I'm David Stein. I'm one of the Founders, and CEO, President, also one of the largest shareholders, and I've been throughout the company's history, all the twists and turns. We're a publicly traded silver mining company. We're actually in production. I know most junior or small cap companies of our size would probably be just doing exploration or some kind of development project. But we're actually producing. We've got over 100 employees there in Peru that are mining silver, but really the story here now is we've done a lot of the heavy lifting. A lot of the hard part is getting into production in the first place, getting financed, all that kind of stuff. That's all now kind of in the rear view mirror.
Now it's about building scale and turning this from a company that's worth in the low hundreds of millions into the billions, and that's the opportunity we have in a very bullish silver market right now. Here's our global footprint. We're going to talk most about the mine in Peru. That is our flagship asset. That's the most valuable asset in the company by far. However, we have over the years picked up some other silver projects as well. We've got one in Ontario, Canada, that's a big land package in a past producing silver mining district that we've had some great results on. Then we've also got into a joint venture in Saudi Arabia with a really great Saudi partner there. That's a joint venture that we're working on right now with an option to acquire 45%.
When you think about Kuya, the company, one thing is, I guess a couple of things that I like to point out right away. First of all, it's very difficult to get exposure to silver, the metal, because silver is mostly produced as a byproduct. Most silver companies or companies with silver in the name, they might have 30%, 50% silver, sometimes pushing 60%. We actually get 90% of our revenue from silver, 85% - 90%, depending on the silver price. We give investors a lot more exposure to silver than they would with other similar mining companies. What that ultimately means is that when we get a little bit bigger and more mature, I think we're going to trade at a premium to our peers.
It's not happening yet, but certainly, again, investors if they're bullish on silver and they want to buy a silver mining company, I think they're going to preferentially go to us over some of our peers. De-risk profile. Look, the biggest risk you have in the mining industry is time. The time value of money just ticks away year after year as you're not doing much. The fact that we're already in production, we're fully permitted, we're in a mining-friendly jurisdiction, again, we're five, 10 years ahead of a lot of other companies already. That's a huge factor. We have about $25 million of cash, so well funded, and no debt. Multi-year growth. We are growing right now. We have a big ramp-up period over the next few quarters.
However, really, what excites me as a shareholder is the long-term growth of the company, the fact that we can compound this growth over many years, mainly just with the Bethania District, the one mining district that we already control in Peru. The other assets we have are kind of a bonus, but we can do a lot of growth year after year for the next three to five years just in Peru. No need for financing, capital discipline, valuation upside. If you look at our peer companies, the larger ones that have made the leap into production, to steady production, I think the smallest one is over a billion dollar market cap. So that's where we're headed with Kuya. Our mine is actually located almost due east of Lima.
If you want to visit our mine, you can fly to the city of Huancayo. There's an airport just outside of the city. That's a city of 500,000 people, so very nice hub for us. It's about a three-hour drive from the mine. It gives us access to this whole mining belt that sort of runs up and down the Andes, the length of the Andes there. The central Peruvian part is mainly lead, zinc, silver, and of differing variations. Obviously, our mine is very rich in silver, but we do have a little bit of lead, zinc, copper and gold as well sometimes. So here's our ramp-up plan over the next few years. This is important.
This year, and I guess into early next year, we're ramping up the 350 tons per day mining rate is kind of a short-term goal for us because that's what our permits allow. So we want to get up to that rate, and then look at expanding from there, filing permit amendments, and then expanding. However, 350 tons per day, because our grade of silver is so high, we're going to produce over 1 million ounces of silver at that rate. With these silver prices, we're talking many tens of millions of dollars of EBITDA just on that starter operation, right? That relatively small starter operation, we can make a lot of money, a lot of profit, a lot of EBITDA just on that, and we should be hitting those numbers in the next few quarters.
