Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is Scott Powell, President of Skyline Corporate Communications Group, LLC. On behalf of OTC Markets and Skyline Corporate Communications Group, we are very pleased that you have joined us for the third day of our Precious Metals and Critical Minerals Conference. The next presentation is from Evolve Royalties Ltd. Please note that you may submit questions for the presenter at any time. You may also view the company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Mr. Joseph de la Plante, who is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Evolve Royalties. The company trades on the OTCQX Best Market under ticker symbol EVRYF, and also trades on the CSE under ticker symbol EVR. Welcome back, Joseph.
Thanks very much, Scott. Thanks for everyone who has dialed in to listen to the presentation today. Very excited to be talking about Evolve and what we have been up to over the past year. Evolve is a copper-focused royalty company. For those of you who know the royalty business, it is a well-established business model in the mining sector, and we differentiate from typical mining companies in the sense that Evolve does not own any mining projects or mines per se. We own royalties on mines, and we own them within a growing portfolio of assets, which provides a very different type of exposure to commodities than your typical mining investment or commodity investment. What I mean by that is, within our portfolio, we have this direct exposure to deposits and mines across the world, and we get typically top-line exposure to these mines.
Over time, what you see is our portfolio, and royalty companies' portfolios in general, have less volatility than typical mining investments do because we get paid right off the top of the mine. Our revenues are not dependent on cost structures of the underlying operations where we are invested. We are not dependent either on capital investments, because typically once we own a royalty, the royalty is a perpetual stake in the mine. We get paid our percentage of revenues no matter what type of investment is happening at the mine. So it is a wonderful way to get exposure to the mining business. Royalty companies in general, have performed really well in contrast to the overall mining sector and mining operators. It is one of the reasons why investors look to royalty companies to get really lower-risk exposure to commodities within their portfolio.
Our team has been doing this for many years. Evolve is our third royalty company, and we are launching a long track record of doing royalty deals, building these portfolios, and running these companies, which is, I think, one of the key things that investors should look for when they are investing in royalty companies. Overall, I think it is an excellent way to get exposure to what I think is a really exciting theme in the market right now, being copper. As we look forward over the next 10, 15 years, we see surging demand for copper, largely as a result of growing use for electrification. For everything from AI to electric vehicles, general electrification of our economy, our world is going to need a lot more copper, and we are seeing, in contrast to that, fewer and fewer sources of copper coming into the longer-term portrait.
I think that the timing is right right now to be looking at copper and looking at it from the lens of a royalty company is a really good way for investors of all kinds to look for that exposure. Evolve, we are about CAD 100 million market cap. We listed in December of last year, so we are effectively a brand-new company, been trading for less than a year. We've amassed so far a portfolio of 15 royalties. We started the year with one of those royalties, which was cash flowing. By the end of the year, we expect that four of our royalties will be cash flowing. Our portfolio's going through some transitions right now and can provide some good catalysts coming up for investors tuning into this call today.
As I mentioned, our team, we've been doing this for a long time, and we have a really big network of companies that we deal with to look for new royalties, but also shareholders. We've been successful in attracting some very high-quality shareholders, including from our Orion Resource Partners, which are the largest mining private equity fund in the sector today based in New York. They own about 18% of our shares and are very supportive of what we're doing. Importantly, this platform is ready for growth. We've come to a point now where our company's been trading for about a year. We have a lot of firepower available with a new credit facility in place to go out and deploy capital into new opportunities.
As an investor, the way you should think about our company is we are a team that is scouring the planet, diligencing projects of all kinds, and narrowing down the ones that we think are the prospective ones and investing in those projects. So when you invest in Evolve, you're investing in all of that knowledge base and what we think are the top projects that we want exposure and that we want you to have exposure to. We're a team that's effectively doing the work for you, finding great opportunities, and when you invest in a company, you get the result of that as well as the next transactions that we can bring into the focus for you. As I mentioned, we've been in this space for a long time. Our last company was called Nomad Royalty. This is a company that relisted in 2020.
It was a gold royalty company. The royalty model is very popular for precious metals. There are many, many companies that are effectively doing this business model in precious metals. Nomad was a company that we started in 2020. It was acquired in 2022, just about two years later, by a large peer in the gold space called Sandstorm Gold. Very successful outcome for our team, very successful outcome for our shareholders, and really showed what we can do. It was a company we started from the ground, and was a full-fledged $750 million royalty business by the time it was sold two years later.
When we get involved in starting a company, we know what we're doing, we're moving quickly to grow, and we think that with Evolve, we can deliver the exact same types of returns and results, albeit with a little bit of a different flavor focused on copper this time. We started this company in 2024. It was private for a year before it got public in December last year. We've done a number of acquisitions so far to put together the portfolio that we're going to walk through today. We've raised capital with investors of all kinds, from retail shareholders all the way to institutions, private equity funds. We have a really great roster of shareholders behind us. I think this chart really says it all. This green line shows the copper price over that period of time.
