Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets and our co-host, Harbor Axis, we are very pleased you have joined us for the European Growth Conference. Our next presentation is from Ecora Resources. 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 Geoff Callow, Head of Investor Relations of Ecora Resources, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol ECRAF and on the LSE under the symbol ECOR. Welcome back, Geoff.
Thanks, Greg. Good afternoon, everybody. Or good morning to you in North America. Thanks very much for that kind introduction, Greg. In fact, you've taken away most of my points, which was to mention the tickers. With that, we'll click forwards through the usual disclaimers regarding forward-looking information and into the more interesting bit about Ecora Resources. We'll take you through this presentation today, which will give you a hopefully good introduction to what we believe is a high-growth, critical minerals-focused royalty company. There are not many royalty companies out there with that commodity focus. We see most of them in the precious metals space, and that's quite a differentiator for us to be focused on, as I say, critical minerals. That commodity basket really is what's driving electrification, power storage and generation, urbanization, digital infrastructure, robotics.
When we look at Ecora, we are a business that has a market capitalization or enterprise value of $375 million, a market cap as of last night of around $260 million. We actually think with the assets we've got here today and the growth that we have, you can see about 80% over the next five years from the critical minerals part of our business. We think actually that we've got a company that's potentially worth well over $1 billion just from the assets we have in the portfolio today and the assets that don't need any more capital spending on them to realize that. We feel really positive about that growth that's coming through in our business, taking, as I say, from about $54 million in analyst forecasts today to about $100 million of overall portfolio contribution by the end of the decade.
While you're waiting, we do pay a dividend and have done for a number of years now. When I looked at the mention about the growth here, you can see that the projection, this is all analyst consensus numbers. I think what you can see here in the blue and the yellow colors are very much that specialty metals and uranium and base metals, principally copper and cobalt. You can see that growth trajectory that we're on from 2020, when that blue and yellow was less than $10 million of income, to 2025, when we'll be generating around $30 million from that commodity basket. As we look out to 2030, the dark colors there, the darker blue and the yellow, is the expected expansion from those royalties that are currently in production.
Those that you can see in 2025 are expected to grow to about $45 million of income from the $30 million of this year by 2030. The hash marks above that are the growth that I referred to in the first slide. That is the copper, the rare earths, and the nickel projects that we have in the pipeline that we think will come into production over the next five years. You can see that really driving growth. If you look at that from 2020 through to 2030, we think we're a really fast growth critical minerals business. You may ask, what's the gray bit on there, which I'm not referring to? That's really the history of this business. If you went back 10 years, we had one asset, which was a met coal royalty. That's really been the history of this business for many years.
The met coal rolls off and moves out of our royalty area because our royalty only covers part of the mine. It will move out of our royalty lands principally at the end of next year. That's why you can see it diminishing from 2020 to 2025 and very little in 2030. What we've really been doing is taking that met coal income and redeploying it to build this growing critical minerals business. That shaded gray section is, as I say, the historic business. The bit that we're really excited about in this year is that 2025 is the first year that we'll see the critical minerals component be larger in terms of revenue contribution than the met coal. We're really at a good inflection point at the moment.
We're seeing some real growth coming through in those assets that can take us up to that $45 million, $50 million in 2030 from the currently producing assets. We don't show growth beyond that. If we were to look at beyond that, and I'll talk about it in a moment when I show you the portfolio, there are assets which are really, really exciting, which will come on in the 2030s. We don't talk about that now because that's too far out to predict with any certainty. If we look here, we're just showing where we are in the valuation today to give you an overview for that. Last night, I think we closed on the OTCQX at about $1.05 a share. If you look at the analyst consensus for our producing assets, it's about $1.41.