Now, one thing we're doing right now today to set ourselves up for the longer term growth is drilling. We control this big district. I'll show you some maps in a second. You can't do a mining presentation without some maps. But we're starting a 20,000-meter drill program. We've already started it. We've only, since we acquired this project, drilled 5,000 m ever. Then we went through some very tough years where it was tough to finance. We were more focused on getting the mine back up and running. We're very behind on exploration, but we can catch up now. Again, that's an exciting time to be an investor in the company because you get all that excitement, all that value as we start to add ounces reporting drill results. We're starting that program now.
This 20,000 m will probably take us six and seven months, so into next Q2. Then we should have all the results out and be able to update and increase our resources quite substantially. Yeah, that's 4x as much drilling as we've ever done. The drilling that we're doing is not like lottery ticket drilling. We're drilling silver veins. We know where they are. This is as low risk as you get. Then as we go into the future years, I've already hinted at what we're doing, but the idea is to expand the resource. Then based on that resource, we can decide, okay, are we going to double, triple, quadruple the size of the mine? Maybe we do it in one step, maybe we do it in multi-steps, but that would be the idea. Keep adding mining capacity, keep adding processing capacity.
Ultimately, we probably will have multiple mines in the same area, in the same district, feeding one centralized mill. It's called a hub and spoke model in the mining sector, and I'll show you in a second how that's going to work. Okay, this is our first map. I guess no, the map of Peru was our first map. Second map. You can see the yellow star by the green square there is where our current mine is. That's the Bethania mine. Okay, that is likely for some time going to remain the core operation. It's already very big. It's going to get a lot bigger. We know a lot about it because we've been there for now eight years. The green square is where we're permitted to build a new plant. Okay, so that will happen. That's something we're going to tackle next year.
The other yellow stars on this map are all other silver vein systems that we've already discovered. We found them, our geologists have found them, they're outcropping. Sometimes they're artisanal mines where you see a hole in the side of the mountain and, oh, there's a silver vein there. All of those are more drilling. I think targets actually undersells it. These are vein systems we've already confirmed with lots of sampling, lots of mapping. It's just now a matter of drilling and finding how big they are. When we look at how big they are, now I'm showing you that same, that core area of the 5,600 hectares, the central area. You can see the red lines, those are the veins that we've mapped, that our geologists have mapped. All the dots are essentially all the samples we've taken.
There's in total, several hundred samples. You can see that besides the Bethania mine, which is the biggest area, because we've done the most work there, not necessarily that it is the biggest, but we've done a lot more work there than anywhere else. But you can see Carmelitas Main, Millococha Oeste, and Tito, of the other six, are the bigger ones. So those are going to be our top priorities to tackle. All six of them eventually, but we're going to go after the biggest ones first, because I think those will have the most impact on our resources. In terms of what we're doing at the mine itself, now this is a slice through the mountain or the hill that we're mining. All of the mining takes place in the red triangle there, where our five-year-old historical resource is.
10,000 of our meters that we're drilling, including three rigs, are actually going to be put underground. We've got one underground rig already. We're setting up the next one. So we can drill down deeper and find how deep those veins go and then keep building resources at depth. That's probably the easiest way to add resources here, is to drill these veins, which are vertical, and keep going deeper. That's something we've got two rigs going there. Then the third rig is going to drill off to the east there, to where those white stars are. Those are other veins that we found at surface, but we don't know how deep they go yet because we haven't done any drilling over there. So we're going to drill that and add those to the inventory as well.
You can see here that there's many multiples of what we have today. I mean, we could potentially fill in this whole hill with veins. We just haven't drilled in any of the white area yet. So that's what we're doing now. We're tackling that now with 1/2 of our drill budget, and anything we find here obviously can go into the mine plan pretty quickly. Then the rest of it is, there's a couple more slides here zooming in on the various zones, so I won't go into that in detail this time. But feel free, if you like looking at individual sample results, we have some spectacular ones, as good as any one you'll find. So you can take a look at those later. This presentation is on our website. Okay. I'll just quickly talk about the other assets and then wrap it up.