When we started the company, copper was under $4 a pound. As we sit here today, it's over $6.50 a pound. We're seeing copper for the first time in about a decade on a serious move. I don't think it's the end. I think we're going to continue to see that move go up for the foreseeable future. We have the right timing in this space, and I do think that we will be rewarded for the investments that we've done. We're already getting paid on some of our royalties, more are coming into the portrait. We think it's just a great time to be looking at our company. Generally speaking, our strategy, we want to focus on copper primarily. We're also interested in other types of commodities within the base metal sphere and the critical mineral sphere. I'll walk through the portfolio.
We have some lithium, we have some tin. Generally speaking, the focus will remain copper. We do see good opportunities out there to invest in other types of commodities. I think it's important to understand one of the reasons we're focused on these commodities in the royalty space, on the gold side, on the precious metals, there are many companies doing this business model, and there's significant competition for new assets coming into the market. It's driven down the returns over the past many years to a point where we started to look outside continued commodities. Outside of gold, there are very few companies that are focused on the royalty model. We're still able to find opportunities that deliver significant returns and significant potential for growth beyond what we see on day one when we make that investment.
I think that's the perfect set of conditions to be growing a new royalty platform, growing a new royalty portfolio. If you look at the portfolio today, most of our assets are focused in Canada and some in the U.S. We have two assets that are non-North American, one in Argentina, one in Namibia. The way we think about the world, we try and find opportunities everywhere, but obviously we're always thinking about risk. Country risk in mining is a significant part of the equation. We don't tread lightly when we look outside of North America, but there are great opportunities naturally in some mineral belts throughout the world. We are cautiously looking outside of North America, but generally expect to stay within safe jurisdictions, North America, Australia, some countries in South America, some countries in Europe is effectively the playground for us.
As I mentioned, by the year-end, we'll have four producing royalties. It's a growing portfolio. If you look at this slide in a couple of years, I expect there to be many, many more royalties added in as we continue to work in this space. Similarly, what's important for us as a company is to invest in companies that have strong operators. One of the best ways for us as a royalty company to mitigate risk by partnering with solid companies that have the technical expertise to operate mines, that have the deep pockets to continue to invest and enhance their operations, whether it's through exploration or expansions. The best way for us to mitigate risk is finding strong partners.
We're fortunate within the top assets in our portfolio, we have companies like Teck, Eldorado, Hudbay. These are significant operators in the sector, that are undoubtedly going to continue to add value to the projects where we own royalties. I'd say when you're evaluating royalty portfolios, this is a very key part of the equation and one element where we score very high compared to peers in our sector. If you look at what's in the portfolio today, the way we like to think about our investments generally in our portfolio is: what's the timeline to cash flow? There's lots of projects throughout the world, lots of opportunities that we look at to invest in deposits.
The way we measure the success of our investments is how quickly are we going to get paid, and how quickly are we going to start crystallizing and returning capital to us from our investments. We're not building a business that's going to deliver success in 25 years. We want it to deliver success in a time horizon that matters to us, as we're also good shareholders of the company, but also to our shareholders. This slide demonstrates our mindset. Every significant acquisition we've done has been on assets that are either producing today or will be producing in a short time horizon. Within this subset, we have three royalties on Canadian copper mines, Highland Valley Copper Mountain, McIlvenna Bay. We have a royalty on a tin mine in Namibia, Uis.
We also have a royalty on an exciting lithium project, which we expect will start construction soon. I think this just goes to show what our strategy is we're really delivering tangible value. Every deal that we do, we want it to add to this portrait, and we want it to increase our ability to do more transactions. If we acquire a cash flowing royalty, it gives us more financial capacity to go out and fund the next acquisitions that we do. It's an important part of the cycle for us. It's one that we're very focused on. It's the same strategy we ran in our last business at Nomad that had a very successful outcome. The playbook is well-known for us, and it's really more about finding what is the next asset that's going to be added on to this page.
Looking into some of the royalties in our portfolio, our cornerstone royalty is a royalty on Highland Valley Copper. Highland Valley is the largest copper mine in Canada, owned by Teck Resources. It is a mine that has a long history. It has been producing since the 1960s. It just went through a mine life extension approval, so they received permits to extend the mine now to 2045. Teck has sanctioned that project, so it is in construction right now. We see many, many decades ahead, even beyond this mine life extension. We think the mine can continue longer. The mine will produce somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 tons of copper over the next couple years and many years to come, so it is a significant asset within Teck's portfolio. We own a 0.5% net profit interest here.