When you back off the net debt, that gets you to more or less the value of our producing assets, a slight fraction more. Where the real opportunity is, and in fact, we sold a royalty called DUGB, which you can see in the highlight here last week. It's a long-dated development asset. It's gold, which is not a core commodity for us. We sold that, having had it in our portfolio for many years and carrying it at the book value of around $5 million. We sold that at a price of up to $20 million with $16.5 million upfront, which enabled us to pay off some debt immediately. About 13% of our net debt, we were able to pay down with that. That led shareholders to say, look, this is great. You pulled something out here which was not valued by the market.
We didn't even know you had this. What else is there in the portfolio? What we've done here is just show some of the items in the portfolio which are not really being given value by the market today and which we think have really material value. We'll talk through in the presentation some opportunities we have in the coming months to show that, just to have values or markers, if you like, as to the value of some of those projects. In the orange box, you've got the nearer-dated development assets. These are RISC 10 AV numbers. If you put your own RISC numbers, they'd be substantially higher. They include really tangible projects. Things like if you follow Capstone Copper, which many of you may be familiar with in North America, their Santo Domingo project, which is a development project moving rapidly towards an FID decision hopefully next year.
That will be worth potentially $30 million a year to us, a real large chunk of that growth that's coming through. That's something which we're not really getting any value for in the market at the moment. I'll talk through some of the others in a moment, but that's a good example of the type of project that is in our portfolio and not really valued. On the bottom right there, I've put some other things which aren't even in the analyst NAV at the moment. If we look at one of our producing copper royalties, something called Mantos Blancos, again, the Capstone Copper project, they have a phase two of that operation. It's a mine that's been producing for about 50 years, but they've got an expansion project they're looking at at the moment.
They're putting a study out next year which could see production increase by over 50%, and that's all covered by the royalty. Because they haven't completed that study yet and there's no real official resource estimates or anything like that, those numbers are not in that mine. The project is not valued by the analysts. Patterson Corridor East Uranium is another one. If you follow NexGen, you'll probably see their Arrow discovery, which is one of the most exciting uranium projects in the world today. Unfortunately, we don't have a royalty over that. Right next door to it, we have a royalty over something called Patterson Corridor East. This is the project which they've been drilling up in the last 18 months and having really, really, really strong results, spectacular actually drilling results.
We expect to see some firming up of that resource next year, which will then give the analysts the opportunity to include this in. These are some of the growth projects not even in there. It is suffice to say, we think it's quite a compelling opportunity to enter at the moment because there's quite a lot of value and upside that we think is there to be unlocked over the coming years. If we look at the balance of our portfolio, copper is very much at the heart of it. That's deliberate. Base metals now make up 80% of our NAV. Bulks and other, which is where the coal sits, is 9%. The coal is less than 10% of our NAV, even though it's been historically the majority of our income and is this year just under 50% of our revenue.
Base metals, say 50% copper, a bit of cobalt in there from Voisey’s Bay, Vale's project up in Canada. We have some nickel in there as well. Specialty metals and uranium is principally uranium, vanadium, and a little bit of rare earths as well, which is very topical at the moment given all the issues with global trade. We think that royalty companies should offer investors a de-risked exposure to the mining sector. We don't take much geographic risk. About 85% of our portfolio is OECD, and we consider Brazil a very well-established mining jurisdiction. That is to be low risk. A really key thing for a royalty company is on this top right bubble here. Our assets are positioned at the very lowest parts of the cost curve.
Over 80% are in the first or second quartile. That is really important because it means that whatever happens in a commodity price cycle, they're able to continue in production and continue generating revenue for this royalty, which is probably a 15- 20 year investment. That's how long most of these lifes of mines are. If we look at the balance of the portfolio in stage of development, previously, if I look back 10 years when the coal was the predominant asset, this would be about 85% producing. Now we think we've got quite a nice balance with 55% producing, 40% development, and about 6% early stage. What we'd like to do now really is further diversify because we think diversification is obviously the key to building up, spreading risk, and actually generating a premium rating for royalty companies.
