Hello, everyone. Obviously, a lot of great companies here today and tomorrow. Great story from Americas. We are here to present ACG. I'm the CFO of ACG Metals. We are kind of a new kid on the block in London. Our whole story is about copper. We are currently producing gold and silver, but from next year onwards, we're gonna be a copper producer in Turkey. I really love this chart for obvious reasons, and I think a lot of companies have actually gained from the commodity price environment. We have gained not only from the commodity price environment, we also gained from our operational activities, how we improved the asset, how we built the story, how we marketed the story. It's a key thing also to have bond investors pleased. Our bond is trading currently at 109, so the yield is significantly down.
Our warrants are 800% almost up, and our share price obviously went up 160% year- to- date. The good thing is, it's just the beginning because we are just one year on the market, and our whole purpose is to consolidate the copper sector. Here we are, just starting the story, really. Our key shareholders, Lidya Madencilik, is the company that we bought the asset from in Turkey. They became a strategic partner, so we had a good alignment between the seller and the buyer in order to create value in the future and having them along the ride. We have Argentem Creek, a U.S. emerging markets fund, very supportive shareholder throughout the whole phase and continuing. The Herd, a family office out of London and Hong Kong.
When we said we want our offtake on the copper, we have Glencore, w e had to align the interest, so they became an equity investor. We have Traxys on the zinc side, to be aligned on the zinc side as well. You see our cap structure very clean and simple. We did a lot of work to simplify it. It is basically cash and bonds, and that gets us to the EV of about $350 million right now. The good thing about ACG, it is still a small company, but we are making significant cash. Last year, we made about $90 million in free cash flow, t his year, we are targeting $65 million-$75 million in free cash flow. Once the sulfide is up and running, it is about $100 million free cash flow from 2026 onwards. That is only from one asset. It is all about the team. Just two words on us. Artem is the CEO.
He's done the same thing in aluminum before. He was key for creating RUSAL as the world's largest aluminum company. That was a $20 billion company. He moved up to EN+ Group, which was a $30 billion vehicle. Basically, we are here to do the same story in the copper space. That is what we are starting with, Gedik Tepe in Turkey. Myself, I spent my whole career in mining, debt side, equity side, royalties, then did M&A, so only focus on the capital structure. We were two people before we did the acquisition, i t was only Artem and me. After that, we built a massive team of really experienced guys. Just to highlight, Peter Carter, 40 years, the CEO. We got Damien Coles as Chief Legal Officer, who was Forbes 40 Under 40 in Asia. He was, Kirkland, an equity partner.
We brought in Graham Ripley. He's 71 years old now. He's constructing our sulfide project. He has more energy than my three boys at home, I can tell you. It's unbelievable how efficient he is working on the ground. This is why our project is, after $80 million spent, halfway there, 50% complete, on budget, on time. He built 13 of these projects in his career, none was above budget or above time. Yahya Hamadou, very happy to have him there. A very, very great guy. He was at Glencore, Barrick, and Newmont as a chief metallurgist. He came to us, 5% recovery improvement in three months on the heap leach, straight to the bottom line. That's a big, massive cash increase for us.
Then last, Victor Ayala. He worked for ERG in Africa and for MMG, seen the Chinese side, seen the African side, a lot of experience. This is exactly what you need on the ground to make sure the budget stays there. I'm still approving everything above $20,000. We have a very tight structure there. Artem basically built the vehicle. My 15-year relationship to Mustafa Aksoy, who's on our board, brought the asset, so t hat's how it all came together. We have a very strong board that's really doomed for a much bigger company than a $100 million or $200 million company. I don't wanna go into much detail, but you see Mike Pompea obviously joined us this year. We have Henny Foul, who was the head of copper for Anglo American. He basically built all these assets and got these assets together that BHP is after now. The rest of the team is really focused to have a diverse set in the board to create a network globally.
The mine itself, first thing to highlight, zero LTI. We never had an LTI since this asset is producing. We are keeping this track record, and we are extending it even with a larger workforce. The whole construction team is included there. Zero LTIs. We are very proud of this. You look at the grade. I think the grade is the most important thing for us because that is something we cannot change. It is in the ground, but we are having a 2.3% copper equivalent grade. What we are producing now on the oxide is 2 g, a ton gold in an open pit. You see some initial factors, but I am coming into this in a second.
I think, as I said, grade is king, they say, in mining for a reason. We have a grade compared to our competitors or even larger companies. That's almost like an underground mining grade, and we have that sitting in an open pit. That's part of the reason why we're making strong cash flows. The other side of the coin is the cost side, and that's what we can control as a management team. Hence, we looked at the asset when we bought it. We saw every tender for every item in the last year. That's how we could actually reduce our AISC. Don't forget, Turkey has an inflation of about 30%, 40% last year. It's a big achievement to reduce the cost, actually, in such an inflationary environment. What the inflation means on the opposite side is that the Turkish lira is constantly depreciating.
You can see from other companies running in Turkey, like Santara, Eldorado Gold, SSR Mining, First Quantum, they all benefit that the cost basis is actually decreasing, if not staying stable, but over the last decades because they have been there for 10- 20 years. Ultimately, we are seeing this benefit also extending in the future. You look at the copper cost curve globally, we are gonna be first quarter with less than $2 per pound of copper. The sulfide expansion I mentioned, one key thing, it is not only on time and on budget, it is also a fixed price EPC contract. You know, you can talk about EPC contracts for ages, and people seeing cost overruns even with a fixed price. It is a fixed price, and we have about 17% contingency in that price already. It's also a sister company of our key shareholder, Lidya, which means we have aligned interest to get this thing done on time and on budget. That is the best insurance you can have with a strong local partner.
