be listening to an alarm. Two seconds. Apologize. Security function in the building. It's a bit embarrassing. Didn't realize that time slot. So our Aircore drilling found 9 m at 1.1 g of gold from 30 m down. And we got some nice big zones of low-grade gold. So we thought there's some structures there. We can see a little bit in the ground, but it's predominantly undercover. We've done some follow-up RC drilling. We're seeing structures in the ground. So are they mineralized, I guess, is the next question.
What we saw at Kotter and T16, we then in January went back. The drillers wanted to go home for Christmas, which is fair enough, and we did a couple of drill holes over RC, over W3, and also up at Wildflower. So there'll be a bit of a fragmented amount of results come here, and then in January we've also, if you look on the bottom map, Monzera and Lightning and Moria, we're up there and we did some structures. So the bottom stuff looks very much like the Rossay deposit, which is a narrow high-grade deposit here in West Australia. It's being mined, and there'll be a lot of mules in this area as well. Up the top where Monzera and Lightning is, it's a very different style of mineralization, like the Warradas deposits you may have heard of. They're doing quite well.
I'll talk about them in a second. Drill results are due early March and towards the end of March on these two different prog. I suspect we're going to need all of them back really to make sense of it. Monzera and Lightning, you can see on the right-hand side, we've got a lot of RC holes into this. There seems to be something going on. We've now started to chase it down dip. The gold sort of plunges down in units. We've gone down dip. We've also, if you can see Lightning, there's a second structure there running up and down. We've gone to extend that to see if it is extended and also look for potentially a third or a fourth structure. We'll just see what the drill results say. There's potential for something here.
Neighboring deposits at Warrada, as I've drilled deeper, they've got wider and better grade. So that's what we're hoping for. So far, it looks pretty good. But we need the results back from the lab. And so basically, it's 11 holes there for 1,400 m. And we're pretty happy from what we're seeing. So there's a bit of excitement there in the gold space. I think gold's a good place to be at the moment. We're in an area where we can get our gold treated without having to build. But then potentially, we could build a small plant ourselves. Gold's typically come up. It hasn't come down. So if this keeps going down, it'll probably go down a long way, which is pretty typical for most deposits in Western Australia. So that's our gold story.
You can see in our Smoke Bush project, we've got the Laren's Lane met studies happening. There'll be results dribbling out between now and middle of year. I think that's going to be a key for us to go back and do a lot more drilling and expand this project. We've obviously got our RC drilling we've done over our gold. Those results will start trickling out in March, which isn't far away. We're going to get straight back, and then we're going to do follow-up drilling. This is a pretty good area, we believe. Our Lort River project. This is, it's nickel. Most people don't like nickel at the moment. I'm not sure why the price is up. Too bad. We're down in the Albany Fraser Belt. There's only ever been two intrusive units found down there. We're in farming land.
We're about 650 km from Perth. It's sealed roads. There are airports down there, ports. A lot of wheat and metal goes out of the Esperance port to world markets. Our Lort River project, as you can see there, the nickel, if you look up on the top, that's our eye feature or intrusive unit. Down the bottom's the Nova Bollinger. Southern Geoscience have confirmed that the eye feature Lort River is most likely intrusive unit. We know it looks very much the same characteristics as Nova Bollinger, same style of mineralization. We know Nova Bollinger was taken over for AUD 1.8 billion when nickel was voluntarily under half the current price. We've only got a market cap of AUD 10 million at Terrain. So there's a fair bit of upside here if this comes off. Nova was meant to be part of a province.
If you look in Canada, the Thompson Belt, every 300-600 km there is a repetition, which is exciting. As you can see on page 14, where we sit from Nova Bollinger is about 300 km. We've done some ground EM in December after a VTEM survey, which is a helicopter flies a big giant magnet over the area. We've got a couple of nice conductors. We announced to the market that we've intersected the conductors with our drilling about 1,000 m for three holes on targets one and two. That's all we've told the market to date. The market has to wait for results. This is one of those could be a major thing for the company, or it could be nothing. We do some of these targets occasionally, but we are getting on with some real stuff as well. This is exciting.
This could be a major company banker of global significance if it comes off, and we'll find out next month, so that's another exciting reason to be in Terrain. Lort River, we've got all land accesses, everything organized. Obviously, we've drilled now, so just results pending. Just in summary, Smoky Bush project is our Wildflower gold and our Lort River's gallium. We've got 19 holes for 2,500 m pending for the gold drilling on our gallium JORC exploration target on only 5% of the area. Drilling outside of that all looks the same, but it's just not close enough to tell us and bring it into a JORC-compliant resource, so we can do that reasonably quickly. We've got a couple of prog ready designed to go, and we're just waiting on the met studies, so all the materials down with the studies now at the university.
We'll see how that all pans out. It's quite exciting. We're looking at some very low acids, number seven or eight, sort of like coffee orange juice. If they work, then we don't have to use the standard process with sulfuric acid. Obviously, the byproducts are not as nasty. It's a lot cheaper. We're using some alternative ideas on how to process it. It'd be basically a detergent with a resin and pulling out a liquor, which is nothing new. Our Lort River project, we've just gone over that. Three targets have been drilled. They look pretty good. Are they magnetic nickel, I guess, is the question. I'm busting to know because this is the exciting part of it, getting drill results. Those results are due in March. We've got gold and the potential nickel copper target results coming in in March.
We've got a pipeline. Now, this is the interesting thing. We need this pipeline. We've got our Billawila project. Check the time. It's copper-gold. It's north of Brisbane in Lake Rockhampton. We've got 2,500 sq km. It's been locked up in one or two companies for 15 years. There's confirmed volcanogenic massive sulfides, VMS types, porphyry copper-gold, epithermal mineral systems present in the area. There's no reason why there can't be a monster hiding here. We're sort of north of Cracow. If you look here, we've basically got the majors have been there. There's been a lot of work done over the years, but nothing with the drill rig. Most of these targets have never really been looked at. There's secondary copper hanging in the ground, up to 9% rock chips, copper, and 2 gram gold.
So there's a lot to follow up on. We're pretty keen to get in the ground. We're almost there getting more granted. This is 2025, the second half where Terrain’s going. Copper gold, I think, is a place to be. We're getting a lot of interest from some larger players. As you can see, it's quite an exciting project. If we just jump back a slide, there's a reference to an ASX announcement. You can go back and have a look at that, 21st of June, 2023. That's when we started the process of granting. This has taken a long time to get to where we are. Secondly, lithium. I don't think it's dead, but the prices are a bit woeful. You want to be in belts that have high grade and potentially big deposits.
Once you find a couple of deposits in a belt, typically that's what you find. So we're 90 km out of Port Hedland. We're along strike from Wildcat Resources, Bolt Cutter Lithium project. We're neighboring SQM and Kali Metals. And 50 km from Pilgangoora. We are in the right area. Just quickly on this map, if you look up at the top, the right-hand side, the blue's ours. Most of this ground's been locked up since 2008 by a major company here in application. So we're almost there. We've had nine objections. The exciting thing about this package is there's no juniors out there. To my knowledge, there's this size package up in the Pilbara. If you look at our tenement in the bottom picture, we can see Wildcat. That's a major regional structure back and forth there.
If you stand at our boundary and you've modeled up the Wildcat Resources pegmatites, which they're now doing their mining study, you can see them running straight through into ours. There's hits along that structure, which makes ours at 3 m or 4 m undercover highly prospective. This is a really exciting project. It's had no work done on it. So we're pretty keen to get in the ground. This is three or four months away from being granted. We're very lucky to get it. So basically, Terrain's got a lot of things happening in the gold space. We've got an advanced gallium project, which we're moving forward. And then we've got a couple of backup projects that we're very, very excited to get our hands on and start rolling our sleeves up and get into. So that's the Terrain story. We're passionate about exploration.
I think the gallium's a bit of a sleeper that people haven't woken up to yet. And there's a bit of gold results in the system. So I don't know if there's any questions, but yeah, thank you for listening.
All right. Thank you very much for the presentation, Justin. Quite a lot of projects, very in many places, a lot to follow here. Can you maybe talk to us a bit about your cash position, shares position, who's backing you guys, and what is the company midterm objective? Is it to continue exploring all of those projects? Is it to joint venture them? What exactly is the goal of the company here?
The goal is company is getting to production. And I think the way at the moment, the gallium's sort of pushing forward there. And we're doing the met studies. That's quite advanced.
So I mentioned the capital structure before. The top 300 own 90% of the company. And I know most of them. So we've got a pretty tight supported register. Cash is back down under $1 million. It's typically always around there. The moment we get capital, we drill. We're active. We don't mess around. There's no matching furniture in our office. We're all squeezed into one little room. We're about exploration and making discovery and getting the company to production. Some of our projects, we are having conversations with some very large companies who are interested in doing site visits and looking around. Typically, the two that haven't quite been granted yet, they really are prizes. So gold, that's potentially a standalone project too, which can bring some cash flow to the company.
Funding, it's typically our shareholders and local brokers here have always been very supportive because we get out and get the work done. Okay. We have a question from Daniel here. Would you be considering spin-off of some projects that might not fit less or more in the portfolio or for cash generation or anyways, any thoughts in that direction? We're here to make money, so we're happy to do all of the above. I guess the goal is, let's try and make a discovery. If a project doesn't work, we've got something of quality to move on to. But in between, if someone came along and said, "We'd like to joint venture," we're more than happy to speak to them. We're happy to do that.
If we make a discovery, then everything needs another home because that's what we'll be concentrating on.
Okay. Maybe one comment here. Do you believe that you qualified your gallium asset as being maybe a sleeper here? Can you elaborate a bit more on gallium, not just about what it does, but actually maybe price compared to gold or something else? I feel in this sphere, there's a lack of understanding of those specific elements. So maybe telling a little more about why, for example, 53 g/tin in PPM is a lot in gallium or so on.
We've done a bit of a scan. There's limited information, but we've done a little bit of a scan around the place. There are no gallium-only mines, so it always comes out as a byproduct.
They're pulling it out at similar sort of grades and only getting 10%-15% recoveries. We're hoping, seeing ours is in sand. It's already oxidized. It's in a different mineral system. It's not locked into aluminum and bauxite. There's a good chance, or we hope, that our met's going to get a lot more of that out. Our mining is a lot cheaper because we're just digging sand. I guess I always looked at the tin price. Tin was $8,000. It was like $0.5-$ 0.10 in your mobile phone. When it was into $30,000 a ton of tin, it's $0.30 in your phone. Gallium's the same. It's $1 million a ton. That goes a long way when you look at the circuitry and computer chips.
If you want AI and quantum computing, you've got to have gallium in your chips. The same as lasers and LEDs. So the price can go up a long way without really making an effect because there's not a great deal amount of it. The global market is about 1,000 tons. They think it's going to grow to about 2,500 tons. But the world pretty well stops if China turns a tap off. I guess that's the exciting part because they're threatening to do that. And they have been threate ning. And they're using more themselves internally now.
Okay. Perfect. And lastly, in all of your projects, can you just reinstate which one of the priorities and where do you spend most of your capital?
At the moment, it's been the gallium. And then we've moved on to our gold and our Esperance Lort River.
That's where our concentration's been because the other two are not granted yet. So until they're granted, we can't spend money on them. So basically, we'll see what the gold results are. We'll see what the drilling results. That sort of tells us where we go next. And I suspect gold, the way it is, we'll be back doing more gold drilling in the short-term because there'll be a lot of value there. And that'll be happening on the side as th ey're advancing the gallium forward.
Perfect. And Eric has a question also. How deep were the holes drilled on the Lort River nickel copper project? And were massive sulfides encountered?
That's what everyone wants to know. The holes are about 230 m deep on about a 60-degree angle. So the conductors sit between 100 to 400 m. So we're intersecting them down there.
We haven't confirmed or denied if we've hit sulfides, and we're not going to. We've just told the market that we've intersected the conductors, and you have to wait for results. It's too hard if you start putting pictures out of what you've hit and saying ASX and all the regulatory bodies here jump down on you. So we've just said nothing. We don't want to spook the market. We try and play the real game and do the work. We're not trying to mine the market.
Perfect. Well, thank you very much for that. That concludes your half an hour period. Any closing word while I invite the next panelist, please?
I think Mario's just helped us list on the Frankfurt Exchange. So I think that's happening tomorrow. So I'll be at Xetra for Terrain there. But I'll really appreciate it.
I'm open to questions or emails if anyone wants to reach out to me. I'm always happy to talk. So thank you.
All right. Well, we are very, very pleased to have you for the first presentation, Justin, of your company here at the 14th IIF. Thank you for joining us. And we will be looking forward to the results and following your company with great interest.
All right. Thanks so much. Good one. Thank you. Have a good evening.
Okay. And with now Justin just done with his presentation, w e have Mr. Passalacqua, John, that is returning here to tell us the update. But it is not John today's surprise. We have Lindsay here joining as a moderator for the first time. And John, we don't see your camera or we don't hear you yet.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, I can John, and if your camera should be on. All right. So everyone, welcome Lindsay for her first time here joining our team at the IIF. And have a good presentation, guys. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Julie.
Hello, John. Welcome, welcome. Yes, as noted, this is my first go here. And I'm excited to hear more about all of your companies. So I want to give just a little brief introduction for you, John. You're with First Phosphate. And this is a mineral development company fully dedicated to extracting and purifying phosphate for the production of cathode-active material for the lithium-iron phosphate battery industry. So first off, welcome to you. And the floor is yours, John. You tell us all about your company.
Yeah. Thank you, Lindsay. I guess we have half an hour in total, including questions. Is that correct? Okay. Great. So does everybody see my screen here? Yes? Lindsay, you see my screen?
We can see it.
Okay. Perfect. So as Lindsay was saying, we are First Phosphate. We are phosphate from the Saguenay deposit, which is apt for creating purified phosphoric acid for the lithium-iron phosphate battery industry. So right up front, it's very important to understand that we bypass entirely the fertilizer markets. We have nothing to do with the fertilizer markets. They're a good space. They are a commoditized space. We're in really the high-purity phosphate business for lithium-iron phosphate battery. And that's where we believe that the biggest growth and the biggest profit margin will be because it's a classic constrained commodity, like what you've heard from some of the other speakers today. Okay. So LFP battery. This is really important to understand because the market has missed this. Just read this figure here. This was as of 2023.
Two-thirds, okay, two-thirds of the batteries coming out of China, two-thirds of the batteries produced on the planet. Now it's even higher. It goes into the 70%. Our lithium-iron phosphate battery industry. I know that the entire Western world is still very much focused on nickel, manganese, and cobalt. And there's definitely a place for nickel, manganese, cobalt batteries that's in high-performance vehicles. But for everything else, economical vehicles, transportation, energy storage, robotics, data center applications, everything is moving to LFP battery. Why? Because it is safer. It is more cost-effective. And it is now the battery of mass adoption for those types of industries. It's really important to understand this. I think that's fundamental. I don't think that the markets have, just as of yet in the West, shifted off of NMC onto the understanding of what LFP battery really is.
That it's going to be all the growth in the future in the next decade. Very few companies that you can invest in an LFP. We are one of these companies in North America, really onshored ability to supply in North America and Europe. So as I was saying, right, lithium-iron phosphate battery, the vertical of small electric vehicles is only 7.1% LFP battery. Public transportation is 11%. You go to China. Every single public transportation is all electrified. It's all electrified on LFP battery. There's a telecom communications perspective as well for telecom towers that are away from grids. Excuse me here. I lost my presentation. Then here's a big chunk, really. This is the battery storage, whether this be battery storage units in houses once you buy an electric vehicle, or whether it be some form of massive grid storage, whether that be solar.
As you know, there's a lot of this in Germany, wind. There's a lot of this as well in Germany and Europe, northern parts of Europe, also hydroelectric. So really important battery for massive energy storage. This is our phosphate. As you can see it, it's found on surface. It's kind of the white brittle stuff that you see in the middle of hard rock. Almost all of this is fully convertible into purified phosphoric acid, which goes into making LFP cathode-active material for LFP batteries. There's already going to be a big shortage of phosphate in North America by 2037. We won't even have enough of the sedimentary phosphate that makes fertilizer, let alone anything to make LFP battery. This deposit is specific to being able to make a lot of LFP battery, and it does not compete with food production, which is very, very important. It's completely green.
The byproducts that come from the development of the phosphoric acid, gypsum byproduct are fully recyclable. This is the deposit. We're now into the PEA stage. PEA has been completed. We've drilled down only to about 200-250 m. Okay. So we're massively opened at depth in Russia, where these other types of igneous volcanic mines for phosphate are found. And in northern Finland, they go down to about a kmeter, kmeter and a half. We've only gone down 200-250 m. So just on surface here, it's a two and a half kmeter pit. Just on what we have here, we have 23 years of phosphate as qualified per the PEA. And that would produce enough phosphate for 350 gigawatt hours of LFP batteries.
To give an indication of that, 350 gigawatt hours of LFP batteries would be enough to electrify 50% of all the vehicles being produced in North America. That's between North America, sorry, between Canada, U.S., and Mexico. It would be similar in Europe. A massive, massive deposit. What we've just shown here is 23 years. It could go on for many, many, many, many more years. We've already been able to create the purified phosphoric acid together with the industry leader out of Belgium, Prayon. They've taken our feedstock, and they've been able to create purified phosphoric acid of it. We're completely proven into the downstream. The really important thing about this is that the NPV is CAD 2.1 billion. The payback on the mine is 2.9 years. The IRR is 37%. Our strip ratio is also very low, 1.5 to 1.
But the real big pièce de résistance here is our location in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec. To give everybody an understanding, everybody knows, obviously, the St. Lawrence. Come down into the St. Lawrence. You've got Quebec City here. You go a little further down here into Montreal. Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean is a very industrialized area of Quebec. It's the fifth largest population center. And it's two hours north by automobile from Quebec City, which many of you probably know and probably have visited. One of the most beautiful cities in North America. Now, why is this important? So this whole area of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean is really Rio Tinto Valley. It's where the bauxite comes in from various countries and is then processed at all the hydroelectric dams that you have between this big lake here, Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, and the fjord. There's a lot of hydroelectric power in there.
Rio Tinto is taking up the bauxite and is basically processing the bauxite into aluminum. The aluminum then travels kind of from here, which is an intermodal station, truck and rail, and then makes it all the way down to the heart of North America to build vehicles, aircraft, appliances, whatever it might be. So a very strategic, important area of North America here. In fact, we have a NATO base here that's been protecting the valley since the Second World War. And also a very important forestry region in this area. Now, the forestry is slowly dying for different reasons. The forestry industry, the aluminum industry is strong, but it's less and less jobs every year. So the whole region needs a new type of development, industrial development, because it's very industrialized, and you cannot lose that. And there's a lot of great suppliers in the area.
There's also a lot of labor force in the area, which are things that people don't think of, but they're very important. You go find that up in James Bay and Hudson Bay on the lithium mines. We've got all that here within 50 km. To give you an idea, the mine here, Bégin-Lamarche , the phosphate mine, is at 50 km from Alma, which is one of the largest population basins in Quebec. It's where Rio Tinto has all their infrastructure. We're 60 km from the intermodal station rail to truck, truck to rail. Then we're about 70 km from the deep-sea port of Saguenay, where we will be shipping part of our mine stock over to Europe for an offtake agreement, which we have, which is now definitive.
And the other part of our feedstock will be going here to the port of Saguenay, where we will be producing or upgrading the phosphate into phosphoric acid at the port of Saguenay. And this is all within basically a radius of 50 km, which is exceptional for industrial minerals, critical minerals. You just don't find that anymore in population basins. So you can sure as hell be sure that we have the logistics to be able to build this project out, logistics that make sense. The valley area here, it's starting going up here. There's the hills. There's some other phosphate found up here in the hills, but they're pretty much mountains. It's a little bit difficult to get up here, but we're sitting in the valley. We're sitting right near the infrastructure. Couldn't be better located next to infrastructure, rail, and port, etc. Okay.
Now this is our plan. Obviously, at Bégin-Lamarche , which is the phosphate mine, we plan to extract and concentrate the phosphate. We get the highest purity phosphate in the world, by the way, the highest percentage of P2O5, which is measurement of phosphate. That's important because it then allows us to do it in this sector here and create the phosphoric acid, which would be our second transformation. Obviously from there, we transform into LFP cathode-active material. We've been able to do all three of these projects already in pilot and in bench scale. The mine already has been able to be proven out to make the phosphoric acid. We need to make iron phosphate, lithium-iron phosphate as well. We've got a very good series of partners that get us down the road.
We've got GKN Hoeganaes, which is the world's largest producer of atomized iron in the world. And they will be taking in one of our secondary recoveries from the mine, which is magnetite, and sending that back to us in the form of powder to make LFP together with the phosphate. We've also got significant offtake here on the mine side. We've offtaken about 25% of the mine. We do not want to offtake more of that. That's just enough to make us bankable. We have about 30%-40% phosphoric acid already offtaken. We will not be offtaking more than that because we need it for our own production, but it's enough again to make us bankable.
We have sizable offtakes here in the iron phosphate and lithium-iron phosphate that we're currently in the process of finalizing, as well as our small-scale commercial plant, which should be beginning here shortly. Okay. Really important to de-risk the project. Really important to have good community relations, good relationships with partners. We mentioned already Prayon of Belgium, American Battery Factory in Nevada, which needs 40,000 tons of LFP CAM. We're under MoU with them. Export-Import Bank of the United States is willing to provide the capital on equipment. It is a division of Glencore. They're willing to provide the sulfuric acid that we need to make the phosphoric acid. Very strong relationship, collaboration agreement with our indigenous partners who are also in the process of looking to make an investment in the company at this time. Relationships with Government of Quebec.
Discussed GKN Hoeganaes, the largest atomizer of iron powder in the world, and then a number of local and international partnerships supporting our developments. Our timelines have always been met and beat. We're very proud of that. The next stages that we're moving into here would be our usability study, and we're slowly also just finalizing all of our strategic relationships that have been built over the years. Luckily, luckily for everybody on this call, the world of phosphate is not as much of a darling as gold or uranium or some of the other critical minerals like tungsten that are out there. The understanding around phosphate is on its way. It's coming.
If you look at a little piece that was put up by Benchmark Minerals, as well as together with Visual Capitalist, the second most efficient and needed product or material for the battery industry is now phosphate after copper. So phosphate ranks ahead of the requirement for lithium, the requirement for nickel, the requirement for everything else other than copper. Obviously, copper is still the biggest because of all the wiring in vehicles and in energy storage devices. But after that, it's phosphate. We are a CAD 30 million market cap company with CAD 20 million invested. We have been meeting, exceeding, beating all expectations. And I'm pretty sure that we're the next project that is going to go live here in Quebec. We're scheduled to be in production, if everything goes well, on a very aggressive timeline by 2029. So still lots of good room to come here.
One thing I did not mention was that our PEA value, we are trading at 1% of our PEA value with definitive offtakes in place. I mean, it's a very big disconnect. There's a very big opportunity there. Have a look, dive behind our management team, which I'll show you in a second, and if you believe that this project will move forward, the valuation here is extremely compelling. 1% of PEA value on a project that could be in production here within four years, and a project that has an offtake in place and significant downstream ability as well. What I was just talking to you about there was the mine. We're not even talking about the value added to phosphoric acid and then the value added to LFP chem. What I'm really proud of our board and our management is really that we're a very multifunction team.
We see ourselves more as a backward integrated technology company, backward integrated into the mine than we do see ourselves as a mining company. The material and technology for us, it's all a big blend. So for that reason, our board and our management is very diverse. We have strong business leaders. We have strong leaders in the mining sector, strong leaders in the technology sector, and strong global leadership as well in critical minerals. That's very important that we have all three. So based on that, I'd like to stop here, and I'd like to maybe answer any questions that the audience might have. And I thank you very much for giving me the time today.
Thank you, John, so much. That was actually a really great presentation and so full of so many insights. So thank you for that for sure.
Just a couple of quick ones that have come in. What strategic advantages does First Phosphate anticipate with the projected annual production of 900,000 tons of high-grade phosphate concentrate over the next 23-year mine life?
What strategic advantages?
Yes.
Okay. So I think we discussed that a little bit in the presentation. You have to remember the mine, the 900,000 tons was not just something that came based on a mineral deposit. It was something that was decided upon strategically. So 900,000 tons, the way it divides up is we have offtake in place between 200,000 and 400,000 tons. 200,000 is definitive. And then another portion is sort of variable. But 400,000 tons would be for others, okay, of which most of that is already offtaken. And so that's important to make us bankable. The 500,000 tons goes into the phosphoric acid plant.
That would be our own phosphoric acid plant, which would allow us to make 190,000 tons of phosphoric acid, which then allows us to make cathode-active material. And so the mine has been 100% right-sized for this project. That's number one. Number two, you have to understand that this material, this phosphate material, which is the world's highest purity anywhere found on the planet, is perfect for making phosphoric acid. So basically, there's almost a 95% conversion ratio in terms of the apatite that comes from the mine, apatite being phosphate concentrate, and the production of purified phosphoric acid. You do not get that in sedimentary deposits. Sedimentary deposits, maybe 10%, 15%, 20% can be scaled up, depends on the deposit. So basically, we are going to be producing enough phosphoric acid for 10 sedimentary mines and without the cumbersome need to be in the fertilizer industry.
So fully focused on LFP battery. So it's a very strategic reserve going directly after technology. Never been done in the world before. Currently, there are some igneous phosphate mines that are being used to produce purified phosphoric acid that goes mostly into the food industry, goes into things like freezer burn, shrimp, water, water treatment, Coca-Cola, for instance, soft drinks, goes into paints, goes into fire retardants and all this stuff. But very little of it goes into LFP battery. It's the same type of materials. The purified phosphoric acid will go into these foods and industrial uses. It will also go into LFP battery, but we will be producing just for LFP battery exactly what the industry needs to be able to grow inside of the West and North America.
Okay. That makes sense. Manuel had a question.
Can you tell us more about the M&A activities in the market? Is there more coming?
M&A activities with regards, I guess, to phosphate and to LFP battery, or is it just in regards to critical minerals in general?
Let's cover both of those just in case.
Okay. So there's been some bit of M&A activity inside the phosphate world. If you see as of late, there's been some phosphate mines that have changed hands in Brazil. There's been some that have changed hands or in the process of changing hands in Australia. That's a typical process that the phosphate producers will buy and sell. But again, that's mostly based on fertilizer. There's nothing out there based on LFP battery yet.
I would assume that as soon as the LFP battery, which is starting hot and heavy here in the Western world, as soon as there becomes a local supply chain, which I believe is only months away, I'm sure there will be some of these in the Western world. The only problem is that there isn't really any assets that can produce a lot of purified phosphoric acid. I only know really of First Phosphate that can do that in an economical fashion, in a fashion that is real and that can actually be implemented. So I mean, phosphate, take a really, really, really, really hard look at this. It is even more rare than gold. It is even more rare than lithium.
You'll say, "Well, phosphate, it's all over the place." It is for fertilizer, but phosphate that can make a lot of purified phosphoric acid for LFP battery is extremely rare. You could put it up there on the same level as some of these other very rare critical minerals like, to give for comparison, value of tungsten, gallium, or whatever else. You just will not find the deposits, the hard rock deposits to be able to make a lot of purified phosphoric acid. You won't find many of them in the Western world. And the ones that you do find will be very far away from any kind of infrastructure to make them at all viable. We have all of that with the First Phosphate project at Bejean-La-Marche and in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area.
Congratulations on that advancement of Bejan-LaMarch to vaulting into first place as quality deposits, very well located. Eric is actually saying the BAPE, the BAPE should not be an issue at the Falco one in any of your projects. What is the local population and how is that favorable to the project?
Yeah. What he's referring to there at BAPE, c'est le BAPE, Bureau des Audiences Publiques sur l'Environnement. It's a special type of environmental passage that you have to go through just in Quebec. At the end of all your studies, you have to go through and you have to satisfy the population of the project. It's not a be-all and end-all, the BAPE. It's not implementable, but it is very important symbolically. It's like a moral suasion tool, and it's one to make sure that everyone's happy locally with what's going on.
We worked very hard with the local community in terms of local acceptability. We've got an agreement with the CMAX, which is the association of all the suppliers, the large heavy equipment suppliers, which there are many in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. So that's very helpful. We work very hard in conjunction with all the local organizations, the local municipalities. We've had the local municipalities send letters to support our megawatt demand, very much supporting the project, and like I said, we have the large collaboration agreement with our local indigenous community that supports us 100%, so all of that does help the BAPE. Also, remember, we're only 900,000 tons of phosphate. It sounds like it's small and big at the same time. It's really the perfect size.
So the mine has been right-sized to be able to meet local requirements, kind of a Goldilocks scenario, not too hot, not too cold, and at the same time to be able to meet industrial requirements for profitability and all of that. So we're quite happy. We've done so much consultation already locally that we're very well known. I mean, sure, things can change as you move along, but we're always very careful to be very much in sync with the local communities. And like I said, that area there of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, it's a pristine area. The people love their area. They work hard and they know how to live also with industry because it's been industrialized for a number of years. And they're also looking for new industry. They desperately need new industry.
For instance, in the area where our mine is going to be located, there's been a lot of job loss from the forestry industry. And people are, I can tell you how many resumes I get every day telling people, "We'll be ready soon. We'll be ready soon. You'll be able to apply soon." People are very, very supportive and very friendly.
Great answer. So when will the feasibility study be done? And where do you see the First Phosphate in three years?
Yeah. So the feasibility study needs to begin this year at some point. That includes all the environmental studies and all the regular feasibility studies that go along with it. That's a process which we think will take us between 18 and 24 months.
At the same time, near the tail end of that, we'll be working on our EPCM to try and get the mine into place by 2029. It's a very aggressive timeline, but we're working hard. We're very aggressive to date. At first, we were told we were crazy, then we were told, "Oh, okay, you're lucky," and then we were told that it's working, and then we were told that we're an example for other companies to follow as well, so now there's a lot of pressure on us to continue that trajectory. Because again, we see ourselves as a technology company. We don't see ourselves as a traditional mining company for gold or what it might be. We have a technological material here. We have to get it to market as soon as possible.
We have to be able to work with a convention, and we have to be able to break convention, and we have to be able to be forward-looking and look at the future, what are the requirements of the future, and follow our own trajectory.
Well, let's talk about the vertical integration strategy then. From mining to LFP, what are the main technical and logistic challenges anticipated in scaling up the pilot to commercial production?
Yeah. First thing to understand is I'm not a big believer in hype or baloney around non-commercial technology. Everything that we've done to date has been based on commercial technology, meaning that if it's a pilot or a bench study and it's not out there in the real world, we just don't do it, okay? Because you don't know how long that's going to take to bring to market.
So that's why we've chosen our partners wisely. Prayon, the world's largest producer of purified phosphoric acid. They have already given us access to the technology to make purified phosphoric acid, to make merchant-grade phosphoric acid, and ultimately purified phosphoric acid. That's technology that's been out there for 70 years. It's produced all over the world day in, day out. So it's not an experiment. This is where we're very lucky in phosphate. We've got that industrial experience behind us. With GKN Hoeganaes, he's making the iron powder and having access to 400,000 tons of that iron powder, which can make over a million tons of LFP. We've got that. So all of these are large companies that are producing. They're supporting us. They want to grow their sales. They're behind us.
All of our bench and pilot, really, and moving into small-scale commercial is not a difficult process. It's a capital-related process. We're going small. Our first step on all of this stuff is to go into small-scale commercial. We're doing that with our iron phosphate plant here, hopefully in the next few months. And so it's all based on processes that are out there in the real world. So there's just zero technology risk, right? I do not believe in having technology risk around the table. There's already enough business risk out there as it is, let alone risk in a technology that is not proven. So yeah, we're all 100% proven technology right through the supply chain that we're creating.
Okay. One more question for you, John. Do you think you will be or do you think there will be an overtaken on that way to production?
That's what Manuel's asking us. Do you think you will be overtaken on that way to production?
I think he's saying, will the company be overtaken over, or will there be an opportunity for the company on the way to production? Look, I believe, especially in these very critical mineral type of projects, I got to take that football. We're talking American football here. We're not talking European football, and I got to drive that football down the field, and I got to go for the touchdown, and in the meantime, if somebody wishes to have discussions on partnering or taking over the company, well, of course, we are business people. We're going to have those discussions. But it's got to be done right. We're not going to leave our community out there in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean hung out to dry. It would only be with very, very large players.
As you see, there's already very large players at the table with First Phosphate. Again, right now, we're thinking of getting into production. We're thinking of working very hard. We're thinking of making this happen. And if somebody wants to take us out at the 10-yard line, the 20-yard line, the 30-yard line, well, that's fine. But we're running this into the end zone if we have to. Well said. I love that analogy. So that is all the time we have. John, it has been such a pleasure to learn about your company. And I can't wait to actually hear more insights coming down the pipeline. Well, that's great. And a pleasure to meet you too today. Lin dsay did such a good job.
Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll see you soon for sure.
Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.
You too. Bye-bye. Thank you, Lindsay. Thank you, Joan. Up next is Carsten Schölzki, the CEO of tick Trading Software AG. And yeah, he's already starting sharing the screen. So yeah, Carsten, the stage is yours.
Perfect. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to provide you with an overview of our company today, tick Trading Software AG. We specialize in the B2B sector, offering software as a service solutions. And our core service encompasses stock exchange access systems tailored for banks and financial intermediaries. The suite includes advanced trading platforms, comprehensive risk management tools, direct exchange access, as well as robust compliance and reporting solutions. I am Carsten Schölzki, and I have the honor of serving as the CEO of tick TS since the beginning of 2020. Currently, our team consists of 35 dedicated professionals, and our fiscal years extend from October 1st to September 13th.
Beyond my responsibilities at tick-TS, I'm also an active member of the Expert Advisory Board at the Düsseldorf Stock Exchange. Prior to joining tick-TS, I held the position of the CTO at the Hamburg-based fintech company Figo and was the Manager at PayPal, focusing on product development for the German market. Our office is located at Düsseldorf, Germany. In our last financial year, we processed over 14 billion transactions through our systems. I'm proud to highlight that our systems maintained an operational availability exceeding 99.99%. Now, let's share a brief history of our company. tick-TS was established in 2002. By 2006, we transitioned into a stock corporation known in German as Aktiengesellschaft or AG. Significant milestones occurred in 2017 when we conducted our IPO. Notably, this IPO was executed without any capital increase, demonstrating our strong financial health and stability.
One of the most distinctive features of our corporate structure is outlined in our articles of association. According to this document, we are required to distribute 100% of our distributable net profit to our shareholders. This policy is quite rare in Germany, emphasizing our commitment to returning value to our customers, to our investors. It's important to note that any amendment to this clause requires a 75% majority at the annual general meeting. Given the current share distribution, where no single shareholder owns more than 25% of tick-TS, a change to this policy is highly improbable. Our key shareholders are HSBC pension funds and the big private investor. Since our inception, we have raised an initial capital of EUR 1 million and have distributed EUR 23 million in dividends to date.
This consistent financial performance and our clear focus on shareholder interest have been pivotal in our successful positioning in the market. We take pride in our ability to deliver solid returns to our investors, reinforcing their trust and confidence in our operations. To give you a clearer picture of how we operate as a company, let me walk through an overview of our services. Each of these services is fully customizable and can be tailored to meet specific needs. I've distilled our offerings into six key services, which are displayed on this slide. Let me dive into each one step by step. For institutions with securities business, our TBMX Trading Suite offers a sophisticated trading platform designed by and for heavy traders. This suite is a popular choice among nearly all of our clients. Now, you might wonder what I mean by heavy traders.
We categorize heavy traders as day traders who engage in trading far exceeding the typical 50-80 orders per day seen on normal or mid-range trading. These heavy traders implement their strategies throughout a single trading day and sometimes they even hold positions across multiple days. A common trait among them is the execution of large volumes of orders, often in varying directions. They require robust functionalities to ensure compliance with regulations, especially in activities like short selling, for example, and they need comprehensive tools to maintain an extensive overview of the market and their portfolios. Additionally, our service caters to liquidity providers, whether they are traditional market makers or serve in a specialized role like the German designated sponsor. Of course, we support both manual and algorithmic trading functionalities in this area. Our white label terminal suite is a streamlined version of our professional trading front end.
