Hello, and welcome to Virtual Industrial Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are very pleased you have joined us for our three-day Metals and Mining Conference. Our next presentation is from ACG Metals. Please note, you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking, Book a Meeting in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome, Artem Volynets, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Patrick Henze, Chief Financial Officer of ACG Metals , which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol ACGAF and on the LSE, under the symbol ACG. Welcome back, Artem and Patrick.
Thank you so much. Great to be back. Let us run through some slides quickly. Before we do that, a quick introduction of ourselves personally for those we haven't met with yet. I'm Artem. I'm Founder, Chairman, and CEO of ACG Metals. Been in mining close to 30 years, led small companies, big companies, and now leading ACG Metals, which we are building from a small company to a very big company. We started our life as an operating company last year in September when we acquired Gediktepe Assets in Turkey. We emerged from that transaction with a $100 million market cap. Today, we are trading around $300 million, and this is a good start. We plan to grow the business through a series of roll-up acquisitions, improving and investing in each of our next transactions. Patrick?
Hello everyone. My name is Patrick Henze. I'm the CFO of the business. I also did my whole career in mining since graduating. S tarted in debt finance and also debt advisory, and then moved to private equity before founding my own company in Switzerland, advising on royalty transactions in the mining sector and then also becoming Head of M&A for Artem in the previous company. N ow joined with Artem again as CFO since two years now. Overall, tried to capture the whole capital structure of mining finance in the career.
Thank you, Patrick. What ACG is today, as I said, we are roughly a $300 million market cap, very relatively small net debt to EBITDA of about 0.5. Net debt is $46 million. We have $200 million bonds outstanding. I think if anything, you need to remember about ACG, is that unlike many other companies in our sector of our size, we are a highly cash-generating business. This year, we aim to produce around 36,000 oz- 38,000 oz of gold, which means free cash flow of around $70 million. That is before the recent gold price essentially increases. We are halfway through building a transition from production of gold into production of copper. Plan to enter full commercial production for copper by the middle of next year, and with a nameplate capacity of about 20,000 t- 25,000 t of copper equivalent. O ur free cash flow will be around $100 million.
The key shareholders of the business include our Turkish partner, Lidya , from whom we acquired the asset with about 1/3 of the shares. Another third belongs to the U.S. New York-based fund called Argentem Creek . Glencore and Traxys are featured on a shareholder register. As both traders have offtakes, Glencore has a copper offtake at market, which means at benchmark terms. Traxys is another marketing agent for the zinc offtake. As I mentioned, cash is the king here and must be for a mining company because mining assets are nothing less, but cash printing machines. Even after the recent share price increase by ACG, we're still trading at a significant discount to peers and producing significantly higher levels of cash flows than our similar size competitors on the London Stock Exchange.
As of today, we're trading at around 3x free cash flow. Average for the sector is around eight, so there is a good way to go in a base case business plan before we acquire any other assets. On a P&F basis, which is another multiple used in the sector, we are trading at around half of our net asset value, which for producers should be around 0.9 to one. Therefore, you can clearly see a rating potential further there. The bonds are also trading well, 1.08 to the issue price, meaning our yield to maturity is around 11.5%. That is the true cost of our debt. We have a strong board. Mike Pompeo is the one who joined us recently. He does help to open doors in the countries where we want to buy assets. Very strong independent directors.
Fiona is close to 30 years in commercial banking in our sector in the mining industry. Mark was a Chief Investment Officer for Global Situation Group at [crosstalk] Abu Dhabi [crosstalk] . He still advises them and our men on the ground in the Emirates. Hennie Faul used to be the head of Copper at Anglo American, so his knowledge is obviously very helpful here. Two well-known advisors. If you know the mining sector, Robert Friedland does not really need an introduction. They're a mining entrepreneur of our generation. Warren Gilman used to run money for Mr. Lee Cashin in the sector for many years until Mr. Lee Sr. retired. At that point, Warren set up his own investment vehicle. You have Mustafa and Martin as representatives of our two major shareholders.
I'm not going to go into the details of our top management team, but what we have here is a good indication of our network and experience in the sector. We do not use executive search firms to find people that we want to join our team, in the same manner that we don't use investment banks to bring us deal ideas. Everybody you see on this page, we have put together [crosstalk] after completion of the [crosstalk] billions of dollars. The project he's building for Gediktepe is the smallest and the simplest of them all. By the way, he now was behind schedule or over budget on many of them. In the mining sector, as a true Canadian mining engineer, traveled the world globally. The mine that we are starting our life with is called Gediktepe.