For a company of our size, we've got some great operating partners. The operational risk is not that which is normally commensurate with a company of our market capitalization. We've got Vale, Capstone , BHP, Cameco, NextGen, all names just to pick a handful, which you'll be very familiar with in North America. There really are high-quality operations that we have exposure to. Whilst we're on those subjects, I'll just give you a quick overview of the portfolio as a whole. We have nine producing royalties at the moment, so quite a lot of diversity for a company of our size. The principal ones are probably the first three. Voisey’s Bay, which I'll talk about in a moment, is really ramping up at the moment and going through a period of rapid growth.
Mantos Blancos, where Capstone did some work in July last year to bring one of the mills up to nameplate capacity, which hadn't been achieved for some time. Since then, that mill has been producing at or above nameplate capacity for the last eight or nine months. We've seen as a result of that and high copper prices, a period of three consecutive quarterly record returns from a royalty perspective from Mantos Blancos. That one's going really well at the moment. Mimbula is a copper stream that we acquired earlier this year. We're delighted actually to be able to access a producing copper stream in this market. We paid $50 million for that. It's a mine that's in expansion, going from 14,000 tons per annum last year to 56,000 tons per annum by the end of 2026. That's a really, really good project with a high-quality operator.
They're a private company, but Moxico Resources is run by Chief Alan Davies, and his team there are very well regarded and excellent operators. Those are the three that generate a lot of the income and also will be generating that growth in that critical minerals that I showed on that slide a few moments ago, going from 2025 through to 2030. Development royalties, these are the ones that are coming through in the nearer term. Santo Domingo, I touched on. I'll talk about West Musgrave nickel copper project from BHP in a few moments. The other ones which we'll touch on in the presentation, probably Phalaborwa, the rare earth, which is, as I say, highly topical. We're looking for new flow from that in the near term.
I think you see for most of these projects, as you'd expect to see, we're replacing the coal, which was very short-dated, sort of short-dated cash flow. Cash flow there, the coal of number eight in the producing section had four years. You can see the rest of the mine lives here are very long-dated mine lives with the opportunity for probable extension and expansion beyond that. In the early stage, Patterson Corridor East I've mentioned. I won't dwell on that, but that's one we've talked about and we're really, really excited about. If you should choose to, there's a slide. I'll put this deck on the website. There's a slide in the appendix which goes into that in detail. What are the catalysts and what we've got to look forward to in the near term for our business?
I think in the near term, as I say, there's some real opportunities to demonstrate the value in some of these projects. I'll talk about Voisey’s Bay in a moment. I've touched on Mimbula and the brownfield expansion of that stream we acquired earlier this year. Mantos Blancos phase two, as I said, I've touched on that earlier on. That's the expansion of this existing copper project, a producing copper mine, which could see the over 50% growth. The study is expected there early next year, which will hopefully give the market the opportunity to take a view on the timeline and the resource estimates. Capstone are very good on their disclosure around that. Keep an eye on what Capstone say. Santo Domingo is a really important one, as I said a few moments ago. It's another Capstone project.
It's 25 km from a mine they have called Mantov erde, which they successfully brought into production around 18 months ago. Santo Domingo is very much the next project in mind for them. They're currently in the process of working out their financing partner, and they've talked about hopefully being in position to announce the partner during the course of Q3. Hopefully that's imminent. If not, certainly hopefully by the end of the year. That's an important landmark bringing in that looking for out of 30% partner to come in there into that project because then they'll be able to move forwards to FID. They are talking about the sort of engineering processes being ready to have FID and the project being FID ready from the middle of next year. There are three key markers for that. First of all, the partner.
Secondly, the FID hopefully in the middle of next year. Then you are looking at about two years to cash flow. We are really, really excited about that one. It is a great partner and a very good project. Phalaborwa is the rare earth I mentioned earlier on. This is quite a unique rare earth opportunity, actually. It is not actually a mining project. It is taking existing stacks from an old mining operation, and they have had the rare earth elements activated within them. It is actually just treating the stacks rather than actually doing any primary mining. As a result of that, it is one of the lowest cost rare earth development projects outside of China. That is what appealed to us when we entered this project last year. The team there at Rainbow Rare Earths are very well regarded within the industry.