It is designed to operate seamlessly across a diverse range of platforms, specifically tailored to meet the needs of the more demanding end customers, essentially the clients of our clients. This suite combines simplicity with sophistication, ensuring accessibility without compromising on functionality. The TBMX risk suite is an easy-to-connect pre-trade risk management tool that seamlessly integrates with our trading operations. It continuously monitors the entire order flow based on risk param that you can configure according to your specific needs. Imagine managing a diverse team of traders. Naturally, some of them are more experienced than others, and with the risk suite, you have the flexibility to tailor trading permissions. For instance, you can set specific restrictions for your junior traders, allowing them to engage in trading activities with reduced risk compared to your more seasoned senior traders.
This feature ensures that your trading environment remains safe and controlled, aligning with your overall risk management strategy. Our Compliance Monitor is a sophisticated post-trade monitoring system designed to scrutinize incoming order flows for any signs of market manipulation. This system adheres to the stringent requirements set forth by European and German regulatory bodies, such as ESMA and BaFin. It is primarily utilized within the compliance departments of our clients to ensure regulatory adherence. Currently, we are in the process of enhancing the Compliance Monitor to also recognize regulations set by the new German MiCA rules. This update will extend its capabilities to include the trading of cryptocurrencies. Then we have our market data suite. This offers streamlined access across both domestic and international securities market data.
This powerful tool is designed for our customers, primarily banks, who can utilize this data directly or provide it as a valuable resource to their own clients. This suite ensures that all users have the timely and accurate information they need to make informed trading decisions. We have all the interfaces. Our interfaces consist of APIs and other connection types that operate without a specific content. These interfaces facilitate the seamless transfer of all the data and connect to various markets and brokers, allowing comprehensive control over the entire order flow. Rather than requiring an institution or bank to establish connections with each individual marketplace, we provide a single consolidated connection, such as from the core banking system to our platform. This simplifies access, enabling the customer to tap into all available connections through just one gateway.
Because banks typically possess ample financial resources, but often lack sufficient project resources, and direct connections to all marketplaces would necessitate continuous project setups for every technical adjustment required by the marketplaces, which occur once or twice a year. By partnering with us, banks can bypass these repetitive and resource-intensive tasks. You can think of our service like a multi-plug adapter. You plug it once, and you instantly gain access to a whole bouquet of connections that you no longer need to manage individually. Additionally, our web service API provides a tailored solution for financial service providers and brokers who seek to develop their own trading platforms. Let's have a look at our customers. We serve a diverse client base that includes over 60 financial intermediaries and banks. While I'm unable to read all our clients today, I can share a few notable examples you can see here.
This includes prestigious institutions like HSBC, UniCredit, Comdirect, and Trade Republic. If you ever traded with these entities, there is a good chance that your transactions were facilitated through our systems. The fact that these well-known financial institutions rely on our solutions is a testament to the quality and efficiency of our products. We take great pride in providing speedy, fast support to our customers, ensuring their trading activities are conducted smoothly and successfully. Displayed here is the trajectory of our net profits since 2010. I'd like you to draw your attention to the shaded bar representing the 2020-21 financial year. This indicates a special effect due to extraordinary income during this period. Please keep this in mind as I will come back to it later. In the last two financial years, our net profits experienced fluctuations, primarily due to a significant investment in our software.
This investment, initiated in the 2021-2022 financial year, spans a total of 24 months and affects three financial years. Our strategic decision to enhance our software underscores our dedication to innovation and commitment, maintaining long-term competitiveness in the market. While this investment temporarily impacts our net profits, we are confident that it will fortify our market position and foster sustainable growth over the long-term. A key aspect of our business model is the stability provided by our revenue structure, with over 90% being recurring. Notably, a third of this recurring revenue is trade-dependent, which means it's directly influenced by market volatility. During periods of heightened trading activity, our trade-dependent revenues increase. During periods of lower trading activity, our trade-dependent revenues decrease.
This blend of stable recurring income and responsive trade-dependent revenue creates a robust foundation for our financial growth, and our strategy effectively capitalizes on market opportunities while ensuring a solid and predictable revenue stream, and this positions us well for both current and future market conditions. Let's have a look at our share price. The development of the tick-TS share over the past few years shows various distinctive phases. During the coronavirus period, we recorded an increase in load-dependent revenues, in particular due to the high volatility on the stock markets. The challenging market environments led to increased trading volumes, which had a positive impact on our results. At the same time, there were negative interest rates in savings accounts that led people to the share market, and suddenly the typical cautious conservative Germans were recognizing that there is a share market.
Additionally, fintechs with easy accessible trading solutions were coming up. In the 2021 financial year, a special market can be seen in the chart, which indicates an extraordinary one-off income that I already mentioned a couple of slides ago. These extraordinary proceeds led to a disproportionately high dividend payout and had a corresponding impact on the share price. Another significant event was the share split that we carried out as part of a capital increase from company funds. The stock split resulted in the number of shares issued doubling from around 1 million to 2 million, and thus also the share price halving. I would like to ask you to take both of these factors into account when analyzing our share price performance. And that's what I wanted to show you today. Thanks for your attention, and now I look forward to answering your questions.
Carsten, thank you so much. We already have a couple of questions in the chat, so yeah, very good, so if you look at sales over the past few years, you can see there has been a decline, or at least it has been stagnated, and have you lost important customers, or how do you plan to grow in the future?
Yeah, sales is not so easy, especially if we have to handle, if we have to deal with big institutions, with big banks. It takes sometimes years until you get a signed contract with them, or you get a contract signed, but you don't get any real project running, so yes, it's difficult to get new customers, and we are constantly in conversation with new customers. Right now, I'm talking with two probably new customers, but I can't really promise when there will be new customers for us.
So this is very difficult for our prognosis. And we lost a couple of not-so-significant smaller customers in the last couple of years, but it was not so bad. But it's like the normal fluctuations. We are very stable with our big customers that we have, and we are usually so deep into the system of our customers that it's very difficult for them to get rid of us. And but yes, getting new customers is difficult. And maybe one example that probably one or two of the listeners here can recognize: we announced about two years ago a strategic partnership, for example, with Baader Bank. But there was just one project we made with them so far, because it's one step to have a partnership, and then another step that might take some time to get the next step with them and making a project with them together.
I have some very nice conversations with new opportunities that we have, but I can't promise anything.
Okay. And has the Booster Program officially concluded, as suggested by the annual report, referenced as the beginning of the calendar year? And if not, what are the remaining milestones as criteria for its completion?
We as tick-TS, we finished it, so we are complete. But it's depending on the first customer, the pilot customer, when this customer is rolling it out. It's not rolled out yet. If so, then there would be a special announcement for this. I expect the rollout happening in the next two months, but I can't dictate our customer what the timeline is. Right now, he's already in a friends-and-family phase, so I assume that we will hold the timeline with the next two months.
But actually, with our project, we are already done. Of course, we have some typical supports that we do, but the project from our perspective is com pleted.
Okay. And what are the specific projected costs associated with the Booster Program for the current financial year, 2024-2025? And could you provide detailed breakdowns of the cost?
Of the cost? So I can't break down right now the costs we're expecting for them in the next couple of months and years. It will be kind of invisible in our normal maintenance costs we have, right? And also get paid for. So it's, yeah, it should be not too much, right? This is just maintaining what we have with all of our services that we have. There might be a little bit coming with when the rollout is completed.
Maybe there is a bug or so that a customer will find that we have to fix. But these are all minor things that are not really relevant.
Ok ay. And is there room for M&A in the future? And could there be, what could be potential targets?
I'm always open to M&A, and sometimes I talk to also opportunities there that might be possible for us. Right now, I have no specific targets in this direction. Yeah, but there are opportunities. No, but if there's an opportunity, I will take it. And yeah, and also I mentioned this in my presentation that we also, besides the booster, we are continuously working on enhancing the stuff we have. And right now, we're working, for example, on our Compliance Monitor to adjust it to the new MiCA rules for trading cryptocurrencies. And we're already talking with two potential customers with this.
So this is also something looking forward where we get new revenue from.
Okay. And can you tell us a bit more about your competitive environment? So what are direct competitors?
We are so special, so we don't have direct competitors. So the strongest, if you want to call it competitors, is if a very big bank makes a strategic decision, and think that they prefer to use some internal solutions or our solution, this could be a threat for us. But fortunately, the people who deal with our solution are so happy with it and prefer it so much to deal with our solution than their own one, that we are usually the winner. And if you talk about Bloomberg, it's not a competitor. They are just a different case, right? There's incredible Bloomberg compared to us.
If we look about smaller trading solutions, then they have their own niche, and we also have their own niche. So I don't have an yone who's really doing the same thing that we are doing.
And there's a question: why is your guidance for 2024-2025 so low? The booster expenses will be canceled in the current year. So why should the results actually rise compared to 2023-2024 due to the elimination of lower booster expenses? So basically, yeah, why is the guidance so low in that regard?
Yeah, so there are two things. So first, we have an increase of employees that we hired already last year, but we have to pay them the full year right now. This is actually the cost for people is the highest cost that we have in general. So this is something.
And yes, as I said, we lose some smaller customers that also have a small impact. And regarding the trades, that is a very significant part of our revenue. It's dangerous to predict too much there. So I'm pretty careful with my guidance.
And in what segments could you see additional potential in your software, and where could you add further add-ons to your software suite?
Yeah, the biggest thing right now is crypto, regarding trading with crypto in general, and also our compliance monitor with the crypto capabilities. And of course, selling what we did with booster also to other customers.
Okay. And how difficult is it to implement a crypto solution? It's probably completely different in terms of trading than stocks. Or basically, how expensive is it to make a crypto solution?
It's not so much. We actually already did it for one customer, but we can't announce it yet. So no, it's not so difficult. I think the biggest difference, from my point of view, are the API executions. If someone buys a full Bitcoin, for example, and usually the normal people, they have something, I don't know, five steps behind the decimal point, what they're buying or selling regarding a cryptocurrency, then you have a lot of partial transactions. And this is the biggest thing. One thing that we had an issue in the past was general things that come after the comma, but this we solved already.
Okay. And with the completion of the Booster Program, will there be space for other activities in the coming years?
Of course. So Booster was, yeah, was a little bit, so some of our developers had to work on Booster, so they are right now free for other stuff. But also in the last phase of Booster, the effort for our developers became lower and lower because we were also working together with an external partner. These were the external costs we had during this phase. So yeah, we can now focus more on the things that we do for other stuff than Booster. And the example I was just mentioning, like crypto, like the ECM for cryptocurrencies that we already are working on, is part of this, that we had more resources to do all the stuff that we want to do.
Okay. Looking at the time, we are already, the time is already up. So thank you so much, Carsten.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Thanks to all the people who asked the questions. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you. Yeah, from here on, Lindsay will take over with the Deutsche Rohstoff AG. Hello, hello. You know what? It's been such a fascinating morning and afternoon wherever you are. Thank you so much for everyone that's actually come online and checked out all these amazing companies. Up next, I'd like to welcome Deutsche Rohstoff. I believe I'm saying the company right, CEO Jan-Philipp Weitz. Am I saying your name right?
Perfect. Yes. Thank you very much.
Okay. You're here with us next, and your core business is the production of crude oil and natural gas in the U.S. Additionally, you are active in strategic and battery metals. Jan will present for about 20 minutes.
And then there are, you know, if there's any questions or wonders or anything, throw those in the comments section. In the question section, there's a question and answer, and then there's in the chat section. And we'll go through that after he's finished his presentation. So tell us about your company.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Can you see my screen?
I can, yes.
Very good. So yes, thank you very much. Thank you very much, everybody, for tuning in and listening to our presentation and the opportunity to present Deutsche Rohstoff here once again at the IIF. I think the last time we presented was in December, and a lot of things have happened again since. And I'm very happy to give you an update on various topics, especially some of the most relevant topics here over the last few months.
Just a very high-level entry for those that have not followed Deutsche Rohstoff closely in the past few years here. We are an oil and gas production company. We produce oil and gas in the U.S., and we have been doing that for a very long time by now. We started in 2010 drilling our first small vertical well in Colorado in the middle of the United States Rocky Mountains areas. And since then, we have really continued to build out our business. We are operating through a variety of subsidiaries in the U.S. We have four companies that are our core subsidiaries active in the U.S. And yeah, we have shown quite significant growth. And these are just some impressions of the white lands here in Wyoming and Colorado that we are operating in.
Our business is drilling oil wells, producing oil, and then selling the oil right off of these drilling locations that you can see here. We do have a little bit of midstream infrastructure in order to be able to sell our gas. But the majority of what we do is similar to what you can see in these pictures here. And we have really always been focused on what is called the Rocky Mountains region. So states like Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Utah have also been states in which we have been active in the past. We have, over time, which is not unusual for publicly listed oil and gas companies, divested several assets in different oil and gas fields and have reinvested the money in other oil and gas fields. So you always have to reinvent yourself to a certain extent, which is what we have been doing.
But at the same time, we have always been growing. As of today, we are producing 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. That is definitely not near the largest oil and gas producing companies in the world. But on the other hand, it's also taken us to a substantial and quite significant level in terms of revenue, which we are forecasting at EUR 210 million-EUR 230 million for 2024. And we also do have a lot of oil remaining in the ground. We have just, last week, published our reserve report, and I will touch on that in more detail here in a little bit. And that reserve report, again, attests that we have total oil and gas reserves of 54 million barrels of oil equivalent in the ground.
That's roughly 10 times of what we have produced last year, and that has in the past been a growing number. We are very optimistic that we can produce at these production levels and potentially increasing into the next decade. To give you a little bit of a perspective on the numbers and where we stand as Deutsche Rohstoff AG, we have not published our 2024 numbers yet, but we will be publishing our preliminary numbers in the near term here. After the first nine months of last year, we generated EUR 170 million of revenue and EUR 122 million in EBITDA. You can see on the bottom right here that our EBITDA and also our production growth, the 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent I mentioned earlier, have been continuously increasing since 2020 and the years before.
For this year, we are guiding EUR 160 million-EUR 180 million in EBITDA, this year being the 2024 final financials, which are about to be published here as preliminary numbers in the coming weeks, and then finally as fully audited financial statements in 2024 later in April. Oil and gas until this day is the key business driver. We do still have a critical metals portfolio. We have originally also been active in the metals and mining space, and that part of our business has become a little bit smaller over the years. But nonetheless, and I'll touch on that also, we are still engaged in a variety of metals businesses, and the most important one and the most valuable one being Almonty Industries, which is a Canada-listed and Australia-listed tungsten company. But oil and gas really is the main driver here.
99% of our revenue comes from oil and gas. And oil and gas, in our view, is going to be an extremely critical and important asset class or commodity class in the coming years here. As we all know, the world's energy demands are growing massively. I think we are at a primary energy demand of around 170,000 terawatts globally, and only 20% of that is electricity. And we are expecting 2%-3% growth of global energy demand. Therefore, all kinds of forms of energy are going to be extremely relevant. That's a very fundamental thesis also for our business. And we don't see oil and gas being replaced anywhere here in the near term just because of the sheer demand of energy and electricity and primary energy, especially that the world will need in order to power the global economies.
I will also touch on our share price here in the past six years here on the left-hand side or the past two years and two months on the right-hand side. You can see that our share price, this is a share price including dividend distributions, has performed very well. We are currently trading at around EUR 39.5 per share. We would obviously be happy if the share price would be trading higher, and we still do see a discrepancy here to our U.S. peer group. That's a topic that we have also in the past often talked about, but if you just look at the relative development here, especially in the last two years and the last five to six years here, it becomes very obvious that we have quite significantly outperformed our peer group on these charts here and just in the last few years.
I will touch today mainly on two key topics. The one is the reserve report that we have published earlier this month. And the other topic is our tungsten investment, Almonty Industries, which is a company in which we own 11% that has performed very well here in the last few months and also operationally performed very well here over the last half a decade managing through the tungsten industry. And I just want to talk a little bit more about that today too. Before I come to the tungsten side, a brief overview on our operations. Just to locate you again, we are active in oil and gas basins here in the U.S., in the Rocky Mountain regions. This is roughly the shape of Germany. And you can see the Powder River Basins where we're producing around 12,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day is our key focus area.
The DJ Basin in Colorado is the second focus area, and we are still producing around 3,000 barrels of oil per day here. If you zoom in, there's a lot of sticks and lines here on the map. But what is really important is those light blue areas. Those are the majority areas for our development, for our future development. All the production that we have today comes from these few blue sticks here. Those are also the sticks that basically represent the oil wells that are generating our existing proved and developed production. And as I will turn to the reserves now, what our reserves show you is how much oil is in the ground here on these areas. Those are the main areas combined with the Colorado assets that we have. How much reserves are in the ground, what future cash flows are to be expected.
Just to point that out before I turn to the reserve report, these areas here, not everything that you can see here, not all the potential is covered by the reserve report. For example, if you look at just this large block of acreage over here that we have that our subsidiary 1876 is going to develop, none of this acreage here that you can see, for example, is part of a reserve report because we are not close enough with the existing wells yet in order to be able to book what is considered proved or probable or in different language, P1 or P2 reserves. Therefore, even beyond the reserves report, we still see a lot of potential. But the reserve report obviously is kind of the most secure and most straightforward measure to look at here.
Our reserve report shows that we have, again, since last year, significantly increased the value of our reserves in the ground and also significantly increased the volume of reserves. So we are publishing a reserve report every year. At the end of every year, we have independent reserve auditors that audit the reserves in the ground in the various oil fields that we are active in. And they are doing that by looking at existing production, looking at the production from existing wells, and the offset production. And what you can see here is that the discounted value, I mean, they're looking at the production, maybe to take a step back, they're looking at the production. And what they are looking at is what is the future production that is expected from existing wells?
What is the future production that can be expected in the proved or in the probable category from wells that are still going to be drilled? What are the associated reserves? Therefore, also based on the NYMEX strip, the WTI price as it's predicted by the NYMEX futures trading house, what are the future reserves that can be expected? Those are, as it's common in the US oil and gas industry, being discounted. Two very important figures here are the PDP and the PUT and probable. The total discounted cash flows of all of our reserves based on the NYMEX strip on December 31st is a total number of $493 million. If you discount all of the future cash flows to January 1st of 2025, the PV of that number is $493 million. Last year, it was only $420 million.
We were able to grow that number significantly. Also, the total reserves, so the total millions of barrels of oil equivalent in the ground have increased from 43 million to 54 million. That's a 25% increase of total BOE in the ground, which is very important because it shows that despite the fact that we are producing a lot of oil, our reserve in the ground, so in simple terms, the tank in the ground is not getting smaller. It's actually getting bigger because we are expanding our footprint and therefore are expanding also the reserve base that we have. Another way to look at it is what is the total cash flow that we are expecting from produced developed reserves? Those are only the oil wells that are already producing today. That's around $562 million.
If we are looking at all the proved reserves, so not only the producing wells, but also the wells that we can drill in the future that are considered proved because they are so close to existing production that it's very, very clear and obvious what their future production and cost and cash flows are going to be. We can expect cash flow of up to $850 million. All of this is based on, as I mentioned, the WTI strip, the NYMEX type curve, which, as you can see here, is not a very aggressive forecast. So we are talking about the right light blue line.
All of our future cash flow forecasts in these reserves are based on this light blue line here, which represents an average of roughly $65 per barrel of oil over the next five years and a significantly lower average over the next 15-20 years. If you look at how our reserves have developed in the past, it's very impressive to see that in 2019 and obviously 2020, they were low. The total reserve value in the ground was at around $196 million, and that number has continued to grow, so we were at roughly $370 million at the year-end 2022 and 2021. And now we are approximately getting very close to a total reserve value of $500 million at this relatively low futures price, while at the same time, we have always continued to increase our production, so again, the same logic.
The increasing production has not reduced the reserves, but we have done what is very typical and important in oil and gas. We have replaced the produced reserve and even more so all the reserves that we have produced. We have overproportionately replaced and therefore have been able to grow production, grow cash flow, grow revenue, and at the same time, grow reserve value in the ground. If you look at this, even though it's a little bit more of a detailed table, but in some more detail here, a few highlights that are very important to point to is, as I mentioned, the future NPV discounted with 10% cash flow is sitting at roughly $493 million.
This also means that these reserves that we are showing here, and as I mentioned, not all of the potential wells on the map, but the reserves that we are showing here represent effectively $1 billion of future cash flow at the NYMEX type curve. So at roughly, on average, probably $65 of oil. If you look at the discounted numbers in two different scenarios, for example, at a high price scenario, if we are assuming the oil price was going to be $80 for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years, the discounted value here associated with that is already sitting at 780 million. So the discounted number would be sitting at 780 million, which is representative probably for 1.6 to 1.7 billion of future cash flow that would be possible from our existing reserves here.
I think also a very interesting number that I'll touch on in a second is the operating cash flow, the net cash flow from the proved developed reserves, because those are oil wells where we don't have to do any more investments other than the $9 million that we are showing here. That means that if we don't do anything and the oil price develops as is predicted by the WTI futures type curve, our existing production will already generate another $562 million of future cash flow, and this number here last year was at circa $460 million, so while we have actually in 2024 cash flowed almost $200 million from the oil wells, we have also reinvested around $180 million, but we have still been able to grow that number. It's similar as a similar logic for the BOE in the ground.
So we had last year, we had 19 million barrels of oil in the ground. We produced 5.5 million barrels, but still at the end of the year, even from the existing wells, we have now got 25 million barrels in the ground. We have cash flowed $200 million. We have invested the majority of that. But despite this fact, we have been able to grow the total expected cash flow and therefore also the discounted numbers. And as I mentioned, once again, as you can see on the map, there is significant potential beyond the reserve report. So we are very optimistic that we have a very long way to go here and can continue to drive our business and grow just on the basis of the existing reserves that we have here.
A very last look at the reserves will also show you if we look at our downside scenario where oil is only going to be $60 from here on, the gas price is $3, or our upside scenario where oil is going to be $80 and gas is $4, that will show you that even in this case, our existing wells, the ones that are already online where we don't have to invest anymore, will cash flow up to $470 million, and the free cash flow from the upside scenario will be up to $775 million, so a lot of future cash flow, even if we don't invest anymore, very important obviously for our shareholders, but very important also for our bondholders, a very cash flow strong business that we are running here.
As the second part of my presentation, and it's a shorter part, but I want to touch on it briefly also, is our tungsten investment that we have, Almonty Industries. Almonty Industries is a tungsten mining company that's listed on the ASX and TSX, so in Australia and Toronto, we have been a shareholder since 2014, since we divested our tungsten mine to the company. And we have been a very supportive shareholder, and we have been very impressed what the company has achieved here and what has not been an easy market for tungsten mining companies, but in recent years, really, the company has managed to get the Sangdong mine in Korea very close to production. The production start is expected in 2025, and Sangdong is not any mine. It's going to be the largest tungsten mine outside of China.
Tungsten, as a very, very critical metal, is going to be extremely important for the tungsten market. The project has been financed by the German KfW Bank here with a project loan, which does show how substantiated it is and what a strategically important project it is for the global tungsten economy. Deutsche Rohstoff holds roughly 11% here. The other large shareholders are the Plansee Group and offtaker from Austria and the CEO, Lewis Black, who has been driving this business here over the past years. There have been some significant news and milestones here really over recent months. Those that follow the story more closely will have seen that Almonty's share price has risen by more than 100% in the last three months here to $1.91. The final construction phase has started.
We have published a little bit of news on our side here also in December, kind of pointing to this and pointing to the big achievements and steps that Almonty has made here in the last few months. Then obviously, the whole situation has to a positive extent for Almonty. And certainly, the attention that Almonty has been receiving has escalated. There have been tariffs imposed on tungsten from the U.S., definitely raising awareness. China has continued to tighten its export controls. Almonty has, in a strategically very smart move, announced that they will remove their headquarters to the U.S. At the same time, more or less, they have also announced that there is a very I mean, it has been known before, but there is a very significant molybdenum deposit here.
This molybdenum deposit has received an offtake agreement here now with a very core and relevant group for 100% of the molybdenum, similar to a very strong offtake agreement that the company already has for the tungsten. That's also generated a lot of attention. Then obviously, the production start here in 2025 is highly anticipated and has led to the fact that the share price has developed very positively. I will go a few minutes beyond my 20 minutes here, if that's OK, because I have two or three slides to go. Then I'm very happy to answer some questions. Tungsten, just a very high-level look here in an extremely critical market.
I think the one thing that I want to point to is Almonty is going to produce up to 7% of the world's tungsten and potentially up to 40% of all of the tungsten in the world that is being produced outside of China once its mine is up and running fully in 2027. Another way to put it is Almonty is going to be the strategically most important tungsten mining company in the world outside of China. That obviously makes it a very valuable company. Tungsten is an extremely critical and by many governments deemed the most critical metal in the world. Last but not least, I want to touch on obviously Deutsche Rohstoff's investment in Almonty and what the value of our investment is.
If you look at the shares that we hold, which is roughly 30 million shares and a potential up to 8 million shares if we convert certain notes that we hold in Almonty, and you combine that also with the loans that we have given to Almonty, the total value of Deutsche Rohstoff's potential investment here or the total potential investment value is EUR 58 million euros as of today based on today's prices. The book value that we are carrying on our books on our balance sheet is circa EUR 30 million euros at the end of 2024. This very significant uplift in share price has obviously also significantly increased the mark-to-market value of Almonty, which is something that we are very happy to see. We feel it's very good that the market finally appreciates this value.
We don't think this value here that is representative of roughly €10-€11 per share in Deutsche Rohstoff shares is fully appreciated in our share price. But we also want to say, according to German GAAP, which is what we are using to do our accounting, the moves in the share price here, they are not something that will be visible in Deutsche Rohstoff's P&L, so in our Gewinn- und Verlustrechnung. And that is obviously something that we are not showing here because we are not valuing shares of the companies that we hold mark-to-market. But obviously, it does show that there is a significant hidden reserve or hidden value here on our balance sheet also as it stands right now with the current development here of Almonty.
But more importantly, obviously, the value of the company and the true value of the strategic asset and what the team has achieved here in Korea and in Sangdong definitely has become materialized a little bit more in the share price here. And at very last, I just want to touch on our stock again, our market capitalization right now at EUR 192 million. We have always been a dividend-paying company. EUR 1.75 is what we have paid last year. And we've always said we want to continue paying a dividend. We want to continue increasing our dividend. I think we are trading at relatively attractive multiples, obviously price-earnings ratio of three.
At the same time, we are always a little bit proud also to say that our trading volume definitely for the continuously reducing trading volumes of some of the stock exchange here in Germany is something that has been relatively stable and that certainly with EUR 440,000 per day is definitely very attractive. We also hope that that will obviously help to generate more traction for our share price and at the same time then also help us to further improve our metrics because as you can see, a price-to-book value ratio here of 0.9 and the mentioned price-earnings ratio of 3.2 are not what we want. We see there is a lot more potential in our company.
The fact that Almonty's value has risen so much has also demonstrated, I think, to the market that even beyond the oil and gas business, there is certainly some potential in our company. And we would be very happy if you follow us on this journey here and continue to follow us. And with that, I will close and leave the remaining six minutes for questions.
Very well done. So much informative information there. So thank you so much. One of the questions that has come in, and it actually is across the board for many companies, is given the geopolitical uncertainty across the world right now, and it's all over the media that we can see, what is some experiences that you've had dealing with the new administration? How are you navigating through all of that? Tell us a little bit about this.
Thank you very much. Yeah, that is obviously a question that's on the mind of many. In general, I will say we have been in the U.S. since 2010, and we have seen many administrations come and go. And with the start of the Biden administration, there was a certain fear that permitting would slow down and would be more difficult for oil and gas companies. It certainly has been for some. I think for us as a smaller company, we have been a little bit exempt there. And right now, obviously, with the new administration coming in, I think we feel it's positive that the administration is very pro oil and gas and pro business.
At the same time, obviously, the potential of a lot of development and a lot of drill, baby drill could in theory be a little bit of a risk for oil prices, which we understand obviously low oil prices make sense. But at the same time here, I think there is definitely ultimately the decision-making process determined by the private companies. If oil prices are too low, they're not going to invest much, so prices would rise. And vice versa, as prices are very high, many companies would go and invest. So long story short, I think we feel that the current administration is positive, that it's supportive for the oil and gas industry. And we feel like the oil price could very well be range-bound between $70 and $90 here for the next few years just because of the existing situation.
Right. OK. And then we also touched a lot on your Almonty holdings, your holdings there. What are your plans long-term with that? And are you looking to purchase more? What's your plan there?
We have been a long-term shareholder here and have certainly invested over the past 10 years after we got our initial shareholding from the transaction. Many times we have participated in share capital raises. We have invested also in bonds. And we definitely are a long-term holder. And we are here to stay with Almonty and see the company thrive and grow. And we actually see that there's quite a bit of potential beyond the current status where we are just because of the strategic nature and also because of the very, very long mine life of Almonty.
So this company has a reserve in the ground of 90 of potentially a mine life of 90+ years. That's something that could generate, yeah, almost 100 years of cash flow. And if you discount that, that is an extremely substantial and potentially extremely valuable resource. So we definitely want to stay on board here at Almonty and help the company succeed further. But also because it has been a significant exposure in our much smaller metals business in the recent year, as is basically public, we have not been a purchaser of additional shares. But we are definitely here to continue to support the company.
Right. And are you looking to acquire new reserves by purchase or what's the plan?
So we are always looking at potential acquisition purchases here, also in the U.S. I mean, all the oil fields that we are in are very large.
There are always opportunities, but we also have to be disciplined with our capital allocation process. So we always have a significant drilling program. We will drill this year, obviously, as we are guiding currently roughly EUR 110 million. We are seeing right now where oil prices are headed, what's the optimal development program here for this year. And then the question will be, is the development program going to be around EUR 110 million? Do we want to acquire assets beyond that, or do we rather want to allocate more capital into our drilling and development? I think those are things that we'll have to see over the coming months as we are getting ready to also publish our guidance for 2025 and 2026.
OK. So let's flip over to your drill program then for 2025. Would you expand your oil program with current oil and gas prices at the level that they are?
Well, that always depends on a lot of things. I think as oil and gas prices sit right now, we have to see where does the cost structure land? What is operationally the best thing to do? What are the things that drive this most? So it's really hard to say right now we would expand under certain circumstances or not. I think what we are doing right now is we are planning our development program. As I mentioned, we have guided EUR 110 million roughly of capital. The question for us also with the significant cost changes and reductions that we have managed to achieve here last year is, can we within that budget even drill more oil wells than we had originally anticipated, or do we want to expand beyond that?
And certainly, that moves with oil prices. I mean, a more simple way to put it is if oil prices go to $60, we would probably not expand our drill program. If they go to $90, we would definitely expand our drill program. That may not be a fully satisfying answer, but I think it's all a little bit in the planning phase where we'll have to see what feels like is the most optimal development program here for 2025.
Well, it's been a phenomenal chat. And thank you for your presentation. That's all the time we do have. If you have any other comments, just head over to their website and you connect with them there. Thank you again for your time. And we look forward to hearing more soon.
Thank you very much. Much appreciated. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye. So next up with us is Stephen Stares.
We're going to get him to come online here. If you can just actually open up your, Jan, we're going to get you to turn your camera off and just exit there. Hello to you. How are you?
I'm fine, Lindsay. How are you?
Great. It's great to have you here. I just want to give a little bit of an introduction. Now, you are the CEO of Benton Resources, and your company is a mineral exploration company that operates as a project generator. You are always looking to acquire promising properties or assets. Then further to that, you carry on work to advance the project with a view of attracting option investors, joint ventures, or for outright sales. First of all, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Yes, thank you very much, Lindsay. Kick us off.
Kick us off. T ell us a bit about the company and then head right into your presentation there.
OK, yeah, sure. Again, my name is Stephen Stares. I'm President and CEO of Benton Resources, listed on the TSX Venture under the symbol BEX. We've been around since around 2007. We've had a few dividends paid to our shareholders over time. And through project generation and so forth, the Great Burnt project is our flagship property right now. We believe this could host a world-class discovery. And eventually, we're hoping to build this into some substantial resources of gold and copper. And the goal of every junior is to have M&A action once you get to that point. So that's where we currently are with the Great Burnt project. I will share my screen. Share. Open. Does everybody see the presentation?
We got it.
All right. The Great Burnt project is located in central Newfoundland, which is ranked number four or number five right now by the Fraser Institute for the best place for mining and exploration in the world, and we're very proud of that. I'm a resident. I'm a native of Newfoundland. I reside in Ontario, Canada right now, but I spend about 50% of my time back on the island of Newfoundland. Of course, this is a forward-looking statement. Of course, we're not saying you have to buy the stock, and obviously, you seek professional representation according to the rules and regulations of the TSX Venture. The project itself has tremendous potential. We own 25 km of a really underexplored mineral belt.
This project was discovered back in the late 1960s by a company called Asarco Mining, which was a bigger American company back in those days. We have high-grade copper zones. I'll show some results in the coming slides. We have a very experienced mineral exploration team with over 150 years' combined experience between us all. We're well-funded with about $3.8 million in cash and equities in the bank. The infrastructure is fantastic. We have all-weather roads that's maintained by the government, which maintains the Great Burnt Hydro Dam, which is only 2.5 km from the main copper deposit. So we have readily available hydropower, so green energy power and road accessibility. And since we acquired the project in 2023, we've done a tremendous amount of work. I think we're over 20,000 m of drilling to date. And we continue to drill.
We just finished another 3,800 m, I believe. We're now waiting for geophysical crew to show up to pull some of our holes for further targeting on the high-grade massive sulfide. Right now, we've extended the Great Burnt Copper Deposit. It says here 850 m, but we're waiting for results. We've recently announced that we've moved that to 950 m down plunge from the previous 600-meter strike length that it had when we acquired it. Up at South Pond, we have a 3 km long gold copper zone that's coming together with many wide intercepts of 1 to 1.5 g/t gold. I'll be speaking about that as well. Newfoundland is no stranger to large deposits. Historically, there was the Buchans Deposit, which was 16 million tons of over 30% base metals combined, including the gold and silver.
Of course, you have the Ming Mine, which is now owned by FireFly Metals out of Australia. They've built that resource now to around 60 million tons at 2% copper equivalent. Duck Pond was just to the north of us. That was in production by Teck Resources. It just shut down a few years ago. And that was a 4.1 million-ton deposit at 3.3% copper. There is room for big deposits in Newfoundland, which previously kind of had its limitations. I should point out that the Marathon Gold Deposit, which is now called Calibre Mining or Valentine Lake Gold Deposit, yesterday, they announced a merger with Equinox Gold to form a large mid-tier gold company. That deposit, my estimates would be will be 6-8 million ounces by the time they're done or more, currently at about a 5-million-ounce resource.
We started when we picked this project up from Spruce Ridge Resources. I should point out that we've earned our 70% interest. And Spruce Ridge is participating at a 30% interest as we move along from here forward. So Benton was required to spend $2.5 million over three years. And we did that in 11 months. So we've got our 70% interest now. And we will continue with aggressive exploration moving forward. We have about 14 km of mineralized zones on the property in which we've been drilling. And then we have about another 12 km where we have very virgin, unexplored ground that we will do more exploration on this summer, including soil sampling, prospecting, some airborne surveys, et cetera, et cetera. But the potential to find more ore zones is highly possible.
We have a current resource of about 1.2 million tons at the Great Burnt Deposit and around 410,000 tons up at the South Pond Gold Deposit at the very north end of the property. Since we've acquired this, we've done a tremendous amount of drilling in both zones. Interestingly enough, some of our best results in this drilling campaign have come from drill holes that were drilled since 2016 to 2024 and now into 2025. We believe the reason for this is the old historical drilling that was completed by Asarco Mines and then eventually Noranda Mines were done with AQX or BQX core, which are very tiny core. They had very poor control over where the drill holes went for azimuth-wise. They had very poor core recoveries.
Hence, a lot of our drilling that we've done in areas, including this current campaign, that where Asarco had kind of lower-grade but decent widths of copper and/or gold, we get far better recoveries and far better grades, et cetera. So we believe a lot of this resource that was historically compiled has to be redrilled, which we've been slowly doing. So we got an excellent number of untested conductors over the entire length of the property where the airborne has been flown. So there's multiple other targets that have to be drilled. And along with other soil geochemical anomalies associated with good geology and trenched areas where we've got mineralization and new float boulders of good copper-gold mineralization. So this project is tremendously underexplored. And the potential to host world-class discovery is very evident to us. The style of mineralization is what they call a Beshi-type VMS.
