Thank you for joining Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Equity Conference. I'm Mark Reichman, one of Noble's Senior Research Analysts. Today, we are joined by Mr. David Stein, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director of Kuya Silver, a silver-focused mining company with a portfolio spanning the producing Bethania silver mine in Peru, the district-scale Silver Kings exploration project in Ontario, and the Umm Hadid joint venture in Saudi Arabia. The company's shares are listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol KUYA, and trade in the U.S. on the OTCQB under the symbol KUYAF. David, the floor is yours.
Thanks, Mark, and it's a pleasure to be able to go through our full presentation today. I'll make it quick, so there's time for questions. But certainly, we have a great growth story here, and I'm very pleased to share it with you today. Start with our important notices, and I know you won't have the time to read this, but this presentation is on our website, so you can review these notes at your leisure in the future. Let's start with the big picture. We have three silver assets. Primary silver projects and mines are extremely rare. Most silver is produced as a by-product. Most silver mines rely heavily on by-products in order to make them economic. The fact that we've got three primary silver projects across the globe is very, very special in and of itself.
However, with that being said, I'm mostly going to talk about Peru today. That is our flagship asset. That is a big opportunity for us to grow the company into a huge silver producer, and arguably, we don't need anything else. But it is nice to have the other projects, Northern Ontario, and the JV in Saudi Arabia, because they give our shareholders additional exposure to great silver discoveries and silver projects that could be future mines at basically no cost, because I don't think we get any credit for it in our share price. A couple of points to highlight if you follow the mining sector or other silver companies. The fact that we get 90% of our revenue from silver is extremely rare and makes Kuya a special company, a special investment vehicle.
Not only does it give investors a lot of good exposure to silver if you're bullish on silver, but I believe when we do get further along in our corporate life in the next six months, 12 months, and we're being valued as a price to EBITDA, cash flow, price to NAV, whatever kind of metric you want to use, we should trade at a premium to our peers because of that silver exposure that you almost cannot get anywhere else or very difficult to get anywhere else. We're also de-risked because we're in production already. Your biggest risk in the mining industry is time. Years can go by where nothing happens. The fact that we're producing, fully permitted in a mining-friendly jurisdiction means you're already ahead of the game with Kuya. We also have a very strong balance sheet.
We're actually today sitting at around $25 million in cash and no debt. We have all the capital we need to build this project now. Multi-year growth, we do have a number of short-term catalysts coming with the ramp-up of the mine and exploration results. But we've really built this company for long-term compounding effect as we continue to grow Bethania and grow it through mine cash flow in the future. It's a really great opportunity to participate in something that could be growing and getting bigger and more valuable for the next three, four, five years. Capital discipline, we have no near-term need for financing because we dealt with that last year and earlier this year when prices were very high. Very significant valuation upside.
Our peers trade at, most of them are actually in the billions of dollars of market cap, and I think we can get there as well in the coming years. In the interest of time, I might skip a few slides, but again, feel free to get back on the look on the website, and you can see everything. We're located in central Peru in this really well-defined, well-trafficked mining district in central Peru with lots of other lead, zinc, silver mines. You can see here on the map. There's more than that, but I pointed out some that are notable. In terms of we've really accomplished quite a lot in the last year with the ramp-up of the mine, getting to the point where we're starting to make some significant revenue to offset our costs as we continue to grow.
Commencing the drill program now, the 20,000-m drill program. We're really, really excited about that, and finally underway. That's a big catalyst for us going forward. As we look into 2027, we are aiming to get commercial production, positive cash flow. That should come very soon. Continue to do exploration, finish that 20,000-m drill program so we can do an updated 43-101 resource estimate. That will be important because that will help us or guide us as to how big we want to expand Bethania. Certainly, we'll keep drilling and making the resource and the camp bigger. But that mineral resource that we do next year will certainly be, I think, pretty pivotal for a couple of reasons. One, because we haven't done any drilling in the last five years, so we've been sort of stuck with this outdated resource now for a long time.
It's certainly possible that would have been holding our value back, but again, now we're fortunate to be able to address that with a really big, exciting exploration program. If you look over the next few years, obviously the ramp up is our near-term goal. Over the next few quarters, get to that 350 tons per day. That would annualize our production a little over 1 million ounces a year, is what it should be, of silver. Certainly margins that will give us quite a significant pre-tax cash flow or EBITDA, even in the next few quarters. Continue that 20,000-m drill program, which has now started.
We should get quite a bit of that done before the end of this year, but some of it will carry over into 2027, and certainly lots of press releases to update the market as we start getting those drill results back. Then we look into 2027, building the Bethania plant becomes more of a focus. Again, we'll have the cash flow to do that, plus we'll be starting the year with still a very strong balance sheet. We should start the year with probably at least $20 million on the balance sheet, and we'll be able to put some of that into starting the plant and then finish it with our mine cash flow that we're going to be generating. Then we want to see, do we double, do we triple production after that? That will depend on the resource update to some degree.
