Now it's high time to welcome our next speaker, who should be fairly familiar to the audience as he was up here. It's First Majestic Silver, a Canadian mining company that owns and operates silver and gold mines primarily in Mexico. You also develop your First Mint, an in-house mint that sells silver bullion, which I think is a brilliant combination. Keith Neumeyer, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thanks for coming to my presentation today. It's a nice time to be a mining investor, isn't it? Almost we're at $50 silver. Looks like it might happen in the next couple of days. $4,000 gold is obviously a pretty good place to be as a miner. I'm sure you're recognizing that as you go through everyone's presentations. This is a very tiny slide. I'm going to have to walk over here. On a revenue basis, we're the purest silver company in the world at 55% silver, 35% gold. The rest is in the form of lead and zinc. I put the company together 22 years ago, when silver prices were much lower. You know, I've been predicting triple-digit silver for, I think, 13 years now.
Somewhat ridiculed at the time, but I see that there are people now believing that we can actually see triple-digit silver, and I'm seeing others speak of much higher prices. I'll get in, you know, we do pay a dividend and, you know, we're very innovative, and I'll get into some details as we get through this presentation. You know, talking about silver, you know, you've been hearing a lot of people talk about silver, so I'm not going to waste your time in talking about too many details on silver. On the panel discussion yesterday, you saw me talking about the ratio, and the ratio to me is quite important. You know, financially, in the financial markets, you know, we're trading in the low 80 to 1 to gold, which is completely nonsensical to me.
The miners worldwide are mining for every one ounce of gold, only seven ounces of silver. We've been in multiple deficits, and you can see the production from the miners has been pretty well flatlined for the last 10 years. The mining sector cannot produce more silver. Simple as that. There are all kinds of reasons why. We don't probably have enough time to get into all the reasons, but it comes down to price, governments, permitting, the length of time it takes from the drill bit to getting a mine into production is around 15- 20 years. It takes a lot of time. The juniors that you're following are exciting and all that. We always look at the junior sector, but for us, we're a producer. We're one of the largest silver producers in the world, third largest in the North American market.
We've obviously one of the more well-known stories in the space, but I've been talking about silver for a long time, and we've had five consecutive years of deficits. In order to fill this void, you would need 10 First Majestics just to fill the deficit. That's not going to happen. The only solution is higher silver prices because the mining sector needs to be motivated to build more silver mines. As we electrify the planet worldwide, we need silver. Everything you do here, everything you do every single day of your life requires silver. Your refrigerator, your oven, your microwave oven, your coffee machine, all the appliances that you take for granted, all the little gadgets that we walk around with.
Nuclear energy, no one talks about nuclear energy, but the renaissance that is currently happening around the world, the building of nuclear power plants now finally to solve some of the green issues that we have, we need nuclear energy. Nuclear power plants consume a ton of silver. There's a lot of demand coming that we aren't aware of today, and this deficit will not improve until we see much higher sustainable silver prices for decades to come, because that's how long it takes for the mining sector to make decisions to build new mines. That's not going to happen anytime soon. We're likely the most leveraged stock in the silver space to the price of silver.
You can go back 22 years and look at how our stock trades when silver moves, and it is one of the best performing stocks in the space when silver starts to move, which we're now seeing. We've got four producing mines, which I'll get into in a little bit. I've been told to only do this presentation for 15 minutes, which for a company our size is a little bit challenging as we've got a lot to talk about, but I'll try to keep it brief. We're also the only mining company on the planet that has its own mint, and there's a slide coming up, and I'll talk a little bit about the mint when we get there. ESG, something that obviously many investors are aware of and sometimes concerned about.
I know Eric Strand owns our shares because he likes what we're doing in this part of our business. The mining sector, as you should know, invented ESG. We didn't call it ESG 10 years ago or 15 years ago. We called it CSR, Community Social Responsibility. It's been rebranded and so on over the last few years. Even from the early days from my predecessor company in Africa, you know, we were the employer. Today in Mexico, these four mines are the only job in these communities. We do everything. I'll get into that as we get through this presentation. If the mayor in town has a leaky pipe on Main Street, he phones the state, good luck. That state's not going to show up, right?
He phones the mine manager and says, "Hey, look, I need this issue solved." Whether it's schools, uniforms, baseball fields, water infrastructure, electrical infrastructure, we do everything. We are the town. Without us, the town does not exist. We take that responsibility very, very seriously. We just put out our Q3 numbers last night. I'm not sure if there are shareholders here that saw those news releases, but pretty darn good quarter, record silver for the quarter. I'll get into some details as we get through the presentation as well. This year we'll produce somewhere around 32 million silver-equivalent ounces. As I said earlier, 55% of that is silver, 35% of that is gold. Share costs are about $20, all-in sustaining. We're cash flowing nicely at current metal prices, as you can imagine. Our CapEx for the year, now we did do a major acquisition in January.