This is the only Beshi-type on Newfoundland Island that we know of. Most other are felsic-related and/or Cyprus-related VMS deposits around the island. Some of the Beshi-types in Canada host up to 34 million tons, so these can be quite large and we believe that our project certainly can host this sizable high-grade type deposit. We do have a joint research program with Memorial University in Newfoundland where they are doing geochemical and stratigraphic work and et cetera for us, so this has been very helpful to us as we move the project forward. Outside of that, we've hired a guy by the name of Mike Coyle, who is a world-renowned structural geologist. This project also has not had a lot of structural work completed before.
So we've basically done a lot of trenching to open up exposures of the bedrock to understand what folding is happening, what structural complexities were happening, what metamorphic grades we're dealing with. So that's all starting to come together. We've relogged a bunch of core. We, like I say, done a lot of remapping of the groundwork. And essentially, what we see is the deposit forms. The top picture shows a really simple cartoon of the VMS deposit being formed. And then you start getting the initial stage of east-west compression and then tight folding starting to happen and then some erosional measures. And what you end up with is kind of a compressed folded ball or pipe-shaped deposit that plunges for a considerable amount of distance. We don't know how far that distance could be at this point because we haven't got enough drill holes into it.
But we know now it's at least 950 m long in the main deposit. And up at the South Pond deposit, we have 3 km of mineralization. We don't know if that's a series of deposits or if it's actually one long lens. We think it's a series of deposits that we just have to chase. So only drilling in time will tell as we drill these things off. But we certainly have started to understand how to target this. And it's working very well for us. I should also point out that the ore zones are highly magnetic because the copper and gold are also associated with heavy pyrrhotite, which is a very magnetic mineral. So we use ground magnetics and starting to do in-hole magnetics and also electromagnetics to chase the zones.
The geophysical techniques we're working on is helping us as well to delineate these new discoveries. Here's just some of the magnetics. The pink underneath is magnetic highs. The dashed orange line are two known zones. The west horizon is a Great Burnt Deposit where we have spectacular intercepts of copper over big widths. And then we have what we call the North Stringer Zone, or now indicating that we believe it's a footwall zone to the North Stringer Zone. And the reason why we think it may be two different events is the eastern North Stringer Zone or footwall zone has associated gold with it, quite a bit of gold in some cases. And it could link that system, actually, or structure could link up with the gold zone seven km to the north called the South Pond Horizon. So there's a lot of work to be done.
There's potential here for tens of km of mineralization. We just have to do the drilling. Previous drilling by Spruce Ridge at Great Burnt, this is what indicated to us that previous drilling by Asarco back in the 1960s were completely not truly understood or were underestimated. Spruce Ridge in 2016 to 2020 drilled a series of holes that created 7.5 m of 16%, 12 m of 10% over a short strike length in the main deposit. These were areas where Asarco had weaker numbers, substantially weaker numbers. When we purchased this property from Spruce Ridge, we basically just continued on what they were doing exactly. You can see the type of numbers from below from 2023, 2024, and this will move into 2025 in our new results coming. 13 m of 8%, 26 of 7%, 25 of 5%. These are world-class intercepts.
I don't think I've seen a company this year put results out that even compare to this other than Power Nickel, which I think your group will be hosting today. Terry Lynch will be speaking about Power Nickel. But I mean, these grades are as good or better than even what Power Nickel has put out to date. So it's just a comparison. And we've got a tiny market cap compared to Power Nickel. And of course, a few months ago, Power Nickel had the exact same market cap as what Benton had and finally woken up the market to what they have. So I believe our time is coming in the very near future. This is a longitudinal showing the grades. So the circles are the 1960 holes. We've drilled a lot of areas now where these circles are upgraded to purple, which is greater percentages over greater widths.
You can see the purple stars are super high grade, and the purple squares are super high grade from Spruce Ridge Resources. So the squares are Spruce Ridge Resources from 2016 to 2020. Circles are Circle from the late 1960s, early 1970s. And the stars are Benton drilling. As you can see, we've drilled a lot of holes down plunge now. And we're still hitting the ore zone. We've got a couple more holes put down there now, another 100 m out down here. And then we've got some drilling in here that's filling in some big gaps. And I think we've already posted some massive sulfide pictures on the website and also press released them last week, I believe so. So we expect we will have more beautiful results in the near future.
Moving to the north, so this map here is the very north part of our property, which is about seven and a half km to the north. This is what we call the South Pond Zone. We've got mineralization chased for over three km. We've drilled 33 new drill holes in areas where Asarco drilled back in the 1960s and 1970s. Also, Noranda drilled some holes up here. Again, I don't think they quite understood the nature of the deposit with this compressed folding, plunging, and refolding. Once Benton figured this out, we've been very successful at hitting the horizon and chasing the ore zones. So we believe that will continue as we unravel the mystery of the geology. And we will be able to put ounces and pounds to the ground, I believe, over the next 12 to 24 months as we continue the drilling.
As you can see, there's a lot of room. There's conductors in here. This big purple unit that you see to the west is an ultramafic complex. You can see there's conductors in here. So there's potential for magmatic copper nickel disulfides. And there's also potential for awarite, which just to the east of us by five km is a company that's working in the exact same rock unit as this ultramafic complex called First Atlantic Nickel. And their stock has moved substantially in the last few weeks in drilling in awarite mineral, which is a nickel iron alloy that don't need refining. So we have also potential for nickel in here. You can see the pictures to the left-hand side. You can see the green malachite staining of the copper. This stuff grades up to 5.5% copper with five g gold.
Very significant gold with the copper up there. Of course, as we move southward, we have very wide intercepts of gold with highly anomalous copper as well. As I mentioned, the magnetics work extremely well. The ground magnetics, we've done five-meter stations, 50-meter lines over the unit that carries the gold. You can see the pink-orange color that delineates the zone very well. We simply just drilled the mag highs, and that's where we started hitting the gold mineralization with the associated copper. This is a very, very exciting play. It's wide open to the south and to the north for another kmeter. In fact, we have surface sampling to the north that indicates the gold zone is still going. Also to the south, we have gold showings all along the trend for another seven km all the way back to the Great Burnt Deposit.
Outside of that, of course, there's been very little work done for the last 10 km to the south. So unbelievable amount of room to build multiple, multiple deposits. These are some of the drill holes. And the core is to the right that you see. This is semi-massive pyrite. You can see the chalcopyrite, which is the copper mineralization within the units as well. 51 m of 1.69 g, 15 m of 2, 21 m. In comparison, the Valentine Lake Deposit/Marathon Deposit owned by Calibre Mining and now, of course, being merged with Equinox Gold, these are the type of grades that they are putting in production and will be producing gold from in the next few months. So we're pretty excited that we have probably one of the best gold assets in Newfoundland along with one of the best copper assets.
I mean, again, I can't reiterate how good a deal Benton is at CAD 0.15 a share or, sorry, at CAD 0.09 a share with a CAD 15 million market cap. It's actually crazy. I've never had a project of this caliber within Benton. Or certainly, if we did, we've sold it and made a lot of money and paid our shareholders. Now would be the time to really look at Benton and this asset. These are some sections. We have parallel zones on the gold horizon. We are currently putting this into a 3D model. We just need some more drilling in it, really, but we're getting ready to launch a 3D model of what the zone is starting to look like at like a half-gram cutoff, open pittable. You can see all the zones are less than 100 m deep. So they come right to surface.
We believe this is all just refolding of the same horizon. So very, very wide intercepts of decent-grade gold at better than a gram. Again, another section less than 50 m deep. So certainly pittable material. It'll be a very low strip ratio in the case of mining. So we see the potential here is tremendous. Before I leave, I want to talk a little bit about the nickel. This is the big mag unit that I was talking about. You can see this pink unit in here. This is the ultramafic complex. We did complete a bunch of soil lines on the southern part of that complex, which is down here. You can see up to 1,700 PPM nickel in soils. So 1,700 PPM translates to like 1 and 1/2 pounds of nickel. That's actually pretty significant to have 1 and 1/2 pounds of nickel in your soil.
It indicates to us that the rock unit below is highly, highly elevated and pregnant in nickel, olivine mineral, and/or sulfides. We are going to drill a few holes in that. We're just unsure when that's going to happen. Our priority is delineating our gold zone and our copper zone at current time. This is a project that we literally just picked up. It's called the Dominion Project. It's a VMS gold system just to the northwest of Benton's Great Burnt Project. It's actually 20 km kind of a long strike from the Calibre Mining Valentine Mine that's currently going to production. We picked this project up because the ground came open for staking, and it was a large package of ground. We staked it. Then we optioned a little bit of ground from a couple of local prospectors to make the land whole.
Our first day of prospecting, we discovered a new gold zone. We call it the Rickirb Zone. It's a spectacular quartz stockwork outcrop that grades up to 4.5 g. There's about three km away or four km away, there's another cluster of historical samples that grade up to 3.5 g gold, never been drilled. We're pretty excited about this new property acquisition. It sits near two large VMS deposits or decent-sized VMS deposits that strike more or less onto our ground. We got VMS potential here as well. This is kind of the mineralization that you see. This is our prospector, Ricky Crocker, that discovered the showing. We stripped it off now over 12 m wide. Quite spectacular mineralization of quartz and sulfides. We expect that we'll probably have this ready for drilling by midsummer of 2025.
So in summary, we got deep geophysics currently underway at the Great Burnt Deposit, getting ready to restart the drill, which we just shut down only a couple of days ago. So we'll have a flurry of drill results coming. We've already released that we've hit massive sulfides in our last press release. We should have an update press release out before the PDAC just to kind of keep shareholders aware of what we're doing and what we're hitting. And like I say, we're doing lots of ground geophysics and deep geophysics. So we'll be ready to start that drill program again in mid to end of March. And we're planning at least 15,000 m in 2025, maybe 20 or 25,000 m if the financings come together for us. We've had spectacular drill results to date.
Outside of that, we just paid our shareholders on March or February 20th, which was our deadline date in which you will receive a Vinland Lithium share. We have a lithium discovery in western Newfoundland that was found by Benton Resources and Sokoman Minerals. That whole project is being financed by Piedmont Lithium, which is America's only lithium producer in hard rock spodumene. So they believe this project is early stage. We have 61 drill holes into it, but they believe it's got huge potential for a new lithium resource. And hence, that's why this is one of Piedmont's only early-stage partnerships. So we'll only have 10 million shares issued and outstanding and only 4 million tradable shares on the TSX Venture. So it will be a very tight company. Our shareholders will receive a portion of that. And there'll be a $12 million exploration budget on it.
Outside of that, Benton holds 24.6 million shares of Clean Air Metals, which has a 2.5 million-ounce platinum palladium copper nickel equivalent deposit in Northern Ontario. And we own a 0.5% royalty on that deposit. And they're currently drilling as well, putting out spectacular platinum palladium results. So I encourage you to look at Clean Air Metals. It's a tremendous project, and they're very, very undervalued. So with that, we got 205 million shares out. We're well-positioned to advance the project. And I thank you for your time.
Well done. Well done. Thank you so much. We just have time for maybe one quick, maybe two quick questions. One of the first ones that's come up is, how does Benton intend to capitalize on the recent high-grade gold assays from the South Pond Gold Copper Zone to enhance the shareholder value?
Yes. Thank you, Lindsay. As everybody knows, it's been a very tough market, tough struggles for juniors in the last year and a half, two years. One of our biggest shareholders, Eric Sprott, who I admire and believe his enthusiasm for the industry, and you can certainly see that he's been disappointed in the last few years in the way the market is, but I spoke with Eric a couple of weeks ago, and you can certainly feel the energy in his voice now. He believes the market is about to turn. He basically told me to hang tight and keep drilling, and we'll get there. That's how the value is unlocked: you stay with it, and you just keep drilling. Eventually, as the old saying is, if you build it, they will come. That's the plan.
Such a great saying and such a great movie. Thank you so much again for your time. We look forward to hearing more things coming down the funnel for you.
Yeah, lots of results to come. And I believe they will be good.
They will be. We know it. All right. Thank you for joining us, and have a great day.
Thank you, guys. All the best.
So up next is another company that I'm just going to invite in really quickly here. And this next company, actually, let me just introduce them very quickly. They are Kobo Resources. So this is a growth-focused gold exploration company with a compelling new gold discovery in one of West Africa's most prolific and developing gold districts. So here with me is Edward Gosselin. Edward, it's so great to have you with us. Hello. Welcome, all the things.
Thank you very much. I'm glad to be with you today.
Take it away and let us know all the insights.
Well, hold on a second. I will bring up the presentation.
All right. While you're doing that, just a reminder for our audience, if you have any questions, any wonders, anything you'd like to say, throw it down into the web chat or right into the Q&A, and we'll bring those up after Edward's finished with his presentation.
One second. Bring it up. Can you see this?
There we go. All good. Y eah, we got it.
Okay. All right. Hold on a second. Let me move this so I can see better. And I just need to adjust. Hold on a second. There we go. All right. Kobo Resources, Canadian junior incorporated in Canada. The assets are in Côte d'Ivoire.
The company was created way back in 2000, late 2015, early 2016, started out as an alluvial play, and morphed into a larger exploration permit standard with the larger companies. So we are in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa, for those who are not familiar. Your standard disclosure. Here we are. We're smack in the middle of the country, Côte d'Ivoire, where our main assets are. Other than myself as CEO, the company is managed with two other expats, one being Paul Sarjeant, our President and COO. Paul is a geologist with 35+ years of experience, as well as Chris Picken, a geologist with the same number of years, give or take. And Chris happened to be the one who drilled the Yaouré mine site next door to us. So to date, we've completed nearly 20,000 m of drilling on the Kossou project, which is our star project.
We have another license in the east, 300 sq km, but that's much more grassroots, as we're talking right now. In terms of infrastructure of the project, we have $0 to invest. We have road access from the east, from the west. There's a power dam, basically less than 800 m away from our license, and an operating mine less than 9 km away from us. Also, we're in a friendly jurisdiction, which is Côte d'Ivoire, one of the best in West Africa, as you will see a little bit later, and Côte d'Ivoire happens to host 35% of the Birimian formation of West Africa compared to its neighbors, and it's a latecomer to the game in terms of exploration compared to Ghana, Burkina, and Mali, and others, and we have a great portfolio of assets going forward if we want to explore other opportunities in country.
Here is your basic share structure. We have about 103 million shares outstanding. Management and insiders own nearly 40%. We have Luso Global Mining as a 9.9% owner. That's a 100% owned subsidiary of Mota-Engil. Some of you might know Mota-Engil is one of the top 15 EPC companies in Europe. It is also a mine contractor present in 10 mines in Africa, four of which are operated by them in Côte d'Ivoire. A couple of institutions in the name of Gold 2000 from Switzerland and Delbrook Capital from Vancouver. The rest is the public float. We have about 5 million shares, options, that is, outstanding and 19 million warrants. Half of those expire at the end of March. In order to be in the money, the stock price has to be at CAD 0.40.
That gives you a snapshot of the company. We recently raised last year CAD 7.5 million, give or take. That's when Mota-Engil, or through Luso Global Mining, invested half of that amount into the company. This is a snapshot of what Luso and Mota-Engil are. You'll be able to connect to through their website and have more detail. But basically, it's a company that has been active as an EPC company and mine contractor for nearly or +7 0 years in Africa. They operate in 30+ countries and so on. As I mentioned, 2016 was really the initial discovery when we started out on the Kossou project in Côte d'Ivoire. It's about 35 km away from the capital city of Yamoussoukro. We initially started out as an alluvial play. We had dug 164 pits, about 2 m deep.
Only but nine did not have gold. We were finding very fine gold, as well as coarse gold and nuggety gold. And then we happened to make a discovery where we channel sampled a wall face of rock over 18 m, and that returned 4.6 g/tin. So we then sat down with the government, petitioned them to change the allocation of the area, which was exclusively reserved to small mining. We were successful in doing that after six or seven months and applied for the license in the fall of 2016. It was awarded to us in 2019. And right after COVID, we began the geophysical survey. Once that was completed and we got the results, we started a geochem program on the property, sampling, trenching, etc. So we made in 2021 an additional discovery at what we call now is Jagger Zone.
We discovered 4 m at 3.72 g/tin and 6 m at 5.3 g/tin. So all that period from 2016 all the way to March 2023, we were private. We raised CAD 4.5 million through 55 high-net-worth individuals. We went public through an RTO in March of 2023. And that's where we raised approximately CAD 4.8 million. And that's when—excuse me—that's when Gold 2000 and Delbrook Capital came into the company. And that's also during that summer, we started our maiden RC drill program, did approximately 6,000 m. And you can see the results there. They speak for themselves pretty well. So after that period, we reassessed the situation and planned for a diamond drill program, which commenced in the first quarter of 2024. We did about 4,500 m of diamond drill there.
And then after the financing in July of last year, we started in September a 10,000-meter diamond drill program, which was completed in the first two weeks of February of this year. We finished just below 11,000 m. And you can see the major results that are highlighted here on this screen. They are all great numbers, we believe, and strong going forward. This gives you a snapshot of on the left-hand side, the gold production of the various countries involved in the region: Guinea, Burkina, Mali, and Ghana. And as you can see, what I was mentioning, Côte d'Ivoire is way behind with a very low production, but also hosts 35% of the Birimian formation, the host rock for gold. So it's a disconnect, but also a huge opportunity because of its untapped potential.
The map that you see on the right is the current situation in terms of discoveries and operating mines. There are actually eight operating mines and two more to be coming online soon. This is the situation how it was way back in 2014, just before the government amended the mining code. They did so in order to attract foreign capital and investment and in order to speed up the exploration of the country in terms of its minerals. Their focus was to make exploration and the exploitation of their minerals a second economic engine after the cocoa production. Fast forward 10 years later, this is what the mining code has spawned upon the country. They went from 22 tons of production of gold 10 years ago to nearly 60 tons right now.
They should be expecting to reach 65 and maybe 70 tons in the very near future with the two mines coming online, especially the Assafou project, which is owned by Endeavour Mining. Now, zooming in on the Kobo research permits, the one on the left side in red is the current Kossou project in which we are focused on. The blue square is the mine that is actually operated by Perseus Mining. That's a 2-plus million-ounce deposit. They are mining on average 250,000-275,000 ounces a year. And we are, like I said, literally 9 km away from the license. And on the right-hand side, you can see the other license that we have in the east of the country. That's 300 sq km. And we are commencing some geochem program on that license, more like grassroots.
The other two that are in the light brown are pending applications. Now, zooming in onto the Kossou license, because that's where we've invested most of our money to date. We are actually active right here in the middle at about, excuse me, at about only 15% of the license. We have yet to explore the rest because of the success we've made so far. This slide represents a picture of what is happening at Kossou license. Like I mentioned, the Yaouré Gold Mine is right over here in the top right-hand corner. That's where Perseus operates the Yaouré mine site. Over here, you can see the power dam that I was talking about. The first discovery we made was a road cut zone. The village of Kossou is there. The Kadie Zone is an additional area that we discovered.
The Jagger Zone is the one that has been so far mostly drilled. We established a base camp last summer in order to have our workforce present and nearby. This gives you a snapshot of where we're operating. The main feature of the Kossou license is that we are in a volcanic package, as you can see on the green on the right-hand side. The purple is the volcanic sediments. We believe that the line between the two is what we call the contact zone between the volcanics and the sediments. This contact zone is also found at the Yaouré mine site and approximately 300-400 m away from the main CMA pit. In that area, they are mining an average of 5-7 g/tin. Now, the Perseus mine next door is producing, like I said, 250,000 ounces a year.
That production should start to decrease substantially by 2030 to, give or take, 100,000-110,000 ounces a year, so therefore, our goal and mission here is to prove as many ounces as we can in the next year or so in order to become a takeout target. On this slide, you can see the geochem results of the sampling we've done over the main area that we're focused on. The road cut zone is basically a strike extent of 1.6 km, the Jagger Zone nearly two km, and the Kadie Zone is approximately one kmeter. The other zone, Kilo Jagger South, we have barely paid attention to at this time because most of our high results are in this area, and the gap that you see right here in between these two, we intend to drill that to see if we can connect that.
If we're successful in connecting these two to Jagger North to Road Cut South, we should have a strike extent of at least three km in that area, which would be fabulous. This slide gives you a snapshot of the results on the Jagger Zone to date: 33 RC holes. We're in 23 diamond holes, basically nearly 9,500 m of drilling. You can see the results on the KRC holes: 48 m at one gram per ton, 19 m at two, 20 m at 1.7, 38 m at 1.55, and 14 m at 2.9, and so on. These are all grades that are minable at our neighbor next door. They're, on average, processing the grade at between 1.5 and 1.6 g/tin. These slides represent a 3D model snapshot of what we have discovered to date and what the shearing and the gold mineralization seems to indicate.
That's what we're seeing. The mineralization seems to be dipping slightly to the west, and so far, we've drilled only to 175 m. We have an advantage of being on top of a hill. Therefore, this is open pittable easily. We could easily go to 250 m in an open pit, and the mineralization appears to be open at depth, so there is high potential for underground mining in this area. By the way, Perseus, the Yaouré mine site, was the first or is the first mine in Côte d'Ivoire to obtain an underground mining permit. They've discovered approximately 500,000 ounces, and they are preparing to have access to that mineralization in the months to come. Another couple of cross-sections here that are representing the same thing at Jagger Zone.
So basically, what you're seeing is between sections 550 to 700, approximately 200 m of strike where we were able to identify strong mineralization in this area. And again, we're drilling on average between 125 to 175 m in terms of depth. As far as the road cut zone is concerned, these are the results that we've obtained to date: 13 RC holes and 31 diamond holes. So approximately 8,000 m of drilling. And we're right now evaluating the results and planning for the next stage. Very good results as well on this zone of discovery. I'll spare you of reading all the results. But for example, 8 m at 3.18 m, 11 m at 6.77, and 9 m at 4.27. Those are all great results and pretty promising for the future. These are the sections of the road cut zone, as you can see.
So we were able to extend on this drill hole on section 550. The drill all the way down to the contact zone, we were able to identify 6 m at 1.94. So that's quite promising. That contact fault and contact zone is considered to be a first-order fault. And it measures approximately 6 km that we have seen on the license. We have yet to explore it in detail. We are planning an RC program on this contact fault in the near future as of Q2. We're planning between 3,000-4,000 m of RC drilling for starters. And should the results be at the rendezvous, then we will expand the drilling program on that area specifically. Again, here you'll see section 600, more results. So we're seeing the shearing panels of shearing and gold results at the RCZ. They seem to be so far quite frequent and present.
Good grades and lower grades, but all in all, very promising. This is a less explored zone that we happened to discover by chance. This is an area where we get Bonanza-style grades. We've only done under 2,000 m of drilling. You can see on the diamond drill hole number five, we drilled nine m at nearly 24 g/tin, including one at 210 m. There are Bonanza-grade veinage in this area. We intend to continue drilling and exploring that area. This is a snapshot of what we've done so far in terms of drilling on the property. We are actually preparing our next phase drill program. In the next month or so, the geologists will be looking at all the core and the orientation as well. We're having in a structural geologist that's going to come to our site.
The structuralist happens to be the same structuralist that worked for seven years at the Yarra mine. He knows the belt very well and is a key asset in terms of personnel for us and guiding us with the future of our drill program. Not much to say on the Kotobe license in the east other than there was a MAG survey that was done. It was interpreted. We have areas of focus that we need that we are currently focusing on right now. We're pitting and sampling. We will be intensifying our work program at that license with close to $1 million of investment this year on that permit. The timeline. We just completed in Q1 the drill program that we talked about, 10,000 m, give or take. Right now, we're analyzing the results and preparing for the next drill program.
So at phase three, we intend to do between 20,000 to 30,000 m of drilling during this year. And we're going to be doing some initial characterization studies and advanced metallurgical work, excuse me. And as you can see on the right-hand side, our drill costs CAD 203 are quite advantageous compared to what we see in other jurisdictions. So right now, we have CAD 3 million in the bank. We're still well financed. We've got some warrants that come to expiration soon. We're probably going to go back to the market sometime in April or May in order to enhance our drill program. So other than myself and Paul that are managing the company and Chris, our CFO, Carmelo Marelli. And what I can tell you is we are supported by a strong board of directors. Frank Ricciuti has over 50 years of experience in the business.
Jeff Hussey, a geologist with the Asarco Mining Group of Companies. Brian Scott, a former B2Gold VP of Exploration. Vivek Darbha, a representative of Mota-Engil, and Patrick Gagnon, a former capital markets advisor, broker. A couple of outside advisors in the name of Marc-Antoine Audet, PhD, geologist, very well versed in Africa. Spent the last 12 years in Côte d'Ivoire, specifically on other projects. Pierre Boivin, an attorney, and a local advisor for governmental affairs in the name of Roger N'Guessan. The rest of the presentation, you can consult on our website. There is also a 3D presentation that is powered by VRIFY that will give you much more details in terms of the structures. So I don't want to keep you any longer with the presentation per se, and I will take questions now if you have any.
Thank you for all of this information.
It's definitely worth every piece of gold for sure. So just a couple of quick questions before you can pop off here if we could. With the recent high-grade gold intercepts at the Jager Zone, including the 7.0 m at 4.83 g/t, how does Cobalt plan to expand and delineate this mineralization to assess its full potential?
Well, once we've completed the assessment in this month and part of March, we will begin the 30,000-meter drill program. A lot of it will be done on the Jager Zone in order to kind of delimit the size of the elephant. That's the terms we are using right now because we definitely don't know the extent, the size of the package. And we're going to be doing the same thing on the RCZ zone.
We're going to be allocating the meterage between those two main areas and about 3,000 or 4,000 on the contact zone. So I think that that's where most of the dollars will be allocated. And we expect that to take us, I would say, about six months. And by the end of the year, early first quarter next year, we intend to come out with our first mineral resource estimate. So that's the game plan here that we intend to do. And the timing is kind of right because, I mean, in 2026, if we come out with a resource that is substantially interesting, if I may say so, for our neighbor, we definitely become a prime target for a takeout in that sense because they'll need a couple of years to get ready to do some definition drilling, etc.
So far, the geology is quite similar to what they're mining next door. So there might not be much tweaking in the mill going forward. However, if we happen to be very, very lucky and have 1.5 million + ounces on this deposit, having Mota-Engil on board gives us optionality to develop it ourselves. So we're not a stranded j unior per se. We have muscle behind us that can take projects to the end.
Okay. So let's flip over to the $7.4 million that was raised from the recent non-brokered private placement to accelerate its exploration program at your gold project, one of your gold projects. How do you intend to utilize that? I know that you mentioned a little bit, but can you expand on that a little bit more?
We've already used a good portion of it in the sense that that money came in last summer. We invested approximately $4 million on Kossou with the drill program, give or take. We still have about $3 million in the bank. Therefore, after we finish our assessing at March, we can continue the drill program and then go back to the market and raise more money. Our plan is to raise just for the Kossou project about $6.5 million because that's what the 20,000-30,000 m is going to take. We're going to allocate a million dollars on the eastern license. We're poised to add a couple more licenses in the very near future. We've been looking at different projects in Côte d'Ivoire. There are a lot of private license owners that are looking for partners. We're tapping that right now as we're speaking. We should be making announcements in the nea r future on that.
And will you be at PDAC as well?
Yes, we will. You can meet us at booth 2650. So we'll be happy to see you there and answer any questions you may have.
And we just have one more question that's come in. What was the strike price last capital increase?
We did the raise at AUD 0.35, and the RTO was at AUD 0.25 each. We're a unit with a half warrant. So the full warrant on the RTO, which is coming due at the end of March, is AUD 0.40. And the full warrant on the raise of last summer is due in July of 2026 at AUD 0.55.
And there you have it. There's all the insights, all the key takeaways to run to your portfolios and use that right away.
Edward, thank you so much for your time today, and we look forward to seeing you at PDAC as well.
Thank you very much. Have a good day.
You too. Bye-bye.
Bye.
Next up, we have Mr. Bernd Krueper himself that's going to pop on any moment here. Now, those who do not know Burnt, I have interviewed him quite a few times. He is such a character. He is from dynaCERT, president of dynaCERT. This is a Canadian-based company who has developed the next generation of fuel savings technology for diesel engines in the global market that also provides significant fuel savings to the operator. So we meet again, Burnt. How are you?
Hi, Lindsay. Yeah, good hearing you. It's always a pleasure talking with you.
Always good to talk to you. So I'm going to give you the floor, and you take it away and just tell us all that information that our investors and everyone needs to know, okay?
Yeah, great. Thank you, Lindsay. And yeah, thank you to the audience, and thank you for listening everywhere in the world. Might it be in Asia, might it be in the U.S., or here in Europe? Of course, it's a big pleasure. A lot of you know already, I think, dynaCERT. Therefore, I made, of course, a short intro, but also some changes which happened since the last presentation. Means what is hydrogen about? Hydrogen is, of course, a product which is a focus of the company dynaCERT. We are in the energy sector. That means the third means carbon emission reduction technologies, of course, for global operations.
We are based in Toronto, Canada, working in the mining space in the oil and gas and in Class 8 majorly. But of course, also different applications. I come to that in a minute. The company itself is existing since more than 20 years. Therefore, it's not a fresh, new, brand new startup, but a lot of experience and, of course, also on a lot of development and adjustment of the product. And we do have a small reactor, which is an electrolyzer function to create hydrogen, pure hydrogen, and pure oxygen on demand. That means we don't have storage tanks. We don't have transport tanks of the hydrogen to be delivered to the operation, means to the engine in a combustion phase. Combustion engines, of course, majorly with diesel fuel, but also working for different types of fuel. What does it mean?
It means principally our major product is called HydraGen, of course, close relationship to hydrogen. That's why it's called HydraGen. It's majorly a box set with an electrolyzer unit inside. And what is the consequence now out of this box? First, we do significantly reduce fuel from 5% onwards with different applications and different fuel reductions depending where it is used. Means we have cases where it's also close to 10% or more fuel reduction, but principally it's from 5% onwards. Second. By having less fuel consumption, we have the corresponding and much more than the corresponding emission reduction, which, of course, is in these times of climate changes and environmental necessities, also a very serious issue. And benefit out of these, out of operation, operating this device.
And thirdly, we are soon able to generate carbon credits, which is also, of course, important for the operators and users of our equipment, as well as for DynaCert itself. And yeah, I will come to that also in a minute, but this means for the operator, means the vehicle user, the mining trucks, the oil and gas, and various other applications having significant reduction in operation costs. We have additionally to the hardware, also some software, which is called HydraLytica. It's principally a telematics software, which you can see the usage and the fuel reduction or the fuel consumption. And by that, with the calculation modules, the fuel reduction and out of that generation of the carbon credits, which is also, of course, important to have it calculated, to have it shown.
The carbon credits are the consequence of less fuel reduction, means the calculation which needs to be shown and needs to be given evidence, which is possible with these telematics, which is also DynaCert own development. It's our own IP, and the name of it, as said, is HydraLytica. Having said that, majorly a few words on the technology means, first of all, some of you may know, hydrogen helps in the combustion to have a faster and higher temperature burn. That means by that, we separate with the electrolyzing function, the H2 and the oxygen, and have by that an enhanced combustion, which has significant impacts on the combustion itself to the thermodynamics and the fluid dynamics. Means we have, with using hydrogen, of course, reduced maintenance. We have less usage or better burn also in the after treatment system. That means less regeneration cycles.
It's better for the combustion chamber itself, means cleaning principally or reducing the particulate matter in the combustion chamber. You have less DEF consumption. It's cleaner burn and by that cleaner for the diesel particle filter. And you have, of course, automatic data reporting, which means it comes out of our own ECU. I come to that in a minute, but also in conjunction and connection with the vehicle's telematics and software system. Therefore, you have the combination of the two databases, and out of that, you can calculate and optimize both systems, means majorly our usage in conjunction with the engine operation of the genuine vehicle. Means technically advanced, as said, 22 years of experience, therefore not brand new invention. There's a lot of guys telling everybody what nice things they can do.
Our technology is proven. We have a lot of different installations. We have a lot of years of experience. Also added some competence to the team coming from world-known, famous engine and vehicle manufacturers. Therefore, the connection between the principally autonomous system, HydraGen, which works autonomously. You can produce hydrogen yourself without the vehicle, but we use it on demand. That means combining, switching on the engine, then our electrolyzer starts, and by that, as said, you don't have to store hydrogen, which of course is also for the safety and the environment better. Therefore, it directly burns. Therefore, no transport, no storage, easy to use on demand, as said. Having said that, maybe coming in a few words to the separation, of course, of hydrogen and oxygen. We have an own ECU.
That means, as said, also from the software and the data side, autonomous system, and we need very low energy. We have a connection to the vehicle's battery, but this is giving the starting impulse. And principally, our device is a perpetual mobile. That means it runs itself, doesn't need that much energy from outside the system, which of course is an advantage compared also to competitors. In total, we have, here's written 18 patents, which we of course have. We are working on more and more patents and more and more solutions. As said, up to now, it's majorly or completely working on diesel engines, but we have also requests from other fuel topics. There is also different type of diesels and biofuels, HVOs now happening more and more. Thirdly, also natural gas and other biofuels and synthetic fuels.
Therefore, principally, our system works with every fuel, but the experience and most of the historical experience and usage up to now is with diesel, and diesel, you know, is a significant volume of diesel engines in the world still and continued, besides all discussions on e-fuels or full electric solutions. We all know that not everything will be propelled or being powered by full electric solutions. I can save the time and spare some comments about full electric solutions. Of course, there is a reasonability and specific applications, but we are very sure and the reaction of the market shows it that our diesel blending technology or additive is, of course, reasonable for the millions and millions of trucks being out there being propelled by diesel engines. Here's some real-life or real test dynamic dynamometer test results out of Germany.
You see there in these bubbles, for instance, close to 10% CO2 reduction in this case with the Class A truck, roughly less than half the percentage of particulate matters, also more than half of the hydrocarbons, 88% reduction in nitrogen, and also fuel, diesel fuel, which of course is also important of roughly 9%. Therefore, as mentioned before, about 5% more or less in every case, also in some cases up to 10%. Here it was on the dynamometer, it was 9%. Therefore, we have these real results, of course, not only on the dynamometer, we have it also in real life. And they're depending on the usage and on the load profiles and the driver's habits also to some extent, sometimes more in fuel reduction and in emission reduction. Here's a short look on our products. Means we have principally four products for different sizes of the engines.
It’s HG1 is majorly for truck size. You see here the pictog, of course, in various applications being used. But for 10- to 15-liter diesel engines, we have principally it’s all the same product with different numbers of reactors depending on the engine size. You see here for smaller diesel engines from one to 8 liters. We have also a solution different to the mining application majorly and bigger gensets where we have for 30 and 60 liters, four times our reactor in this HG4C box solution, as well as for the bigger mining trucks and big shovels and big generators where we have also this HG6C solution, means six times the reactor. But principally same working method of the electrolyzers, but in different numbers of reactors inside, but all deliver significant fuel reduction and more significant emission reductions. This is majorly our product base.
Which markets do we serve? Majorly up to now, as said at the beginning, mining and oil and gas and Class A trucks, but of course also having installations now in the first buses in cooling trailers, in smaller trucks, as well as in more and more gen sets. Might it be in oil and gas or might it be in general power supply or for utilities? And we are also in construction and agricultural applications now more and more entering. What was not in the first time on the radar, but of course in the mind also of Jim Payne, who know a lot of you guys, was always thinking about also the marine application.
Therefore, we have there also now first accesses and being approached by marine, by shipbuilders, by some guys also out of Asia who are interested in our technology for using it for inland shipping, also in the U.S., but also in Asia. And of course, principally our system and technology works also in very small solutions for passenger cars with petrol, as well as in very big solutions which would be necessary for ocean-going vessels. But to say very clearly, we focus majorly and are up to now majorly not only, but majorly in mining and oil and gas and Class 8 applications, but of course a lot of potentials in different applications and different geographies, which doesn't mean that we have to do everything ourselves and can't do everything ourselves.