At the start of last week, I actually had a really positive update on this project talking about the spec they were able to generate. It is a very high spec and high-quality product that is coming out there. With the DFS due at the end of this year, a definitive feasibility study for those that are not familiar with the mining jargon, that is again another landmark at a point where they can hopefully give some more value indicators and give a pathway towards first production, which could be as soon as 2027. That is one to keep a very close eye on in the coming months. On the medium term, what I would point out is possibly West Musgrave. This is a nickel copper project which we acquired in 2022. OZ Minerals was the operator at that point. It was FID ready.
They took it through FID, started construction, and then for various reasons I will not get into on this call, but due to the nickel market falling away and it being linked to a broader division within BHP, which had some loss-making nickel smelters, BHP took the decision last year to suspend all of its Western Australian nickel operations, including this project, which is 25% complete. They have said they will review that decision by February 2027. Mike Henry, the Chief Executive of BHP, has spoken about how West Musgrave actually breaks even and actually makes a strong return at current nickel prices. The product is around 45% copper and the upside is all copper. We think it is very, very low cost. We think it's actually on a standalone basis, a very attractive project.
For the first time recently, they talked, BHP also started to talk about the potential to divest of its Western Australian nickel units. That's something we'll keep a close eye on because if they were to do that, it's by no means guaranteed, but it's just something that they're exploring, they've said, that could see potentially a resolution to that and a return to construction ahead of the current timeline, which would be really positive for us. I talked a little bit about Voisey’s Bay. This has been a really key project for us. It's a Vale nickel mine up in Canada, and it has a cobalt stream, which we have the rights to along with Wheaton. When we look at the ramp-up of this project, it's the underground mine, which is the expansion of the underground mine, which we really came into this for.
This has been delayed somewhat over the years, over about 18 months behind schedule, probably. They've finally started to get onto this and are doing a great job now of ramping this mine up. We received about 150 tons of cobalt last year. You can see from here how this is growing. In H1, we received 140 tons. In H2, it's only been two months in H2 to date, and we've already received 140 tons in H2 to date. It's really progressing well. We've increased our guidance here to 365- 390 tons for the full year this year. It's moving very rapidly towards steady state, which it should achieve at some point during next year, at which point we get about 560 tons. We're really seeing strong growth here in volumes coming through.
It's an alloy-grade cobalt, which is really important when you look on the right-hand side here because the alloy grade gets a premium to the standard grade pricing. If you follow the cobalt market closely, then you probably don't, but the prices were at an all-time or a cyclical low at the start of this year. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which holds around 70% of the world's cobalt, actually banned cobalt exports for initially a four-month period and extended it to this month. That's had the impact on pricing that you can see in the chart there on the bottom right. They're evaluating what to do next for a longer-term solution to support prices. We're expecting some news on that very soon, which should hopefully maintain pricing at this level or push it higher. Alongside that, we're seeing other interventions in the cobalt market.
You may have seen the U.S. Department of Defense recently talk about tendering for $500 million of alloy-grade cobalt over the coming years. And Voisey’s Bay would be one of only four mines, I think, that would qualify for that tender. There are lots of things in terms of sort of government intervention as well, which we're seeing not just here, but across the rare earth space as well. If any of you have seen the deal the U.S. government did recently with MP Materials, that gives another example of how governments are getting more active in supporting industry and providing floor prices, which are above the spot price. If there's a read across to our rare earth project, again, it could be very encouraging. Very quickly, I talked at the start about competition.
This slide just shows you the level of competition in the precious metal space as opposed to the space that we operate in, the diversified critical minerals focus space. We feel that there are very few competitors, and most of the deals that we do, we do on a one-on-one basis. It's not the same as the precious case where there are huge amounts of competition for all the assets within that area. Very quickly, on the balance sheet, we did lever up to do the Mimbula transaction. We took on $50 million of additional debt to take our net debt at the end of June to $124.6 million. We sold this royalty a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago. When we adjust for that, that would be $108 million.
