Executive Director of Arctic Minerals, a Nordic mineral explorer and developing company that focuses on discovering and advancing mines of copper and critical metals in Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
Thank you, Kalle.
The stage is yours.
All right, firstly, welcome to Stockholm. Congratulations to Nordic Funds and Mines. I think it's been a fantastic show so far, very professional, and I really enjoyed the location. My name is Peter George. I'm a 30-plus year mining veteran, I guess I am nowadays. I'm one of the very few mining engineers around that was fortunate enough to start my career in Sweden. Thirty years later, I'm still here with a whole bunch of different international experience in the middle. For those of you that know me well, you know that I am an Australian. You can probably tell by the accent, but I'm also a dual citizen with Sweden as well. I think the Aussie in me is I can't really help myself at this time of the day.
I'd like to really stir up a little bit of trouble, I think, with a couple of comments that I'd like to make. I think this is a really unusual conference, pitching exploration and mining projects to a Swedish investment community. That's a bit of an out-there concept, I think. Let's be fair, you guys, you've been more interested in investing millions into bloody apps for iPhones and technical things over the last 20 years than in the mining industry, much to my irritation. Not only that, but the Swedish investment community has really bought into the European myth that mining is bad for the environment, bad for the community.
This has resulted in over 50 years of underinvestment in the European mining industry to the point where we actually import, for those of you who don't know, we import over 50% of our copper concentrate to feed our copper smelters within Europe. An awful lot of that is coming from places like South America. If you don't understand what a copper concentrate is, that's actually less than 30% metal content for the most part. In other words, we're importing 70% shit from the rest of the world. From an environmental perspective, that doesn't make a great deal of sense, if you ask me. On that, I didn't get to see too many investors' presentations yesterday, but I did get to see Rob McEwen's presentation. Congratulations, Rob, fantastic presentation and very jealous for all your success.
I have to admit that by the end of it, I was starting to get a little bit pissed off. I wasn't sure why I was annoyed or pissed off, to be honest, at that stage, but I probably dismissed it before I went to bed, thinking that I was just a bit jealous of Rob's success and all these sorts of things. I went to bed, woke up at 2:00 o'clock this morning, probably from whatever, having a couple too many beers last night, and I realized why I was annoyed. That's basically, you know, these guys in South America, they're spending a fortune on building a biosphere for their projects over there. I realized that why I was upset was the fact that we have the best biosphere in the world here. We call it Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Think about that just for a minute.
We live in a beautiful part of the world up here. As Europeans, we've naively allowed ourselves to, you know, our once flourishing mining industry to wither on the vine for the most part. Like I said, like investing 70% crap from outside of the EU and then having to pay those companies for them to build a biosphere in the middle of nowhere. I think that's the definition of madness, is really to keep doing the same thing and hoping that you'll get a different result. I think it's time that Europe woke up to itself and started to invest in itself. I believe that it begins with our primary producers, such as us in the mining industry.
Now that I've probably alienated half of the fellow presenters here, I think I have the perfect company for the investment community and the European investment community to put your hard-earned euros, crowns, francs, or whatever euro flavor of currency that you use. Let's take a drink. Arctic Minerals. Here we are up here. I won't use the slides too much. We really are a truly Nordic explorer and developer of copper, silver, gold, and other critical metals right in your backyard. Just a quick bit of history. Arctic's on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market, have been since 2012. Don't bother looking into the history. Didn't do an awful lot for 10 years. I got involved in October last year.
We did a reverse takeover of the company, rolled in a couple of new projects, changed out the management, changed out the board, and have had a really big year in the last 12 months. Like I said, the new board and management, very, very experienced. Perhaps I will roll into that. The board has significant Nordic and international experience. You might not recognize a few guys in there. I've got a lush Erik Aaro over there, a former Managing Director of LKB. Myself, six years working for Boliden. Erik, 17 years working for Boliden. He was their Chief Geologist and had six major discoveries in his own right. Peter Walker, the Krister Söderholm. These are the guys that discovered Kevitsa, sold it through to First Quantum, which is now, of course, was on-sold to Boliden, is now an operating asset for them.