But we are talking, as said, with various guys who maybe could use it in license or in a JV. And there will also are already happening a lot of discussions, and the more will come. I will explain it in a minute as well to you. Okay, maybe after a lot of words, some pictures. This is typical installations for Class A trucks in North America. As you know, in Europe, some of you may know, we have smaller dimensions in the trucks. Therefore, we have here different mountings, different solutions here in between the wheels, not at the back of the cabin as here or in the U.S. or Canada. We have here some vehicles where we have it on the roof, different solutions possible. Of course, we have it here again in a truck between the wheels.
You see on all these pictures here on a mining truck where, of course, the driver's cabin is more speed in the bigger version 4C and 6C. And here we have it. We also were installed and are installed on second time on the famous Paris-Dakar racing trucks and the equipment which supports the racing trucks, which of course gives proof of challenging application and usage. And you can imagine in these tough conditions with a lot of sand, with big heat. And yeah, the device and the engine, of course, but the device with the engine has to work and to be proper functioning, which we do, which is proven. Therefore, also there, of course, evidence of our usage. And you see our capabilities.
You see here as well a gen set, as a generator set installation, which also, as mentioned before, is happening more and more on stationary applications, and as said before, the advantage is you don't have to bring hydrogen to the application. We produce our own hydrogen. Therefore, you don't need pipelines, you don't need portals, you don't need transport of hydrogen to the application. We produce with distilled water our own hydrogen infusion. Here also a dozer, but there's various possibilities, of course, to install our device and product, and therefore principally quite easy to install. It's a two hours work roughly.
Means, of course, fixing it to the mount or to the vehicle, secondly combining it to the battery for the energy impulse, and thirdly having a manifold in front of the turbocharger or sucking in the air and the hydrogen and the oxygen into the air intake of the turbocharger and then bringing in the hydrogen and the oxygen into the combustion chamber. Okay, this is some of the applications, as said, more and more to come, more installations, of course, available, might it be from buses over construction equipment and agriculture, as mentioned before, and maybe soon in one of the next presentations, maybe also on a boat or a vessel, but let's see what we can do ourselves and what others will do maybe with our technology, but all potential business and potential growth for dynaCERT.
Having said that, maybe explain. I have explained the product. I have explained some of the applications. I named it update one and two, as said. I don't want to bore you. Some of you have already listened, I guess, at the last time, but maybe a few words. Of course, we have a lot of potentials, a lot of opportunities. 22 years existing. We also added our executive team on the one side. Sorry for starting with me as new President myself. I have a background coming from MTU, big marine engines and Detroit Diesel. Some of you surely know I'm the Mercedes and Rolls-Royce and also a smaller German engine manufacturer, Hatz. I brought my former right-hand Kevin Ullrath to dynaCERT as well. He's the COO.
He's also a very experienced engine and vehicle guy coming from MAN, big truck engines, where we are also now more and more in first installations, also working for Rolls-Royce. They're the passenger cars. And together with me at Hatz in the management team, also, of course, more and additional people coming to the management and the regular workforce. Secondly, we have added significant competence. There was already, of course, but also significant competence additionally to the board of directors on the one side talking on emissions and emission-relevant devices and emission reduction. Of course, we are very happy and honored having James Tansey in our board, who is one of the, let's say, popes of emission and carbon credit topics.
He is CEO, for instance, of Carbon Dynamite and has a lot of competence in how realizing carbon credits, how to go ahead with emissions, how to manage to generate the carbon credits. Tanya is very experienced in securities, worked also in management functions with TMX and has, of course, a lot of competence on the stock exchange, on stock development, all these topics. Myself, you know, I'm also in the board since also already before I started in the executive function and as a shareholder. I brought in also long-term colleague of mine, Doug Seneshen, who is also very experienced in distribution, in sales, in engine technology, working very closely and for Penske Group. Therefore, of course, also very important knowledge and competence in the team. Yeah, therefore we also added there additional competence and interesting and competent players to the group.
And here I named it update two. This is what happened since our last discussion. Of course, not only that, but today I want to stress also a little bit on the internal development. Means, of course, we continued and worked and aligned and streamlined our corporate strategy. Means preparing the company, let's say the post-startup of 22 years with 30 people roughly and having, of course, field population and various installations, but streamlining, focusing, balancing and evaluating the potentials and opportunities. On the one side, of course, in Toronto and the headquarters means we work on clear and streamlined processes, might it be starting from R&D and sourcing and manufacturing and assembly up to quality processes to be ready for the stronger volume increase coming to two and three shift populations.
We have quite a lot of potential capacity available in Toronto, but this means also to prepare and develop the sourcing guys, the suppliers. Means also adjusting the quality processes. Of course, we have a high-quality product, but this is more or less in a handmade manufacturing process. Therefore, as said, preparing for the volume increase, also the internal manufacturing and assembly setup being ready for having scaling up and bigger volumes in manufacture. Secondly, of course, this is a hardware process. We have also the software processes mentioned before with the HydraLytica, our software. It works in functions, of course, properly. Secondly, we develop it furthermore in adjustment with the different vehicles and types where we have the combination.
Principally, finally, as Jim, our CEO and chairman, always says, we are on the way to a data management and data company, which has, of course, additional hardware, but so change things from selling hardware to adding software. And then with the carbon credits, which we are, where we have the general authority already, but where we are in the final and big project to define and apply together with the approval of Verra for the specific individual carbon credits on the way to a software and a data management company. That's on the one side, of course, on a global basis, on a global level based on Toronto. We have also European setup. As you may know, I'm half of my time based here in southern Germany, half the time in Toronto, and of course also traveling worldwide around for dynaCERT.
That means here in southern Germany, in Munich, we also moved and relocated new EMEA regional headquarters, which is at the Munich Airport, very easy to reach. We have there also on display some products and of course meeting rooms. Everybody who would be interested to meet us either at PDAC in or in general in Toronto or in Munich is heavily invited. We assigned there also a new managing director, as introduced already a while ago with Kevin Ullrath a few minutes ago. We changed also some of our people and added, of course, there also majorly sales roles and technical and installation support and expertise, which is for regional sales function, of course, also important and necessary. Therefore, you see different things are happening in the preparation of the potential growth and the acquired field test installations to be turned into series orders.
As you may have heard, maybe have written during the last days, we worked together with Mario and various guys on an additional CAD 5 million dollar deal, which was successfully taking place for the next weeks and months to come. And everybody, of course, invited to invest also into dynaCERT. And thank you to those ones of you who are already invested. This is what we raised from the capital market and from the investment side. Of course, we will have additional cash in or cash in additionally coming from further order entry and repeat orders, which are happening and of course are the consequence of having a good product and delivering what we promised and to some extent also over fulfilling. Might it be the fuel consumption or might it be the emission reduction?
This, of course, needs to be used for the financing of our internal and the external development. Concerning sales and marketing, as we all want to, of course, grow the business, we, as said, changed also a few things and a few people. That means also our global sales head left, and we changed a few of the sales people who carry on additional sales, but also general competencies into the company. And we have a very close relationship now with an additional telematics partner here from Europe, taking care, also helping us, and partnering with us and giving some input for this HydraLytica 2.0 solution. And, of course, we intensify and improve to some extent where it's necessary the quality of our dealers and distributors in our worldwide organization. And we are next week also at the PDAC. Therefore, we are happy to meet everybody who is there.
Yeah, and have been coming from Cape Town, from the Indaba, and will be presenting at the Bauma, the biggest fair or exhibition of the world, construction majorly and mining here in Munich. We'll be, for instance, also in Anaheim. Therefore, who pops up at one of the places, heavily, heavily appreciated to meet. Of course, also besides these exhibitions. What happened on the concrete sales and lead side? Of course, not of course, but gratefully we have more and more repeat orders from existing customer base. Also, for instance, from a bigger Canadian player in the oil and gas side, majorly there from the drills and the gen sets, which of course is always a good sign when you have repeat orders because then the customer is happy and then we are happy.
We have, as mentioned, also more and more orders and also some repeat orders from different geographies. For instance, we received a bigger order from the Middle East area now for Latin America. Therefore, there's also this cross-selling between geography with the same customers, and we have, of course, different geography and new applications, as mentioned before, for instance, for the first marine applications, and we continue our discussion and we are negotiations with different applications, geographies, also with some combustion engine, OEM engine manufacturers, as well as on the energy side and vehicle OEMs, which have been regarded genuinely not as the first priority customer base because it's principally a retrofit solution for the fleet owners and the operators.
But you see, and we see, as more the OEMs and the engine manufacturers are interested in what we are doing there and what our technology is about, it's of course a good signal that the guys are interested in us. And yeah, therefore we will also have more and more discussions and negotiations and maybe also some cooperations, which we will also continue in a bigger Middle East and Asian sales office offensive and partnering too. There are also more and more guys being interested in us. And we, of course, have also some guys in our view with whom we would like to talk. Therefore, I think and hope you see we do a lot of activities internally and externally.
We want to grow the company, of course, and by that growing the volume and the turnover and for the hardware volume and turnover of the hardware, our hydrogen, but of course also want to grow the subscription earnings out of the carbon credits and the software and telematics usage, which of course is continuous money in income. And by that, we want to grow, of course, the value of the company as well as your and our share price. And yeah, that's majorly the story. And I'm happy, yeah, first that you listen, secondly, that ones of you who are already invested, thank you for that. And thirdly, that ones who want, I can only recommend it to you. I also spent significant money and time into this company and product. Thank you very much. And Lindsay, your turn. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for all of this. What a great presentation. So, you know, there's just a couple of questions that have come in for sure. One of them actually being, you know, Volkner said, "Good to see that you could already partially finance yourself in 2024 from sales. Can you estimate if the sales in 2025 will be high enough to finance all running costs in 2025 by the sales?"
Yeah, very good question. Principally, we are targeting in 2025 for roughly doing five times more volume, which would make it possible together with the AUD 5 million, which we have raised to finance ourselves. Of course, is this significant growth? And as I said, we do a lot of activities to prepare ourselves for this being able to manufacture it.
All right. Now, we had an email that was sent in prior to this by a big fan of yours, actually. I am a big fan of dynaCERT's products and patents and have been following the. Why was there another? I think Lindsay's connection is breaking off there. So the first question is, what was the reason for the CAD 5 million non-brokered deal? And the second question is, when will you expect revenues from the Verra certification?
Yeah, good. First, yeah, the CAD 5 million deal was, of course, yeah, being the right time and right amount of financing our internal development. And as we all know, the more money you have, the faster you can do the things we defined as appropriate. Might it be in sourcing material for the assembly? Might it be in additional people? Or might it be in setting up the global topics?
Therefore, principally, depending on the financing or the financing defines a little bit the speed of our activities. Therefore, that's why we asked for the five million and why we ask for also in the next weeks and months for more to come because then we are able to do the things faster as if we wouldn't have the financing or the funding. Secondly, as everybody can imagine, I guess, is the point that now the time for hydrogen technology is the right one. Means, of course, there's now more and more different technologies or different approaches popping up. And as said, as our company is 22 years old, maybe it was not too early, but therefore we have a lot of experience.
But now it's really the time where we need money to be fast in the marketplace and to harvest out of our field test seedings more and more series volume. And maybe that's the first point. And the second point for the first question, second question, when we will have profits or turnover out of the carbon credits. Means principally, as said, the general approval of Verra is existing. We have that already different to a lot of other players who would be interested in that. Secondly, we have found quite a significant project to work on the definite generation process of these carbon credits, which will mean we have, for instance, in roughly six weeks' time, kind of public hearing where we are also to the audience showing our process together with or in preparation of the Verra approval.
Therefore, this, of course, costs a lot or needs some time, but we are quite realistic that we will have, let's say, by year's end maybe, or we were working on earlier, of course, to have also this individual generation generating process defined and approved, and maybe what is important is the individual carbon credit is being based and generated for realized, as in real life realized emission reduction. That means we need, depending on, let's say, quarterly or yearly subscription and generating, it will be paid for the historical or in the retrospective. That means also with the approval, it means not first day already money income, but of course with a proper process, which also will be audited and everything in the future.
And a real reliable so-called premium carbon credit process also means really from well-accepted worldwide organizations like Verra, it will be to the benefit of the operators and of dynaCERT. And we intend to have the money out of these carbon credits being divided by the operators and us mea ns also giving continuous potential and turnover and, of course, profit potential to dynaCERT and therefore for the shareholders and investors as well. But answering again means from today's perspective.
We have to intervene. Very sorry for that, but it's two minutes past the half, so we're sorry. For other questions, I invite the attendees to write to you or get in contact with you.
We thank you very much for your time and for the presentation and for updating us on the latest development at DynaCert, and we'll be very happy to have you at our next IIF if you're available. Thank you very much, Mr. Krueper.
Yeah, thank you, everybody. You take care. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
Thank you also very much, Lindsay, for being with us today. Great. So we will have to continue now with Mr. Jack Stoch from Globex. Mr. Stoch is a usual participant. We're always happy to have him with us. He's already sharing screens. He's a professional. He's already there. We see the image, everything. So we enter a very important part of the IIF right now.
Within the next four, presenter will have Globex Mining Enterprises, Almonty Industries, Power Nickel, which just was renamed, and First Nordic Metals, which are all companies that share price have appreciated greatly within the last year. So we're very happy to have you with us. And for starting this very core period, Jack Stoch, all yours, please go ahead.
Hey, Julian, pleasure to see you again.
Pleasure is mine, Jack.
Okay, I'm going to do something a little bit different because usually I do these talks and I use up the entire half hour almost because we have so many assets. But what I'm going to do this time is a very short presentation, just focusing on what we do rather than the assets that we have. And that therefore leave a long period of time for people to ask questions.
Because normally what happens, you only get in one or two questions and there's usually a lineup of questions that people don't get a chance. So I'm hoping that this works out and that there's not a big dead period, but we'll find out. So I'm going to be talking today about Globex Mining Enterprises, which is a mineral property bank. What we do is we do exploration, but we also generate revenue through deals with other companies. And we also have a business of royalties. What I would like you to focus on while I go through this presentation is on the value model of what we have. I'm not going to talk about very many individual assets, but just about the concept of what we do, so Globex is a diversified company. We do pretty much anything has the potential to generate revenue.
We have a lot of precious metal properties, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, base metal projects, particularly copper, zinc, but also lead and nickel, very often with gold and silver credits, and then we have a lot of specialty metals and minerals, magnesium, rare earth, manganese, antimony, lithium, bismuth, cobalt, fluorite, uranium, dolomite, and recently hydrogen. Not that we found it, but somebody else found it on our property, which is a silica property, and we also have a lot of silica projects, so we're diversified is the idea. We also have a whole series of royalties, basically 106 royalties, most of them generated by people who have earned interests in our properties by doing the work, and we sit back and if they get the production, we end up with a revenue stream.
Other things about the company, we only work in areas of low political risk, particularly Eastern Canada, Saxony, Germany, and the USA. We have revenue, and that revenue is generated through options where other companies come to us and option a property in exchange for cash shares and a work commitment. They carry the project forward and hopefully in some cases to production. We also have joint ventures. We have only one joint venture. We also have this whole bunch of royalties. The position of the company currently is we have about $25 million in cash and shares of other company. Actually, it's closer to $30 million. We have no debt. That is something a bit different than the junior mining sector. Number one, we generate revenue. We have revenue. We have money in the bank, and we have no debt. We own our assets.
What are the basics about the company for those who are not familiar with the company? We have 56 million shares out. That is after the company has been listed for over 40 years. We have never done a rollback. The reason for this, the small number of shares, is because we generate revenue. We don't have to go back to the market on a constant basis and issue more shares in order to pay for work. We have the deals that we do that give us the revenue to allow us to do our work and upgrade our assets. Fully diluted, we're 57.7 million shares. Management, principally myself and my wife, we have almost 13% of the company. The board of directors is a bit different than other junior mining companies. It's a professional board, three senior geologists, one mining accountant, and one senior finance professional.
It's not doctors. It's not dentists. It's not the guy next door. It is people who are working in the industry who have know-how, whether it's technical or financial. Another thing different about us is we're on the senior Toronto Stock Exchange. We're not on the Vancouver. We're not on CSE. We're on the senior reporting exchange. We're also on seven exchanges in Germany, including Frankfurt. And we're on the OTCQX International in the US by invitation. So talking about our assets, we have, it says here, you can see here the red bars. This is just showing how over time we've increased our asset base. It says 254 projects. Actually, as of this week, it's 256, but we won't quibble. And we have 106 royalties of that 254 that we talk about here. So you can see how steadily over time we've been building the asset base.
The breakdown of the 254 is 127 are precious metals, of which 73 are exploration projects and 54 are royalties. 69 are base metal projects, 42 which are exploration projects, 27 royalties. Specialty mineral projects, 23 are exploration projects, 19 are royalties. Industrial mineral projects, 10 are exploration projects, 6 are royalties. So you can see the breakdown. A lot of these things are already quite advanced. So if you look at those numbers again, a little bit of a different way, 254 projects, 127 precious metals, 69 base metals, and including precious metals credits, and then the 58 specialty metals and minerals. We are very diversified, and some of these things we have a goodly number of projects. For example, silica, we have a half a dozen silica projects.
One of the things that's not shown here on this list is hydrogen, which is a new thing which has come up on one of our projects. We have 106 royalties. We have nine active options. These options generate cash, shares, and exploration expenditures by the other company that is optioning the property. And if they go to the end, we end up with a gross metal royalty. Now, you may be familiar with net profits and net smelter royalties. We invented the thing called the gross metal royalty. And basically what it is, is a percentage of the metal that is produced or the mineral if it's an industrial mineral. So for example, if we have a 3% gross metal royalty on a gold project and 100 ounces of gold are produced by the refinery, we get 3 ounces. The idea is it's paid by the third party.
It can be paid in cash or in kind, usually at our choice. And there's nothing to fight about. There's no deductions of any kind. Because what happens with net smelter or net profit, when money's on the table, people get silly and you start fighting about what is an acceptable deduction, what is not an acceptable deduction. With the gross metal royalty, there are no deductions. Of our 254 projects, 58 have historical or NI 43-101 resources and over 40 have former mining operations on them. So one of the things about our projects, we only, I think, have two projects which could be considered grassroots. They're positioned beside a project that is going to production or has some sort of news factor. All of our other projects are advanced. They have targets that are already defined by geophysics or by drilling or surface showings.
There's always a reason. It's not just land. Now, the map that you're seeing here, the large gray map in the center is the map of the Abitibi of northern Quebec and northern Ontario. The black lines are major fault structures. All the gold stars are gold properties we own. The blue squares are base metal projects. The red stars are critical metals and minerals, and the green sort of diamond shapes are industrial minerals. You can see that we have a lot of projects in the Abitibi, and the reason for that is that the Abitibi is one of the main producing areas of minerals in Canada, so lots of projects. We own our projects. That's the other thing. We own our projects, which is different where other companies are trying to earn an interest in projects. We own them.
If you go to the top left, you see the rest of Canada and the U.S., and you can see we have a lot of other projects in the rest of Quebec, in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as well as Saskatchewan, Washington State, Nevada, and Arizona, and on the bottom, you see there's a map of Germany showing the silver project we have in Saxony, Germany, and there's a map there showing Portugal, and we're in the process, hopefully the final stage of acquiring a gold antimony project in Portugal, so we only work in areas of stable government where mineral rights are acquirable without conflict. We don't have to worry about dictators. We don't have to worry about assets being grabbed away, so I'm just going to talk quickly about four projects just to give you the idea of what we do and how things work.
For this is an example up in the James Bay area. And we acquired all those blue rectangles are claims that we acquired for lithium exploration in the James Bay area. And company Brunswick Exploration approached us and wanted to option the property from us because they were looking for a good project with lithium potential. So we said, "Fine." We worked out a deal. It was a five-year option, cash payments each year, share payments each year. And they had to undertake a certain amount of exploration to earn 100% interest in the project. We keep a 2.5% gross metal royalty. So they're actually doing the third phase of exploration now. They liked the project that much after the first phase. They paid us 100% of the cash, 100% of the shares upfront and carrying it forward with more drilling.
You can see some values that they've intersected in some of the areas. Those red stars are areas where they've intersected lithium mineralization, and they have more now in the third phase. They're carrying it forward. The dashed line around the blue rectangles shows the area of influence. So anything found within that dashed line area, our 2.5% gross metal royalty applies. So that's an example of how our projects are structured and companies go forward with. This is another project. This is in Quebec on what's called the Porcupine-Destor Break, which is one of two of the main gold localizing structures in the Abitibi. This is north of Rouyn-Noranda. So historically, the property has 4.17 million tons of 5.4 g gold, or that's cut, uncut, meaning values over 30 g/tin are not eliminated, is 6.36 g. So that's talking about 727,000 ounces cut, 853 ounces uncut.
Nice average width, 5.71 m. So this was calculated at a price of $960 USD per ounce. As you're well aware, the price of gold is much higher than that now. And also, this estimate was based upon underground mining. We've done a deal with a company called Emperor Metals. They're in the second year of the option. We just received a $500,000 cash payment, second payment, and $300,000 in shares for them to meet their second year obligation. They've met all their cash expenditures, and they're looking for lower-grade open-pittable material. So the deal is $10 million cash over five years, 15 million shares, 12 million in work, and a 3% gross overriding royalty if they carry it to production. So they've done several drill prog. They've intersected high-grade material.
They've also intersected wide widths of low-grade material, substantiating their concept of potential low-grade large tonnage open pit mining. So again, we generate revenue over a period of years, more ounces in the ground being developed, the risks taken on by another company. We sit back because we own the asset. They carry it forward. Another example, the advantage of all the projects that we have. We said we have 256 at the moment. This is a project we picked up in the James Bay area also of Quebec. And it is pretty much anything property. There's lots of gold. There's base metals, copper, and lots of potential in the property. You can see there's multiple zones either on surface as surface showings, high-grade gold, and there's also trenches with good values. There's also grab samples, and there's also drill holes with good values.
There's an iron formation with gold in it. It's a really interesting property. We picked this up by staking. It cost us a couple thousand dollars. On either side of us for miles, Azimut are working, and they've got to deal with the Polish mining company. They're doing exploration. They've flown airborne. They've done prospecting, mapping. And if you see on the bottom right, there's an area it says Power Nickel discovery. That is a new nickel discovery by Azimut. You can see 8.42% nickel and platinum, palladium 7.25, and so on. Right on surface discovery, they've done a whole series of drill holes, intersected good values. Again, the example of us having all of these projects all over the place, they find a discovery, a brand new discovery right next door to us.
You can see from the map, and if you go on our website, you'll see the geophysics. The geology goes directly through our property, and we already know that our property is covered with all kinds of showings of base metals and precious metals mineralization. The advantage of our expertise in acquiring properties with potential, but also just the simple number and distribution of our assets puts us in the position where if someone else makes a discovery, we're part of the game. This is a map showing the yellow line is what's called the Cadillac Break, and this is near the town of Cadillac, which is halfway between Val-d'Or and Rouyn-Noranda. The black outlined area is our central Cadillac Wood property. Two former producers on the property with historical resources. We did some exploration.
We've got some values, but we also discovered a new zone called the Ironwood just to the north of the main fault: 243,000 tons, 17 g, and open, so we just finished a 19-hole drill program to try to define the shape, not necessarily the grade, but to define the shape of the deposit because we're looking at what is the potential of us or another group mining that small deposit. It is a disturbed property, so theoretically, it should be easier to permit. There's road access. It's right on the highway. There is power. There is a town with equipment and a workforce right next door. Literally, you can see where it says Cadillac. That's the town of Cadillac. And again, it's halfway between Val-d'Or and Rouyn, so we're looking to see what is the potential, so we did the 19 holes.
We've announced in four press releases the results, lots of high-grade gold intersections. We've engaged a senior engineering firm to come up with a new resource calculation, tonnage and grade. We've done a new 3D model. The idea is to see, can we mine it ourselves, or can we do a deal with another group and let them mine it? There's a new mining method called Novamera, where they actually mine using large diameter drill holes. You don't need a shaft. You don't need a ramp. What they do is they set up on the deposit. This deposit comes, we've proven with the last drill program, comes to sub-outcrop. So they drill down using these large diameter holes, which are three and a half m to 4 m in diameter, or it could be less if required.
They actually crush the rock and bring it to surface. You can put it on the truck and send it to a mill. We're in discussions with Novamera. They're waiting for our new resource calculation and our new 3D model, and we will see how we go forward. We may do it ourselves. We may let them do it, or we may do a deal with someone else. We'll see. It's kind of an interesting project. Also, if you see tied right onto the side of that, on the left side, there is a thing that says Kewagama Royalty. We purchased a 2% net smelter. Radisson are drilling there, and we have that royalty, and they are drilling and carrying the potential of the deposit to depth, as well as on their main O'Brien mine. There's a whole series of mines.
You can see also further to the west, there's a because it says the new Alger Royalty that also is under the care of Radisson, and we have a 1% NSR, so on about half of the Radisson property, we have royalties. They're spending large amounts of money to carry the project forward. They're getting excellent results on both of our royalty aspects within their package, and we're looking forward to them carrying that project to production and generating revenue for us. Again, how our model works. We let other people take the risk and carry the projects forward, so I'm going to stop there so people have a chance to ask questions, something which previous presentations they haven't had the chance, but the things I'd like you to keep in mind when you're focusing on the value of the assets, and I invite you to go look at it.
We have a new website. Go look at our website and go through the long presentation there. Look at individual properties, see what we're doing. Look at the financials. By the way, I should mention on our financials, we show all of our assets at zero value. We do that because it costs a lot of money to generate each year during the audit to come up with a value because you have to do it with the auditor. So we just, across the board, write everything off. So the actual numbers on our financials don't reflect the value of all these assets, a large number of them which have NI 43-101 or historical resources or generation of revenue from deals that are ongoing. So things to keep in mind, few shares out. The board is made up of senior people in the industry. We have income.
That sets us so far apart from most other junior companies. Income from royalties and options. We own our properties. We're not paying anybody else to earn an interest. So not only do we own our properties, we own our office buildings. That's one of them you see there. We own our vehicles. We own our core facilities. We own everything. We also own land on various projects. We have no debt. That's interesting. For most other junior companies, they have debt. That's when they get in trouble. We have no debt. We have funds available for exploration. We only work in areas of low political risk.
Those are the things that I think I would like you to keep in mind, that along with the fact that we have this board of people who are in the industry, who understand the industry and can help us in advancing the proje cts. And that's it.
Well, that was very concise today, Jack, and I think it's a very interesting thing. So we've got a few things. You always obviously discuss junior mining and so on. But you're, as you were saying, on the main board of Toronto. Revenues-wise, you were not a major, obviously, like Rio Tinto or so on with billions and billions. However, you do have positive revenues. You do make money each and every year, which is important. You do not have debt, as you say. So we do have a few questions. Please write more questions in the Q&A.
We have four minutes to go through, but a message here, obviously, that Jack is trying to send to attendees out there. You are not investing in the same kind of risk as a junior mining company, but as a money-making, product-generating with high upside, very low downside mining play here in the commodity sector as this sector is coming in an upward trend. So first, Tony, you were asking in the Cadillac trend, obviously, the Ironwood gold deposit, and there's also other zones like Wood with one million ton, five g historic resources. Do you plan to do exploration on the work on other zones? I think, Tony, missed that you sent a press release with tremendous results, if my memory is correct, on Ironwood.
Yes, we have great results, wide widths, but more importantly, high grade. And that's what's so fascinating about that project.
Yeah, we're going to do more work on the other parts of the project, but right now we're focusing on the Ironwood Zone to decide how we're going to carry that forward because we want to carry that forward. But keep in mind, we also have a vast storehouse of other properties that we intend to work on, for example, the Rouyn-Noranda property on that same break, but further towards Rouyn-Noranda. We actually i ntended to drill it in the fall, but we got delayed by a government regulation, so we're starting in the spring. So yeah, we have a lot of things to work on, including on that central Cadillac Wood Mine project.
And just one complementary question of that. They're asking about the timeline of the project, but moreover, actually, are you going to do with this project the same that you do usually?
Find a partner, keep a royalty, and have someone work on it and spend the money?
Yes and no. How's that for a concise answer?
And we say, "Yeah," and it makes perfect sense.
Yeah, look, we've done the drill program to see if we can apply this Novamera system. If we can apply the Novamera system, we're going to be looking at the economics and deciding whether we do it ourselves or we do it in conjunction with Novamera, or we let Novamera do it, or if we do it another way. The nice thing about the Novamera system, it's simple. It should be easier to permit, and it has less impact environmentally than other methods. Like I said, no shaft, no ramp. So we're open to all kinds of ways.
If it becomes evident that it's a no-brainer that we can make a really great profit from this using the Novamera method and using them as a contractor, we'll do that. But they've indicated that they'd be interested, depending on the results of the work that we did, that they would be prepared to take it on themselves, and we retain an interest. So all avenues are open at this point.
Absolutely. And Novamera is actually a surgical mining technology that allows you to make drilling holes and follow the veins and then go on and not have to do basically diamond drilling from surface and then filling it up with concrete and just going and following the veins. So this is a very interesting technology for sure.
Tony's also asking, "Any update on your property with hydrogen potential?" I think you did cover that, so we're going to skip that. Eric is saying, "If you would entertain the possibility of a dividend eventually to shareholders?"
Oh, I'd love to get a dividend. Listen, we're the largest shareholder, myself and my wife, so I obviously want dividends. But doing a one-year or two-year dividend doesn't make any sense until we have an ongoing long-term dividend source, like one of the mines, one of the deposits going into production, becoming a mine, going into production, whether it's five years, 10 years, 15 years. But if we can foresee the revenue coming in on a yearly basis, I'll be more than happy to provide dividend to our shareholders, including myself.
Perfect. Well, that's all the time we had, Jack. Thank you very much for the presentation.
This is always very interesting. We really love seeing the share price of your company finally getting up into the sphere where we would like it to see on a daily basis and even higher than that. Congrats to you. It takes a lot of effort and commitment to do it. We're going to be keeping on following all the great stories you have in the project, Jack. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Thank you. Now our next presenter, which is obviously someone we all know very, very well. I just invited him as a panelist. We're waiting for him to accept it, but he should come within seconds. He's Mr. Lewis Black from Almonty. This time, it is my privilege to moderate this half an hour with Mr. Black.
Things have been tremendously going well, at least on the share price of the company. Now let's hear what's happening internally. Lewis, welcome once again.
Oh, hello, everybody. Happy to be here on the 14th International Investment Forum. It's always a pleasure, and it's something I look forward to every time you do these things. Thank you very much for having me. Let me just.
Yes, exactly. Share your screen, and then you'll be able to.
Yeah, I know the system. I've got it all worked out now. It's all in hand. Hang on, I've got to do the. What do I do? View. Full screen. Exactly. How does that look?
As good as your share price, Lewis.
Perfect. So my name is Lewis Black. I'm President, Founder, CEO of Almonty. And I'm still the second largest shareholder.
We are a tungsten and moly company that primarily focuses on our deposit in Korea, which is the world's largest tungsten mine formerly when it was open and closed in 1993, and in one of Asia's largest moly mines, which is attached to our tungsten mine. So, as was brought up, our share price has responded for a number of reasons, predominantly because of geopolitics. But this has been a long time coming. You can see that we've been essentially inching up over the last 24 months. And most importantly, our liquidity over these last 24 months has increased significantly, not just on the recent geopolitics, but even prior to that. So where we are now, some ten times or more higher than our nearest competitor within tungsten, which has essentially made sure that we've broken away from this sector, which is very important.
We have a fairly diverse shareholder base, but we've resisted the temptation of having a rich uncle. We've always done this internally, both through friends of the family and through the majority of long-standing shareholders. We're quite unique in that regard in that our first set of shareholders back in the day when we did the IPO of Almonty, when we bought the Los Santos project, we've still got them, and they've more than doubled their money. So this is quite rare for a junior not to have gone through two or three sets of shareholders. So I think we've done a good job in preserving value for shareholders because, of course, the main reason is because, well, I'm a very large one, and I've put a lot of money into this. So it makes complete sense. We have a number of assets.
Portugal, which is producing. It's an old mine. It makes money every month, which is important. Not a huge amount, but it was never expected to, but it contains within it a pool of knowledge that has allowed us to do this number two project, which is Sangdong, which is obviously something which is far superior to what Portugal is now, and with a grade significantly higher, so I've always said, if we can make money with really what ends up being a real grade of 0.11 underground in Portugal, imagine what we can do with a grade of 0.5 underground in South Korea. We also have the Valtreixal mine. This is fully permitted by the environmental permit. I think anyone who follows mining in Europe will be fully aware that in the last eight years, the Spanish government has not issued any new environmental permits for metal mines.
This seems to be a policy of the government, and until such times that changes, this project will remain as is, but it's ready to go. Los Santos, the tailings, as soon as I've got the calendar open, I'll turn my attention to it. There's only one of me, so I don't have endless amounts of time during the day, but it's important because the plant in Los Santos is ready to go to Valtreixal and has been maintained for that purpose. But I think it's very important to feel that our internal growth is not fueled by project three or four, but by project two. Because project two is not just tungsten, it's also the moly, and it's also the downstream tungsten. So I know you guys have all been waiting, all the shareholders have been waiting. Oh, what's been going on?
When I presented last, you saw the picture on the right, my right, maybe your left. Now we are at this later stage of heading into the finish line. Please note the color of the plant is obviously matched to Almonty colors. There's no Korean significance of this color, except it's a color that I like. But you can see we are well advanced. We've had a bit of a tough winter. I always said last year when I presented, I was worried about snow. I probably should have also added, because I never considered it, extreme cold, because unbeknownst to me, extreme cold doesn't allow much snow. But you can't actually work when it's minus 20 degrees Celsius or less, because in Korea, like in many jurisdictions, you can't handle steel bar in anything less than minus 10 degrees Celsius, apparently the skin can stick to it.
So it has allowed us to drag on a little bit longer than I would have liked. We've lost probably two or three weeks. But again, this idea of a junior miner always racing to the finish line to then create this black hole of money pit is not really for me. We have, as always we've said, we've walked to the finish line, do it properly, do it right the first time. In this time, under our construction, our pilot plant still operates. We're still constantly assessing. We're constantly examining. There should be no reason to mess this up. And I think that's very important. And this idea that you can open a mine and it doesn't work pretty much as designed out the gate is insane. It has to do that. It can't be in 12 months or 18 months, "Oh, you know, we're still looking at this.
We're doing that." That's not how this works at all, because it's your money and my money that has to feed it. And that's not good. So yes, geopolitics is a big factor here. We've got restrictions coming into the Department of Defense in regard to where they can procure tungsten from. Obviously, Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia are now excluded, which pretty much means there's really only us pretty much left. There are export restrictions on dual-use, which unfortunately pretty much disqualifies everybody because the export ban or the export license requirement is so broad that anyone even making, I don't know, brake parts that they manufacture and are bought by a company who in turn supplies it to the military for armored vehicles potentially could be disqualified.
And so I think what I'm seeing in the sector right now from talks with my customers and I would imagine very soon to be customers is a broad acceptance that the gig is up. Real diversification has to occur now. There has to be a plan B. And how long is it going to take us to get up to full capacity of phase two? These are the questions I'm being asked. Obviously, NATO has been going on about this, and we've seen Rio Tinto looking continually for supply. I don't think I need to tell anybody here what the problem is. The share price is doing the talking here. We are considered by the market the last man standing. And this brings on an interesting point. And it's a point that I would like to talk about. I mean, we can talk about price.
We can talk about all the things. But what sets us apart? What is different about Almonty that we're trading, as I said, more than six, seven times the value of our nearest competitor in tungsten? What is it about Almonty that gives us the liquidity of more than ten times our nearest competitor? Despite all the abuse and grief we get from our competitors about, because, of course, everybody likes to throw rocks at the guy that's broken away from the sector. But have we broken away for the right reasons? And I'm going to share with you why I think it is. What is our difference? Firstly, we're the only company in tungsten that has direct government involvement. We have a lender in the German state bank secured by a guarantee from the Austrian Finance Ministry.
We have unprecedented assistance for land, infrastructure, direct investment in that regard from the Korean government, so we have three governments already that are involved in what we're doing, and governments don't take these commitments lightly. This isn't just a soft loan under a broader package. This is identifying this as a strategic moment where they can resolve a lot of their current concerns in this sector through a company. We have premiums paid on our material. Now, if our competitors receive a premium, we do. There's a reason for that, and it's not just because of my sparkling personality. It's because the product we produce is reliable, consistent, to spec, and desirable. We receive floor prices on our larger contracts where such contracts, if the price turned against us, could be absolutely detrimental. We don't get this because I'm a lovely guy.