It's on the Mediterranean side of Turkey, three hours to Izmir and two other ports on the Mediterranean coast, well positioned to supply smelters in Europe, essentially the other side of the pond from the European Union. It is a very high-grade mine. 2.3% copper equivalent is very good in our sector versus, for example, Escondida, the largest copper mine in the world owned by BHP, is 0.5%. Given the open pit nature of the operation, the high grade and the very competitive Turkish mining contractors, we are in the first quartile of the global cost curve for gold and will be in the first quartile of the global cost curve for copper, which means again we are producing a high level of cash flows. Our focus on cash generation is paramount. Patrick, over to you.
Thanks, Artem. Yeah, just a few slides on the operation itself. I think most importantly in any mining operation, safety is the key aspect. W e are very proud to say that since the mine has started operation, even during the construction before, there were zero accidents or lost time injuries, which is a key KPI for a mining operation. That means, zero since the start, more than four years, five years now. Also, since we acquired the asset, there was none. O bviously, now we are building the sulfide plant, which means that instead of 280 people on site, we are now about 680 people on site, with the full construction team and still no accidents. Very, very proud of that track record. In mining, there are two ways to look at an asset.
One side of the coin is that, what's in the ground, you cannot change. Hence, you look actually that there's a lot of [grade] in the ground, so it keeps obviously a pretty nice margin for your business because you have more value that you can elevate from the ground. We are very happy. If you look at our asset currently as a gold-producing asset, we are running at 2 g a ton on an open- pit mine, which is very, very good. Also, for the future of the business, the copper equivalent grade of 2.32% is significantly higher than a lot of our peer assets, and it's almost comparable to underground assets which are usually very much higher cost, but they are running at similar grades than we are looking at an open pit. The other side of the coin in a mining operation is obviously the cost.
You cannot change what's in the ground, but you can change obviously how you manage your cost. Since we operated this asset, we have been able to slightly increase production, but most importantly, we really did a big focus and a big push on our cost. You can see that the mine was already running at a very significant margin. The gold price here, you see, $2,950. Now we are at $3,950. O ur all-in sustaining cost, which means all costs including in the asset to get an ounce out of the ground, is currently sitting at $1,060. We're having a $3,000 margin almost currently in the business. Also, going forward, we are very confident on the copper side that we will have a significant margin in the copper business, but we'll come to this a bit later.
This mine is currently mined from the oxide cap, which is the higher layer of the deposit. When we go into the copper production, we go into the sulfide, which is the deeper layer. We see actually a lot of upside, not only in the sulfide, which is the mine life for the next 10 years-2 0 years. We also see a lot of upside in the oxide because we have a current plant that's sitting there. It costs $90 million that the previous owner spent. It's only two years old. We are looking for options, how to actually extend that mine life on the oxide while we are going into the sulfide. We can run both in parallel. That's logistically not a problem at all.
You can see here that only the enriched ore, which is about 4 million t, means there is quite a couple of years in that material and it's running also at about 2.2% copper equivalent. Hence, we're looking to unlock this value. You see on the map that in our license area, we identified a couple of oxide-bearing deposits which we could add to the oxide circuit. A lso, outside and in other vicinities in Turkey, we see potential of getting further ore and mine this, and basically treat this in our plant and make additional cash flow that's not currently in the base case numbers that Artem mentioned before. Artem.
Thank you. The future of the mine and the main future, is obviously in the sulfide part of the deposit, which is 90%, if not more, of the material that we have at the asset. In order to extract that material, which eventually will be copper concentrate and zinc concentrate, with significant gold and silver byproducts, we are halfway through construction to build a very simple flotation circle. This is a brownfield expansion, so it's very simple. We are essentially building a flotation line and a tailing facility, and the camp for the bigger workforce. The rest, infrastructure, electricity connection, water connection, et c, is already built. The project EPC contractor is, what I say, our sister company because it's a subsidiary of Çalık Holdings. Lidya is another subsidiary of Çalık Holdings, our main shareholder with 33%. There is an additional incentive.