We have the Silver Kings Project as well. This is about twice the amount of land that we have in Peru. Our Peru area is very big. This is even bigger. It's in a historical mining camp that was one of the biggest silver producers in the world in the first half of the 20th century, called Cobalt, Ontario. So it's confusing because there actually is cobalt there as well, the metal. It occurs with the silver veins. It's a byproduct here. And the town is called Cobalt. Anyway. So if you get into the critical minerals angle, it can get very confusing here. But let's focus on the silver for now. So our area covers probably close to 100 million ounces of the historical resource, which is gone, so it doesn't really help us, but it indicates that there's good potential there.
What we've been able to do in the last few years is we've been able to drill and find actually a whole new set of silver veins. So whereas people would have gone in here and said, "Oh, everything's gone, everything was mined 100 years ago." It was from surface, so we go deeper and with the same geological model, and we can find veins that are a little deeper but still there. And we had one of the richest silver intercepts in the entire world in 2023 when we discovered this. We have put this a little bit quiet on the shelf the last couple of years and decided to focus on what we've got above ground. We think there's a nice environmental plus low CapEx way to recover silver from tailings here. There's old tailings on our property.
There's old stockpiles from the mines, from the low grade, which is not so low grade now, 100 years later. So there is potential for us to start up an operation here with very low CapEx, without having to drill and blast any new mining. That's our preference right now here, and then we can obviously tackle a new mine later once this thing is self-funding. That's almost got its own separate business model. Lastly, the joint venture in Saudi Arabia. We did this deal with a Saudi partner. We're operating the drill program, and directing the traffic there. They're funding it at the moment. However, together we've done something quite extraordinary here.
We've gone into an area that hadn't seen any work, any drilling probably in about 50 years, and we've found some very interesting silver veins here, particularly in the southern portion where all the dots are. Recently this year with the current drill program, which is still ongoing by the way, we've hit some nice wide zones of silver with a high-grade core in the middle, and these are very close to surface. So it could be an open pit, it could be something we go underground and focus on the higher grade zones. We don't know yet, but we're doing the work right now. Saudi Arabia is very favorable to mining. They want to diversify their industries away from oil and gas into other sectors, including mining. They do have quite a few gold mines and other bulk mines already in the country.
But a big push for new mining and foreign investment, and we're able to take advantage of that. Thanks to our first-mover advantage and thanks to our Saudi partner as well. So that's it. Here's our capital structure. I should have said in the intro, we are listed on the OTC. KUYAF is our symbol. We do trade about a third of our volume on any average given day in the U.S., so the OTC listing has been quite good for us. Our main listing is on the Canadian Securities Exchange, the CSE in Canada. The ticker there is just KUYA, our name, K-U-Y-A. So it's KUYAF in the U.S. and KUYA in Canada. That's it. With that said, do I have any time?
Yeah, of course you have time.
The clock didn't go, so I had no idea how long I was.
No, that's all right. Don't worry. If there's any questions, please ask. Off the bat, we've got questions. All right. Mike, we'll come to you in a minute.
Two questions if I could. First is Silver 101. There's silver as the commodity, which there's a huge need for, and there's silver as a precious metal, which is like, eh. Where do you guys fall?
You're just asking me my personal opinion?
Yeah. Your personal opinion, where does silver-
The silver that we make goes wherever it's needed. I don't choose where, but panel manufacturer or someone is going to invest in a silver bar. It's all the same silver. Look, I agree with you, the demand side of silver on the industrial side is quite exciting. Not only is it steady with the current uses of silver, solar panels, electronics, et cetera, but there's some new uses coming to silver, which could add a lot to the silver demand. There's going to be a lot of restocking going on from that side, as well as new batteries technology that has silver in it. There's a very strong case for silver just on the demand side. The investment side, I've done a lot of analysis on this, and if you look over many decades, silver does track with gold quite closely.