We get this because our track record and our project and our approach gives our customers confidence that no matter what the future brings, they will be able to depend and rely on the delivery and specification of our agreements. And that is very important. And I think it's really one of our cornerstones of what we do going forward. If I look at our share price performance, it has been very positive. But it's not just because of geopolitics. What else makes us different? Well, we'll be the only, as we finish our re-domiciling, don't forget to vote. The vote is on the 27th. We'll be the only U.S. company currently producing tungsten, which is important. We have always focused on value. Always.
Yes, we've done raises over the years, but we've avoided being with a rich uncle for a very specific reason, because our independence has given us the strength to do what we've done. That's why we've been able to attract this support. We've also operated mines for decades, tungsten mines. You know what I mean? I think that's also something which is very much forgotten, the difference between us and our competitors. We've done this a long time. Our mines have always made money. We forget how successful Los Santos was. We bought it for very little money. We turned it around, and I think in four months, we were already making money. And by the end, it was making extraordinary levels of money. I think it's something which is lost in the annals of history. This is what we do.
I think we look at the fact that management directly invests, myself particularly. We have a 100-year+ track record in what we do. Portugal, I've owned twice. This is my second go around with them. But that team has allowed me to develop career. We are making decisions for the shareholders, me, not for the management. This is also a huge distinction. I think one of the testaments of what it's like working at Almonty is we have a very low turnover of senior and mid-level staff. No one leaves. It's not that I've got them trapped in a room. It's not that I haven't got anyone chained in the basement. They stay with us because they understand what we're trying to achieve here. I think if you look at our customers, we've only ever worked with EU, U.S., Japanese customers.
And soon, I hope, well, I know, Korean customers. We've made that decision. We're not saying that we don't respect our Vietnamese and Chinese customers, but we've never chosen to work in that way. And I think that commitment to Western consumption has certainly borne fruit for us over the years. And I think one other point to make, because I can keep this up for days, one other point is to say that KfW IPEX, which is considered to be tier one Project Finance lender, it has a phenomenal and fantastic reputation. We are the first tungsten project that they've backed to this level of 80% of cost. I mean, we're almost certainly the smallest loan they've ever done for 80% of a project cost, but we're the first. And I think that also, you think KfW went into this blind?
They put me through four and a half years of due diligence. I went two and a half years of due diligence and two and a half years, two years of compliance. I mean, this has been a journey. We've essentially earned our stripes here. Now, what do we think the future holds? Who knows, really? From my point of view, and I know this sector very well, I've been in it a long time. I'm coming up to, well, it's got to be close to 20 years if I add in the first ownership of Portugal. I mean, it's a long time to be in this sector. We believe that China has now introduced a mechanism to control the export of material at their election.
We also are aware that there's the potential at the next CCP Congress in March that the environmental rules regarding the consumption and importation of scrap, tungsten scrap, is going to be got rid of, allowing them to also feed from tungsten scrap procured around the world, meaning that now China is fully in competition with all Western consumers on both raw materials, as in concentrate, and on scrap. This is a dynamic which we've never really, we've never experienced. So we don't know how this is all going to play out. We've signed, obviously, our deal with SeAH, the world's second largest moly oxide smelter. Fantastic guys. Plus, it's great guys too as well, in case they are watching this and they say I didn't mention them. They're great guys too. But SeAH, great guys. We are now working through local debt to build it.
It's obviously a much easier story internally because it's going to be shipped domestically in Korea. And then my understanding is it will find its way to their new plant in Texas to provide the specialty moly steel for SpaceX and for the U.S. missile defense sector. We raised money recently over Christmas New Year. That also is a big distinction of how we're viewed. No junior can raise money over Christmas New Year. It's just not possible. But we did. And we raised what we needed to take care of a problem, which is one of the reasons why we've seen our stock, I think, also free itself up. But I don't want to say any more on that because I don't want to end up in litigation. This is all being handled separately. But it's all good for me.
But it shows how our shareholders view us, that we were able to raise money when we so desired. I don't want to do, I didn't want to do the raise, but I had to because I had to fix this problem. But I don't want to do any more raises. This is it. We're now on the finish line. I don't have interest in further raises. You can hold me to it. But I think it's important. It's a good highlights how we're viewed by the wider investing audience. We're relocating to the States. I look at like Canada. We've been there a long time. But I think that we need a bit of the, we need a bit of the excitement that's now underway in the US regarding certain strategic metals and us being front and center in that in tungsten.
And I think being a US company is certainly going to do us no harm. We're keeping the listings. Everybody stay calm, Australia and in Canada, and of course, our German listing. But from a re-domiciling point of view, I believe we have good valid reasons to go. I think we will not suffer because of it. I think we will benefit. And I think in terms of how I believe our next four years looks, phase one opens in Saudi shortly, two to three months, I would estimate. Phase two will start, we'll start work on that immediately when we commission phase one. A lot of the work has already been done. We expect within 12 months to have phase two online. That may sound crazy. My competitors will be all up in arms saying, "Oh, how can you double production?
How can you do this in 12 months?" Well, because a lot of the work, like the grinding circuit, infrastructure, and plant space has already been done under phase one. So most of the work, especially the long lead time things, has been concluded, which is good. We want to finalize the, what we say, financing for phase two. It's roughly about $17 million. I'm going to try and do it internally from my earnings. I'll do my usual junior miner, Almonty approach to things. We'll scrape it together. It's not a huge amount of money, but imagine this, $17 million, you double your output. I mean, it's a big win for us as shareholders. We want to try and knock down the debt piece for the Sangdong moly this year. So those conversations are underway.
I don't have much time to do anything else, but this is another one of my focus, and in regard to the downstream tungsten, tungsten oxide, we are now, those conversations with the government are now advancing at a faster pace. Obviously, what's happening with the geopolitics has meant that now we have to really get going. They've given us a site, or they've identified a site they're going to give us, which is important. Let me see during this year whether I have further news on that, which I believe I will, and so we're going to fund our growth through this mine. It has tungsten and moly, and I think that's important. We're not going to look externally at this time for acquisition. We're going to focus our attention on our near-term growth internally.
So on that, because I see I've got seven minutes left, and I know that they ran a tight ship on this forum, let's see if there's any questions. Otherwise, I can keep going. You let me know, Julian.
Lewis, I don't know what to tell you. There is, for the first time ever you present, absolutely no question or comments. So go on. Go on. And in the meantime, I invite every participant. It's the most participant we ever have for you. No questions.
And there's no questions.
Nothing.
I knew. When did I lose them? Page three. I knew page three was a problem.
No, I think you lost them at hello, but that's me. So anyone that's listening right now, please write your question into any area of the chat. I'll be happy. In the meantime,
I will carry on. I will carry on with my, what makes us different? The moly mine, it's fully permitted, both environmental and mining permit, which is in a democracy unheard of. I mean, it means it's ready to go. And we've never really talked about the moly because obviously the focus has always been tungsten. But the moly has the potential to make a profound effect on the company. I like to describe it that phase one tungsten is X revenue. Phase two is 2X. The moly mine is 4X. So it means that as a company, as a group, we can see a clear path to four times our revenue within assets that we currently own and are already permitted. The missing pieces were an off-taker. That bo x is checked. And the finance, it will be addressed as we've done with the tungsten. Are there questions coming?
Yes, they are. Now it's flooding. I just had to open the valve. I don't know what's happening.
No one was paying attention. They were all making tea.
The first question I got was a comment, which is, as a long-time holder, thank you for your tremendous due diligence, liebe Grüße. So thank you very much. This is great. Okay. A lot of the questions are about turnover 2026 or this year. What do you expect for the first year of production as a turnover?
As an operator, you don't want to jinx it. The good news is we're working soft commissionings now on grinding circuit. Remember, we're not a gravity plant. We're a flotation plant. It's a big difference. Flotation is chemical. It's a far more predictable ramp-up. So we've allowed a 60-day ramp-up. Ask me again at the next IFF.
Perfect. One analyst is asking. Analyst from First Berlin says, "Can you explain how you have managed to reduce the ramp-up period at Sangdong from nine months to three months since the December IIF presentation?"
Well, hello, Simon. How are you? I think, as I just said, we've been doing soft commissionings as we complete sections. So when we do a nine-month ramp-up, it's normally considered done when you've actually finished the project. But we've actually decided to do the soft commissionings as we build. So as we finish the grinding circuit, we start the commissioning. And that's how we've been able to reduce it. Sorry, Simon. It's not a gotcha moment. But I'm sure your next question will be.
All good. Mark is asking, "In the future, with good cash flow, do you plan on paying dividend or focusing on M&A or development?" I think you answered that through focusing on internal growth, but your message.
Internal growth and paying a dividend makes the assumption that we'll be the proud owners of this going forward. But think about what we have, what we've done, and who's involved with us. I would say, and given my track record of exits, I mean, if I was a b etting man.
You can stop here. Don't say more than that. You can stop here. That's quite clear. Eric from Quebec is asking, "What are the risks to tungsten price going down per Chinese flooding or so?" You touched that through your flooring of prices. Maybe just a few words again on it.
I have a hard floor. So China can do whatever they want, but I have a hard floor, meaning I can survive it. But they have less mines now in China. They've been closing them. They've cut the subsidies and they have much higher costs, hence why they're a net importer of Western concentrate now.
Perfect. Hence, as an interesting question, is there any plan to develop Mugok, the gold project?
No. And very simply, I'll tell you why. The residents don't want it, and they built a church on the site. And to be between me and you, I don't want to be the one knocking that church down. It's just something which doesn't look good on social media. And the residents will not stand for any of it. So nobody will develop that site. But I may have a little surprise in Portugal for everybody in that area. But hold your horses. All will be revealed later this year.
This is difficult, Lewis. Then all of a sudden, everyone gets excited. We need to say something else. You have to come back to the next IIF. You're creating so much expectation. Let's go with another question. Hold on. Some question came in by email also. Sangdong was also known to host bismuth. This was also mined in the past. Any comments on that?
Yes. In the past, 8% of revenue came from byproducts in Sangdong. It was bismuth, gold, and silver, and a little bit of moly. These were the four, but predominantly bismuth and gold and silver. We have done all the work on that. We've never included it in our models. But yes, we will see a significant contribution to our revenue from these byproducts. But I never wanted to confuse the situation.
I hate mines or tungsten mines that talk about their byproducts as a justification for economic viability. I want to focus. We are a tungsten mine, and we happen to have 8% of our revenue, as it did in the past, from byproducts. But we'll talk more about that when we commission.
Perfect. Let me see one more question. Well, I think you answered the approach for takeover. Any updates regarding the tungsten oxide plan? You need money, and when will you start? I think you touched that also.
We touched it. We will find the debt funding for that internally in Korea through the Korean government.
Well, Lewis, it's 4:30 P.M. on the nose. We answered all questions. You discussed absolutely everything.
I think people are out of question because simply with your project update, you provide the answers as a real mining company should do, and not true words, but true actions. So Lewis, thank you very much for being once again with us today. We will all be continuing following the story. We wish you to, we're knocking on wood. We don't want to jinx it, but continue wishing you the best for the near future.
Thanks very much, Julian. Take care.
Thank you, Friday.
Thank you. Bye.
So this concludes the session with Mr. Black. We will now be moving on to the old Power Nickel name. Let me bring as a panelist, give me one second here. Where is he? Trying to have him inside us. Duncan, where are you? Duncan Roy. Here. There we go.
So we're going to be able to have him, as normally we do have, Terry Lynch was presenting. Today he is stuck at another event. So we will have Duncan replacing him and presenting for the first time. So thank you all for your questions. Please, during the time of the presentation from our old friend at Power Nickel, please just send them all in the chat or in the Q&A. In the meantime, Duncan, how are you doing?
Hey, good. Thank you. Thanks for having me on today.
Well, we're very happy to have you. Obviously, Power Nickel is now renamed PowerMetallic and also has seen a new share price value and market cap. So we'll be very happy to see the latest development and the way forward. All yours.
Great. Thanks very much. And thanks everyone for joining today. I'm calling in from Miami, Florida at this moment.
Nice change of pace from Toronto where it's very cold. Anyways, here's the story about Power Nickel. We're a company that we believe is going to end up creating history in Canada, probably the biggest discovery here in the last 30 years. It's a very unusual...
Just a second, Duncan. We do see the tabs and so on. If you could go in full screen, we would not see maybe some of your information from the top part because we're seeing your tabs and some of your favorites right now.
Okay. I think I just changed that. So from automatic zoom, if you could go maybe to full screen, that would help because I still see the full screen with your information. There we are. And is that coming?
Could you try to press F11?
F11. There. And... How do I get rid of all this stuff up here?
Yeah, it's because you're seeing it in the browser and use as an independent PDF.
Okay. Are you okay with that? Just use this for the moment?
We are good with it. It's just that, as I said, we do see some of your... Just try to click F11 again. I think you haven't selected the presentation. Let's try it again. Oh, okay. Let's go anyway. All right. Go ahead. Okay.
So we're a very unusual project here. It's a polymetallic discovery. So it's very high-grade nickel, copper, and PGEs. And we're having an awful lot of fun with it. Here's your typical boilerplate page. We'll tell you what we believe are the facts, but please do your own due diligence and research. And so we're set up here with a market cap that's about $350 million today.
We just concluded a significant financing that has brought in $40 million of flow-through funds and $10 million of hard. In the left-hand side, you'll see there's a bunch of warrants out. We'll get those mostly converted into common stock in the next couple of weeks. That'll bring in roughly another $8 million. Unlike most mining companies, more than half the stock is held by a small group of investors. The largest is our CEO, Terry Lynch and his family. Critical Elements, which still retains 20% ownership of the Nisk project. They've got about 10 million shares at this point. They've been sellers when we've asked. The Stern family, CVMR, who is the largest private nickel refining entity in the world, and some names that many people would know, Robert Friedland and Rob McEwen, and a couple of fantastic hedge funds out of Montreal, BT Global and Palos.
There's roughly 14 billionaires on board this company. So we've got a fantastic shareholder base at this point. So we're just going to roughly go through these different areas. So we think we've got a polymetallic super giant potential here with this project. We're in Québec. We're just southeast of James Bay, just outside the town of Nemaska. And we have a great situation there. We're right beside a major highway with a Hydro-Québec substation across the road and power lines that go right through our property. Our relations with the James Bay Cree are fantastic. They're probably the best guys to deal with in the country. They're very sophisticated. The Québec government's very much behind us as well. And there's all sorts of attributes for doing business in Québec.
We've taken advantage of charitable tax flow share deals where we're typically able to finance at twice our end price and you get half the dilution. So very positive. As I mentioned, later on this week, we'll close a $50 million funding. We're all set for all our work that we're going to do through this year and into next. In addition to Robert Friedland and Rob McEwen, we've got Gina Rinehart on board. She's Australia's richest woman, big fan of us in our project. We've got Terra Capital out of Australia as well. That may be coming a little bit from a reputation of our newest director, Dr. Steve Beresford. In Australia, he's certainly revered as a bit of a geo god. Fantastic resume. He's the guy behind First Quantum, MMG, and IGO as the chief geologist. He came on last year.
He came up to our site, got incredibly excited, and went from being a consultant to a board member. And he is probably the foremost mind in polymetallic world. So it's really key that we've put together a pretty significant brain trust to help us go at this quite unusual discovery. So at this point, we've got three rigs on the go on our property, and we'll bring in additional rigs. There's about 40 weeks of the year that we can work on this property. We stop for spring break, which is basically the month of May, and we stop in the middle of September to the middle of October when it's moose hunting season. And the guys take a little bit of time off at Christmas. So we'll have just a ton of news coming out over the next couple of weeks and months and all through the year.
So let's take a look at this project itself. So Nisk is the name. We originally started to develop Nisk Mine. And we've had this property now for about three and a half to four years. We've taken it from about a million tons of 1.2% nickel to 43-101 at the end of 2023, where we are just north of 7 million tons of high-grade nickel. A year and a half ago, we looked up towards the northeast, and we found an interesting anomaly, ultramafic showings on the surface. And we were down to our last 200 m of drilling for the season. We put a hole down, and we had the third best platinum palladium hit in the world. And that led us to this Lion discovery. We've named it that. And it has been nothing but exceptional results.
We probably found north of eight million tons of 7% +copper EQ. We think that this is going to grow dramatically over the next couple of weeks and months. We've got about 11 different elements there. We get comparisons to Norilsk, which is in Russia, probably the most valuable mine in the world. They have about 14 elements. We've got 11. This thing is just looking like it's going to be very significant. Dr. Beresford, when he came to our property and started looking at this thing, he made a couple of observations and basic theories. His primary belief is that this whole body is between the Nisk mine and west of, and Lion and east of is all one major nickel body. You've had these hydrothermal events that have created these super rich and concentrated shoots. That's what Lion looks like.
He expects us to have more discoveries like that. We think we've actually made one just recently. We did a 700-meter step out to the east of the Lion zone, and we've found sort of a different version of Lion. We're nicknaming that internally Tiger at this point. We'll be doing an awful lot of exploration work around that, around Lion, and working in between Nisk Main and Lion to prove up Dr. Beresford's theory. We put this chart together a couple of days ago. It basically shows some of the exceptional grades that we have here on this Lion zone. As I said, it's very copper-rich, highly concentrated. Platinum and palladium numbers are exceptional. We're actually, after Stillwater, the biggest platinum palladium play on the go right now, which is kind of neat.
We don't talk about that too much, but it's part of the mix here. Great grades of gold and silver in there as well. And they're significantly large and wide. And this is what's turning on people in the marketplace. So as I mentioned, this lion zone keeps getting bigger. We're having success going both east and west and going to deeper levels. This basically comes up to surface just like in this mine. And we're down at this point five to 600 m. We're about 600 m wide where we've done concentrated drilling. But it's looking like this is going to expand up to at least 1,800-1,900 m wide. So again, incredibly rich grades that we're getting out of here.
One thing that we do is anytime we do what we believe are successful holes, we put up pictures of the core because, excuse me, we believe it's material, and this rock type is fairly evident if you're a geo, and so we point out that here's some successful core that we've found with our drilling. Generally, the assays prove that up in fairly short order. We're going to continue to drill deeper on the lion zone. We're just waiting on assays for two of the deepest holes that we've done here, as well as hole 94, which is the 700-meter step out to the east or over to the right. We're doing step outs in the 100-150-meter amplitude going to the west. One key thing that we do is when we finish drilling the hole, we go and do downhole EM.
It's been a very productive tool for us. We've used all sorts of different ways of gathering data. The downhole EM seems to be very productive for us. The positive of having hydro power on our property, that's a positive, but it's also a negative when it comes to doing airborne EM. We've been doing all sorts of other goodies like geochemistry, ground EM, and the downhole EM. That's giving us an awful lot of knowledge. As I mentioned before, we have this new discovery that we're calling a tiger. Examples of some of the core here, it came about from doing some holes where we did downhole EM to give us some better imaging. It's fairly clean rock that we're dealing with.
We're able to get visuals about 100-150 m from the holes, which is giving us a very good picture of what's going on here. These assays will be out, I think, within the next week. And they should be incredibly significant for our company. One thing people look at and they say, "Well, geez, you guys were like $0.20, and now you're nearly $2. I've missed it." And we suggest that we're just in the beginning of creating value for this project and that there's tremendous upside here as we get going. And very traditionally, we say we're trading at a bit of a discount. We think we're being valued about $0.30 or $0.35 on the dollar given what we've already discovered. We show a number of different examples here of fantastic world-class discoveries, Diamond Fields, Arequipa, Aurelian, and Great Bear.
So when these things come together, they present fantastic capital gains opportunity. This is a matrix we show roughly where we sit in comparison to polymetallic discoveries that are out there in the world. And we think that we're going to be able to move up on this matrix substantially over the next couple of months and this year. But these are clearly the most valuable properties in the world. And that's why people should be interested in these polymetallics. This is all on our website. So you can take a look at this in more detail. But basically, here's some examples of companies that are out there and what their market caps are. Maybe the best one to look at closely here for us is Foran. And we're getting pretty close to their size in terms of assets. And they're trading at just under $2 billion.
So we're about 350 million at this point. And we think we'll be up to those levels in fairly short order. Let's see what happens. Again, so for the second time, both Friedland and McEwen were significant players in our financings. Robert Friedland took half the issue that we did last June when we did a CAD 1.25 charitable flow-through with the buyback at CAD 0.66. And again, a significant player in the one we just did at CAD 1.85 and a CAD 1.45 buyback. Sorry, CAD 2.85. So as I mentioned, we're in Quebec. There's a couple of other aspects to being here that I didn't mention earlier. The Quebec government and the federal government will give you tax credits for the development of mining facilities. They'll give you tax credits for 55% of your costs. So that's a significant help in going and building a facility here.
If we did, and we're going to be releasing a feasibility study shortly done by CVMR, perhaps we're looking at around 300 million to get this thing into production. So key to have some really smart guys. So obviously, Steve Beresford, top guy in the world in the polymetallics. Joe Campbell is our VP of Exploration. And he actually heads up a company that we sub out work to called GeoVector out of Ottawa. And Adam Finley with GeoVector is our guy on the site managing everything there. A small aspect that's important is when Beresford came on board, he took a look at our database and recognized that it had been done in a methodology of a company that he had worked at before called Western Mining. And it turns out that Joe Campbell had been there at the same time.
They're operating from the same database structure. Makes a big difference for people coming in. We're doing additional work here too. Aside from the feasibility study, we have brought a geochem group in, geophysicists, and they're busy also doing metallurgical work for us. We're just trying to get a good handle on what we have there in terms of the rock. This will take a couple of months to get done, but it should be a significant announcement when we do put it out. Here's the joy of polymetallics. Our particular one is determined to be an orthomagmatic. It's a balance. We sit roughly just above Sakami here in this pyramid or triangle. Basically, it's just incredibly valuable rock because it's roughly a third, a third, a third of nickel, PGEs, including gold and silver, and copper. This is an ideal situation.
As I mentioned before, we did an awful lot of research last summer, especially, and ongoing still. So doing gravity surveys, EM surveys, the downhole work, geochem work, etc., so that we build up a significant database so we can drill effectively and explore this project as fast as we can. I mentioned CVMR. They're doing a feasibility study. Most people have never heard of this company, but they're actually the largest private nickel refining entity out there. They have a really interesting process. It has been around for a while. They basically atomize and reatomize elements. And of particular interest for us when they look at nickel is they create nickel powders. Nickel is a bit of a four-letter word these days.
But what they're able to do is take a product that if you bought it in the market at $15,000 a ton, their cost structure to transform it is about $4,000. And they're able to sell these nickel powders for $60,000-$80,000 a ton. They're obviously used in the battery complex. The military uses it extensively. And one of the fastest growing areas right now is 3D printing. So they're a big supplier in that area. Their top customers are U.S. government and Fortune 100 entities out there. So it's a nice relationship with these guys. Some people get sort of passionate about this, but we think we're actually going to be the first carbon-negative polymetallic mine on the go. There's all sorts of natural reasons for that with our intrinsics.
We don't necessarily know if we're going to get higher prices for our nickel, but we think we're going to have the better customers coming to take a look at us. So we've had extensive meetings with the Korean battery makers and also the U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Defense. One other technology that we've used is really neat stuff called ambient noise tomography. It's passive seismic, basically. And we've teamed up with a company called Fleet Space Technologies. They're out of Australia. They're the fastest-growing company there. Rio Tinto uses them extensively. And they've been able to do a whole bunch of interesting mapping for us, not only at Nisk, but also with our properties that we have down in Chile that we recently spun out. So pretty neat stuff.
As an example, if you take a look at Nisk Main, which is in the red here, they've identified four bodies east and west, two of them that they think from their technology work are roughly similar size to Nisk Main and two that are maybe 40% or 50%. So excuse me, very helpful technology. As I mentioned a second ago, we spun off our assets in Chile and British Columbia into a private company. We're naming that Chilean Metals. It'll stay private for at least four or five months. And then we'll get these developed a bit more as a separate entity and go from there. Very quick, here's our team, a bunch of entrepreneurs for the most part, doing things with the exception, obviously, of Dr. Beresford and Joe Campbell and Ximena Perez, who's down in Chile for us. But a nice brain trust here.
This is basically our story. If peo ple have questions, I guess off we go.
Perfect. Well, thank you very much for the presentation and the update, Duncan. Very, very impressive. Obviously, the big financing and the upsizing of it really speaks for itself. We do have a few questions in, so there's still four minutes to go. So if anyone has more questions, please feel free to ask. I will start with Eric. So Eric is asking, is it a PEA or a PFS that is being conducted at Nisk? And what is the expected date of disclosure?
We're doing a feasibility study on Nisk. We'll eventually do a bankable feasibility on this, but we're in no rush to go do that. So feasibility from CBMR. The next sort of important data like that is the metallurgical study. And that'll be hopefully around by the end of Q2.
So those are the things that matter on that front. It's still early days for us, even though we've made a pretty significant discovery so far. Our focus will be drilling this as aggressively and intelligently as we can.
Perfect. What is the average widt h at Leon?
Average width is closing in on 20 m. Just huge.
Yeah. Perfect. Sorry. I can't help myself. These are just ridiculous numbers that we see, right? As an example, the guys at Stillwater came to see us in Vancouver recently. And we had a bunch of core out and assay numbers. And they're looking at our platinum palladium stuff. And the guy goes, "Well, I guess these are all parts per million." And we said, "No, they're g." It gets quantum different size. Jus t incredibly rich.
Absolutely. Discussing the metallurgical testing, which company will be performing the tests?
Oh, I don't know the name of it, actually, to be honest. We brought in a group from Finland to do this. So I can get back to you. That'll be on our website.
Per fect. When can we expect the next set of drill results? Ask Gerard.
Couple of minutes? No. I would say we should see something either later this week or next week, almost for sure. We have an issue with our assays typically where we're going over on the measurement standards that are being used. So we have to get many of our holes reassayed a second time and sometimes even a third. So that slows things down a little bit. But we should have a substantial number of assays out both in the next week and the next two or three weeks.
Perfect. And then would you plan to bypass the Toronto Exchange in case of uplisting and go directly to a U.S. exchange?
That's definitely under consideration. We think we'll get more appreciation being in the U.S. market. We're on a lousy exchange right now in the States. So either NASDAQ or New York. And we're well advanced in the discussions and process for that.
Perfect. Well, that's all the time we had. So this will conclude your presentation and your time slot, Duncan. So thank you very much for the presentation. Very great to meet you. I hope everyone got a really good update of what's happening. Two major project numbers are off the charts. Nothing else I can say than best of luck to you guys. And we'll be following the project. It is very, very interesting for sure.
Right on. Thanks very much, guys. Appreciate your time.
Have a good day. Thank you very much, Duncan. And so with this presentation being done, let me welcome our next, a core presenter today, which has share price quadrupled in the last year, which is very, very interesting. Mr. Adam Cegielski, is that right?
That's right.
All right. Perfect. So first time with First Nordic Metals. The way it goes, you should use about 25 minutes to present, and then we'll have about a five-minute Q&A afterwards. If everyone has a question, as usual, please feel free to use the chat or th e Q&A box. Adam, if you could share your presentation, and then you'll be ready to go. e Q&A box. Adam, if you could share your presentation, and then you'll be ready to go.
Yep. I'm just waiting for Taj to join with us. And I will pull up the presentation here. One second.
Okay. Perfect. So I am looking at the attendees. He should be joining under Taj, I guess.
As soon as he's in, I'm going to be promoting him as a panelist so he can be next to you. Perfect. One second. Okay. You have that. One second. Hold on. He's probably just filling that out. No problem. In the meantime, just for our attendees here, it's the first time we see your company. Share price was about CAD 0.12 a year ago. You're trading at about CAD 0.52, which is always a good indication of what's happening at the company for a market cap that I think is about close to CAD 150 million. So Taj just joined. Okay. Let me. Oh, okay. I think we just promoted him to panelist. Or he was in and he disappeared. There he is. Is he here?
I don't know, but I can start here.
Yes, please. And then as soon as he's in, I'm going to obviously promote him. Thank you. Okay.
And you see that everyone can see my screen, correct?
Yes, we can. Just please make sure to go in full screen. So basically press F11, and that should bring you into full screen. Or if you're from a MacBook, then you can go on the top and choose presenter view. On the top menu, well, you have preview. Yeah, exactly.
There w e go. How's that? Is that good?
That's better, but it's just full screen that presenter view. We see slides left and right, but let's just go on because we're eating time right now. So we see it very good.
Okay. Thank you. First Nordic Metals, thanks for the introduction. Yes, we're today a $150 million company.
We are the merger of two companies, Gold Line Resources and Barsele Minerals, back in about 12 months ago, so we are excited to showcase here, and we'll jump right into it. I will be sharing some cautionary statements, so please be aware of that. First Nordic Metals, we call this the Nordic advantage. Jurisdiction is everything in today's world with what we're seeing in different parts of mining communities, and we're very excited to work in a country or in countries with a very long history of mining going back thousands of years, very secure tenure, incredible taxation rates, very low political risk, and a very mature, well-defined environmental and permitting procedures. The reason we chose the Scandinavian markets is these are probably the final frontiers when it comes to new discovery opportunities. Sweden and Finland only opened up to modern exploration in sort of the mid-1990s.
You've got a very underexplored greenstone belt compared to the other greenstone belts in the world. So just a tremendous place for us to be building what is now the largest undeveloped gold deposit in Sweden and the second largest undeveloped gold deposit in Europe. If you move to northern Sweden, where we have the majority of our projects, you see two main belts. You see the Skellefteå VMS belt, which is typically Boliden, Mandalay Resources, a lot of base metal operations, maybe 30-40 past-producing or active mines. And that coincides and moves into this north-south belt called the Gold Line belt. And as you can see, there are three projects here, the Storjuktan, the Barsele, and the Paubäcken projects.
This covers over 100 km of strike in 104,000 hectares of mineral concessions, with the middle part, the Barsele, being a 2.4-million-ounce gold deposit discovered in 2014 and joint-ventured with Agnico Eagle. So very unique to have such a large land package. And part of the reason why we first went into the Nordics is because when you're early, you can go grab these large district opportunities. And essentially, that's what we're building today with our First Nordic Metals. 100 sq km, 100 km of first-order strike and significant targets across the belt that are all second, third, or fourth potential deposits on the belt. If you want to compare this to the Abitibi in Quebec, you could see this is the 100-km land package we have.
If you'd have that land package here in Ontario or Quebec, that would cover off probably 100 million ounces of production and 12 to 15 established projects that are all feeding a central processing facility. This is our vision. This is our grand vision and what we've put together over many years of consolidation and work. So today, we have 100% of this greenstone belt controlled by one company where you probably have that in maybe 15 or 20 companies fighting over this in the Abitibi. If you look at our share structure, we've recently completed a bought deal financing in the end of November 2024. This was done with Haywood Securities and Ventum Securities. Today, our market cap is about CAD 145 million. And with CAD 12 million in the bank, you see the distribution of our shareholders. We have 40% of our shareholders are institutional.
35% would be Bob Gibson, Ingalls & Snyder out of New York, who've been long-time shareholders. The recent financing added to that ledger with some new institutions out of the US. Insiders are about 18%. Retail is about 31%. We have Agnico Eagle here with 11% equity. Since we took over through the merged entity of Gold Line and Barsele in February 2024, you can see we've had pretty significant share appreciation. Really, just getting the story back into the front and center and for the limelight, we've traded through 100 million shares. The stock has been incredibly active and liquid. We've got a new shareholder base, new shareholder base supporting the story.
And I think this sets us up very well for 2025 to sort of go beyond our current plans, make some new discoveries, continue to add to our treasury, and hopefully consolidate the balance of the Barsele project here.
Perfect, Adam. And just to let you know, Taj has just joined as a panelist. He's right there with you.
Hey, Taj. Just in time. Hey, guys. Perfect time.
Thanks. And sorry, guys, about the technical difficulties. So glad to join you here. I'll do a few slides here on the Barsele project. Adam's already introduced us and led us to this point. So this is a plan map of the Barsele project, which is located on the Gold Line belt. This is a joint venture, 55% Agnico, 45% us. We are fully carried, as we have been since Agnico came into the joint venture in 2015.
Very large land package, about 25,000 hectares. So in addition to this resource area shown in the red here with three big zones and the big deposit that Barsele's, there's 15-20 actual real targets in addition on this claim package that I'm not going to talk about here. But as this becomes a mine and regional exploration becomes more significant, there's a lot more here to work on. But I will, again, focus on the resource area. About $55 million has been spent to date by Agnico since they came in. And it's about close to 450-475 probably holes and close to 175,000 m. So lots of data here. Very well-studied deposit. And again, drilled by one of the best gold companies in the world. So you know that the data and the quality of the data is very strong. Adam had pointed out this project.
The way the current structure is if Ignico puts out a pre-feasibility study, we would then go to they would become 70% owners, and we'd become 30% owners, and we'd become pro-rata. We'd have to start paying costs. That likely is not what's going to happen here. We are in advanced discussions with Ignico to advance the project forward. Likely with us is becoming the operators. What the structure of that looks like, that's to be determined. But I think it's kind of clear, very clear that this is a project that will become a mine and needs to be advanced for sure. There will be some things happening on this structure that will advance through the year. Moving on to the next slide. High level, guys, this is a long section of the deposit.
It's a very wide deposit, three and a half km, composed of three kind of zones. All of them have a starter open pit component to them for early cash flow, but the majority of the economics in the deposit is an underground deposit, which is actually very helpful for permitting. The average resource depth here is 550 m. We have actually hit to 925, very strong mineralization, very strong grades that's shown here. Our deepest intercepts as well as our best intercepts, some of them are shown here. So we have a very strong belief, guys, that this will continue well beyond one kmeter in depth, likely maybe even towards 1,500 or 2,000 m, which is very typical for greenstone belt deposits of this kind of age, and what we see very typically in the Abitibi will show that.
This kind of two and a half million ounces, we believe, has very strong potential to be able to move towards four and a half to five pretty straightforward and hopefully even beyond that. This will be a mine that can continue for decades. Just a quick, these are cross-sections of two parts of the deposit, just two typical kind of cross-sections. The big thing about the Barsele project, which really makes it very economic, is how wide the deposit is for an underground deposit. You typically see underground deposits, 1 meter, 2 meter, 3 m, 5 m. You're talking about zones here, underground zones that are 100 to 200 m wide, some cases wider than even 200 m. Your stopes can be much, much wider here. You're talking about 40-meter stopes, 20-meter stopes.
This all helps for your unit cost to keep your mining costs very low. That's what will really make the economics of the Barsele project very strong. A couple of other characteristics, guys. I'm not going to go through the details here. The resource is shown here. Again, underground is the majority of this deposit. It's about a two and a half to three gram per ton underground. Open pit is about 1.4. Each of the zones, again, has a starter pit. Here's a list of kind of mines and operations that the deposit is very similar to. You see with our grades of around three gram per ton, we fare very well versus very similar kinds of operations. A list of them is shown there. I won't go into detail.
But we strongly believe that the favorable geometry and dimensions of this deposit are really going to set it apart. Metallurgy has not been even optimized, and we're talking about mid-90s% recovery. So again, that could probably be improved. So very nice, simple, clean metallurgy. And again, there's lots of room for growth regionally and at depth, as I've talked about, and along strike. Next slide. So very quickly, I'll talk about an actual operating mine in Sweden. I mean, I can talk to you about things and say it's going to be economic, but let's look at an actual mine that's not far from us in the same county as us in northern Sweden, the Björkdal mine. The Björkdal mine has been operating since the 1980s. It is having a very strong year, obviously, in part due to a very high gold price.
But what's very interesting to see is you see their operating details in that first part on the chart here. You see the grades that you're talking about. You see the kind of cost, the unit costs we're talking about. These costs are 25%-30%, maybe even more% lower than what you see in Canada, which is already a very favorable jurisdiction for costs. I don't think people realize how low the operating costs of Sweden are. It's amazing, northern Sweden. The low-cost power, the highly skilled labor, very efficient mining methods really makes northern Sweden a top, top jurisdiction. And I've operated in many regions in the world. It really, really was shocking and surprising in a very positive way. You then compare that to Barsele, right? Barsele is a very similar style of deposit would be mined in a very similar way to Björkdal. Grades almost double.