The royalty has been paying for many years, and we typically receive about three payments per year. Generally speaking, we expect to receive between $2 million and $3 million from this royalty on an annual basis. A great asset in the portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, having Teck as a counterparty, couldn't expect for a better situation for any company like us. This is one that we are very pleased with, and it has been performing well since we acquired. Next in the portfolio, McIlvenna Bay. This is one of Canada's newest copper mines. It was actively developed and brought into construction by a company called Foran Mining. Foran was recently acquired by Eldorado Gold. We are seeing now a transition from a single asset company into a bigger company that has many mines that are within its portfolios, much better from a capacity. The mine is ramping up currently.
We expect that they will reach commercial production before the end of the year, which is what they have been guiding towards. Most excitingly for us, now that Eldorado is the owner, we are seeing lots of new avenues for value addition to this project. Not only is the mine going to reach steady state before the end of the year, the operator is now thinking of an expansion. They are starting to unlock exploration budgets for this big land package that we own. We expect that we can see news on exploration over the coming year or years. We have royalties covering the entire property. The main ore bodies here are covered by a royalty that is a net tonnage royalty, so we get paid $0.75 per ton from these ore bodies. Some of the new exploration targets that they are targeting, we have NSR royalties covering that ground.
We have different royalties here that cover the whole property. But it gives us two things. It gives us cash flow in the near term, predictable cash flow from the tonnage royalty. As the mine processes ore, we get paid on the ore that is processed. Then we get exposure to the next areas of growth for the mine on our NSR ground. We think it is a large land package. It is very prospective. These types of camps, typically, you do not see just one good VMS deposit, they come in clusters. We expect that there will be more news coming out. In five years, I expect the portrait here will look completely different from today and likely significantly better than what we see today. That is really what you hope for as a royalty owner.
You want tangible value within a portfolio that gives you cash flow, but also the potential for mine extension, expansions, all things that give organic growth within our portfolio and to you as shareholders. We also have a royalty on the Uis tin mine in Namibia. Uis is a mine that was recently restarted. It has a long history. It shut down in the 1990s. It has been restarted with new capital from Orion, one of our partners. The mine produces about 1,000 tons of tin per year. It is a very significant resource. The property, we believe, has ore bodies that support a mine life likely in excess of 100 years. The royalty will pay to us about $4 million per year at the current tin prices, so substantial royalty within our portfolio. Tin is a very interesting commodity to bring into the portfolio alongside copper.
For those of you who are less familiar, it is used for soldering in electric circuits, largely used in solar panels as well. The tin market is overall a small one. Most of the production comes from difficult jurisdictions like the DRC, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Generally speaking, it is difficult to get exposure to tin as a mining investor. What we have been able to do here by acquiring this royalty is provide a really lean way to get exposure to tin on what we think is a very long life profile. It is one of the reasons I am very excited about the strategy of acquiring royalties on base metals and critical minerals. These types of opportunities are not on the radar of most royalty companies. To give you an idea, we acquired the royalty for just over $39 million.
It will pay us $4 million, if not more, per year over the next 50 - 100 years. So wonderful assets to own, very long-term cash flow. These mines are not complicated. It is a small mine that the processing is excessively simple and just a great asset to own overall and to get exposure to great commodities within the portfolio. The reason I say tin fits well with copper, if you believe in a world where we need more copper as we are connecting, we need connections within the grids, it is likely because we are connecting things that need tin. These commodities tend to move in lockstep, and we see lots of upsides on copper and on tin, and we are very bullish on the tin price over the coming years. We also have a royalty on Copper Mountain. Copper Mountain is another Canadian copper mine.
Our royalty covers the North Pit area.
This is not a life of mine royalty. It will give us payments likely for about three to four years on these royalty areas. We expect to get our first payment in Q4 this year. We have to get through a $10 million earn out from the previous owner. We expect we will reach that in Q4 and start to receive payments thereon. The royalty pays about $1 million a quarter, so it can give us substantial cash flow for a shorter duration period of time. But it gives us exposure to another great Canadian copper asset where there is lots of resource upside potential on some of the claims where we have royalties. Just being mindful of time and wanting to leave a bit of time for Q&A at the end.
I think the way to think about our company, I've highlighted some of the interesting assets in our portfolio. We have many assets here that we see lots of potential for growth. When you're investing in a royalty company, you want the portfolio to deliver growth, and it can do so without us further investing in the assets where we've got royalty interest. Within that portfolio, there's lots of catalysts in the coming two to three years. Obviously, we're getting paid on some of our royalties today. We're expecting new payments or first royalty payments from Copper Mountain and McIlvenna Bay before the end of the year.
There's new resource growth that's expected at McIlvenna Bay before the end of the year and on our lithium asset where we're seeing potential for startup construction on what will be a very exciting lithium project in a great province in Argentina. Beyond that, we see potential for expansion in McIlvenna Bay at HVC. Most importantly, on top of that organic growth, what our team is focused on is delivering new growth from new investments. So you have this platform where you can grow organically, but you can also grow by deploying capital. That's what our team is there for. That's what we're focused on. I do expect the next few years to be rich in terms of catalysts. As I mentioned in the intro, our platform is ready to go for those new investments.