Again, just because we do one expansion doesn't mean we're done. We've got this big district that will eventually see multiple mines feeding a centralized mill. So I think we can keep growing and keep adding value to this project for many, many years. What I mean by that now, let's talk about the multi-mine possibility here, because obviously a lot of the focus has been about Bethania, as it should be. Bethania is really a gem. It seems to be a huge mineralized silver vein system, and it's still very under-explored, even though we've been starting to mine it. We only drilled 5,000 m back in 2021, and now we're going to be able to drill a lot more there and really see what's under that hill in terms of how many tens of millions of ounces are there.
But over and above whatever we find at Bethania, we've got six more silver vein systems that we've identified on our very large land package now of 5,600 hectares. The furthest one away would be about 4 km or 2.5 mi from where the plant's going to be. So everything is close, within trucking distance. Certainly the idea would be, over the next few years, is to at least open a few of these as new mines and have those add to whatever we're producing at Bethania, to maybe go from 3 million to 4 million to 5 million ounces a year. We'll have to see exactly how big we can make this, but certainly that order of magnitude, there's definitely that potential in this district.
Anything in that 3 million- 5 million ounce per year range, if you look at comparable silver mining companies, that takes you into the billion-plus market cap very, very easily. Again, we're well under $100 million today, so there's a lot of upside there. Zooming in on the central part of the property, you can see now those same seven vein systems, including Bethania. Now you can see the veins that we've mapped, the silver veins on surface, and all the samples we've taken with those colored dots. Most of the work that we've done has been on the Bethania mine area because it's where we've been mining and we've done the most work on over the years. But we have been able to do hundreds of samples on these other vein systems, and that's allowing us to start to prioritize.
I think we see a little bit bigger footprint at Carmelitas Main, at Millococha Oeste, and Tito PH. Those seem to be bigger vein systems, at least what we can map and see at surface. I think those would be the top three priority before we tackle the other three. But eventually all six, we want to be drilling, getting resources there, and then potentially mining. The resource estimate, which was on the previous slide, 14 million ounces if you combine the inferred and the indicated resources of silver equivalent, all sits within this red triangle here. It's parallel veins that run in and out of the page, open at depth, open along strike. We have made some new discoveries since the resource was done five years ago within that block. It's not stuck at 14 million ounces necessarily.
There's also been several million ounces taken out of it before we acquired the mine. Substantially, somewhere between 15 million , 20 million ounce original geological endowment there that's open at depth, open along strike. We think we can do something similar at depth and then maybe another 20 million ounces if the veins continue for 200 m. That's roughly what it would work out to. If you get the same grade, the same width, and you extend it 200 m, you'd have another 20 million ounces there. You'd actually have a lot more if we can extend these veins off to the east, where the white stars are. Those are where we've taken samples at surface. Again, we've got the vein system continuing on the other side of the hill.
That's about almost the same distance as the whole mine and the whole resource itself, if you go to the Santa Elena vein there on the eastern edge. There's lots of potential for tens of million ounces to be found before we even go to the other satellite zones and start looking at those. Of course, I won't go through all the satellite zones here, but we've got close-up maps in our presentation so you can look at the samples, and there's some of the highlights there. It's very interesting. I would encourage you to look, and you can follow up if you have any questions. Each zone is interesting in its own way. The Millococha Oeste has probably got the most density of veins that we've mapped. So lots of veins close together with very high silver grades there.
You can see several over 2,000 g per tonne. Then something like a Tito, where you've got the single longest structure that we've identified so far at about 2 km east to west. Each zone is quite special, and they all have good potential to be new mines one day, and all controlled, 100% owned by Kuya, no royalties, no debt. It's just all ours for the taking. I won't go into too much detail about the other assets. We do have a few slides in the presentation on them. With Silver Kings, we've been very technically successful, made some good high-grade silver discoveries there over the years. But we have more lately decided to focus on the tailings potential and stockpiles, because that's something that can get permitted faster and requires a lot less CapEx to build.
Could be a starter project, and then you can add the bigger resources onto it later and potentially have an underground mine a few years after you start up with processing tailings, reprocessing tailings, or something like that. That's conceptually what we're thinking. We have put out a press release on that recently with some sampling results that were very positive. Again, not paying anything for this in our share price, but it does have significant value. I would say the same thing about Umm Hadid. We're very pleased with the drilling, especially the new drilling this year. It looks like the discovery is getting better and better as we do more drilling there. Saudi Arabia's been a great place to operate, supportive governments, great partner in Sumou Holding that we joint ventured with a few years ago to develop this target or this project.