Recovery 5-7% higher than what Björkdahle is now. Of course, Björkdahle has been in its good days. In its early days was much higher grade. But you'll see even now they're making money. So that bodes extremely well for Barsele. So that just gives you kind of some context to see what Barsele could be. And to be honest, if you did some calculations, you'd be able to quickly see we'd have very strong cash costs and all sustaining costs at Barsele. And a very quick slide here to show depth potential. I've talked about greenstone belt deposits. They're very typically known to be deep, deep-seated deposits because the fluids are derived from the mantle. 2 km is pretty typical, 1,500 m to 2 km. So we think at 600 m, we're really just scratching the surface at Barsele.
This could extend well beyond a kmeter, which would mean obvious straightforward resource growth. I touched on Barsele, guys. That's one part of the story that underpins our value. Barsele will be a mine. It will be Sweden's largest mine. It will be one of the largest gold mines in Europe, period. But what really makes this interesting is the fact that we believe our hypothesis is there's two or three more Barsele that we own 100% on our ground that will add in addition to Barsele that could really make the Gold Line belt become an entire camp with a central processing facility. I'll let Adam walk you through the various targets.
Yeah. Again, thanks, Taj. Moving on to our 100% owned projects. Again, this is really where we see the blue sky potential of the belt.
We have this fantastic Barsele deposit, but we've got 80 km of ground around it to go make multiple discoveries and change the perception of how we build the business out. One meaningful drill hole on any of these projects will completely change Agnico's perspective on what could be done on this belt. Everyone is watching eagerly. This is a discovery we made three years ago at the Aida Target. It was an initial discovery hole that was never followed up on. We did a very simple sort of 12- to 1,400-meter drill program three years ago. We made a discovery of 22.5 m of 2.4 g/tin. That is a discovery hole that is better than the original Barsele holes. This is a 4.5- to 5-km structure. We know this is a structural corridor through geophysics.
Again, this is on the southern end of the belt. We have within four km of this discovery. We have Dragon Mining and an operating mill at the Svartliden deposit and mill. This is a mill where they had an open pit mine that they mined out about, I think, 400,000 ounces of four g/tin maybe a decade ago. This is a known mineralized system. You can literally take a 4 km dirt road access to these drill holes. We've demonstrated already previously that this was a mineralized structure of at least 800 m. When you see these blue dots, these are Base of Till holes. These are shallow holes that you're using to penetrate the ground and do your sampling because you're not having any surface exposure of the bedrock, and you need to get below that.
We do geochemistry, and we do geophysics. And then when we understand the structural controls, we do these base of till holes. And when you're getting 0.1, 0.2 PPM, these yellow and blue dots, I mean, this is what Rupert Resources used and what they found to make a discovery at Ikkari. And so we've got a very similar mineral identification system here. And so we've completed a lot of this base of till drilling. And we're now following this up with a current 10,000-meter drill program. We're about five holes into this program where we're testing the structure in its entirety. So this is something that we've been waiting many, many years to do. We were finally funded for this and able to move it forward given the capital we raised at the end of last year.
And we're going to be doing somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 m here immediately with results pending. So again, today we're getting fully valued on really only the Barsele project. If you add a second discovery and you add a little bit of exploration success, we've got a real chance to build this story out far beyond our current valuation today. If you move further north up the belt, so let's go about 10 km further north. Remember, this whole Barsele project is about 40 to 45 km in length. This black line that goes through the middle of all of our projects is the first order structure. In these types of systems, you need to be within four or five km of this structure on either side to, I think, to have a high probability of success. And you can see here we've got a 5.5-kmeter geochemical anomaly.
So just to give you perspective, Barcelly is a 3-kmeter anomaly that's turned into a 3 million ounce or 2.5 million ounce-plus deposit. The Aida Target is a 4.5-kmeter anomaly. This is a 5.5-kmeter anomaly, almost identical signature to Barcelly. Over 6,700 samples taken here over multiple seasons. So you've got a tremendous amount of work that was done to identify this. And we're currently completing 200 base-of-till holes hitting the bedrock. As soon as we get those results, that will allow us to target another 5,000-10,000 m of drilling. So we've already got 10,000 m of drilling going. This will likely be our second drill target that we'll be following up on. And of course, as data comes out, we're going to make these decisions depending on the success of the data.
Now move further north. Now north of Barsele, the Storjuktan project, which is another 40 km in length, so massive land package. Right in the middle of it, we identified a third multi-kmeter over five-kmeter geochemical anomaly. You can see again, almost identical in layout and density of samples. Almost 5,000 glacial till samples were taken on this over a few seasons. And we've now identified this massive anomaly that has base of till drilling being completed on it. All the magnetics are completed on it. This is a third target. Assuming the base of till drilling is what we expect and we get those 0.1-0.2 PPM markers, we will be targeting this with another 5,000-10,000 m of drilling. All of these targets are essentially going to be drill ready in 2025. All of these targets are funded through our financing in November.
And we're going to have a long season of exploration discovery results from here till the end of calendar 2025 and into 2026. When you look at these anomalies, you think, okay, those are three massive targets already after the Barsele project. About a month ago, we identified four new multi-kmetric targets on the belt. So this is now extending our targets to close to eight multi-kmetric targets on a belt. So we're going to have many years of exploration to do this. It's incredibly advantageous to be able to use the same team, leverage Agnico's technical team, apply all of the learning that you do with every dollar that you spend. You're actually understanding the belt substantially better season after season. And so we're going to go into what I think is going to be our sixth season now of work.
This will be by far the most active season that we've ever had. Most importantly, this will probably be the most active exploration program in all of Europe, aside from a couple of companies that may be doing asset expansion through the work that they're doing. I think the only thing I'd maybe follow up on here is a little bit about our team. I think the only thing better than our geological prospects or the team that we've put together here, we want to show the market that we are very serious about making new discoveries. We're actively in discussions to acquire and potentially acquire the balance of the Barsele project. Agnico had a deal to sell this project to previous management, but that deal did not consummate through lack of funding in 2021.
We know that there's an opportunity to potentially consolidate the belt further. Taj Singh, our CEO and director, joined a year and a half ago and joined me at Gold Line Resources, which quickly led to the merger with Barsele. Within about 60 days of joining, we had raised our first bit of capital and successfully completed our merger. Taj has a long pedigree of mining and mineral exploration development success. He was founder of Discovery Silver, which is now the world's largest undeveloped silver deposit in Mexico. He took that from a 10 million market cap to over $800 million market cap. He was also founding director of GT Gold, which sold to Newmont for, I believe, $450 million+ a few years ago. So again, a proven developer.
He has the ability to go put these projects into production with many projects under his belt with his previous history. I've had success in the mining industry most recently selling Cadan Resources with a wonderful team I worked with here that's part of my team now. We were successful in Cadan selling to Agnico for CAD 210 million. We were part of the team that built Keegan Resources, which is now Galiano Gold. Benjamin Gelbert is our head of exploration who I worked with at Cadan and at Keegan, as well as John Aaron, who's our VP Corp dev. At the board level, we have Toby Pierce, who brought me in originally to take Gold Line public. He was part of the team along with Henrik Lundin that assembled this extensive portfolio in Sweden back in 2017.
We've got a long and experienced team here with Tony as our chairman. Henrik Lundin rejoined the board here after our merger, and he's joined about a month ago, which gives us fantastic representation in Sweden with local investors. We are listing our shares on the Swedish exchange in about a month's time. Henrik joined in anticipation of that to be able to help us further get exposure in that part of the world. We do have Marc Legault on our board, who is a 35-year veteran of Agnico, very close relationship with senior management at Agnico, and I think continuing to help us bridge the relationship and ensure that Agnico is comfortable working with us longer term. Gary Cope, our founder from Barsele Minerals, is still a very supportive and active director.
Jeff Couch recently joined us after a 10-year at Bank of Montreal as a head of mining and metals in London. He also works as a special situations with Orion out of London as well. So a fantastic team that we've put together to execute on our goals of completing further acquisitions and consolidation of the belt. Taj, I'll hand it over to you for some concluding comments.
Yeah, thanks, Adam. I would say, guys, listen, we're going to be one of the busiest companies you'll see in the junior gold space. I think it's the perfect ingredients are in place for First Nordic. I mean, the sector is looking very hot, as we know, but specific to this story, I mean, what kind of company do you know that owns 100 km of unexplored greenstone belt?
You can just think about the potential mineral inventory that could be built up over the next two, three years. It's shocking, and it's all underpinned by a deposit that's sitting at two and a half million ounces that will be a mine that likely grows to four or five plus. I think Adam had noted that we're only getting full value for Barsele right now. And I would say I don't think we're getting even 10% of our value of Barsele. 0.1 times NPV, high level is what I'm thinking. You can do your own numbers. We're not even close to being valued for what Barsele is worth, and all the rest of the 80 km of belt is free. And if you hit on even one or two of those, it completely changes the entire situation for First Nordic in a very positive way.
I've been through a lot of stories and had a lot of successes, right place, right time, most of the time, and building the right team around it. But I'm extremely excited about what's happening here. And on top of that, when you add the kind of encouragement we're getting from the Swedish government in terms of moving projects ahead, it is, again, all the perfect ingredients are in place, I think, for First Nordic. So again, thanks for that. And Adam, maybe anything I missed to close off?
I did see a question here, which is what BOT stands for, drilling. So your typical drilling is diamond drilling where you get core and you analyze that core. Base of Till drilling is essentially a smaller drill bit. You're penetrating the surface 10 m, 15 m, 20 m deep, and then you're sampling that rock that you hit.
It's essentially a percussion drill that lets you get down cheaply to the bedrock, test that bedrock, and sample it. And if it's mineralized, you go in, you diamond drill right underneath that. That's how we made our discovery originally at Pa wbaccan.
Yeah, I'll add to that, guys. In the Nordics, Northern Canada, Northern Europe, Russia, a very typical common thing is the new layer of information they used prior to diamond drilling is this BOT drilling that Adam mentioned, base of till, also often called TOB, top of bedrock. So you hit the till that's near the bedrock, and then you go into the bedrock, as Adam noted. It is found as a very, very efficient way in correlation between that and diamond drill results are very strong.
Actually, in the long-term, I believe it reduces your diamond drilling costs because you've now targeted the area you want to hit. Very cheap. We're talking about $1,000 a hole. So you do 100, 200 holes in a given area to set up a certain grid. You've already honed in on what to drill, and you've gotten lots of good information about the bedrock. It's a typical method used in the Nordics because there obviously is this overburden of glacial till.
Perfect. Well, thank you very much for the explanation. We still have two minutes to go. If anyone has another question, please feel free to post it in the Q&A box or the chat box. Just one thing, Taj. I really want Adam to focus on 100 km of greenstone belt. This is not only unheard of. I don't even think it ever existed, to be honest.
I will have to look back in the archives here. How do you manage to explore a 100-km-long greenstone belt as we all know the next deposit could be anywhere?
Correct. Yeah, I'll start off. I'd say, as Adam had noted, we're already in our sixth season really of doing this. So clearly, it's been slow and steady on purpose, systematically, cost-efficiently. But the methods our team employs are tried, tested, and true in the area. You have to do full geophysics over the whole belt. Structure tells you, okay, this is the main regional fault, as Adam notes, the first order structure. We have to work off of that. There's some second order structures. So that's one layer of information. Then boots on the ground, you have to sample. We've done thousands and thousands of samples. God bless students. We love the summer students, the university.
We get lots of experience. We use them. That gives us more information now till sampling. Then you do this base of till drilling, further giving you more information. So maybe you initially start out with 50 targets, then it gets to 20 good targets, and then that lowers to 10 very good targets. And you slowly have to just do it as a stage gate process before you diamond drill. And it's a proven method, and it takes time. We've already spent the majority of the time. The exciting thing is the time for the diamond drilling, the ultimate truth machine, is happening now at three major targets. And likely, there's already three, four more ready for 2026. So to answer your question, lots of time, being systematic and patient. Adam, anything I missed?
No, just thanks, Julian, for bringing that up.
If you believe in God, God only created four or five of these greenstone belts around the world. So you do have to be in the right place at the right time. These are not businesses that you can replicate. These are geological occurrences that happened millions of years ago. And if you happen to time it right, it's a truly powerful and a unique thing to have. So we do have a very unique situation. And for the question there about the analyst coverage, you will see some analyst coverage here. Haywood Securities and Ventum Securities will be initiating coverage this quarter. So we'll update the market as soon as we see that.
Well, this is very interesting news, as obviously this is going to really open the gate to put your story out a lot further.
All right, guys, time is up. Thank you very much for being with us today. It was a very nice first overview of your company. Now we'll be looking forward to the developing of the story. I invite any attendees to get on your mailing list or write to you if you have any additional questions. One thing is sure, it looks very, very promising. Thank you very much, guys, for being with us today. We'll be going now to the next presenter from Thunder Gold Corp. I already have Wes Hanson in. Thank you again, guys, of First Nordic Metals.
Thank you, guys.
Wes, do you hear me?
I do. Do you hear me?
Yes, I do hear you. Thank you very much. That's quite clear.
From there, please, if you could share your screen with your presentation would be awesome, and we ca n take it from there.
One moment.
If you do not know, it's a green button on the lower.
I got it. Yeah,
perfect. And it's starting to share. Give us a few seconds so we start seeing it. Here we go. If on the top left, you could go on full screen mode would be great.
Full screen mode. There we go. All right.
Awesome. So thank you very much for joining, Wes. This is Thunder Gold Corp. So you have a good 20, 22 minutes to present, and they'll take Q&A.
Awesome. Well, thanks very much for having us. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm here to introduce Thunder Gold and our Tower Mountain Discovery in Ontario, Canada.
As I'm a professional geologist, I've worked in the industry for over 40 years. I can say categorically that this is probably the most intriguing and probably one of the most valuable gold resources I've seen in 40 years in the industry, and I've seen some rather large ones over the course of my lifetime. Forward-looking statement, I'm sure everybody is fully aware of the necessity to include the fact that this is a presentation that includes forward-looking statements, so you're so advised, so why do I love Tower Mountain so much? Here's a simple analogy. Look, it's an intrusion-related gold deposit. That pink circular, semicircular outline on the right-hand image basically is an alkalic intrusion. It's one of the largest alkalic intrusions. In fact, it's the only alkalic intrusion for a 20 km radius.
This sits within the Shebandowan greenstone belt, which is a large and underexplored greenstone belt in northwestern Ontario in Canada. Surrounding that intrusion is what I believe is an opportunity that's second to none in the world today. It's a tight, compact distribution of gold extending 500 m surrounding that intrusive core. It's very much like the hole in the donut on the left. You can see the drilling is superimposed on the two bites of the donut on the left-hand side. That drilling is limited to only 20% of the known circumference surrounding that intrusive core. The remaining 80% untouched. We control 100% of it. This represents a startling opportunity that's overlooked in the industry today. What we're looking for at Thunder Gold is an opportunity similar to Detour Lake.
And you've heard this all before, but there's a lot of similarities between Tower Mountain and Detour Lake. First and foremost, the average grade of both deposits is hovering around one gram per ton. Gold recoveries are hovering around 90%, 91%. The strip ratio at Detour Lake in their 2011 feasibility study, which was conducted at $850 gold, I might add, was four to one. We see similarities to Tower Mountain where the average grade from the drilling, the meager 40,000 m of drilling that's been completed to date is indicating an average grade of one gram per ton. The strip ratio certainly appears to be in that three to four range, similar to what we see at Detour Lake. Metallurgical recoveries are the same. But the key differences of Tower Mountain relative to the feasibility study from Detour Lake is, first and foremost, gold's three times higher.
That's a significant benefit. Tower Mountain is located much closer to infrastructure than Detour Lake was ever located. Detour Lake had almost 900,000 m of drilling compared to the 40,000 m of Tower Mountain. And Tower Mountain is non-acid-generating rock. And I will admit, I threw that in there without fully understanding if Detour Lake is acid-generating or not. But it's just a flag I wanted to wave regarding Tower Mountain. Executive summary, look, we acquired the property in June of 2020. It's a small property. It's not an expansive position along the greenstone belt, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, there's more than enough opportunity to discover a tier-one gold deposit within our 2,500 hectares that we've really not been interested in pursuing land acquisitions or increasing our stake in that Shibandwin greenstone belt because it diffuses our attention.
Our attention is focused on Tower Mountain, and I'll tell you why in a moment. This is an intrusion-related gold deposit, so it offers significant tonnage potential. These things are typically 20 to 30 million ounces in terms of size. Similar type deposits are the Cadia deposit in New South Wales and Australia, the Cripple Creek deposits in Colorado. Intrusion-related deposits are some of the largest gold deposits in the world. There's only 42,000 m completed of drilling, 200 drill holes sampled from collar to the bottom of every drill hole on the property. All of them have been submitted for analysis. All of them have indicated gold is present in different tenors, and the gold mineralization at Tower Mountain starts at surface, and it extends to the bottom of the deepest hole drilled to date.
One of the things that attracted me to join this company was the fact that all the necessary infrastructure is in place. I don't need a railroad. I don't need a road. I don't need an airport. I don't need a camp. Tower Mountain is located immediately adjacent to publicly funded built infrastructure that's necessary to drive down our cost per meter. We have one of the lowest cost per meter exploration costs in the industry at about CAD 300 a meter. That's operating inefficiently with a single drill rig. We can drop that even farther if we have multiple drill rigs operating on the property. Gold recoveries, we've done preliminary metallurgical work. Most juniors don't bother with that critical aspect. Gold recoveries are indicating no problem. Environmentally, this rock is acid-consuming, which means acid mine rock drainage won't be a problem in the future.
All of our exploration permits are in hand. We're good to go. We can march a drill onto the property anytime we wish. And the claims are in good standing for 50 years or more. I've built six mines over the course of my career all over the world, from South America into the United States and Canada, narrow-vein underground mines and large tonnage open pit mines. But my objective with this company is very simple. I want to demonstrate tier-one discovery potential and attract the takeover from a producing gold producer. I think the last thing I would do in my life or recommend to anybody to do in their life is build a mine as a junior mining company because that's an incredibly difficult undertaking.
This image shows the location of Tower Mountain in the upper left-hand corner in white relative to the existing paved road Trans-Canada Highway Network, which is shown in yellow. The railroads, which are the dashed white sort of zipper-looking lines. There's a power line that crosses the western boundary of the property. The city of Thunder Bay is 45 km to the east. That gives us direct access to the Great Lakes Seaway. There's an international airport at Thunder Bay. There's a population of 110,000 people in Thunder Bay. This is a resource-driven sector, and you couldn't literally place a gold deposit anywhere in the world with a better location. The project was originally discovered in the 1980s by a local prospector. Noranda, Inco, and ValGold drilled almost 30,000 m of core. The results ranged from 1.9 g over 52.5 m, 1.8 g over 16.4 m.
Typically, what you see is at a cutoff grade of 0.3, you have intervals of several tens of m, if not up to several hundreds of m, averaging between 0.7 and 1.5 g/tin. Outlier values are extraordinarily well. There's not these 500, 600, 700 g over half a meter that you see a lot of other companies releasing, and that's a great thing in my mind because I understand the relevance of statistical stability, and this is one of the most statistically stable gold populations I've come across in 40 years in the industry, and that includes the Paracatu deposit in Brazil, which had an average grade of 0.4 and currently produces over 500,000 ounces annually, so lots to love about this project.
Our recent drilling released in January of this year was from a new target on the opposite side of the intrusion, the P target, which I'll go into greater detail. That's very significant because basically it proves our primary exploration concept is valid, which is the gold mineralization surrounds that Tower Mountain intrusive. And if we look at a regional map of the district, we see Goldshore Moss Lake deposit, 6 million ounces of resource on the 65 km to the west of us, scattered other small gold deposits and properties that are currently being explored. And then we come to Tower Mountain on the opposite end of the greenstone belt, basically focused around that Tower Mountain intrusive complex, which is shown in pink. And that intrusive complex is the largest and only exposed intrusive complex for a 20-kmeter radius.
Why that's important is because all of the assessment reports for the Shibandwin greenstone belt have two things in common. Prolific mention of gold anomalies throughout the entire greenstone belt and a close association of all those anomalies with alkalic intrusive rocks. Again, Tower Mountain is the largest alkalic intrusion for a 20-kmeter radius. We see our mineralization drilled off on the western contact. Remaining 80% of the perimeter surrounding that alkalic intrusion is untouched except for the P target where we drilled in November of 2024. Results are statistically identical to what we see on the western side. We see all kinds of gaps on the western side through the drilling, current drill coverage. This is a block model using a 50-meter radius.
It's an internal model, so we can't tell you what the results are, but basically we're looking at an exploration target in the 40-80 million ton range, probably averaging 0.8-1.2 g/tin. I'm not allowed to complete the math for you. You guys have to do that on yourself, but the question marks are basically areas of the resource that are outside of that 50-meter projection distance from a known drill hole, and that means there's lots of opportunities in the existing drill coverage to go in and increase the confidence level and add potential ounces both on a horizontal plane and on a vertical plane as well. Our focus with our exploration is to stay within a reasonable pit shell or something that sort of constrains your drilling.
There's no point in drilling 700, 800, 900 m below the mineralized target at this stage in the game. Let somebody else do that later. Our focus is to develop an open-pittable resource, and that means we've got to stay above a 350-meter pit bottom, which this sort of represents. So those question marks within that conceptual pit slope, that's the sweet spot for our exploration program, and that's what we're going to be limiting our exploration drilling to. As I said, this is one of the most statistically stable drill populations I've ever seen in the gold space. The mineralization at Tower Mountain is agnostic to rock type, to lithology, to alteration, to any observable visual feature. What you see is similarities in the average grades and the statistical distribution of those populations regardless of what's been looked at.
You sort of see it in the scatter plot of duplicate analysis versus the original analysis, which is essentially defining a one-to-one slope, which sort of suggests it's fairly stable. Lots of targets to drill from. Our P target was picked up in a soil geochemistry anomaly survey that we completed in September of last year that first and foremost demonstrated correlation to the western contact mineralization that's been drill-tested and led us to the discovery of the P target where 13 of 13 drill holes hit mineralization. More importantly, there's all kinds of targets surrounding that Tower Mountain intrusion, which is the dashed line shown in pink. All kinds of targets that are not tested in any way, shape, or form surrounding and coincident with that intrusive center and also coincident with mag lows that also surround that intrusive center.
You've got three primary vectors: soil geochemistry, mag, and geology, basically saying, "Drill here is stupid." Not being a man to take many chances in life, that's exactly what I propose to do. We see the same thing with our metallurgical results as we do with our geology, and that's consistency regardless of rock type. We've done about 15, 16 baseline bottle roll tests to see that this stuff is capable of being recovered using traditional cyanidation. What we see is regardless of rock type, whether it's an intrusive rock, a mixed rock type, or a volcanic, recoveries are always the same in that 80-90% range. You could probably, through a little bit of effort and work and some brilliant metallurgical detectives, bump that up to the 92-94% range without too much problem.
Currently, we have 227 million shares issued and outstanding, options of about 20 million, 45 million warrants at a strike price of $0.10 for a fully diluted total of 293 million shares. I'm the President and CEO. I've been with the company since mid-2022. I've been having a blast. This thing interests me as a geologist, and it interests me as an opportunity to make some money. So we've got a great entry point. Insiders have a 20% stake in the company. Our close associates and advisors own an additional 6%. Retail currently makes up 74%, but we know where about half of that retail component is. We've got a treasury of just in the range of $2 million. We plan on deploying that in the not-too-distant future.
We're actually soliciting bids for drilling contractors as we speak and hope to get back with diamond drills on the property here within the next, certainly within the next one to two months, depending on winter conditions in Canada and so on and so forth. Very experienced board. Warren Bates and Scott Joben Bevans are both geologists with long experience in the industry, particularly with large tonnage low-grade deposits. Elliot Strachan is our Chairman. He's been associated with this company for over 40 years. Very strong supporter. He's our largest single shareholder by far. Great guy. Certainly very supportive of our efforts to advance this project and maximize the opportunity for our shareholders going forward. And just to reiterate on everything that we've already said during the course of the presentation, we acquired the asset in June of 2020. It's 2,500 hectares in size. We own it 100%.
The mineral rights, there are no further payments associated with maintaining that claim block. All payments have been made. All option agreements have been completed. We now own full mineral title to the full 2,500 hectares and, more importantly, to the portion that surrounds the intrusion, which is the guiding light in terms of mineral exploration. Great opportunity for a large tonnage low-grade discovery. Very limited amount of drilling, but that can be rapidly expanded. I think the Tower Mountain will ultimately offer one of the lowest per-ounce discovery costs in the industry today. Absolutely brilliant location relative to the necessary infrastructure that you need, not just to keep your costs low, but to keep your construction costs low for anybody that acquires this with a view to bringing it into commercial production.
Those development costs and operating costs are going to be hugely and beneficially impacted by the existing infrastructure that is in place and fully funded by the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario. Low drilling costs, CAD 300 a meter, great recoveries, no problems. This is disturbed land because of the infrastructure that's there and its proximity to the claims. We're not talking pristine Canadian wilderness. We're not anticipating any significant objections to future development or certainly exploration of this particular and wonderful opportunity. At the end of the day, I just beg you to remember this. It's pretty simple. It's like a donut or, for our European friends that are with us today, a Danish. Unlike a Danish, donuts have holes in the middle.
We have a filled middle, which is that calc-alkaline intrusion, which I believe is driving all of the mineralization, not just the Tower Mountain, but throughout the entire Shebandowan greenstone belt, as demonstrated by hundreds of assessment reports talking about various gold discoveries over the time, and with that, I'll give you the details. This is a picture of probably our only significant outlier value, which was 941 g/tin over one and a half m. I was absolutely stunned when we reported that. There's nothing else like that in the database. Everything else sort of tends to rest in that 0.3-2 g/tin range, and it's just consistent day after day after day after day.
If you break it out at a 0.3 cutoff grade, which is the operating cutoff grade at the world's largest open-pit gold mines, you get an average grade between 0.8 and 1.2 g/tin. With that, I believe we'll go to questions.
All right. Thank you very much for the presentation, Wes. That was extremely interesting. I think there's a concept here of the presenters today. I could rename the commodity sector, the green belt, to the greenstone belt presentation, as there's so many of you guys that have amazing property, and it seems like you find gold where gold is supposed to be. I guess the greenstone belt is one of those places. That was very, very interesting. Again, great drill result, great project. Now let's go and hit the questions. First, Erik is asking, are there First Nations community in the area?
Who are they, if applicable? I think you touched that already just a few minutes back, but please expand on it.
So the largest First Nation are that the property is located on the traditional lands of the Fort William First Nations, which is based out of Thunder Bay, Ontario. They're more of an urban First Nations. I mean, these are not, they've been surrounded by infrastructure development and resource development for almost their entire existence. Thus far, the relationship is very good. I plan on maintaining that relationship and basically ensuring that they're fully aware of what it is we're doing and when we're doing it so that they're consulted with our plans so that nothing takes it by surprise because nobody likes surprises, correct?
Absolutely. And more specifically, is there any population in the near-local area? Is it open to open-pit mining?
Oh, it's absolutely open to open-pit mining. That's exactly the target that we're trying to outline and the opportunity we're trying to outline. There's some smaller single-family dwellings and cottages that are nearby to the property, but generally speaking, well outside of any reasonable or dangerous perimeter for operating an open-pit mine.
Okay. Perfect. That's all the questions we had right now. If anyone else has more questions, please put it in the Q&A or into the chat. We'll be happy to answer them, and I'll ask them to Wes. Can you discuss a bit more? So right now, you do have AUD 2 million. Most of that money of what we understood is already engaged into future work. What is the plan on future capital raise? And how will that raise materialize? Will it be kind of flow-through plus hard? Or how do you see that?
I'd love to make my life easier and say that a significant investor was going to come in and give us all the money we could ever conceivably spend because exploration is an expensive undertaking, as everybody who's participating here can attest to. Look, as a junior company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, our bread and butter is to tell people, tell our investors what we plan to do, go out, do it, come back and report to our investors the results of what we said we were going to do. Hopefully, our investors are encouraged enough to stay with the story and invest in a further round. You keep setting and resetting your low, high share price value and market capitalization, and you just move that up in stairsteps.
And eventually, we'll build this thing to a level that's appealing for a takeover bid from a producing issuer, whether that's a major company like a Barrick or Agnico Eagle or somebody similar to that size. All of those companies need to replace a significant number of gold ounces that they deplete through production. So large tonnage low-grade projects offer limited drama. They're predictable. They're not like higher-grade gold mines, which are notoriously unpredictable and often suffer because of that fact. Large tonnage low-grade deposits are predictable and very desirable for majors, and they're very desirable for smaller gold producers that are looking to take that next step in their development. Gold's absolutely undervalued, fantastic investment. We're going to see great appreciation. You can't live without gold. It's just impossible.
All right. Well, there was a lot to take in in these three minutes.
But let's go back a bit to it. So basically, Tower Mountain is obviously priority number one project within your company, I would believe. But you do have also other projects. Can you give us a quick look around of what else you have in your portfolio? And if you keep on intending keeping those, or what's the plan with them?
Well, look, Tower Mountain is our focus. Like I said, I'm a professional geologist. I recognize the opportunity Tower Mountain presents. We've got to put every dollar we can put towards Tower Mountain. We have vended other properties and other assets to different companies. Those different companies are advancing those assets on their own timelines. They seem to be progressing in a manner which I find to be positive.
It's possible some of those vending option agreements generate some cash that can come back into the company, which we would then immediately turn around and invest in our primary asset, which is Tower Mountain. Believe me when I tell you, I've seen a lot of these projects over the course of 40 years, seen them all over the world. And this was the one that was attractive enough to convince me not to retire. I simply can't put it any more plainly than that. I wasn't looking for work. I mean, I was happily winding down my career and happy with my accomplishments and achievements. And then when I was introduced to this story, I kind of went, "This one's really interesting.
It's got that rare blend of upside opportunity, easily attainable, cheap to drill, cheap to explore, very strong vectors indicating where to drill, which a lot of companies don't have. And again, that premium location. I mean, the number one rule in real estate investment is location, location, location. So I toughed it out, and here we are and meeting everybody here today and participating in this fine forum. It's been extremely interesting thus far, and I look forward to some of the other stories.
Absolutely. We still have two minutes to go. There's one thing we do have to touch and expand on. What you guys have, which is I'm referring to your 7th of January news that came out with drilling results here, includes 1.93 gram per ton over 54.2 m. Is it low-grade disseminated, or is it very high-grade stretched throughout 54 m?
There is not a single assay in that 51 m that's greater than 3 g a ton.
And can you expand on what does that mean as a difference?
Well, it means that you don't have this problem. Look, in the entire database, which is currently 28,000 samples, there are only seven that have returned a grade greater than 15 g a ton. So a lot of investors would be scared of that because they're so used to seeing all of these spectacular numbers like 600 g over a meter or 700 g over half a meter. But in order to produce an ounce of gold, there's two components. There's the grade of the gold, which is expressed in g/tin. Then there's the m of the interval that's been drilled. And that generates your tonnage.
So if you have 1 gram over 100 m, it's exactly the same as having 100 g over 1 meter. It's got exactly the same intrinsic value. The difference is I know for a fact that 1 gram over 100 m is more than likely going to be 100 m away from where I drilled that hole, whereas that 100 gr ams over a meter probably doesn't exist 5 m away from that drill hole.
Exactly.
It's a lack of continuity.
And this basically means two things: choosing a mining method, reducing dilution, and lowering, well, normally mining costs. Is that right?
Absolutely.
All right. So I hope everyone learned a little bit from this, the difference between high-grade, very, very short narrow vein system or low-grade dissemination throughout very long intersects. So on that, it's exactly 6:00 P.M. here CET time, Wes.
So we thank you very much for joining the IIF for the first time. We look forward to following your story. It's extremely interesting. I think great length. You have it all. Just keep on working very good diligently, and we'll be able to se e your next and updated results at the next IIF, maybe.
Julian, it's been an absolute pleasure to meet you and participate today, and thanks very much for the opportunity.
Thank you again. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye,
and Matthias will now be taking over for the next portion of the IIF. Thank you. Thank you, Julian. Yes, up next is Desert Gold Ventures with Jared Scharf. He's not only presenting the new company, but the new company logo as well.
Yeah, yeah, we updated a little bit after 15 years. This logo has been around a long time.
So yes, you can start sharing the screen, and then it's all yours.
Okay. Perfect. Okay, you can see that, okay, Matthias?
Yes.
All right. Well, thanks for having me back. I'm Jared Scharf, President and CEO of Desert Gold Ventures. And yeah, so thanks for having me. And I'll get right in. And Matthias, please feel free to interject if you have any questions along the way.
Sure.
So Desert Gold Ventures is a West African exploration and development company. Our primary asset at the moment is a 440 sq km regional land package located in the Kenyeba window of Western Mali, Eastern Senegal. It is one of the most prolific gold belts on the planet for large multimillion-ounce gold deposits. There is a number of operating mines in the belt, and the belt continues to expand. There's a lot of investment going in.
In fact, Allied Gold just announced this morning a major transaction with a fund out of Abu Dhabi. I think some $500 million overall is going to be contributed with Allied. So you've got a lot of the major players there. Barrick Gold has their Loulo-Gounkoto mine complex. B2 has their flagship Fekola mine, Allied, just to the north of us, and Endeavour Mining to the southwest with their Sabodala-Massawa. So Desert Gold, like I said, we've got a 440 sq km regional land package. We're bracketed by tier-one mines. There's a lot of exploration and development going on. And it's a belt that, even though it still has a lot of large deposits, it's still extremely underexplored. And when we get into a little bit of what we're doing on our project, you'll see how evident that is.
Management, both on the corporate and technical side, have been operating in West Africa for over 15 years. I myself started working in West Africa in 2012, came on in 2015 as a CEO of Desert Gold, and we've aggressively expanded the land package. High-level Desert Gold on this Senegal-Mali Shear Zone project, we've got a little over a million ounces of inferred and measured and indicated combined resource. The company is about 80% complete on a preliminary economic assessment to go into mining oxide minerals on the property package. And as well, there's just a whole myriad of exploration targets where we can vigorously expand the resource base. A little bit of overview on the corporate. Our main listing is on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker symbol DAU. We are also listed in Frankfurt as well as on the OTCQB in the US.
We've got 240 million shares issued and outstanding non-dilutive, 12 million options going to the directors and the board, and about 48 million warrants, the majority of which are held by insiders and arm's-length parties to the company. And you can see a breakdown of the warrant schedule there. Major shareholders, management is obviously a significant shareholder. Merk Investment, fund out of the U.S., major investor, Grand Peak Capital, asset manager out of Vancouver. Leede Jones Gable , a retail brokerage also out of the west coast of Canada. Ross Beaty, a household name you may know, Chairman of Pan American Silver, one of the founding shareholders of Equinox Gold. He's had an illustrious career in the mining business. Sodinaf International, small investment group. And Lucky Holdings, a company associated with our chairman who owns a significant shareholding in the company, and Elemental Altus Royalties.
On the management side of things, myself, I'm the President and CEO, largely responsible for consolidating the land package that exists within Desert Gold today. Sunny Janda, our Chairman, a private investor, commercial real estate developer, really likes the mining business. Him and his family and associated investment partners own a significant chunk of the company. On the technical side of things, Doug Engdahl, an independent director, Chairman and CEO of Axiom Global, brings a good independent technical voice, second opinion to what we're doing on the geological side of things. Then really driving the geological strategy of the company is Don Dudek. He's our lead technical advisor. Had a long career in West Africa, specifically in the belt we're in with Avion Gold. He was the Vice President of exploration. Until they were purchased by Endeavour in 2012, the transaction was around 400 million.
He then went on, moved into the Burkina Faso side, started a company called Savary Gold, which was then bought by Semafo, and Semafo was then bought by Endeavour, so he got a lot of regional-specific experience, which is important. Ousmane Sheikh Diallo, structural geologist, spent the majority of his career at Acacia, a subsidiary of Barrick Gold. He is our VP on the ground. He spends over 60% of his time in the field. Fantastic geologist. He's actually in the field right now, and we're very lucky to have him. Between him and Don, they make an excellent team, so a little bit about Western Mali as a district. Mali, we'll see what the latest numbers look like coming out of 2024, but it's either the third or fourth largest gold-producing country on the African continent.