We have recently set a $75 million revolving credit facility with BMO. It's currently fully undrawn, so we have significant firepower to continue to grow the business. In terms of the cap structure, very simple business, 51 million shares outstanding, [USD] . That puts us just over $100 million market cap, lots of room for growth. What's interesting to me about this setup is that we have over $75 million of capacity from new investments. You can rest assured that the investments that we make will deliver significant growth in the portfolio, and that's what I think should be very exciting from your perspective, shareholders. We also have a great roster of institutional shareholders behind us, as well as Orion as our largest shareholder. Management team, we own 50% of the company, fully invested alongside shareholders.
So we think we have a good setup here, and we're going to continue to build. Maybe just the last point before moving on to the Q&A. In terms of our valuation, we're on a strict consensus basis. If we look at the analysts that cover us, trading about 20 x net asset value. When we look at peers in the sector, they typically trade somewhere between 1.1x and 1.3x, 1.4 x NAV. So we do think there's lots of room for the stock to rerating those multiples as we continue to show big quarters of growth with our cash flow. So it's something that we're obviously focused on, and I think an area where there's lots of potential for a shorter-term return for shareholders. So on that note, with about five minutes left, we can move on to the Q&A.
Just a second here, I'll look at some of the questions that have come in, and we'll go through some of those. Okay, so first question. McIlvenna Bay is now under Eldorado. How does the bigger operator with bigger budgets change your upside on Tesla, Balsam, and Hanson Lake? I covered this during the presentation. It makes all the difference, right? And it's one of the reasons I like to invest in operations that are just nearing the end of construction, because typically what we see is the operator's been so focused on managing the construction budget. They haven't turned on the tap for value add ideas. That includes exploration, it includes expansions. When Eldorado announced the acquisition of McIlvenna Bay was the first thing that came out, revised the exploration budget. They started drilling on Balsam at the Thunder Zone.
They're continuing to drill on Tesla, of course, and they'll give me a reserve on Tesla later this year. I expect that to be a substantial resource. All of that adds value to our royalty, and we don't have to fund any of that exploration. It's a game-changer. Eldorado coming in was an absolute game-changer for our royalty and what we expect to see there over the next five years. As exciting as it is, we're following it and seeing what they do. But another thing they announced that was very exciting for us is the studying and expansion of the mill. I think there's lots of value elements here coming into the portrait over the coming years, and we're following closely. Next question. National Bank Financial just initiated coverage. Could broader analyst attention help close the valuation gap? Absolutely.
That is one area where we've been focused on since we listed as a new company. About 10 months now, in that period of time, we've had three research analysts launch coverage. Stifel also launched coverage. We think that as the year progresses, we may get two or three more that are doing work. It's a big part of just increasing the profile of the business. Great thing about research analysts is they bring in typically a crowd of more institutional eyeballs onto our story. It's one area that we can very focused on. And I see for sure, more analysts coming into the portrait over the next 12 months. What does Orion's backing bring to the table when you're competing for a royalty deal? Great question. Actually, this is, I think, an underappreciated part of our story. Orion is a huge edge for us.
The reason being that they manage about $9 billion in capital. Orion gets called on almost every single transaction that happens in the mining sector. And in our history with them, we've acted as partners many times on transactions. They are not a royalty fund. They do structure royalties and streams every now and then, but it's not the core part of their business. We've been successful in acting as their partner on many transactions, and so we can benefit from their huge pipeline of opportunities. And in some instances, from their financial backing, where they've been able to help us get our foot in the door on transactions, just by the sheer weight of their organization. It is an edge. It's one that we appreciate very much and continue to work on that relationship with them, which goes back many, many years now.
On that note, despite there being many other questions in the queue, I believe we've now hit the 30-minute mark. Unfortunately, we're going to have to end the presentation at this point. I'll make a note of answering the other questions that have come up here individually by email. What I'll also say is I'm available for follow-up. If anyone has any questions and wants to talk directly, you can reach out through our website. There's all the contact information there. I'd be happy to get a phone call or a Teams with anyone that has more questions.
I'd say as a parting thought, if you're an investor looking to get exposure to the critical minerals thematic, obviously there's lots of great ways to do that in the sector, and I strongly encourage you to consider having at least one royalty investment as part of your basket that you're invested. I'd say it's a really, really interesting part of the royalty space that's growing quickly. We want to be a leader in part of that space. There aren't that many companies there today. We see the opportunities to do that, and most importantly, our business is ready. We're ready to go. We're ready to deploy more capital into transactions. On that note, I appreciate everyone's time today. Thank you for calling in, and we'll put an end to the webinar here. Thank you very much.