Essentially, we have alignment of interest between us and Çalık Holdings, to ensure that the project is done on time and on budget, as it currently is being executed. A lso, we have a fixed price contract, so we cannot pay more than $146 million. The project is on time and on budget. We're roughly halfway through. We are building as we speak, and the situation at the site changes on a daily basis. I plan to enter full commercial production by the middle of next year. Given the fact that this is a brownfield project with very few things to build, the capital intensity is very low. If you look globally anywhere in the world, you'll need to spend 20,000 t, 25,000 t of copper production capacity per year. We are building that copper production capacity at $7,000 per ton of capacity, which means very high IRRs.
A busy slide, just to say that we are very much on time and on budget for full commercial production by the middle of next year. The upside potential on the sulfide will not come from producing more per year, but it will come from producing for a longer time. The previous owners stopped drilling when they had an 11-year initial mine life. That's enough for the typical bankable feasibility study.
As you can see on this picture, already 35%+ of the resources we have on our balance of JORC resources, is outside of the eventual pit shell. In seven or eight years from now, we decide how to access those resources, whether we build a decline and go underground or we expand the pit shell. It will very much depend on costs and commodity prices at that time. We do expect this mine to be producing for 25 years- 30 years eventually. We do not see the end of mineralization. The grade is actually going higher as you go deeper underground, and mineralization is open all along the strike to the northwest. Patrick?
Thanks, Artem. Yeah, a couple of words on the financial side, the capital structure. As we said, we were able to raise a bond just three months after the acquisition. That's been basically in November last year, and we closed it in January last year. That fast-tracked obviously also the construction of our sulfide project. Funding is available at all times, can be drawn in bi-monthly installments. On the other side, we're drawing it from an escrow account, which means that we maintain the cash in the escrow and we obviously also generate cash from our oxide operation. Hence, you look at our current capital structure as published in the interims, a $207 million bond because there was still the coupon in there which we paid 14 days after the interim financials.
We have $160 million cash, a net debt of $46 million. V ery clean capital structure, very simple, and we've been simplifying that over the whole year to get to this position. Also, going forward, if you think about, okay, we draw the bond up to $200 million in the end, we will have at this point in time, probably a $50 million cash balance. That means our NPV will go up because we're de-risking the project. We get into production of the sulfide ore body. We have $50 million on the balance sheet, which means that our NAV also will increase after we complete the project.
A couple more things that we've done, we did a gold hedge just for 2025, but it was a collar, which means that we're still fully exposed to upside in the gold price. W e had a downside risk mitigant to ensure our budget, which is a further mitigant for any uncertainty for the construction period. That's been done and obviously very successfully. We've been a lot over the budget versus what we expected. We also just recently announced that we restructured our royalty agreement to save another $6 million next year, plus further potential royalty payments. There's a lot of buffer in the system to go through the commercial production phase, so basically from now through the construction, the ramp- up, and commercial production. We talked about this a bit earlier.
Sorry, Patrick. J ust to note that the total amount of gold hedge is 14,000 oz. It is less than 50% [crosstalk].
Yeah, I don't know. I think, Artem, you were cutting out a bit, but basically the gold hedge was for 14,000 oz, and it's now almost completed. As I said, we maintained the full upside to the gold price even on those hedged ounces. On the cost position at the moment on the gold cost curve, that's what we're currently producing. We even increased our position, which means that about 3/4 of the whole industry need to go out of business if the commodity prices go down before it would affect us. Again, at $3,950 gold price today, we are making a very significant margin, obviously creating a lot of buffer in the system. If we look at 2027, which will be the first full production year for our copper production, even there we are in the first quarter.
Again, means that 3/4 of the global copper mines need to go out of business before it would affect us. If we are thinking about a copper price right now at $4.50-ish per pound, our all-in sustaining of $1.90 provides a very significant buffer again. We did this analysis within the team, just for the generalist audience. If you look at the EBITDA margins and the P/E ratios across industries based on the S&P data we got, you see that there is already interesting EBITDA margins and P/E ratios in the diversified mining area. In the gold mining space, 34% margin. ACG, with our low-cost operation in Turkey, we are making a 61% EBITDA margin at the moment, including head office costs. We are trailing at a 4.8 P/E ratio, whereas the industry is probably looking at eight and copper companies even higher.