The vast majority of that production comes from the Kenyeba window, which sits in the extreme western part of the country on the Senegalese border. I'll show you that in a bit more detail. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of big developers and operators have multi-billion dollar operations, which they are expanding and running as we speak. This is a pretty important picture. It kind of lays out the framework for why Desert Gold is doing what it's doing and why we are where we are. This is essentially a satellite image of the Kenyeba window. If you can see the blue river that sort of starts in your northwest and cuts south, that's the Falémé River. It demarcates the border between Senegal and Mali, with Senegal being on the western side and Mali being on the eastern side.
This belt has two major shear zones that cut through it, the most notable one being the Senegal-Mali shear zone, which I've marked with this gold hue that essentially goes from north to south. Along that shear zone, there are at least six operating mines of significant size, even more deposits. I'll go through them high level in a second. On the western side, you have the main transcurrent, which starts on the Mali side of the border and then dips west into Senegal. That's related to Endeavour's Sabodala-Massawa-Gounkoto group of mines and to Resolute's Mako mine. That was previously Teranga, and Endeavour acquired them in quite a significant transaction. There's been a lot of M&A in this belt here over the years. Starting from the north, Allied Gold, as I mentioned, they announced a very big funding deal today.
They have this property package here with their Sadiola mine. Sadiola still has over 7 million ounces of reserves and resource. Allied's looking to expand the mine, upgrade a lot of the plant and equipment there. They're also doing a lot of exploration. I think they're having significant success finding additional ounces and also finding some oxide zones as well. Yatela was mined out. It's since been shut in. All history, past production reserves and resources, you're looking over a 15 million-ounce camp here. Further south, you encounter our property package. We border them on their southern border. This is our Senegal-Mali shear zone project. Like I said, it's 440 sq km. We've got 38 km strike extent exposure to the Senegal-Mali shear, another 11 or so km of the main transcurrent. We've got a whole bunch of interesting ground where these two shear zones converge.
There's a lot of compelling stuff happening geologically that's related to just a whole myriad of gold mineralization. Going further south along the Senegal-Mali shear, you encounter Barrick's Loulo-Gounkoto mine complex, produced over 700,000 ounces annual production last year. There's so much mine life left. All told, there's well over 15 million ounces of production and reserves in this camp. Further south, you've got B2Gold's flagship Fekola mine. Combined resources, it's comfortably over 7 million ounces. They're expanding. They're doing a lot of exploration. And they're looking to expand production in this area. And I think they recently had some major breakthroughs on the licensing side of things, which is going to allow them to do that. And finally, in the southern part of the belt, before you dip into the Guinea side of the border, you have Managem's Boto-Diakha group of deposits.
It's somewhere between 2 and 3 million ounces combined, not yet into production. But I think Managem's quite keen to get that into production. And then finally, on the main transcurrent side, you've got Endeavour Mining's group of mines and Mako's mine as well, and a number of other deposits that are being developed by Endeavour and also by earlier stage explorers like ourselves. And that's all told at least a 15 million-ounce camp at this point. So the game here really is to have a lot of exposure to these regional shear zones that structurally control these large gold deposits. And that's why, since 2015, I've been consolidating as much ground as I can in this area. And I really think that's the major differentiator of Desert Gold. We have an outsized land position in this belt for such a relatively small company.
The only other companies that have blocks similar to this on these features are multimillion-ounce producers. This slide just dives a little deeper into some of the history of the M&A in the belt in the picture you just looked at and one or two other transactions in the southern part of the country. But the major takeaway here is when junior companies or developers find something interesting and they get closer to that two million-ounce threshold, they usually don't last very long. And they usually get taken out and sometimes at a significant premium. And so that slide, I won't go through it in detail, but it's there for your reference if you want to take a look. Okay. This is a plan view of our Senegal-Mali shear zone project. It's a bit of a technical image. So I'll discuss a few of the points sort of high level.
What you're looking at is analytical signal magnetics in the background. The yellow and purple dots you see are gold in soil anomalies, with the yellow dots being represented in a range of 50 parts per billion gold all the way up to 200, and the purple dots are 200 parts per billion going all the way up to 16,000, which I believe is the highest soil sample we got on the property, 16,000 PPB being 16 g/tin, which is extremely high tenor for a soil sample. The black stars you see are where we have gold zones of various size and development that have been confirmed by drilling, and then in the black and white boxes, we've highlighted some of the material drill intercepts we've encountered along the property presented in terms of grade over width.
Really what this image is trying to show at a high level is the proliferation of gold in this part of the world. If you take a bit of time to look in detail, we have economic intercepts scattered throughout the property. Gourbassi East, 3 g over 43 m. Gourbassi West North, a gram over 123 m. So we have broad zones of lower grade mineralization disseminated in sediments. We also have higher grade, relatively narrower zones hosted typically in quartz or intrusive-type units. You can see, for example, this highlight intercept here at Linnguekoto West, 16 g over 7 m. So a lot of this stuff is open. It's a virtual certainty that we're going to find more, that we're going to make it bigger. It's just a matter of how much bigger can we make it?
And so a little over 1.1 million ounces of combined resource; it's a good starting point. And I'm optimistic that we can crack that 2 million-ounce mark with more work. In terms of where the 1.1 million ounces of resource come from, you can see the larger black stars on the property package. That's what makes up the resource. In the southern part of the property, there is a bit of a center of gravity that's developing. You can see as the crow flies, maybe 12 km, a little over 800,000 ounces of that resource comes in the southern part of the property. And then we have another group of resources here. And that's probably not a bad way to segue into where we're at with our preliminary economic assessment.
In addition to the exploration initiatives that are taking place, we're also looking at starting mining at oxide minerals in this part of the world. Typically, gold zones have an oxidized cap to them in this part of the world of varying thickness. Sometimes it's only 10 m. But in some cases, on our property, the oxide goes down 100 m. In the central part of the property here at Barani East, we're about 80% complete the PEA where we're looking at mining oxide in a two-phased gravity plant. With any luck, we'll have the initial economic findings of the PEA out before the end of Q1. As a second phase, we have these two sort of sister deposits here in the southwest part of the property, Gourbassi West, West North. They lie within 600 m of one another.
These are very wide, sort of broad zones of mineralization, albeit at slightly lower grade. We're developing a solution here to potentially do mining via heap leach, which is a very low OpEx, CapEx way of capitalizing on these wide gold zones that are lower grade. The PEA will address the economics of mining at these two zones. High level, we're looking at something that's going to start a little over 200,000 ounces of oxide, processing 20,000-30,000 tons per month. Right now, where we're at in the PEA is all the metallurgical work has been done. The majority of the geotechnical work is done. Plant design, process, that's all been done. Really, we're just at the optimization phase of the PEA. Like I said, with any luck, we'll have something for the market before the end of Q1.
This is a detailed breakdown of the resource by zone. High level, like I said, some of the biggest deposit areas are Mogoyafara S outh, a zone a little over 400,000 ounces in an area mineralized that's almost 2 km wide east to west by 2.5 km long north to south. And there's a lot of opportunity in that area for expansion. This is a little bit about our, let's call it our exploration model in terms of how we evaluate targets when we choose to move targets up the priority list. But essentially, high level, what we're looking for is something big and wide that carries economic grade. We're looking for 100 g m intervals. And we're looking for something with multiple km of strike extent.
In the Senegal-Mali shear zone, that's what you need to be looking for because the regional endowment suggests that that's more than possible in this part of the world. 2025 exploration program, high level, we've got 20,000 m of drilling planned, another 10,000 m of contingency. So all told, it's about 30,000 m. These are drill collar locations. The yellow collars are air core. The orange are reverse circulation or RC. And the red are diamond. The purple fences are auger. We use auger as a way of getting underneath laterite and overburden where we don't have very good exposure and we can't really see the geology. So hopefully, we'll get all or part of this program done this year. And as you can see, we're targeting specifically along certain structures where we have existing zones and where we see obvious opportunity to make things bigger.
So, high level, the Senegal-Mali shear zone, one of the, if not the largest, contiguous land package of any non-producer in the belt. There's a lot of gold on the property. There's over 30 gold zones discovered to date via drilling. Virtually all of it are open along strike into depth to certain degrees. We have a high degree of confidence that we're going to be able to make it bigger. In the meantime, with the elevated gold price, we see low-hanging fruit in the oxide to fast-track into mining. We're almost finished our PEA, which will address that opportunity as well. I'm optimistic for a positive outcome. Like I said, we have 20,000 m of drilling planned this year, another 10,000 m of contingency to follow up in real time.
We are optimistic to get some, if not all, that worked on this year. And that's kind of it, Matthias, high level.
Okay. Excellent. Quite some time left for questions. So. ` Hi, Jared.
Hey, Julian. How are you?
All right. So back on it. Very easy. Sorry for the technical issue we had here. Okay. So let's just focus on a few things back here. So you obviously announced the resources a few weeks, months back. This is what we see on the screen here. We saw the update of the focus. We do know what happened in Mali and so on. Is there any plan of looking outside of Mali? Are you guys just keep on focusing on Mali and have all the chips in?
Yeah. Great question. So yeah, it's no secret that there was a coup three years ago.
The current government has come up with a new mining code. It hasn't exactly been well received by the investment community, and there were also a number of disputes by the biggest, let's say, tax disputes by the biggest miners in the country, but I think the opportunity is getting really interesting. If you look systematically one by one, each one of those cases was resolved amicably, the latest being Barrick, and so the Loulo-Gounkoto mine reopened, and the debate about how much of the economic benefit should go to the miners and the shareholders versus other in-country stakeholders is an ongoing debate, not only in Mali, but in other parts of the world. Sure, the companies with 100% of their exposure in Mali, their valuations have been affected, but the opportunity in West Africa in general is immense.
Quite frankly, Desert Gold is always looking at opportunities both inside and outside of Mali. In fact, I'm going back to West Africa for two weeks here shortly to go look at a number of opportunities. If the right project presents itself, then we will be very interested in that. I think it does make sense to potentially geographically diversify the project portfolio. I would emphasize that reconstructing a land package like this on a structure like this would be almost impossible to do today. Impossible. If we can find something of similar merit and it passed sort of the litmus test geologically and it's a friendly mining jurisdiction where they want us to be there, then we're definitely taking a serious look.
On that, if we can expand, it is very good news that obviously major companies have come to an agreement with the Malian government. Did you have any talks with the Malian government lately as they approach you? Is there any channel of communication? And without telling us what those communications are about, what is your feeling towards what they want in the mining sector as a whole? Because you are not producing a very different story than a billion-dollar project of Barrick. So can you expand on that?
Yeah. So we maintain an ongoing regular dialogue with both the Department of Geology and Mines and with the Ministry of Mines. They come and visit our property at least once or twice a season to see what we're up to.
They are aware that our intention is to go into mining on one of the properties where we have a fully permitted mining license, which is this rectangular block here, and then the rest of the licenses are held under exploration, so we've been given the indications to go ahead. We've already actually started some of the pre-stripping. We've already built our perimeter fence around the initial starter pit, so we're doing things and moving things along in the background, obviously the PEA being a major catalyst for us from a funding-securing perspective, so clearly, the Mali government had, let's say, bigger fish to fry over the last year or two, dealing with the big miners and coming to a settlement with them.
But our mining license is governed under the, not to get too into the weeds about this, but it's governed under the pre-existing mining convention, under the previous mining code from 2012. And so there's been no, we haven't been told in any way, shape, or form that they want to retroactively apply the new mining code to our license. So far, so good. We haven't had any issues except with the bad headlines creating just bad news out there in the market.
Okay. So I'm back. I had some technical issues with the camera. But another question here is, considering Desert Gold's strong position in Mali and the extensive experience in Western Africa, are there any plans to explore additional opportunities in other regions to further diversify and expand the company's growth potential?
Yes. The short answer to that is yes. How much I can tell you, I'm somewhat limited. In my experience, there's part of me, and I'm sure a lot of investors won't want to hear this, but there's part of me that thinks the real opportunity is actually in Mali because the worst of this is behind us now. And there are unbelievable projects that companies have walked away from that you could pick up for pennies on the dollar. However, there are certainly other jurisdictions proximal to Mali that at the moment have much, let's call it, friendlier mining codes. They're under stable democratic rule. And so the perception in the capital markets is that they're better places to go. And like I said, I'll be in West Africa in two weeks. I'll be there for at least two weeks. And at this point, pretty much all I can say is we're always looking at opportunities.
So the short answer is yes. We can all expect the PEA at the end of the first quarter, probably. What you can expect regarding the PEA is before the end of the first quarter, we will publish essentially an executive summary of the results and under the National Instrument 43-101. That then triggers the 45-day window for us to actually file the technical report publicly on SEDAR. So we will come up with the initial economic summary of the PEA, hopefully before the end of Q1. And then within 45 days, we have to file our technical report. That's the timeline. Perfect.
And just one question to clear out. Are there any royalties attached to the project?
Oh. So this project is comprised of 10 licenses. Some of them are owned, well, they're all now owned outright by the company.
But in a few of the smaller blocks, there are licenses, excuse me, there are royalties with local landowners that we did earn-in deals, these small blocks here. In all cases, we can purchase the royalties up to 1%. However, all of the properties where we have resources, where we're contemplating mining, so this area here where we have resources, 400-and-some thousand ounces, 420,000 ounces, 280,000 ounces, there are no royalties on those property packages. So by and large, for such a large property package, it's fairly unencumbered by royalty. But there are a couple of small licenses where there is a 1% or 2% NSR where we can buy back roughly 50% of it.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Jared. Matthias, you're back at moderating. So all yours. Go ahead. Thank you, Jared. Thank you so much. Yes. Thank you, Jared. Time's up. Up next is NetraMark Holdings with George Achilleos. I hope I pronounced that correctly.
Not too bad.
Not t oo bad. Okay.
All sorts of versions of it over the years. Matthias, don't worry about it. You did a fine job. Achilleos.
Achilleos. Okay. So you already started sharing the screen. Excellent. Yeah, the stage is yours.
Perfect. I just want to say, first of all, thank you. I always enjoy telling the NetraMark story. As CEO, I'm obviously biased, but I'm very excited about where we sit as a company and what the opportunity really looks like. Let me just dive right into it. What is NetraMark? NetraMark is an AI company with a fully developed technology. This is not a fantasy of what we're planning to build. A fully developed technology that is pointed at the pharmaceutical industry. Okay?
The pharmaceutical industry runs clinical trials, and you may or may not know, but clinical trials fail at a ridiculously high rate. About 90% of clinical trials from inception of molecule through to commercialization, about 90% fail, so this is a problem that has been going on as long as clinical trials have been running, and our mandate is to use AI to, as we say, optimize response prediction. Those words are carefully chosen, and I will articulate why we chose those words. Essentially, what we do is we take a pharmaceutical company when it's running a clinical trial, at the end of every phase, you have phase one, phase two, phase three, etc., you have what's called a clinical trial data readout.
It's data that comes from your trial that says, "Hey, how did this drug work with the patients that were in the trial?" And you get data about that so you can tell whether you met the endpoint, etc. We take that data, we ingest it, we run it through our AI, and what spits out are kind of three primary things that pharmaceutical companies are generally interested in. Number one, what's driving drug response or not drug response? What's driving placebo response and what's driving adverse events? So we have a unique technology that can actually discover if there are subpopulations that were in the trial that could be affecting these things. Okay? So this is a very, very important factor for everybody to understand as we go through the trial.
So imagine if, when you're now getting prepared for the next phase, you passed your phase, now you're getting ready for the next phase of the clinical trial. What if you knew if there were specific subpopulations that were affecting drug response, etc., placebo response? What if you could exclude them from the next phase of the trial? Or what if you could include people that are actually responding to the drug, etc., in a more feverish rate? Well, that's what we do. We identify those subpopulations so that you can adjust the study for the subsequent phase. That's why we say we optimize response prediction. We often get from people, "Well, isn't that kind of rigging the trial?" Well, what's important to note is this is actually from the FDA, okay?
The FDA has actually put out guidance to say that if you do these things, the regulator is supportive of these things. If you can find these subpopulations, pre-randomization, so you recruit the people based on what we find, and then after they're recruited, you randomize the study, that's okay. That's why we say we optimize response prediction, which is ultimately what you want. How can you increase the chances of having a successful clinical trial? Okay? As I alluded to, about 88-90% of trials fail from inception through to commercialization. What we focus on is what we call phase two and phase three of a clinical trial. Okay? Phase one is often a very small clinical trial. It can be less than 30 participants in that trial. You get your readout, and if you pass, you go to the next phase.
And then you get your readout, and if you pass, if the results show that you met the endpoint, you go to the next phase. Okay? So what we focus on are phase two and phase three studies. Why do we focus on that? Because this is the worst place to fail in a clinical trial. Okay? It's much better, actually, to fail substantially earlier because you've risked a lot less capital. Okay? We focus on two specific therapeutic areas. One's called CNS, which is central nervous system-related diseases, things like depression and schizophrenia, etc., and oncology. And you can look here, the stats show that you can pass phase two, and in CNS, you still have a 51% chance as your chance of approval. Okay? So you have a 49% failure rate in phase three.
And in oncology, you have a 65% failure rate in phase three, the worst place to possibly fail a trial. So the question is, when you finish phase two, is there an opportunity to analyze the data that came out of your phase two trial to better set up phase three so you can increase the chances of a successful phase three and ultimately make it through to commercialization? Okay? The question often comes up is, why do so many of these trials fail? Okay? Many times, it's because when you go into phase three, you're expanding the trial, you're expanding the heterogeneity, and therefore, it's sometimes hard to understand what's really happening. Imagine a golf swing. You have a great golf swing when you're hitting your pitching wedge, and you get to the driver, and you've got a big slice all of a sudden, and you're not understanding why.
Imagine if you had a technology that could tell you why you might have a slice when you go into a later phase of a clinical trial. Often, what causes failure? Wrong endpoint, that we're not suited, the drug didn't really show a demonstrable benefit over the standard of care. A lot of CNS trials have high placebo issues. Is it possible to figure out what's driving placebo response, etc.? Those are all the things that are causing clinicians that are running clinical trials to be stressed out at night when they're sleeping. Let's talk about the market. The market is massive. The pharmaceutical industry is massive globally. Cumulative trials since 2010, and these trials often take a long time. That's why I'm looking at cumulative. Got almost 400,000 trials.
If you look at clinical trial support services, which ultimately are the budgets we pull for when we're running a clinical trial, $25 billion in 2023 and $47 billion globally expected in 2032. So you have a massive market. AI in healthcare, as you can imagine, is exploding. I'll talk a little bit about the AI landscape, and it's expected to be about $148 billion by 2029. Anybody that thinks AI is a flash in the pan, etc., I would really like to debate them. This is not a flash in the pan. I remember when I worked at IBM and people thought the internet was going to be a flash in the pan in 1999, and that certainly was not true. It's the same with AI. This is going to permeate every industry, every possible business process, etc. It's not going away. This is a macro trend.
Let's talk about the AI landscape in general because there's lots of confusion over where NetraMark sits in this landscape within the pharmaceutical industry. So when you look at this industry, you have to ask yourself the question, where are the natural places for AI to go? And those are the places where there's the most competition, where we don't operate. But I still want to highlight the landscape. So in the first bucket, we've got drug discovery. Okay? It makes sense to point AI in the drug discovery area. Why? Because you can ingest massive data sets, and AI loves massive data that it can crunch. And through the crunching of that massive data, it can spit out potential molecules for treatments moving forward. We don't do that. There are many companies doing that. It's highly competitive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent.
A high-risk game. I am rooting for it because I do believe that 10 years from now, certainly AI-discovered molecules will be in the marketplace. So that's one area. The other area is what we call clinical trial operations. So now you've discovered your drug, and you're into the clinical trial process. Okay? Well, when you're running a clinical trial, there are many things you have to do. You have to recruit patients for the trial. You got to run the trial. You got to administer the drug to the patients, etc. So there's other obvious places for AI to play there. You can imagine we want to recruit faster and find patients easier. Well, let's ingest these massive electronic medical records to help find these people faster and easier. Okay? There's lots of people that are playing in that space. We also don't operate in that space very crowded.
We operate in this area, which is very foundational, I will call it. Okay? So as you can see here at the end, when you're a pharmaceutical company, at the end of every phase of the trial, you get a clinical trial data readout. That's where the information is stored, where you can, from a statistical perspective, analyze and understand, did we meet the endpoint? Submit those statistics to the regulator, and you pass or fail, and then if you pass, you can then design another protocol to submit to the regulator to begin the next phase, well, within this protocol, the foundational layer, the architectural document, essentially, of the clinical trial, there's something in there called the study population, and the study population outlines who should the drug be administered to, who should be included, the inclusion criteria, who should be excluded.
Imagine if somebody, NetraMark, could ingest the data readouts from each of these phases of a trial and tell you, "Wait a minute, you should change," we call it enrich, "the inclusion-exclusion criteria of this protocol that you're going to submit to the regulator for the next phase." And we can statistically tell you what we think it will do to improve the odds of a pass and avoiding a failure in the subsequent phase. That's what we do. Now, there's a lot less competition in this area. Why? The data sets are small. Okay? 65% of clinical trials have less than 100 patients, and over 90% have less than 1,000 patients. These aren't large data sets. Okay? And Dr.
Joseph Geraci, who's the founder, the CTO and the CSO of NetraMark, he's a PhD mathematician, okay? And he spent over seven years trying to figure out the mathematics of a precision medicine formula that could ingest small data sets and find statistically significant subpopulations that could impact whether the subsequent phase is a success or a failure, so years and years of trying to figure out the mathematics behind that, that's what he figured out. We've built the platform, and that's what we now do. We ingest these small data sets. Okay? We enrich the subsequent protocol design so that you have a greater chance of success in the future phase. That's where we focus on. Now, when I say small data sets, I mean number of patients can be small, but what can be very wide are the number of variables.
You're typically looking at 500 to 20,000 variables per patient that are captured in CNS and oncology trials. Furthermore, the data can be multimodal. If you're running a depression study, you would have these qualitative scale survey questions that are helping assess whether you're depressed or not, etc. But you can also have biological data. Okay? So if you had just 1,000 variables, just to put this into context, the permutations and combinations of finding four, five, six variables that are associated with drug response or placebo response or adverse events, one of those things, would be in the trillions. A human can't do this. Okay? It's impossible. So what the pharmaceutical companies do now, they do something called a post-hoc subpopulation analysis. Okay? But in that, what they're doing is they're hand-selecting often variables, three, four, five variables. Where do they get these variables?
Well, it's often very experienced medical people or feedback from the regulator, etc., that are saying, "You should look at these variables." So they hand-select two or three from the 1,000 or 10,000 variables and run statistical analysis. Well, think about that. I just told you there's trillions in the permutations and combinations. So this is an impossibility for a human to do. This is what we've done and pointed the AI at this technology. It's proprietary. Okay? We call it NetraAI. We've kept it as a trade secret. We have not patented it for a specific reason. We do not want to expose the mathematical formulas behind our proprietary AI. Okay? The other thing is you got a market that's massive. You got a problem that needs to be solved, and that clinical trials are failing at a crazy rate. We've got a technology that's built.
Now you have to commercialize it, and that comes down to people. So myself, as a Chief Executive Officer, I've been in the technology my whole career starting at IBM, many, many years in technology, but I'm not a pharmaceutical person. So I needed to attract and build a team that essentially comes from the pharmaceutical industry. I've been building this team. We launched NetraMark officially in January of 2023 and started the construction process around this. Okay? I mentioned Dr. Joseph Geraci. He's the PhD mathematician. But I do want to spend a moment to highlight the other people that have started and joined this business. So Josh Spiegel is our president. He's out of New York. His responsibility is the commercialization. He comes from VeraSci, which was in the clinical operations side of the pharmaceutical industry. That company was sold to WCG Clinical for $330 million.
He joined our company as president. Dr. Luca Panni, for those of you that are from Europe, was the former director general of the Italian Medicines Agency, where he ran a multi, multi-billion dollar budget and oversaw over 800 drugs go into that market. Still works closely with the European Medicines Agency, now resides in Washington. He's a global icon of regulation. He's our Chief Regulatory Officer. Dr. Larry Alfs, our Chief Medical Officer, former executive director, advisor, head of Therapeutics Johnson & Johnson, director at Novartis. Our most recent addition has been Dr. Angelico Carta. Okay? So when you run a clinical trial, you're often using what's called a CRO, a contract research organization. Dr. Angelico Carta was the co-founder and president of Worldwide Clinical Trials. It's a very large CRO that operates in almost 70 countries around the world.
He was co-founder and president, and he joined as Chief Strategy Officer for NetraMark. We've got some amazing advisors on this, so that's essentially the team. Then I often get this question, "Well, what do people do with the results that you get them?" They do what we've partly what I've outlined already, which is this protocol enrichment and covariate analysis. That's a fancy way of saying, "Change the inclusion-exclusion criteria or track some variables that you might want to affect down the road." But there's many other opportunities for NetraMark with the same technology stack, including this TPP, which is product profile, which essentially is influencing and helping create the label that you would be utilizing to drive this trial and submit to the regulator, market access. Once you get approval for phase three, the work's not done. Now you got to go into the market.
What if you had a technology that could ingest the phase three data, okay, and tell you who the high responders are so that when you then go to launch with the doctors and practitioners, etc., the supporting publication strategy, the ideal launch patient identification would all be crisply identified to help those marketing efforts. And ultimately, what we're talking here is the future of precision medicine. What you should also know is what's happening now as a trend, it's starting to happen, is you could get all the way through phase one, phase two, phase three. Now there are some phase three drugs that are getting, they're passing phase three, and they're not getting approved by the payor. There's no clear unmet need. It's undifferentiated from the other drugs that are on there, and the payor doesn't want to cover them. Okay?
We are moving, whether we like it or not, to a precision medicine model, and NetraMark is highly positioned to unearth the subpopulations driving precision medicine. The next part really is, and I just have a couple more slides, and then I'll stop and go to questions. We started the commercialization of this company in April of 2023. The sales cycles are very long. Gartner says it's often upwards of three years to commercialize. So we're about 21 months in. We've already got a beachhead client where we've closed. We started with one contract. Now we've got four. We're working on more contracts. They're an over $10 billion biopharmaceutical company listed on the NASDAQ. That's our beachhead client. And right now, what we're doing is we're kind of priced for validation.
The way we price this is it's about $200,000-$300,000 to evaluate one clinical trial data readout, meaning one drug that comes out of one phase of a clinical trial. To talk about the addressable market, you'd have to look at a pharma company, their whole pipeline, all the drugs, and at every phase. Okay? Ultimately, over time, though, we're not going to be charging this because you can imagine, as we go through validation in the clinical trial space and in the pharmaceutical industry, what really is this technology worth if it's incrementally increasing the chances of success of a clinical trial. There's a really large sales pipeline that's building with lots of momentum.
We're speaking with all sorts of organizations, from large cap, being a $100 billion pharma company, mid-size, which are $1 billion, and single compound, which are less than $1 billion. And we're looking at companies that usually have at least a couple of drugs in their pipeline. So we've got a robust sales pipeline, priced for validation. The other thing that we're doing from a validation perspective is we have announced a collaboration agreement with a top five pharma company. The idea there is to analyze their data from Crohn's disease and to co-publish. Co-publishing is important in the pharmaceutical industry. We also announced a collaboration agreement with the NIMH, which is one of the 27 institutes of the NIH, the largest biological research organization in the world. Okay? We're going to be co-publishing studies there based in ketamine studies.
Those collaborations are important because they add to the credibility of what we can tell the pharmaceutical industry. And this morning, we just announced a collaboration with the Ontario Brain Institute to analyze imaging data for major depressive disorder. Amazing collaborations that we need for validation. We're priced for validation with respect to contracts moving forward. And then the other thing is working with the regulator in the US. We are going back and forth with the FDA on the right program to get regulatory approval. Even though we're pre-randomization and don't need it, it's important and helps lubricate. Okay? All of this is the one other thing I do want to add to is we're an AI company that has a fixed cash burn, okay, of approximately CAD 150,000-CAD 160,000 per month.
I don't think you're going to find a lot of AI companies that have a fixed cash burn in that area. Our gross margins, if you were to look at our financials, you'll see are substantially higher than 90%. Every dollar of revenue comes in essentially goes to covering our SG&A. Okay? It's very exciting from a cost structure. At a little over CAD 2 million in revenue, we will start to spit out EBITDA. Okay? This year, 2025, is the year that we begin now to crystallize on a bunch of very, very global arrangements, contracts. By the end of 2025, our goal is to become EBITDA positive. We're very excited about where we sit from the perspective of the company and the valuation.
And then the last thing I'm just going to just summarize quickly is I want everybody to make sure they understand the technology's built. It's gone through QA validation with a major biopharmaceutical company. It's commercialized. We're already getting contracts. We've got high, high-profile collaborations, which I just touched on. We're focused on CNS and oncology. We have a beachhead client, a rapidly evolving sales pipeline, very high gross margin, low fixed cash burn. And the average revenue multiple in this space is 34. And I've seen them as high as over 90. Okay? And a really clean cap table. Mattias, I'll turn it over to you if there's any questions for me in the eight minutes that we've got left. That was a lot to jam in in that time, but hopefully I did a good job.
Indeed, that's a lot. That's maybe the reason why there are currently no questions in, but everyone is welcome to ask questions in the chat or the Q&A function. So you said you had 133 opportunities in your sales pipeline. What kind of conversion rate do you expect from this?
Our goal this year would be to get at least our goal is 15 contracts out of that. But you got to remember, it's a rolling because we have to wait for clinical trial data readouts. So that would be a really great goal for us this year that would allow us to be EBITDA positive.
And in terms of data security, what measures are in place to ensure data privacy and regulatory compliance, especially concerning sensitive clinical data?
Yeah, great question. So we have met the QA compliance requirements of the FDA.
When we do a contract with the biopharmaceutical companies and sign master service agreements, we have to go through QA validation and quality assurance review. So we have very high encryption protocols, etc. And we actually have two options on how we manage this. And it depends actually more on the biopharmaceutical company. We can set up an instance of NetraAI, which is our AI technology, inside their firewall. And it's kind of mission impossible-like, which is we set it up in their firewall, we analyze the data on their side of the firewall, and once we're done, that instance kind of blows up and goes away. Or we can pass the data securely through the firewall to NetraMark and on our cloud services and analyze the data. And we've got highly encrypted, secure platforms there.
Okay. And can the AI handle diverse therapeutic areas beyond CNS and oncology effectively?
Yeah, good question. We focus on CNS and oncology because the industry is always asking for use cases. To be quite honest, the AI doesn't care. It's analyzing variables. It doesn't know what is this variable per se. So it's therapeutic area agnostic. But from a sales and go-to-market perspective, we've just decided to start with CNS and oncology. But we can go through any therapeutic area.
Okay. And can you mention some successful examples where the AI was used for significant insights?
Yes. We've published some. So we've analyzed third-party data in schizophrenia trials, and we've presented those in posters. And if anybody wants to, they can go to our website and they can see the posters and the publications that show the validation of the technology. I can't unfortunately name our beachhead client, but we've analyzed now three of their trials.
The feedback from them was that this has changed the way they look at clinical trials moving forward, and we're expanding our contract base. There's two parts. There's the publications that you can see on our site, and then there's clients who are expanding their contract base with us.
I mean, we're talking about an AI. How do you mitigate risks of the AI hallucinating or doing inaccurate predictions?
Another great question. Most AI overfits. If anybody understands AI, they would know what that means. It's essentially saying, "I got to ingest the data and put populations into these two subsets," let's say. We actually don't do that. What we do is we split them into three populations, what we call the good, the bad, and the ugly. Okay? The good are the people that are treatment responders, placebo non-responders.
The bad are the treatment non-responders, placebo responders. And then there's this other group called the ugly. And the machine says, "Statistically, I'm not going to fit those people because it's going to create hallucinations." It spits them over to the side, actually, and then works on mathematical statistics with the populations that it understands, number one. Number two, from a hallucination perspective, this is not black box AI. This is what we would call augmented intelligence. So two things happen. Number one, when the results come out from NetraAI, we have PhDs that review the data and input their own kind of feedback, if you will, onto what they're seeing.
Number two, when we deliver the results to the client, we also deliver raw data so that they can do their own statistical analysis using their traditional methods to validate what the machine has said, rather than saying, "Here are the subpopulations and the variables that are associated with drug response. Trust us." We don't do that. We show a route all the way back to the raw data patient identification sets.
Okay. There's a question from the chat. So who are your competitors?
So there's a few competitors. They're coming at this in a very different way. So this would be an Owkin, O-W-K-I-N. And just to give you an idea, they had about 11-12 million in revenue. And their last raise was a $1.1 billion valuation. Okay? So the revenue multiples are ridiculous here.
There's Unlearn AI, but that's a digital twin technology, which is going to require heavy regulatory approval for that to be validated. Okay? So there are ancillary competitors that are taking very, very different approaches and not very many of them. This is a very challenging space because we're talking about ingesting the sponsor or the pharmaceutical company's data sets. And those data sets are small, 100, 200 patients. Not very many people know how to do this. Dr. Joe Geraci got his PhD in mathematics with DARPA, the defense industry in the United States. He has his postdoc in oncology, a postdoc in psychiatry, and a postdoc in quantum mechanics. Okay? This is literally a rocket scientist who has figured out how to ingest these small data sets mathematically and come up with statistically valid outcomes.
Okay. So we have less than 60 seconds left. So maybe you can do one last elevator pitch why NetraMark is so interesting. 40 seconds.
40 seconds. I would just challenge everybody to ask themselves, "Do you understand that there's a problem? Clinical trials fail at a ridiculously high rate, number one. Number two, we have a built technology that you can see the publications, the posters, and now we have product-market fit with client that's demonstrating that we can actually solve this problem." Okay? And number three, we have an amazing team. This is a very, very difficult industry to penetrate. I would challenge anybody to find a team that has been coalesced around the technology as prolific as the team that we've put together here.
You put all of those together, okay, I think this puts NetraMark at a very, very unique position to really, really capture a very, very high market cap over the next 12 to 24 months, and ultimately, I believe we're going to get acquired.
Excellent. Thank you so much. Very interesting presentation.
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
And up next is Scott Young, the head of corporate development of Nova Pacific Metals. He already joined us here on stage. Hello, Scott. How are you?
Good. Nice to see you. How are you? Thank you for having me.
Good, so you can start sharing the screen and your presentation, and then we are good to go.
Great. Let me just see if I can do that. Let me know if you can see my screen.
We can see the, yes, in your background now.
Yeah, now it's loading, yes. But can you try stopping sharing the screen and select just the presentation, not the whole screen?
How do I do that?
Just stop with the sharing and click the share button again, and then you can select what you actually want to share.
Okay. Stop sharing.
Yes. And then there should be where you can select what you want to share. And don't click on the screen, just select the presentation.
How's that?
Currently, there's nothing happening. Okay. Otherwise, just go with your previous method, but.
All right. Let's try that. Okay. Share. Sorry, everybody.
No problem. Shared the screen for a second and then stopped. I don't know what was happening on your side. Is the presentation online? Should I share it? I know it's starting.
No. All right. Let me just, let me just go there. Okay. Let's try this.
Let's go with this then.
How's that? Is that all right?
I can see myself in your shared screen, but let's go anyway.
You can't see me. You're much better looking than I am.
I can see myself in your shared screen, but anyhow, let's go.
Okay, everybody. My name's Scott Young. Thanks for taking the time. I'm head of corporate development for Nova Pacific. I've spent 20 years raising money for mining, oil, and gas and technology companies. That's my specialty. I get offered jobs regularly because there's very few people that do what I do. I have a Rolodex of folks all over the world and have spent too much time on an airplane, and I was brought the opportunity of Nova Pacific about a year ago. I really like the people involved, and that's one of the reasons I took this job.