You can see on the right-hand side here, we show some illustrative year-end net debt scenarios for the next two years, as we see a lot of cash flow coming through. This year in particular, our cash flow will be second half weighted, as the coal royalty was not in our land in the first half of the year. It only came back into our land at the end of Q2. We'll have a big spell of that during Q3 and into Q4. We're very much H2 weighted this year, and we should see some aggressive deleveraging from this point onwards. We're well within all of our covenants, I should add, so we're not particularly under stress there. We've got a very good lending group in Scotia, RBC , and CIBC. The share structure is very clean. The key shareholders are South32, the mining company.
Then UK institutions, [ABA], Forth, and Schroders have large institutional positions. Good analyst coverage from four or five well-regarded analysts in the sector. The directors have been buying quite aggressively. Those are the amount of shares purchased in the last couple of years by our Chief Executive, our CFO, and other directors. They're definitely very much aligned with shareholders and big believers in the business. Finally, before I take questions, I think we'd say we are a very fast-growing critical minerals royalty company. The business model is proven, but we're applying it to a different commodity space than that's traditionally been done, which is in the precious metal space. We think it's a really good focus. There's more government focus on this. People are looking to stockpile, and they're just playing into the megatrends that we see going forwards.
The portfolio is really high quality for a company of our size. Good operators, good cost curve positioning. Growth profile looks very good, and we think it's a good attractive entry point. With that, I will pause for breath and go to questions. OK. We've got plenty of questions. Starting here. What do we look at? It says, thanks for the presentation. Given the large discounts for NAV and stronger financial position, would you look at share buybacks to close the gap to NAV? Thank you for that. It's a question we do get relatively frequently. I think we changed our capital allocation policy last year to focus very much on growth. We did sell a royalty and allocate some of that capital to a buyback in Q2 last year, which ran through to the middle of the year. I think our focus very much at the moment is deleveraging.
You can see the deleveraging profile I showed a few moments ago. We think if we can get that debt down, it does two things. One, it should release equity value. Two, it will free up capital for us to grow further. We're very much in growth mode at the moment. Whilst we do evaluate further buybacks, most of our shareholders are very supportive in us actually allocating that capital towards firstly deleveraging and then freeing up the capital to be able to grow and develop the drive of this business further. Why is it with Ecora trading at 0.5x PNAV? What factors do we believe are driving this discount? Are these fundamental market perception or macro-driven issues? Thank you. That's a very good question. I think part of there's a couple of reasons for that. I think the first two would be project-related to a certain extent.
With Voisey’s Bay being 18 months delayed and the coal transitioning away, I think that just led people to question, or will we have the cash flow income replaced by the time it rolls off? Voisey’s ramping up now has been a real positive, and the shares have rallied recently. The other thing was combined with those delays to Voisey’s was the pushback of the West Musgrave project, which is quite meaningful to us. That's about $20 million per year. That was in construction. We were hoping that right now we'd probably be 18 months away from first cash flow. That would have been a real catalyst for us to be talking about now. With them pushing that project out, it definitely impacted our equity. I think the subsequent transaction from Mimbula has helped because that plugs a lot of that gap.
I think the third component, and we knew this would be a contributory factor, was changing the capital allocation framework last year and going from a fixed dividend to a dividend that is a percentage of free cash flow. It meant that a lot of UK income funds who'd held this while the company was kind of a coal play and a regular dividend play at quite a high level, it meant they had to rotate out of the company. A lot of them told us it was the right thing to do strategically for the business, but they just couldn't hold us anymore at this point in time. The last year, we saw a lot of selling, reasonably indiscriminate selling. Unfortunately, that's passed through now. We feel we can put the register in place who support that sort of growth focus that we have going forwards.