Thank you, Patrick. The strategy is very simple. Buy a m ine at a good price, invest and improve, move on to buy the next mine. The vision for us is to have a number of assets on our platform in the next few years, focusing our acquisition strategy on producing or near- producing mines. We do believe that copper will find the next pricing level above the current $10,000 per ton, simply because the demand for copper is growing faster than supply, including the new sectors such as data centers for artificial intelligence, robotics, EVs, etc. It is also supported from the demand growth from traditional sectors, construction, grid, defense. The ammunition everybody wants to produce in the world is nothing else but copper.
We do expect the next level in copper pricing to come in the next two to three years, and we're busy looking to acquire producing or near- producing mines in the meantime. That is the strategy. We do believe that we are starting a process of building a large and globally diversified copper-focused company. For that, we are focusing on several key copper belts in the world. We are currently in a [Tessian] copper belt, which in addition to Turkey, includes surrounding countries, Eastern Europe, Balkans. We're looking in Central Asia. We have targets in the African copper belt as well as in the South American copper belt. W e are focusing on producing mines, we can utilize the debt and therefore minimize dilution for our shareholders when we do M&A. I suggest that we move on to the questions, to ensure that we have a chance to answer those.
Patrick, let me deal with question number two and number three, and you deal with number four and number five. The first question, b y when could we expect another acquisition of a producing mine? The simple rule for M&A in mining is that you need to [crosstalk] three to five, better five, to get one done. This comes from experience of buying and selling, mostly buying actually, mining assets and companies over the last 30 years.
As of today, we're working on about 10 different opportunities in various countries. Therefore, we have a good chance of something happening. When it happens, I do not know and nobody will. The second rule of M&A is, nothing is done until it's done. Given the large number of targets, we're certain that there will be follow-up deals. Second question is, w hat do you do to increase the market liquidity of the shares?
If you look at our share price and liquidity, you will see that there has been a 300% increase in liquidity from mid-June. Mid-June is when we started marketing the story. That's when Berenberg and Canaccord published the initiation reports on us, followed by the Cantor of Fitzgerald in August. We are working hard to bring new investors into the story. We are fully funded. We do not need to do any share issue to fund any of our activities as of now. Certainly, when we do the next M&A, part of that could be funded with shares. As I said, we are looking to utilize the debt to 70%, 80% as much as possible of the acquisition price. Therefore, any further issuances of the shares will certainly be small versus the expected targets. Patrick?
Yeah, so the next question was, what are the next key operational milestones for the expansion, and how does the team plan to de-risk to commercial production? A very good question, obviously. I think in the end, it's all about preparation, right? You see that the first six months of the construction phase were really a lot about preparation. The team has done everything to really make sure the whole process runs smoothly. Long lead items were the ones we tackled very quickly, with the engineering being completed so that you have basically no timing issue in the project. We were able to secure, for example, the mills, which were a really key item. We were able to secure them three months ahead of the planned schedule actually, because they were available and we could prepay a bit more because we had the bond funding available.
A lot of preparation work has gone into it. The same actually for the ramp-up phase to commercial production. The best preparation is to have the real good team in place that has managed these things before. We not only have Graeme, who is a very experienced Construction Manager, we brought in [Yaya Hamadou], who has managed ramp-ups for sulfide flotation plants for Glencore, Barrick, and for other companies in the past. We also brought in our COO, Pete, who joined us in July this year, who has done these things before. It's all about getting everything ready nine months ahead of the real implementation of the ramp-up. Basically, that's what we've done.
In addition to that, we took actually the advice and the recommendations from the previous studies, from the previous owner and did an additional drill program to make sure we understand everything that comes into the plant for the first three to five years. We changed the design to have a bit more bay areas, to feed the plant always very homogeneously. Ultimately, all of this preparation gives us a lot of comfort to be de-risking the ramp-up and getting into commercial production as planned. The other question that came in was, yeah, yeah, Artem.
I'm sorry, I'm just told that we have to ramp up in 30 seconds. We will not have time to answer all the good questions that came in. The answers to some of those are already in the presentation, which is available on our website. I would be delighted to speak with investors who have questions and interests in our story through one-on-ones. Please reach out to Mandy, and we can have separate meetings with each and every one of you who have interest in our story. Thank you very much for your questions and for your interest, and look forward to connecting. Thank you.
Thank you very much.