The Los Gatos operation was put into our portfolio after that acquisition was news released back in September of 2024. That's why you see the bump up in CapEx there because we added a fourth mine. That's a pretty substantial investment. We have 30 drill rigs currently active through our four operations, plus our development project in Nevada. Exploration is pretty important for any mining company, of course. Their job is to replace ounces. The 30 million ounces that we're mining this year, their job is to make sure they find 30 million ounces so the life of mine is stable. That's what we look for. That's success if they hit that target. If they do better than that, then that's a win. Sometimes they do better, and that's a good thing. Here, this compares us to some of the others in our peer group.
You can see the four primary silver companies listed in the U.S. and Canada. On a purity basis, we are number one. We ended the June 30th cash balance of over $510 million. We'll be putting our financial statements out in early November to bring in Q3. I can tell you that Q3 was quite a good quarter, and cash, the treasury continually grows. Our revenues this year, 2025, will exceed $1 billion. That's a pretty big milestone for us as a business. 6,000 employees, primarily in Mexico, so it's a great achievement for the business. Of course, that's a lot to do with the metal price. We're very lucky to have four mines all in neighboring states. The synergies that this brings to the business and the cost savings that this brings to the business is quite dynamic and very beneficial.
If a motor breaks down at one of the mines, it's a simple phone call. They may have to wait a month to get that brand new motor, yet they can just phone one of the neighboring mines, and in one of the warehouses, it's very unlikely that one of the mines doesn't have a part that one of the other mines needs. It's great to have that diversity across the portfolio. We can move people across the different mines, which we do on a regular basis depending on certain issues that may come up. We can move talent around. It also gives us huge buying power when it comes to purchasing tires, purchasing equipment, purchasing cyanide, whatever the case may be. Because of our size, we can garner pretty darn good contracts, and that helps us maintain a relatively low-cost business.
There's our mint in Nevada as well, and our corporate offices, as you can tell, are in Vancouver, Canada. Los Gatos, this was purchased in, as I said, January. We paid $970 million for it. It increased the business by about 30%. It took us from about 20 million ounces to a little over 30 million ounces. It's a great mine. It's a joint venture with a company in Japan called Dowa. We contribute 70% of the total production. The mine produces about 15 million silver-equivalent ounces. 70% of that is silver. We contribute, or we take, approximately 10 million of those ounces to our own books. It's a really great add-on to our business. It's only been in operation for a few years.
This is probably our only acquisition in the 22-year history of First Majestic where we didn't have to do anything because the mill was brand new. This mill cost $350 million to build, and it's only been running for about three years. For us to buy an asset like this that we had to do nothing, was pretty good. We did cut off the head and put our own people in place. Other than that, some of the systems, of course, they were a single asset company. We had to put SAP in place and all of our corporate policies, and that took time, of course, but now it's all been integrated, and it's cash flowing extremely nicely and adding nicely to the business. Geologically, apparently, if I use this thing, it works. Let me see if this works. Oh, yeah. See that little black square there?
This is an enormous property, and this is what we like when we buy stuff. We want big, big, chunky assets. This is 103,000 hectares in size. That's a monster asset. This will take a lifetime to explore. It is so big. The reason why I'm pointing out that black box is because that's where the entire life of mine is, in that little square in this huge, huge property. This mine today has a 10-year mine life, but that hardly represents the potential of this property and the future of this operation. This mine will be producing for decades into the future, and we are very actively drilling this area. We've had some news come out recently that's showing some of our drill intercepts, and we're adding ounces. As I said, this is going to be producing for decades.
Going on to Santa Elena, this was added to our portfolio in 2015. At the time, it was only producing 2.5 million ounces. Recoveries, and on my panel, I spoke yesterday about recovery rates for silver. I'm not sure if you heard that, but recoveries in silver are more difficult than recoveries in gold. We have an extremely good metallurgical team that is very adept at adopting new technologies and innovation. Over time, we were able to increase production here to current levels of 10 million ounces a year, up from two and a half in 2015. Recoveries today are 80%-85%, so it's a pretty good achievement for our team to achieve those levels. Again, it's one of our, it is actually our most profitable operation. It's running at about 60% gold, 40% silver, in the form of Dory bars. It's a great asset.