We're starting to see a little bit more of that come through with the way the shares have performed more recently. Thank you. How will the sale of DUGB gold royalty and ongoing deleveraging efforts impact our net debt and financial flexibility over the next few years? I think I showed the net debt slide a few moments ago. You'll see I'll put it back up. It should come back up in a moment. There we go. You can see how we believe we'll delever over the next couple of years. By the end of this year, we think we'll actually be in a similar position to we were at the end of last year. That's having deployed $50 million into Mimbula. We think that's quite positive. We'll be very much focused, as I say, on deleveraging for two things. One, we think it releases equity value.
Two, it will free up capital. If we see any more transactions, we're focused very much at the moment on adding things that are either producing immediately, such as Mimbula, or with brownfield expansions, or are very close to production because we want the revenue at the moment rather than longer-dated assets. If we don't find those, we'll just happily continue to deliver. We think the more we can do that, then clearly the more flexibility we have to take on new transactions. We do have quite a lot of headroom against our facility where we sit today. What are the implications of emerging U.S. critical minerals policy? There's inclusion of copper and government financial cobalt and rare earths on our portfolio value and future growth.
I think I've touched on this a little bit during the presentation, but very briefly, I think it can only be a positive that we're seeing people intervene. The U.S. government is indirectly a shareholder in the rare earth projects I talked about that we're invested in through an entity called TechMet. They also have an interest in a nickel project in Brazil called Piauí, which is one of those that's contributing to that near-term growth. If the U.S. is focused on building strategic suppliers of some of these commodities, then we're well positioned. Hopefully, some of those projects are well positioned to benefit from that investment. I talked about cobalt and what could happen there with the cobalt.
If the Department of Defense continues with this procurement or this tender for $500 million and Voisey’s Bay is one of those mines, then clearly there's potential to, if we don't benefit directly, then for us to benefit by potentially the price being squeezed by us seeing such a high demand for such an amount of demand from the U.S. government for what is a relatively supply-constrained project. What's the significance of Ecora Resources having 80% of its assets in the lower half industry cost curve? How does it support future cash flow growth? The more margin we can have in a project, simply put, the more it can weather fiscal shocks within governments, the more it can wear cost increases, and that mine can stay in production.
Equally, if you're a nonprofit, and if we're investing for 20 years, we need to make sure we can weather the volatility in commodity prices across that period. Quite simply put, if you're at the top of the cost curve, you're one of the first mines that can potentially get shut in when those costs fall. If we're at the bottom of the cost curve, it just gives us more contingency that it can carry on through that period of time. Secondly, if it's a development project, then the developments that have the lowest cost will attract more capital and are more likely to be the first cabs off the rank. That's why we look at that very carefully. I'm just going to whiz through these last couple of questions. The anticipated timeline for bringing Phalaborwa into production, they're looking at kind of 2027, 2028 at the moment.
I think we'll get more from that when the DFS comes out later this year. That's a project which is moving very well and has had very positive updates recently. One left, and I've got about a minute. How does Ecora's focus on critical minerals royalties position the company to benefit from global megatrends like electrification, energy storage, and digital infrastructure? Very simply put, we get pure price exposure of being the royalty model. We don't get any exposure to operating costs or capital CapEx increases. Once we've given our capital, we then benefit from a rising price. That's what I think we'd expect to see. Those megatrends kick in and push commodities like copper demand up higher, which a lot of commentators expect the copper has a long way to go. That just drops straight to our bottom line, and we see pure margin expansion.
Whereas the operator, the mining companies themselves, often see cost curve and squeeze their margin for the royalty company after our initial investment. Any price increase, commodity price increase, just sees our margin expand. If we're exposed to those sorts of megatrends and they drive commodity prices up in our basket, then it will only be beneficial for us and our shareholders. I think I've just about completed the question on time. With that, I'll just say thank you very much to everybody for your time today. If you have anything else, please don't hesitate to reach out and contact us. Thank you very much for your attention. Have a good day.