Again, it's looking very good and something that we hopefully can build with our partner in the future and, again, add value to the Kuya shareholders. With that, I'll wrap it up, the capital structure here, and I won't go through all the great shareholders we have, but we've got a great suite of shareholders. Always welcome to have more, though. For anybody who is watching and thinking about buying shares, we'd love to have you on our register and to make money with me and with the rest of the shareholders as we develop this company and build these silver resources. How's that? Can I pass it back to Mark for some questions?
Yes. Thank you, David. We do have a question here that Bethania is now producing, but the operation is still in the ramp-up phase. What are the most important operational milestones between today's production level and achieving the phase one target of approximately 350 tons per day?
Probably the single biggest infrastructure that will really help us jump up the production is going to be the new ramp that we're currently developing. When we acquired the mine and restarted the mine, a couple of years ago now, we were relying on the existing infrastructure, which was very narrow tunnels with tracks and basically bringing the ore out in ore carts. It works. At a small scale, it works very well, but it definitely limits how much material you can get out of the mine. It becomes a bottleneck as you start to develop more working areas underground, and that's certainly something we've been running into.
The ramp's really going to debottleneck that and allow us to modernize the mine and actually allow us to go beyond 350 tons per day ultimately because the size of the ramp that we're developing, 4 m by 4 m, is wide enough that we can drive trucks, small trucks, in and out of the mine to move the material. That can take us actually beyond 350 tons per day. We're really not only going to 350 tons per day with this particular investment, but it's going to allow us to ramp up even further in the future when we're ready to do so. That's really the biggest single thing.
Otherwise, it's a lot of little things like doing more stope development, making sure we have a nice full crew and contractors on site to do all that work, and that's all in process right now as well. I think we're in good shape to meet those targets over the next few quarters. Importantly, we want to sustain it so that becomes the baseline, and then we can grow even bigger off of that.
The next question is, Bethania's existing resource is shallow and occupies only a small portion of the broader property, with 20,000 m of drilling planned this year. How are you balancing underground resource expansion around the mine against regional exploration for entirely new mineralized zones? I guess what I might add onto that is, could you just maybe provide just an update on where the drilling program sits today?
Sure. We plan to have three rigs underground. Only the first rig is going right now, and it started last week. We're still just really starting the 20,000 m. A lot of it will get done in the next few months, as I referred to earlier, before the end of the year. But some of it will finish in Q1 of 2027. We don't have any results yet because we're still relatively early in the drilling stage. But I think we will start to get some of the results from the first rig, and maybe the second rig, by maybe later in November, depending on the lab assay times. Which is we'll try and rush them as quickly as we can, but that's sometimes out of our control.
Two of the rigs are actually put in the current mine workings and drilling the veins deeper, hitting them deeper so that we can start to drag the resource down into that area below the current resource, below the current mining area, where we know the veins continue, but we don't have any resources yet. That's a big focus. That's the lower risk drilling. It's shorter holes, so it should be a little quicker, at least the individual holes are quicker to drill. The third rig is going to sit at the edge of the mine workings on the eastern side and drill off to the east towards the Hilltop zone.
The Hilltop zone is, again, it's another cluster continuation of the vein system on the other side of the hill, of the Bethania Hill, and we want to hit those veins off to the east, which they should be dipping vertically as well. That's something that those holes will take a bit longer because they're going to be longer holes. Again, that's going to be an important part of the underground drilling to really bulk up the resource.
I think you addressed some of this in your presentation, but which exploration targets have the greatest potential to meaningfully expand the resource, and how large do you think this district could ultimately become?
Yeah. Well, I forgot to use my trademark 100/100 plan in the presentation, but really the 100 million ounces is. I can only speak personally, and certainly this is not a forecast, and it's certainly not 43-101 compliant, but I certainly personally believe this is going to be much bigger than 100 million ounces, the camp, given that we could probably get close to that just with Bethania, and then we've got all the other six targets. There could be more silver vein systems, too, that are buried, that don't outcrop or that we just haven't run across yet. Because keep that in mind, the exploration we've done to date has been quite low tech. It's been walking around in the field looking for veins and evidence of past mining, and then when we find that, we narrow in on it and start sampling and mapping it.
But within this big area that we have, it is certainly possible, in fact, it is likely that we have missed some. I think when you look at Bethania potentially being significantly more than 50 million ounces, whether it is 70 million ounces , 80 million ounces , we do not know, but it is certainly that order of magnitude, has that potential within that hill, just based on the size of the hill and assuming those veins continue at depth and along strike. Then, of course, getting back to your original question, a t least the lowest risk place to explore and add resources is Bethania, because we know the most about it. Could one of the other zones be bigger than Bethania or the same size? It is certainly possible, but we just do not know enough yet. But certainly Tito, for example, has the footprint to be as big as Bethania.