Again, big chunky property, 102,000 hectares in size. We've had a huge amount of discoveries here. You know, as you can see the size of the property. One thing I should point out, I'm sure many of you know, Coeur Mining, they purchased that little black box, which is right in the middle of our entire land package because we own all the colored properties. That black box is what Coeur paid $1.7 billion for, I guess about six months ago. That was the SilverCrest acquisition that I'm sure many of you are aware of. You compare that to Los Gatos, where we paid $970 million for a much larger property with much higher potential. If you look at it on a cost basis, we did quite well with that Los Gatos acquisition.
Talking about discoveries, the Ermitanio, which you can see on the top there, that right there, Ermitanio, that was discovered in 2016. We developed it, finally got it in the middle in 2021, and that's been the main driver of growth at Santa Elena since 2021. That's what allowed us to get up to the current production levels of around 10 million ounces a year. Lo and behold, we discovered two additional major discoveries. For a geologist in his career, it's quite unusual to have two discoveries in a single year. Many geologists go a lifetime without a discovery. For our geological team to have two discoveries, and this is Navidad. It's still early days. We put a resource estimate out in March of this year, and our geo has estimated about 30 million silver-equivalent ounces in the ore body.
The metallurgy is fantastic, so the recoveries are going to be great. We're now just starting in the next quarter or so to run a ramp down here. I think the next slide. Okay, this is the second discovery. If you see here—no, sorry. Oh, it's not working. Anyways, if you look at that topographical map there, you see that the Santo Niño, where the Santa Elena mine is, that's where the mill is. Santo Niño was a discovery that was just made, which is this one here. Navidad is the one further down. We're going to build a ramp from the Santa Elena mine into Santo Niño and then into Navidad. That ramp will take some time. It is a lot, it's approximately a little over around two kilometers. It takes time to build that ramp, but that's the future of this operation.
Over the next two to three years, you'll see these two other new mines come into the mill, and that's going to really positively impact Santa Elena going forward. The life of mine here will be very, very good, and the grades are outstanding, which is fantastic. San Dimas, we bought this mine in 2018. This mine's been around for 250 years. It's one of the most well-known gold-silver mines in Mexico. It's the largest gold-silver mine in the state of Durango. It's had a great Q3, which is really nice to see. Have a look at the news release for further details. This mine should be producing even more than it's currently producing, and we're working on ways to accomplish that. We're looking for some upside at San Dimas over the next couple of years. Large land package, and a lot of discoveries.
We put out a news release just last summer of some pretty impressive intercepts that we've had here. Life of mine is staying stable or potentially even increasing over time. It's a cash-flowing, very profitable operation, and it's great to have such a strong asset as part of our portfolio. La Encantada, we bought this mine in 2005. Back in the day, it was a 5 million ounce producer. Today it's about a 3 million ounce producer. It's a bit of a more difficult operation. It is our smallest mine, so it doesn't really have a huge impact on us. The nice thing about La Encantada is it's 100% silver. There are very few mines in the world that are 100% silver, as you probably heard throughout this conference.
It's a doré producer, and it's just a nice little addition to our portfolio to bring our purity up to the current levels of 55%. Our mint, we've been selling silver to the retail public market. Many of you maybe even have some of our silver, I'm not sure, but I got quite frustrated because we were using third-party mints. We would be sending our refined bars to these mints, and they'd be sitting on their floors for months. I'd say, like, what's going on? We have sold-out signs on our e-commerce website, and we're getting complaints from your mining company. How can you be out of silver? It was frustrating for me. In 2022, I just pulled the trigger and I said, look, we got to build our own mint. It was a different business, it's not mining.
We had to hire the people, we had to find a location, we had to figure all that out. It took some time, we had to buy the equipment and all that kind of stuff. We got it up and running in March of 2024. It's a little bit, you know, 18 months running now. September, this past September, we had a record month, which was pretty exciting to see. It's doing well. It's cash flowing, it's making money. We're selling silver about $2- $4 over spot, depending on the product. Currently, 7% of our production is going through the mint, which is pretty exciting. Our target by the end of the year is to get it up to 10% of our total production going through the mint. We have other goals as well, but short term, that's our goal.
If we can get 10% of our production through this mint, obviously it adds profitability to our business. It's an exciting part of our business as well. It's really nice to be doing this for investors in the space. Our premiums are pretty well lower than anyone else, you know, because if you're a mint, you know, and you want to produce a product like this, you're going to have to go buy silver. You got to find it somewhere, you got to buy it, then you got to fabricate it, which has cost to it. You're seeing these mints selling their ounces at $5, $7 above spot. You look at our website and we're selling ounces, you know, three bucks over spot or whatever it is, you know, thereabouts. We could do that because we're shipping directly from our mines in Mexico.