There's never been a time when silver's gone up without gold and vice versa. What typically happens is in a precious metals rally, so let's group them together, gold and silver will move up. Gold might lead for a bit, and then silver takes over. Silver, because it's such a smaller market, it's only about a 10th the size dollar value, global turnover. When money does move into silver on the investment side, it pushes the price up quite dramatically. That's why at the end of every precious metal cycle, you're going to have silver outperforming gold by between 50% and 100%, low to high. I believe that will happen again when we do- We're in a, I don't know, not a super bullish area because it's come down so much from the highs of- Okay.
Yeah, it feels like we're in a consolidation time right now because the silver price has come down so much from the highs of December, January earlier this year. When it does move up again, I expect it'll have a spiky type trading pattern because there's no demand to feed the silver market when it does go. Right? Okay. Do I have time for another question?
I've got a question.
Oh, sorry.
It's quite tight.
I thought you were passing it on to someone else.
Yes.
Different question. You had that typical undervaluation slide, and if I had a dollar for every company that said they were undervalued, I'd be rich. To paraphrase the old New York Giants football coach, "You are what your stock price says you are." You're undervalued. When you make that comment, you're not comparing yourself to similar stage companies today. You're talking about where you could be, correct?
Correct.
Okay.
Yeah, no, what I'm really saying is that if we deliver on what I'm saying we're going to do, okay, you can believe me or not, but then our company should be worth 5x, 10x, 20x, and that will depend on how big we can make this, what the silver price is as well, really those two factors. I'm not necessarily saying that we're undervalued today. I could argue that as well, but really, I don't care about what we're worth today. I'm looking six months, 12 months, two years from now, and I see huge potential. I'm a former stock analyst myself, and I think my own view is you got to look at the comps to see what the market-- Because it's basically telling you what the market is going to pay for you if you can do something similar to what the comps are, right?
As I said in the presentation, some of the companies that have already moved through this sort of early production, late-stage development phase and into steady cash flow production, we're not there yet. We haven't had a profitable quarter yet, but it's coming in the next three to six months, I would say. When you move through that, then the market starts valuing you based on some kind of multiple of earnings, EBITDA, whatever. It doesn't really matter, in my opinion. If you look at where our comps are trading at, we should trade at least 10 x EBITDA once we get to that steady cash flow phase. That would imply if we're the cheapest silver mining company in the world, we should trade at a $400 million, $500 million valuation. Okay? We're at about less than $100 million now.
Then, as I said, we're going to keep making the mine bigger. That means more cash flow, more EBITDA, and that would push us towards $1 billion.
We've got time for one more quick question.
Last year, not very much. In 2025, I think at 50,000 maybe. The nameplate will be 350 tons per day to start, which will produce about 1 million ounces, a little over 1 million ounces a year. Personally, this is just my personal opinion because we haven't put out a study in five years. So this is not NI 43-101 compliant, but our study was $12 an ounce five years ago. I think if you inflate that, something in the $20 - $25 is probably reasonable for today. Correct.
Just got one at the back.
Just a really quick technical one. I am pretty sure I am the only person in the room who lived in Cobalt, Ontario for two months. So there you go. Those silver vein intersections, are you getting them down below the Proterozoic into the Archean?
Yes. They are right below the Nipissing Diabase on the contact.
But not down into the Archean yet.
It is Archean in that area that we drilled.
Yeah.
You can have Archean or you can have the younger metasediments-
Yeah.
-depending on where you are. But the Nipissing Diabase, which is usually barren, by the way, it is a barren rock unit.
Yeah.
It can be up to 300 m thick. In that area where I showed you the map, it is 200 m. So we drilled 200 m below, and on that contact we hit-
On the contact.
1.5% silver over 10 ft.
Got it. Thanks.
Yeah.
All right. Well, that's all we've got time for that.