When I invest in mining companies, folks, there are four things that I look for. The most important thing is the people that are around the mining company. Have they done it before? Do they have a good history? Is their reputation intact? Number two, the jurisdiction. Is the property in an area where there's other mines around? Does the property have a history? Do you have the data of that history? Number three, does the management know how to raise capital? Because all of these companies in the junior mining spaces, most of you know capital is the lifeblood of these companies. So you have to have a group that knows how to raise money to keep this thing going. And number four, how are we going to make money for the shareholders? How am I going to make money as a shareholder?
So if I find a company that ticks all these boxes, I want to follow that company, and I want to invest in that company. So let's talk about the first box that needs to be ticked, the management. Malcolm Bell, the CEO, has been in mining for over 45 years in the resource industry. He's had a couple of companies that have put mines into production, and he owned a geological survey company. So he has had a huge history in mining. And he's been in Vancouver his whole career. Dal Brynelsen, who is a very important person on the board of directors, he's a fifth-generation miner in British Columbia. He started his career in China about 40 years ago. He discovered a zinc property in China that had about 2 million tons of resource. And that company has been producing zinc for the past 40 years, Griffin Mining.
It is one of the largest underground zinc mines in the world. Griffin Mining is trading on the London Stock Exchange. Dal has had a huge amount of experience and looked at Nova Pacific and wrote checks for the financings and wanted to be on the board when he saw what we had. A quick note about Sam Eskandari. He represents a marketing group that are part of our team. The marketing group has been in business for a long time. They really understand how to move stocks forward and on the upward trajectory. I'm going to go along here, folks. The Lara deposit is a VMS deposit, which is a polymetallic deposit, which has gold, silver, zinc, and copper. As you see here, it's on Vancouver Island, very close to the Port of Chemainus, which is a very important port.
It's 14 km from the Port of Chemainus. And as you see, Vancouver Island is quite prolific in the mining industry. And we have a historical resource on this property of 2 million tons. I'm just going to move this along to show you the historic resource. And if you look at the grades of the historic resource, this is what really attracted us to this property. So the way we acquired this property was about in 2022, a company called Treasury Metals owned this property. And during COVID, one of the folks at Treasury Metals forgot to reinstate the mining permit, and it became open to be staked. And a prospector staked it, and Malcolm Bell, our CEO, found it. And then he offered the gentleman CAD 250,000 for the property, and the gentleman took it. So there's no royalties on this property.
What I'll tell you about this property is it has a historic resource of two million tons. There has been about $30 million worth of drilling on this property between 1982 and 1994. So you've got about 60,000 m of drilling, and we have all the data. What really attracted us to this property was how high-grade the metal is. If you look at the widths and the grades, you've got a situation here where you have what's called direct shipping ore. So the grades are so high, and we have all of the data. The grades are so high that you can just put this thing into production. What happened was in 1994, the company that owned it was called Laramide. Laramide did all the drilling. Then they were going to put it into production.
So they put a 2,000-foot decline into the side of the hill. After they did all of this drilling, this is where all the drill holes are on our property. They put a 2,000-meter decline right to the ore body, and they were just going to start mining. But unfortunately, in 1994, gold was running around $400 an ounce, so it wasn't economic, so they mothballed it. Then they put it into Treasury Metals. Treasury Metals focused in Ontario for the next 20 years. And again, they forgot to put the mining permit through. So we acquired it in June of 2024. So over the past couple of months, we've raised about $3 million. We raised $2.6 million in three hours through a flow-through. So currently, we have $2.6 million in the till, and we're going to be drilling 10,000 m.
The idea here, as you see here in the Lara project, we have a seven-kmeter trend that goes from Lara all the way up to the Anita zone. We're going to be focusing on the Lara project with our 10,000 m. We're waiting for a permit from the BC government. It's been in for nine months, so we're looking forward to getting the permit within a very short period of time. We've hired a drill crew. They're going to get on the property right away, and we're going to have two drills going 24 hours a day, and that's how we're going to drill the 10,000 m, and the interesting thing about this project is because of all the drill holes, we already know what we're going to get because we're going to twin a number of these drill holes.
I'm just looking for the—we're going to twin a number of these drill holes, and we're going to do some infill drilling. We already know what we're going to get. As we acquire the information from the core, we will put it out to the market, which will support the stock. Here's our work program slide. 10,000 m. We'll announce the results probably at the end of September. We will update the current resource from a historical resource of 2 million tons to a 43-101 current compliant resource. At that point, folks, we're going to apply for a mining permit. What's really exciting about this project is that we have direct shipping ore right out of the ground. It's such high-grade that we're going to have contract miners come in and mine it.
We're hoping to be up and mining within the next two years. It should take about 12-18 months for a mining permit once we've completed our preliminary economic assessment. We can take the ore right out of the ground. We have an optical ore sorter, as you see here. All we have to do is take the ore out of the ground, crush it, turn it into small little particles. It goes in this X-ray sorting. It has AI. What it does is it puts the waste product in one basket and the high-grade in the other basket. Then we ship it out, and we send it to a mill. The cool thing about being on Vancouver Island is we're very close to a port.
The port can go over to Vancouver, and then we train the ore most likely to a town called Merritt, where the mill is, so there's very little issue with mining, and that's why we think we can be up and mining very quickly because we have direct shipping ore, and it's very easy to mine, so as we see here, folks, this is our capital structure. We've got 46 million shares out. We're currently trading at CAD 0.22. So we've got about a CAD 10 million market cap. We have a number of warrants, 23 million warrants, and these are all priced at CAD 0.40. So the idea here is to get the stock up to CAD 0.50 or CAD 0.60 over time, and we believe we can do this because we have a whole bunch of news coming out when we start the drilling.
As I mentioned, we're going to do 10,000 m of drilling, which we have the money in the bank for, and so once we get the stock up, then we'll get the warrants exercised. And that's another $8 million financing. So what's really important to understand with this deal is that you've got a situation where we believe we can put this thing into production because it's very easy to go into production for about $10-$15 million CapEx. And in the first year, we believe we can put about $100 million onto the bottom line. And we believe this because we're just going to be mining the high-grade. And if you look at these grades, you'll understand that this is exactly what we should be doing. As you see, it's from surface to 200 m. This was a trench that they came up with.
You can see the mineralization here: 25 g/tin gold, 513 g/tin silver, 43% zinc, 3% copper, and 8% lead. So the idea here, folks, is to get this thing into production as soon as we can. Within the first four years, we should add $400 million to the company value. So if we go back to the capital structure, there we have it. So we have a mining plan. We have a work program that's fully funded. And I want to go back to what I discussed, which is the boxes that need to be ticked before you invest. So I think that the management of this company has been in mining for probably combined about 250 years. Malcolm, 50 years. Dal, 50 years. So we have excellent management that knows how to put this thing into production.
The jurisdiction is excellent because we are close to this. This is really one of the most important aspects of our property, which is Myra Falls. Myra Falls is a VMS deposit, polymetallic, just like Lara, and it has gold, silver, copper, and zinc, exactly the same grades as we had, and exactly the same. They started mining this in the 1960s. They had 2 million tons, exactly the same grades, and over the past 40 years, they've been mining, and they've pulled about $20 billion worth of metal out of the ground on Vancouver Island, just 150 km north of us. Here's the Myra Falls project. It's now owned by Trafigura, and it's exactly the same deposit as ours. This is a really interesting aspect of our property because we already have a precedent set on Vancouver Island for exactly the same deposit.
So, for us to put this into production with 2 million tons, and the idea here is to put this thing into production and then take the profit and then do exploration so we don't have to go back to the market for more financings, for more money. So we can expand this property because we have a 7-kmeter zone that needs to be explored. But we want to put it into production first, and then we can start exploring it and expanding the resource. So that's my presentation. Is there any questions?
Thank you so much. So far, there are no questions in the chat, but I have some. So can you come back to the processing again? And what processing advantages at Lara could position you as a low-cost producer?
What's really great is there's already a 2,000-meter decline going right to the ore body. It's very easy. All it is is just taking the ore out of the ground, putting it through this ore sorter. We put it in a crusher that turns it into stone. It goes into this ore sorter, which has AI in it, and it's 98% accurate. It gets rid of the waste. We would put the waste back into the mine, and then we would send the high-grade ore out to be processed. It's very simple. What's great about this, Matthias, is that there's no tailings ponds. There's very little disruption to the land. All of this land that we have has been logged, and we have a very good relationship with the First Nations. We've already done an archaeological walk through our property.
So there's no environmental issues. And the interesting thing about Vancouver Island is it's been logged a lot. So there's not as much money for the First Nations through logging. And the fisheries is depleted. So they're looking to mining to add some money to their treasury. And this is a very quick and easy way to get into production. I haven't seen a mining company that can get into production in three years. And the wonderful thing is that we acquired this property, and it has all the data. And all we have to do is sort of replenish the data with modern-day technology, and then we can put it into production. It's a very simple, easy way to get into production.
What exploration results would trigger a PA at Lara?
We're doing 10,000 m of drilling. You combine that with the historic data and the current data, and you'll be able to put this into production. It's from surface to 200 m, and we're open to depth, and we're open along strike, which means that, again, we have 7 km to explore once we get into cash flow. We want to do our exploration from cash flow so we don't dilute the shareholders. If you look at this capital structure, it's very tightly held. Management owns about 20%. We've all written checks for this company. We've all got skin in the game.
We believe that for a very low CapEx, like $10-$15 million to put this thing into production, and then you're going to produce $100 million worth of value per year coming out of the ground. It's very compelling in a short period of time.
There's now a question from the chat. Is the decline flooded?
The decline is flooded. So we'll have to dewater the decline, which is not a big deal. We'll have to shore up the workings inside. We estimate that probably in the sort of between AUD 500,000 and AUD 1.2 million to do something like that. That's part of the CapEx.
Okay. And which techniques will de-risk the upcoming drilling program?
If we go to this particular slide, you can see all of these drill holes. We already know when we drill, we have to twin them because they're historical, as I mentioned. They were done between 1982 and 1994. When we do twin these and when we do infill drill, we already know that the deposit is there, so you know you're going to get grades like this. These are some outstanding grades. I mean, 15 m of 6 g/tin gold, 95 g/tin silver, 5% zinc. These are really high-grade, so the idea here is for us to mine the high-grade because it's very easy to get the high-grade out, and then we're in cash flow very quickly. It's not going to take 10-15 years to put this into production like it does most mines.
What infrastructure gaps could impact the development timeline?
Great question. So what's really interesting, Matthias, is that there are high-speed logging roads right to the property. We're about 14 km from the Trans-Canada Highway. The contract miners that we're going to contract can live in a town that's probably 10 km away. It ticks every box, this particular deal, because it's right within infrastructure, within 5-10 km of the mine.
Okay. And can you come back to the financing? What if the warrants don't get into the money? What kind of financing do you plan in the future?
We work with Red Cloud. Red Cloud is one of the largest mining investment banks in Canada. I've done a number of previous deals with Red Cloud, and I really like what they do. They put us in front of institutional and retail investors, and we've had a number of inquiries as to when and if we're going to do a financing. Because we have CAD 2.6 million in the bank for drilling, we've got about between CAD $500,000 and CAD $800,000. It's already committed to marketing. Again, I get a lot of inquiries as to when we're going to do another financing, and there's a possibility that we will do another financing. But based on everything that we have now, there's enough money in the till to move forward, so I'm not really concerned about capital. As I mentioned, it's one of the boxes that needs to be ticked.
But based on the interest, I think we're in a good position that if we had to do a financing, we'd get it done quickly. And I might add that Red Cloud helped us raise the AUD 2.6 million. And I think we did it in about three hours.
Regarding the copper and zinc price volatility, will you plan to do a hedging or?
Good question. So 75% of this deposit is credited to gold and silver. So the majority of the value of each ton, and the idea here is we're going to mine 500 tons a day. 500 tons a day, we value the value of that ton is about CAD 850. We figure it'll be about CAD 300 to mine. So we're going to net a profit of between CAD 5 and CAD 550 per ton. We're going to do 500 tons a day for 300, and I'm going to think about 330 days. That's really our goal. That's our mine plan.
Another two questions from the audience. How much water shall be required to treat? Has acid generation been an issue?
That's a question that I can't answer because I'm not a technical guy. I'm a financial guy. But we can certainly, if that person would like to email me, my email address is scott@novapacificmetals.com. I will get the answer for you.
Okay, and looking at the time, we have about 50 seconds left. Maybe you can wrap up the investment case, a short elevator pitch in like 30 seconds.
Thank you so much. As I mentioned, we have a great management team, which is the most important thing. We have an incredible property that has a historical resource on it: gold, silver, copper, and zinc. High-grade, easy to put into production, financed for drilling, 10,000 m. We're going to do the 10,000 m in the next two and a half months. And we should have an updated mining plan by the end of September. And you have a $10 million market cap with a company that has the potential to produce $100 million a year within the next two to three years. It's a very compelling story.
Yes. Excellent. Thank you so much, Scott.
Matthias, I look forward to having you as a shareholder.
Perfect, and up next, the moderating part will be taken over from Julian. All right. Thank you very much again, Scott. We will not disclose publicly if we are a shareholder or not, but we're very happy with your project. Let's keep it at that. That being said, have a very great afternoon, Scott.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Bye-bye. We are right now waiting for our next presenter. This is James Tworek. We had him just a few seconds ago. We promote him to panelists, and somehow he disappeared. I guess he's going to be joining back in a few seconds. In the meantime, we can maybe, as this will be the last presentation, we can maybe start discussing the next IIF. On May 21st will be the next IIF, the 15th of this event. We already have Desert Gold Ventures confirmed, Almonty Industries, Globex Mining Enterprises, dynaCERT, and so many more to come. We will then head on into October for the 16th. Finally, the last IIF of the year will be held on the 3rd of December 2025.
If this was your first time, please be assured that we mostly have companies that do come back and present us updates of their results. And we always like to try to incorporate also new companies at the same time. So we give you a better look, a better idea of sectors such as biotech, mining, small cap, and mid cap also. I do not still see our friend James in here. So we're still going to be waiting a bit. In the meantime, I will be inviting the host or the organizer of the project, Mr. Mario Hosa, if he's available right now, if he could put his camera on and if we could discuss just a few things together while we wait for James. Mario, if you're here, please just turn on your. I think Mario is trying to reach him. To reach James also. So in that case, well, what we're going to do, Matthias, maybe if you do have any question or anything to throw at me, please go ahead, and I'll be very happy to give you a little more update of the mining sector, political context, or so on while we wait for James.
Yes. What's your take on the insanely rising gold price nowadays?
Gold price is where it should be, to be honest. We will be having the season just before PDAC of the reveals. It starts with Agnico, Barrick, and so on. We're going to have the yearly financials. Still, costs or high profits are also there, but not as high as they should, so the demand is extremely high. Countries, insecurity, global events that we don't even need to talk about really are having a big problem or creating big problems. We saw it today with Mali. We were discussing it. Countries that are thinking about themselves first, that obviously really hurts the sector as a whole in a positive way. So a lot of pressure being applied on production everywhere. People want to secure their supply chain and going to resource security, and resource security, we always quite think about critical metals, which right now is a very hot topic.
But gold as a resource security is something also very important. And so we saw also a lot of presentations from new projects or projects being developed within Canada, within the U.S., or within the occidental world, and a bit looking away from Africa right now as investors are asking for more tier one political jurisdictions. And I think that this will be still pushing the price of gold higher and higher within the next year.
Yes. James just came back online. I'm trying to promote him to the panel. Yes. He will be joining us in a second. Hi, James. How are you?
There he is. You're on mute, but we do see you and all of your diplomas behind you. But you're still on mute.
Now.
There we go.
Tech issues resolved.
All right. We do hear you. We do see you. So last thing there is to do is to share your screen if possible. It's a green button down.
There we go.
Ribbon? Yes. Good.
Are you able to see the presentation now?
Not yet, but it should be coming up.
Share screen.
There we go. It's starting to share in a moment. Okay. That's great. Yes. You're in full screen. All good. So there we go. 20 minutes, and then we do a quick five-minute Q&A.
Sure thing, so thank you very much for your patience. Sorry for the tech issues here. I had to switch at the last moment from my desktop to my laptop. Anyways, long story short, Element 79 Gold Corp. We've been public since 2021, and we finished one phase of our business, which was focused on portfolio amalgamation and creating value for our investors through an amalgamation strategy to bulk up. We have added further value by basically increasing a resource value from a historical 1.8 million ounces to 3.71 million ounces, and then we completed that sale last summer. That allowed us to clear up our balance sheet, and we have shifted to a new business model, which is production-focused, much to follow on the same line. Right as I chimed in, I was hearing your soundbite about resource security as well as providing production to the actual global marketplace.
This is our renewed focus. First and foremost, before I dive into the presentation, I will be making forward-looking statements. This is your standard legalese that you can read through should you choose to go to our website and download the presentation itself. To echo the statement I just made, our goal is to meet global gold and silver demand, delivering shareholder value. We have an increased focus on Peru for the opportunity of resource development. Revenue generation is my main focus. If I were to start another business today, whether it's a lemonade stand, a tech company, or anything of the sort, it's very difficult to run a business without revenue. I have a lot of respect for junior miners, especially in the exploration space. It's a very tough business model to follow.
So we have rekindled and retooled our business model around being able to generate revenue in the near term. This does involve local workforce development, positive community efforts, and ideally a minimal environmental impact as we do so. We feel ourselves, speaking of the business opportunity, our current market cap is about $4 million. Our balance sheet includes $3 million of shares of other companies, primarily from the sale of that asset, Maverick Springs that we sold last summer. And we do have a resource exploration project, which is Lucero. I'm going to highlight our efforts on focusing on Lucero, which has 10,800 hectares at the top of a mountain in Arequipa, Peru. Arequipa, Peru is, if I may be so bold, it's kind of like the Texas of Peru.
What I mean for that is that they're very resource-focused as a state government, large number of major projects, including Teck Zafranal, Buenaventura. They have a project called Orcopampa in the region. This asset used to be a Buenaventura asset. When I talk about exploration, I can identify the fact that, number one, there are 74 veins identified at surface, 67 of which are untouched. There are attractive high sulfidation targets, which have never been touched with a drill on this project. Now, you can see from the quick math that there are seven veins that are actually open right now. There are three main portals on the project.
And that's where artisanal production is coming from and ideally where we will be working with the community to ramp up production from those existing portals as well as opening some new ones on some of the other veins that are available. Now, speaking to near-term revenue potential, there are 1.3 million tons of tailings. They're just dry stacked sitting on site right now. They've been sitting there for about 20 years. And we have signed a joint venture with the owners of such so that we can actually get those into production in the initial term. And if we're building a plan to do so, obviously, we would like to amplify that, not just to deal with the tailings, but also to be producing anything that comes out of the mine, being the close production node to the minehead.
Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for local groups to be working with us. Now, as of today, I'm just going to quickly jump into. I'm a finance nerd by background, so I'm going to focus on the corporate finance side as a first step. Just really quickly, our overall cap table, about 30% are founder, institutional, and strategic investors. Management and board own about 16%. Condor Resources, whom we have the option to acquire Lucero from, they own about 3% of the balance, sorry, 3% of the balance sheet, and approximately 50% retail in terms of where the share ownership currently is held. Now, we do have of this 50-odd percent that is owned in-house. Everybody has a big picture long-term vision. We understand what we're creating.
Considering our cohort of other companies, and I could highlight everything from Cerro de Pasco to Tinka Resources, Silver X, PPX, a lot of them have share counts into the 250-400 million share range. I would consider it relatively humble given our stage of development and access to being able to generate revenue, much like the rest of that cohort that I've just described. 118 million shares outstanding is actually quite humble. We do have a relatively clean balance sheet. As I said, we sold Maverick Springs last year. That gave us the opportunity to clean up a lot of our just overburden of debt that we had on the balance sheet. It did leave us with some capital to move our projects forward up until today.
If we are going to be raising capital in the future, equity raises will be focused on operations and drilling and reporting, as well as obviously investor relations. When we look at major project development, whether that is the building of the mill and/or any other revenue-generating facility, whether that's a tailings or for new ore, we have been in talks with several groups on a global basis looking at streaming and/or royalty-type financing, which obviously makes sense if you're able to generate revenue in the near term to be using those types of capital debt prog. First and foremost, although I've made a quick pass at our physical assets inside the company, I'm a firm believer, and I come from a commercial banking background as well as I helped operate a mezzanine debt fund for about combined 15 years of my entire career.
Through all of the underwriting of a transaction and sourcing capital for projects, more than anything than the actual project itself, I believe the true assets of the company go home in the elevator every night. The team is more important than the asset. If you have a great team and a mediocre asset, you can still end up ahead. If you have a mediocre team and, I should say, amazing team—I'm sorry, I'm tripping out with my words here. Amazing team plus poor asset equals still success. Poor team plus amazing asset, you can still fall on your face. Apologies for that. What I mean by that specifically, my background is structuring financing, structuring products, and leading teams to do so. We have an amazing CFO group fronted by or led by Tammy Gillis. She is a fractional-use CFO.
It's a great way to run a junior mining company in terms of low cost and still having all the horsepower to complete things. More than anything, focusing on the geological side, I spend a lot of time with basically Kim Kirkland. He's our COO. He is a JORC Fellow. He is a QP. And Kim, when I talk about putting things into production, Kim's background is actually he spent 23 years working in Peru operating mines. The majority of his career has been spent operating and optimizing mines, nine years of which was spent operating and optimizing the Antamina Polymetallic Play, which is a Teck joint venture, as well as he spent another nine years operating and optimizing and ensuring the ongoing feedstock for a major copper play in Peru called Las Bambas.
So fantastic to be able to hook up a gentleman with this level of experience of building, operating, and optimizing mines when it comes to our business model of far smaller scale than anything that he's worked on in the past. But the same mentality, whether it's metallurgy, understanding feedstock, mine planning, and being able to build, operate the machinery that's around. Kim's an absolute major asset to the company. He's definitely part of the in-house brain trust and definitely look forward to building this company into a producer with his leadership. One of our directors, Neil Pettigrew, he's also a QP, very well-known. His day job is with GT Resources as their VP Exploration. He also runs a consultancy out of Thunder Bay, Ontario called Fladgate.
His whole world has been being a PGO and both sourcing as well as developing assets around the planet, primarily in North America and Europe. Fantastic to have him as a guiding light behind us. Zara Kanji is our director who runs the CPA group that obviously backs up all of Tammy's efforts. Very happy to have her help guide with a lot of guidance around everything from compliance to obviously keeping auditors moving. Mr. Warren Levy has built multi-hundred-million-dollar exits and a billion-dollar exit in his career. He's an amazing driving force, especially within Latin America. That's where a lot of his focus has been. So while I can speak the language, he makes fun of me saying I speak like a Mexican and he speaks like a Colombian.
At the end of the day, fantastic mentor when it comes to building and operating from zero to very significant cash-flowing businesses within the natural resource space. Mr. Tony Maragakis, Antonio Maragakis, he runs a fund today. He was the original CEO of the company that we acquired called Calipuy Resources to acquire the Peruvian assets that we had. And now Lucero, obviously the main focus. Tony runs a fund focused on near-term cash-flowing mines. He is a mine engineer and a PMP focused on whose focus his entire career on developing, operating, and optimizing mines. He also has built a consultancy with 55 associates working on it.
They were a key function behind building out the Skouries mine for Eld orado, as well as he helped behind the scenes help develop Skeena Resources from a $20 million market cap company to over a billion-dollar market cap company through the background controls and operations efforts from his consultancy. So the man definitely knows in terms of what we're doing, exactly what we're doing, as well as he's a main motivator behind this business model. Mr. Shane Williams is an advisor to our board. He currently runs West Red Lake Gold. And again, he is a mine developer by trade. He and Tony were the ones that built that Skouries mine together in addition to Skeena Resources and once again using that business model unfold at West Red Lake Gold. And very proud to have those gentlemen as advisors here on our team. Mr.
Kevin Arias, last but not least, strategic advisor to the board of the corporate finance side. Kevin has raised over $100 million over the last seven to eight years for a variety of mining primarily, as well as oil and gas companies. And again, massive help and motivator to our business plan and how to stoke that fuel with the cash that we need to develop things out. So more than anything, very proud of the team that we've been able to assemble around this business model. And again, this whole business model is primarily focused around Lucero. Lucero is located in Chachas. Chachas is about 270-odd km away from Arequipa City. And again, Arequipa is the resource-focused state within Peru, which I lovingly call the Texas of Peru, given that it has basically everything you could ever shake a stick at from farming, every form of agriculture, mining.
It has its own hydropower. It has open water ocean access. It has basically mountains, just like where this mine is located, as high as the Himalaya Plateau, but it has an amazing mineral blessing in terms of the endowment that it has, and you do see throughout this map here, you can see all of the other major mines in the general area around us, but more specifically, this is us right here at the Sheila project. Now, in the general region, I was talking about general infrastructure. There are great roads in addition to regional mills. We had signed an agreement with Buenaventura. It seems that they are actually winding down the mill in the general area, similar to us, so this is why we have shifted our focus onto building our own plant to deal with our own product coming out of the mine itself.
As I mentioned before, there are 74 epithermal veins identified at the surface on this 10,800 hectares of land. To put that in context, that's 26,000 football fields of contiguous land at the top of a mountain. These veins in your traditional epithermal fashion, they effectively millions of years ago, volcanic activity came up, hit a cap, they spread out, the veins run on, and they do ebb and flow and expand and contract at height and at depth, I should say at length throughout the system. So while it is very, as we have seen, very high-grade gold, silver, and even getting into some base metals at different altitudes on the mountain, it's a fantastic opportunity to be producing from this. Now, as you can see right now, there's over 16 km of underground working.
Some of that was started by Buenaventura when they owned it from 1989 to 2005. But a lot of that has been continued on since that time. That's 20 years of the artisanal miners in the region working these same veins for profit. So in addition to that, as I described before, there is a high sulfidation target identified in the northwest quadrant of the project, which has never been touched with a drill, but every exploratory geologist that has ever visited this written their master's thesis on this project, etc. For better or for worse, they'll look at it and say, "Why have you not punched a hole?" So there's a great opportunity there, which we could uncover through drilling, ideally this to next year.
So just to talk specifically about the opportunity here, the past producing high-grade mine that was a Buenaventura asset, they abandoned it in 2005 only because basically it was uneconomical for them to do so with an all-in sustaining cost upwards of $1,000 and market prices at the time were below $600. It cost them more to produce from this mine than they could actually make in the market. So they just chose to abandon it. At that time, Condor Resources jumped the claim, took it, and had been really just exploring it themselves, as well as they had done a couple of farm outs until Calapuy Resources picked it up from them, auctioned it, and then we bought Calapuy. During the time that Buenaventura was producing from this mine, its average head grade was 19 g/tin of gold equivalent. That's significant.
A lot of discoveries happen in the three to five g. If you put it in context of the Bald Mountain mine, the Kinross Bald Mountain mine in Nevada, it produces and has been producing for over 30 years at about half a gram per ton. This is 19 g/tin as a head grade, and a lot of our sampling that we have pulled throughout 2023, we had two different field work prog that we carried out there doing channel sampling along the veins reinforce that. When Buenaventura was producing with that level of head grade, they were producing upwards of 20,000-40,000 ounces of gold equivalency per year, so this is a small mine. It's vein chasing, but it's small but mighty.
It's very strong in terms of what the grades continue to produce, obviously, if the artisanals are working there today, and you can see in these photos, these are the artisanal workers doing their work. If they're continuing to produce there, it's obviously very financially fungible. It makes sense for them to do so. Our 2023 assays from pulling samples yielded rates of 11.7 ounces per ton gold and 247 ounces per ton silver, which is, again, just it validates the concept of why we're looking at this as our flagship and our main point of focus. Speaking to the tailings, again, Buenaventura created 1.3 million metric tons of tailings. You can see two of the piles right here in the center of the photo here. Now, those piles are on the same land where basically the past producing mill was.
When Buenaventura abandoned the site, they took that mill and moved over to where Orcopampa is to amplify operations over there. These are dry stacks. So there is a geomembrane below, as well as a geomembrane on top of these. Then they piled limestone, and then natural grasses over the last 20 years have formed. 2011, 2012 lab tests reflect that these piles, they've only ever been flotation treated, so they've never been touched with chemicals. Basically, these are the, I guess I'll call them the heavies that didn't float out at that time. So they would have to be reground and then basically run through a leaching or cyanidation process. One and a half g/tin times 1.3 million tons is approximately a 50,000-ounce resource.
Now, you couldn't pull that out at the same time, but that does mean over the next approximately 12 to 15 years, this would be a fantastic baseline to create some revenue, create some jobs in the region, deal with the environmental issue of the, we'll call it the social harm of seeing these still sitting there. But it's a great baseline to build a business around, number one, and then expand local infrastructure for being able to produce anything that comes out of the mine as well. If you're going to be building the infrastructure to deal with one thing, it's very easy, meaning the tailings, it's very easy to deal with building the mill on the front side as well and to be dealing with all of the product.
So the negotiations that we have with the group that has the rights to these tailings are that we can retire up to 2.5 million tons of total product in the first phase of this, meaning the 1.3 million tons coming out of these piles, as well as additional product coming out of the mine. Our general trajectory, to speak to where we've been through 2024, we did sign a tailings deal, and the gentlemen that run that are very well-known geologists, both on the small and large scale within the university world, as well as the big business world inside Peru. Very happy to have them as strategic teammates and working with us. As we're going through right now, we're finishing off the agreements with the community.
So while we have the mineral rights and while we have the permit to be able to produce from this mine, the community around us. Excuse me, I have a dry throat. The community around us, basically, they control the service rights. And to the benefit of these approximately 3,300 people in the area, 900 of which are miners working at a number of mines, not just Lucero in the area, they've been open to working with us and trying to carve out a deal, but it's a bit of a slow process, especially right now where it is the rainy season and everybody has basically left town and will not be back until approximately April. December to April every year is a rainy season. And again, we're working with the state to draw everyone to the table to complete these contracts so that we can start work this summer.
Approximately, based on that business plan, approximately Q2 to Q3 of this year, we intend to be doing at least 1,000 m of underground drilling at Lucero. Then moving on to developing on the tailings themselves, because there's just piles of effectively dirt sitting above or sand sitting above the ground, it's very easy to form a mineral resource assessment and PEA on those. Coming into Q2, Q3, provided we have surface access in Q1 to Q2, that we should be able to form those reports and reinforce those numbers that I talked about, approximately 50,000 ounces of recoverable gold equivalent sitting in those piles coming into that timeframe.
And then lastly, here we go, Q3 through Q4, you can work up until about December 15th on the project each and every year, talking about surface drilling to form a mine plan, potentially a mineral resource estimate, even if it's small on the existing open veins, and then starting bulk sampling in addition to starting the plant construction on the back of the MRE and PEA for the tailings. Lastly, here we go. In terms of the next steps, I've already described some of those, but just to recap, number one, we're working on the community contracts right now. No activities happening at the mine at this exact point in time anyways because it's absolutely rained out, which is fine. So we can sit in town and work on contracts, deal with the human aspect of things, and start working on both.
The idea is to start working towards the existing veins as well as uncovering some of the value out of those other 67 veins and potentially the high sulfidation target. Our first goal, as soon as we can gain access to the tailings themselves after the rainy season and contracts being in place, we're going to drill out those tailings to form that mineral resource estimate and PEA that will set us off down the path towards near-term revenue generation. Again, like I've talked about, that's planned to work with the tailings themselves. It's a great opportunity to also build the front end to become a local toll processor for any product coming out of this mine, let alone anybody else in the general region on a small scale.
In addition to that, to at least 1,000 m through an underground campaign to give us a greater understanding and form a mine plan about working the veins at a higher pace. Current production from the artisanals is estimated around 20 tons per day, and this mine used to produce at 150 tons per day. So with a little bit more drilling and planning, we should be able to amplify that production, whether directly shoulder to shoulder with the artisanals or independent from them on the existing or new veins.
Perfect. Well, this is great, and I have to cut here because you're up to your time.
Sure. Yeah, we're right at the end.
We had three questions, so let's do very, very quick. I'll ask them. You have five.
Yes, sir.
Who owns Lucero, and how significant is the community relationship once finalized?
We own Lucero. In terms of the mineral rights, the surface rights are in the hands of the community, and it is significant in terms of being able to carve up that contract. We're only looking at long-term contracts. We're not looking for just campaign-by-campaign anymore. We intend to be here in the long run.
Perfect. What are the benefits of the Synergy Metals spinout?
Synergy Metals was a project. It was our initial IPO starter kit, and it no longer serves our current trajectory. We were going to be dropping it, so this is a form of recapturing some kind of value for ourselves and our investors.
Clear. Last question: Can you explain the details of the Crescita Capital Agreement in 10 seconds?
Let's liken it to a life offering through brokers, including all of the costs of commissions and/or discounts that would come along with that, and it's basically CAD 5 million of money that's sitting on the shelf that we can pull off in draws over time to fund our day-to-day expenses, marketing costs, and project development.
Perfect. That's awesome. We went a bit over time, but it's important to take the questions from the attendees. This is why you're here after all, so James, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. We will be following Element 79 Gold Corp in the near future. And yeah, we wish you best of luck, James. Thank you.
Thank you, colleagues. All right.
With this, the IF, the 14th one of its name, just came to an end. We will be passing back the microphone to Mario for the closing statement. All yours.
Thank you very much. It was a great day again, and there's a lot of different topics, a lot of different perspectives of the market and from entrepreneurs that run business, that run operations, that give us insight. And I always find it very inspiring and sometimes also shocking to find out information from people who really work in those sectors and industries. And so it's one thing when you hear and read things about different industries and sectors through the media, but when you hear it from people firsthand, then it's always something different. So as participants and attendees of previous events, we had the great opportunity to make a great performance with the investments, with different companies that we're also presenting today.
I think we also saw a lot of new faces, a lot of new companies that have been here the first time that are also in an attractive situation. A lot of people think penny stocks are tricky, but here is the value driver. When you have a lot of penny stocks and these penny stocks become hot because they get in the focus of the general interest, then this is the way where you can make really money. The best example was Power Nickel, or now it's called Power Metallic Mines. That company was one and a half years ago a penny stock, CAD 0.15. Now it's CAD 1.60-CAD 1.80. It's a 10-bagger. Billionaires are now invested.
So when you have the money, when you have the interest and the patience to invest in companies that are in exploration in the growth stage, early stage, then there's an opportunity. And we have seen a bunch of companies today, without mentioning any names, but there are a few companies that are in the one-digit cent range that could be of interest and could be a multi-bagger. So for that reason, it's a great opportunity. But we also had companies that we're presenting today that are in the dollars and that could also several-fold. What I can see just in the past two months, since the beginning of the year, that there's a lot of money coming into small caps, the international small caps. So a lot of companies now seem to move up.
When you want to see confirmation of this upside trend, you have to look at the TSX Venture Index. That's an index that can tell you pretty much about the resources sector. This is now really the turnaround that everybody's waiting for since, I don't know, more than 10 years. For that reason, for those of you who are not sure if this is now the right opportunity to jump into the market, into small caps, into the penny stocks and so on, have a look at the TSX Venture. When that lifts off, it might be too late to get the really cheap shares, but when the TSX Venture goes up, then it could be like a cruise ship. It won't stop. It will run, run, run, run, run.
And then you have to be patient and don't sell too early, otherwise it doesn't feel good when you just sell at 100% when it makes a 10-bagger. So that was it. That was it from my side. Thank you for thanks to everyone who was joining, also to Lindsay, who was supporting us today as well from Canada. And I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again on May 21st. And that will be already our 15th event. And based on the attendees today, it was pretty busy all day long. When we established this format, this platform a while ago during COVID, we thought, okay, this is just something temporary, but it definitely confirms that there's a market, there's interest in the market for what we do. So I'm proud to be part of it.
Thank you very much for that, Mario. One more thing on what you said, the TSX Venture is up 15% in the past 15 months. So you can see clearly, obviously, as you were seeing, quite maybe the rebound starting there. It was a pretty exciting day. We had a lot of companies. We want to thank every single one of the presenters that was here that either made it or had a replacement. It's always nice when we can go on with our schedule undisturbed. We want to thank, as you say, all moderators, all our back team that makes this possible. There's a lot of work that comes behind the screen that no one sees. We want to thank every single one of them. I want to thank personally Matthias for co-hosting today with me, and Lindsay also.
Mario, thank you for giving us a chance, and we hope to see you, everyone, on the 15th IIF in a few months from now. Thank you very much.