Lastly, I've got Robert Berhets in here as well, and he's an important man. I've known Robert for 30 years. On two occasions, he's taken companies' market capitalizations very similar to Arctic Minerals AB today and engineered a sale of the company within four to five years, one for $1 billion and another one for $600 million . We have an awful lot of experience within the organization in being able to take companies from very small market capitalizations into very large market capitalizations. Our flagship project that we have within Arctic, sorry, I'll just scroll through a couple of these, is our Hennes Bay Copper-Silver Project based in the amazing biosphere of Dalsland, down there in about an hour and a half northeast of Gothenburg. Pretty amazing project, actually. It was 14,000 m we put into it back in the 1970s, 1980s by the Swedish state, SKB.
It really hasn't done anything for the last 50 years. Not too many people realize that there is a project down there at a historic resource of around about 20 million tons at 1% copper equivalent. We got hold of it back in 2023. They've gone through all the core, reassayed, got some fantastic reconciliations, handed all the data over to our independent JORC experts over in Australia. In March this year, came out with a 55 million ton of 1% copper equivalent resource in the heart of Dalsland there. We believe that's just a starter resource as far as we're concerned. We have another five prospects that sit just outside of the project. We believe that we're going to quite quickly be able to bring those up into JORC compliance once we start drilling. What have we done? We've just completed a significant MMT, geophysical survey over the area.
We brought expert geophysics out from Canada. I think that they're working for District as well. Really a new geophysical technique which allows us to see down to about 1,000 meters. Initial results coming back, our ore bodies are just lighting up. We're really excited to get the final results out of that, which is really going to help us in our forward planning for our drilling going forward. We've submitted our plans for 4,000 meters worth of drilling, which doesn't sound like an awful lot, but Hennes Bay is a sedimentary host that's trying to form copper deposit, very similar to the copper shifer. We believe with a very small amount of drilling, we can add significant tonnage to Hennes Bay. My aim is to get it up to the 150 million- 200 million ton mark quite quickly within the next couple of years.
We just completed an underground mining study. This one here that was done by Deswik. They demonstrated that we can split the Dingelvik part, which is just where the starter 55 million ton sits. We split that up into four declines. All four declines will be in ore from surface as compared to the copper shifter, which is down, I think they're mining around 1,200 m today. Room and pillar mine underground, quite a standard sort of method that's being used, but huge potential upside. Like I said, we'll be expecting the MMT survey data back in the next few weeks. Hopefully, that will also give us a whole bunch of new targets where we can again expand our resources up to the 150 million- 200 million tons quite quickly. We're submitting more drilling plans once we get that information through.
Given this is an investors' conference and not a technical conference, I'm not going to bore you with too many more slides on all that sort of stuff. I think, as mentioned, we've restructured, we've recapitalized, and we've sharpened our focus with regards to our flagship project at Hennes Bay. We currently have 43.3 million shares on the register. I think there's another 3 million shares to be added to that from some warrants that came in. We had some warrants attached with the capital raise that we did back in October last year. We raised SEK 12 million. We raised another SEK 17.5 million in June. Like I said, the warrants came in last week for about another SEK 10 million. We're actually quite well funded with a bit over SEK 20 million in the bank, which is quite sensational for a tough market for junior equities.
That money will be what we need to do the drilling that we want to do in the next program. Really looking forward to another busy 12 months. A little bit more detail around our shareholder base. Our top 20 control 70% of the company. I'm a 9.5% shareholder myself, together with Erik and Robert. It's a very tightly held stock. I think even the top 86 shareholders control 88% of the company. There's really only about 6 million pieces of paper floating around that I don't know personally. From that point of view, it's a perfect scenario for us as we start to build. What more? What I also tell all my investors is that we're on a five-year journey here with Hennes Bay. We plan to be construction ready in about five to six years' time.
Might be ambitious, but I think we'll have numerous milestones to achieve along the way, which we fully expect to be re-rated each time we achieve one of these. A classic example of that was when we put out our maiden JORC-compliant resource in March of this year. We flew from SEK 2.4 up to SEK 15.5. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump came out two days later and hit us all with the tariffs. The share price has just been going backwards a little bit since then. I think it shows the potential for what is possible with Arctic as we move through the different milestones. A good example perhaps for those that are used to investing in the Swedish market, I quite often like to compare myself, or ourselves, I should say, to Boliden.