What are we looking at in the moment, in the market? I think there are a lot of these charts you see probably over the next days. For me, the key thing is the cash flow. All I care about is cash flow. If I look at a cash flow multiple, that's about 3x , and our peers, which are similar size, are trading much higher, that tells me something. If we look at what we actually can do, and you will see in the next week or so, we will have a good announcement on the enriched ore zone because, when we bought the asset, we knew this zone was there, and it was completely treated as waste. How can you treat something waste that's running at 2% copper equivalent? This is about 3.3 million tons of material. It's sitting there as a stockpile. Our first efforts, and that was also why we brought Yahya, etc., into the team to look how can we treat this most efficiently. Watch the news. There will be something we can say about this soon. On the other side, we're also working on how to extend the oxide mine life because the oxide is going out in the end of 2026.
We are starting the sulfide mid-2026, so there's a good overlap. We are not gonna throw away $90 million of investment in this oxide plant. We want to utilize this as long and as much as we can. Ultimately, you see in our license area, there's a lot of oxide potentials that we're trying to lift. We also have, around the license area, gold deposits. It's a VMS deposit. They do not come as a single VMS. There are usually multiple VMS coming with it. We see also toll treating potential because a lot of these gold open pits, they are running at 2 g a ton as well. They are just smaller. They do not have a processing facility. We want to utilize that in the future as well.
Certainly, we're gonna produce from the oxide in the north of the license and from the sulfide in the southern part of the license. We're looking quickly at the sulfide, t hat's the purple area. Even what's currently in the mine plan is just about 60% of the defined JORC-compliant resource already. So there's much more going into the ground there. It goes actually also with a higher grade, and it is dipping in a very nice lens thing. You can actually bulk mine this underground, or you can extend the open pit depending what's the better economics in the future. How we approach things, we are all about copper. Copper is the key for us. Can be copper gold, can be copper moly, can be polymetallic, but copper needs to be the key value driver. We are looking to find a good asset.
I think we found an amazing asset with a 2.3% copper equivalent open pit in the first quarter cost in Turkey, a jurisdiction where a lot of Canadian and other mining companies have operated for decades. We actually do a good deal. Again, we are not competing for price. We're not looking at auctions from banks. We are really focusing on value creation, h ence, the seller becomes part of the story. There's a bonus payment if copper goes to $11,000, if copper goes to $13,000. There's a bonus payment if they actually extend the resource. You know, why not share a bit of that, right? We can do this in the future but w e're gonna do a really good deal that the market likes. We bought the asset for 0.2 P/NF, a producing asset in Turkey, and at 1.9 EV/EBITDA.
We finance, improve, and, invest and improve. Two months after we did the acquisition, we were a $100 million market cap company. We raised a $200 million bond. Which other junior mining company could raise a bond just after its inception, right? I think we were pretty proud accessing the bond market early on, getting actually a lower cost of capital, and most importantly, building a track record in the bond market to become a repetitive issuer in the future. You automatically have access to a cheaper financing than private equity, private debt, or the equity market in general. We are improving it. As I said, Yahya, 5% recoveries. Recovery goes straight to the bottom line, cash impact. We're looking at the enriched ore zone now. We're looking how to extend the oxide mine life. That's all the improvements we do.
Then we want to generate cash, repay the debt, and do the next deal, and ultimately become a bigger company. That's actually, unfortunately, a bit of an old slide, so I skip over that. What are we focusing on in the M&A? We want to consolidate the copper space. The Tethyan Copper Belt is the best thing we can do. I was running a mine with a private equity fund in North Macedonia, Zurich to Skopje, two hours, driving two hours to site. You can manage that asset. In Turkey, three hours from Zurich to Istanbul, four-hour drive. You can manage that asset. Looking at Central Asia, Turkey, and actually up to Portugal is a natural fit for us.
We also have assets in Africa and in South America that we're looking at that are in the pipeline from our network. It needs to be big game hunting, right? It needs to be significantly larger scale to justify the management time and keeping the company as lean as we have. Our President and one of the key mentors of Artem was Mick Davis. He ran Xstrata with a very lean corporate team focused on the operations where that's where you make the money. You're not making it in the head office. We don't even have a corporate office right now, and we're making roughly $100 million free cash flow. It is really about the operations, keeping that, encouraging the value add and the skill set there. Yeah. Obviously, where we are here, we did the acquisition. Our market cap went already from $100 million to $310 million today.
With the sulfide coming into production, the copper being in steady state, we think we're gonna get to $500 million-$700 million. We obviously have the oxide upside as well. And then with the next acquisitions, we're targeting $1 billion, and then ultimately in the three to five years, getting to $3 billion-$5 billion. Another mentor of Artem was Brian Gilbertson, the founder of BHP. He always said, "Think big." That's what we're doing. But we're starting with a very solid asset, free cash flow generation that's above $100 million already. That's a good way to start a business. Thank you very much.
Brilliant. We've got time for one question if anyone would like to ask one. Otherwise, we'll go straight to the break. Yeah. Lunch is served, right? Yeah. All right. Break days. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you very much.