Millococha and Carmelitas are pretty big footprints, too.
Those could all become meaningful satellite deposits, basically.
Correct. Yeah.
With support for larger.
Tens of millions of ounces. Whether it's as big as Bethania or not, I wouldn't say that yet, but certainly, given the size of the footprint of the veins at surface, all three of those could be tens of millions of ounces each.
Okay. I did want to touch on Umm Hadid, because you did put some results out recently there. You have an ability to expand your ownership-
Right.
-of Umm Hadid over time. Could you maybe just-- We won't talk too much about Silver Kings at this point, but Umm Hadid intrigues me anyway. Where do you see that going, and at what point would you exercise your right to increase your interest?
Sure. If you go back to the scout drill program we did in 2025, I think it was only 5,000 m, and we drilled a few holes on a couple of targets. Some of them didn't really work. Didn't really have anything, at least that we found. But then that area in the southern part of the property, we call them areas one, two, and three, but they're all connected together. It might be just one big area. We did get some good results, and we got these high-grade veins, but narrow, close to surface because it's very flat there. So we're drilling similar to Bethania, where we're drilling outcropping veins to see how big they are and how deep they go. But the difference is that Saudi Arabia is very flat, so there's no hills and no topography, really.
Whereas obviously Bethania, up in the Andes, there's lots of hills and lots of topography. So that was 2025. What we've found this year is that we're starting to be able to more predictably hit those veins, those high-grade veins. Some of them get at least over tens of centimeters or a meter. They get spectacular high silver grades in the thousands of grams per tonne, plus gold. But around that, we're starting to see in some cases the structure actually is much wider, and there's a halo of lower grade around it, which is quite interesting, because then you can do instead of 1 m at 1,000 g per tonne, you can do 10 m at 100 g, right? Just to use round numbers.
If you start getting that width, then you start to at least entertain the possibility of potentially this could be open-pittable. So now with the drilling that we continue to do, I think one of the main things is we want to start to put models around, three-dimensional models around the veins, so that we can start thinking about, is this going to be more of an open pit, shallow open pit, maybe narrow to follow the structures, but where you still can do some open pit mining. Or whether you're going underground with a ramp in order to just focus on the narrow high-grade center. That remains to be seen. But either way, I think, again, my personal opinion is that there's going to be a mine here. I think the work that we've done to date is looking very good, and it will continue.
We're excited to be a part of that.
Okay. I've got a couple questions in queue here too. We're getting near the end of our time, but one question is, has the ramp structural development begun yet, or are we still in the contractor bidding phase? What timeframe are we expecting the ramp to be completed to allow operations?
Well, actually, we've started the ramp ourselves. We're still looking to bring in a contractor to help with that, and that process is ongoing. We're close to the end, I think, on that administrative aspect and should have them on board pretty soon. We've actually been looking at the ramp design internally, and we think we've got a little tweak to the design that'll actually allow us to access ore faster than when I've previously mentioned this in presentations and meetings, et cetera. It's something our engineers and our team are constantly working on improving things, and we tend to make things better. It's not always when you want it, but things generally get better. I'm actually very excited about what we can do with this ramp and get into ore sooner.
That starts to add to what we can announce for production, maybe even later in Q4 here, and certainly in Q1.
I think we'll end with the last question. Looking over the next 12-1 8 months, which two or three milestones should investors focus on most closely, and why is now a good time for investors to consider Kuya Silver?
I think our quarterly results is going to be a milestone because I think as we go, especially Q4, year-end, and then Q1, you'll see significant progress both in terms of tonnes mined and silver produced, and also on the financial side. That seems to be, when I look at our peers who've made the transition and have gone from low hundreds of millions into the billions of market cap, it seems to be that those first few quarters where you start to have some steady cash flow seems to be pretty critical, and the market loves to see that. I think that's a catalyst to watch. It won't necessarily happen in one day. It might be over a couple of quarters. But I think that's a big catalyst. The other one will be the updated mineral resource estimate mid-next year.
We will have drill results frequently. Every few months, we'll put out drill results as we get five, 10, 20 holes back, whatever we can do from the lab. I think investors, especially ones who follow us very closely, they'll already have an idea of how big the resource is going to be. But certainly when that actual report comes out, then there's no argument about it. It's going to be a brand new, much larger resource that we can then build upon in the future. I think that's a big exciting catalyst for us as well, about nine months out here.
David, thank you so much for joining us today.
Well, thanks everyone. Appreciate the questions, and feel free to follow up with us or Mark, if you have any further questions. Thanks again.