They've been extremely successful over the last five, six years, moving their company from a SEK 200 million market capitalization up to about SEK 2 billion market capitalization, going through exactly the same milestones as what we have to do over the next five years. Very similar grade. I think ours is probably about 10%- 12% higher. They started five, six years ago at about 45 million tons, currently sitting at about 105 million tons. As I've demonstrated, as I mentioned earlier, we expect to blow through that quite quickly up to the 150 million- 200 million tons and have anywhere up to 5 million ton per annum style operation coming out from a room and pillar mine sometime in the near future, hopefully. I think we're starting to run out of time. I'll start to finish up there.
Do yourself a favor, check out Arctic Minerals, ARCT on the Nasdaq . We've got the right team. We've got the right projects. We're in the right commodities. Copper is where it's at. Obviously, we have a significant boost there with our silver. I haven't mentioned it, but we also have a significant amount of gallium, germanium, vanadium, and rare earth metals within the project. I don't need it from an economic perspective, but politically, everybody here knows how important those are, especially from a European perspective. Thank you very much. Please come by and meet us at our booth.
Thank you for that. Now we have the question here, so just raise your hand. I will kick off with one question. If one has followed Arctic Minerals AB over the year, there's been a lot of press releases, which have surprised the market.
You mentioned the share price rise there. Did the findings in the Hennes Bay Copper-Silver Project surprise you? It surely surprised the market and was much better than anyone expected. The reason why I ask is that you refer to new technology and also if we look at the knowledge that you carry around. How much of a surprise was it?
The result wasn't a surprise because we had a pretty good indication quite early on. I think the response from the market was very interesting. You have a look on the Stockholm market. We have less than 10 companies in the material sector. Compare that to the ASX, I think there's like 2,500. We're a, and the ASX would be a very small fish in a very big pond, whereas here we're just small fish in a very small pond. Was I surprised at how the market reacted? Yes, I was. Were we ready for it? No, we weren't. We've done a lot of work in building our investor network and continuing to move through those different milestones as we move through. The next year is going to be even busier, I think.
We had a question. Yes?
Yes, thank you. Nothing like an Aussie to debunk a few myths. Thank you for that. My question was just at the end there, you mentioned the political situation with Critical Minerals. I was curious if you could say anything about whether you have any tailwind from European efforts, Swedish efforts, Business Sweden. Do they reach out to you and get you involved in things, or have you reached out to them? Just a flavor there would be useful.
Look, like I said, my experience in Sweden started in 1995 with Boliden for five years. I've never seen Sweden as bullish towards the mining industry as what it is today. I've never even seen both sides of politics, the left and the right, actually agree with each other that they love mines. There's been a definite change in politics over here. Of course, you back that up with the European Critical Raw Materials Act. How that's going to impact us, I don't know. I mean, the purpose of it is supposedly to speed up the permitting process. I'll believe it when I see it. We're driving our own agenda in that regard while keeping a very close eye on all of that. I think as far as Sweden, the Nordics, we're trying to lead the way in Europe with regards to what's happening.
We recognized a few years ago, I think, that we couldn't rely upon China. We couldn't rely upon Russia. Now, of course, the Americans have come in with a tariff. We definitely have to look after ourselves. I think the public perception is changing to that effect.
We have the last question there.
During the old times, it was a pure exploration company. You intend to build the mine. Is that it?
Look, I'm a mining engineer by profession. I've built mines, built companies my entire career. If we have to do that, we have to do that. I have no problem in taking it all the way through. We haven't really thought that far. We've given ourselves this five-year timeframe to get us into construction ready. If we have to take it into construction, more than prepared to do that. I sort of put a bit of a question mark on that because I don't think that we'll be allowed to get that far. I think that there's one of the big boys that's going to come along and take us out before we get to that stage. If they don't, we have a poor market for a few years and we'll just continue moving through the milestones and we'll start constructing in hopefully five or six years.
Interesting. One should watch the space. I assume you will have an equally busy next year coming up. Thank you, Peter.
Thank you.