It goes into Asahi's refining to get into 1,000 ounce commercial bars. We still own the silver, of course. They just refine it for us and it gets shipped in armored trucks up to the mint. Lo and behold, we produce these products. It's pretty exciting. Our financial strength, you know, as I said earlier, we've got over $500 million in the bank. Pretty nice place to be. Look for November financial statements that come out for the third quarter. I'm sure you'll be pleased as investors to see the current cash balances in the business. We don't need money, which is a pretty good place to be. Our top 10 shareholders are listed there. Most of them are ETFs and our stock trades like water.
I don't know if you really watch our stock, but you know, it's the most liquid mining stock, you know, maybe it's too much to say in the world, but it's crazy liquid, trades, you know, I think yesterday it was over, you know, like 25 million shares or something of that it trades. It's an extremely liquid stock. The institutions love it, and of course the ETFs like it as well. Analysts have recently upgraded us. We got upgraded by TD just recently. All the banks actually increased their target price on us over the last couple of weeks. It's nice to see the support coming in from the banking sector. Our dividend, you know, it's something that is likely to increase over time. I can't promise that, but currently we do 1% of our total revenues.
The idea there was to fix it to our revenue, which is obviously fixed to silver prices. $10 million will be spent, approximately a billion in revenue, $10 million in dividends being paid out this year. There's a potential of that increasing in the short term. Future catalysts, you know, everyone's watching our financials really and exploration results. We try to come out with exploration as much as possible, but we're not an exploration company. People don't generally buy us for drill results. If we do find something interesting, we do, you know, once or two or three times a year, we put out drill results. Look for just continued improved balance sheet, continued improved financial statements throughout the business.
The 10 rules of investing in silver, you know, it's not sure if you want to take time to read them all, but, you know, I put a silver company together because I was, you know, when I looked at the, I came from a copper company, and I was there, you know, building that business and left. Then, decided to put a silver company together just because, you know, the supply demand fundamentals back in 2022 were pretty dynamic. Compare that to 2025, and it's multiples of the reasons today why you want to own silver compared to when I put the company together, you know, 22 years ago. None of these rules have changed since then, except the demand has picked up substantially, just from industry. 60% of silver produced goes into industry. That's it for my presentation. I see I got six minutes, wow.
Thank you for that. Very interesting and invigorating. I think we have one or two silver bugs in the audience. Raise your hand and we'll give you the mic. I just have to expose a little bit of my ignorance here because you said production was up 96%. That wasn't due to the CapEx being up because you have increased production by getting more mines on stream, or is that the case?
That comparison is from the same quarter one year ago.
Yeah, exactly.
That would only have the three operating mines in it. It wouldn't include Los Gatos.
No.
The major increase is really the Los Gatos acquisition.
This means that you brought up more silver from the ground.
By adding a fourth mine.
Okay. Could we extrapolate that? It's a pretty decent increase. How much can you tell the market there?
We are expanding that. I should have talked about the two mill expansions that are underway. The Santa Elena is running around 3,300 tons right now. We'd like to get it up to about 3,500 tons. Los Gatos is running around 3,500 tons right now. We'd like to get it up to 4,000 tons. The CapEx for 2026 will be included in our budget. We put out our budgets in January of each year. Watch for that news in January.
It looks quite positive, I would say. I'm just watching here, but every metric that you brought forward here, the underlying business and your cash position and the demand, it seems like all the stars are aligned. Is there anything that will keep you up at night? You seem like you're in the sweet spot now.
It is mining. You know, mining, dealing with Mother Nature. The mines are doing well right now and obviously prices are doing good as well. It's nice to see, you know, three of the four mines improving. Throughput's increasing, production's increasing, and to have that happen as well as silver prices going up, it's the best of both worlds. It is mining, so there's always stuff happening.
You sleep good at night.
I sleep fine.
Los Gatos, you said it was a low-cost mine, but it's also an underground. Is the low cost due to the fact that you more or less bought a ready mine, or could you define low cost versus high cost?
It's, you know, look at, all of us, cash costs are about $18. That includes La Encantada, which is dragging that number up a little bit. We're always looking for ways to maintain our cost structure. There's always influences on our costs. Energy costs are a big one. With oil prices on the weak side, that's helped us when buying tires, cyanide, all the reagents, ammonia, all the inputs that we use are quite stable. It's nice to see. Los Gatos is a big mine. It has good grades as well. Grade helps. Grade doesn't affect cost, but it's just a good operation all the way around.
You touch upon the cost side and fuel and so on. I remember during the previous, particularly the copper boom, all of a sudden, everything exploded like a tire for one of the trucks could go from $5,000- $50,000 or whatever. It was quite astonishing, I would say. You haven't seen any signs of that as you are a heavy producer. Do you see any cost increase from the sandwiches of the world or the cat?
Yeah, no, not really. I remember in the run-up from 2009- 2011, we did see a lot of inflation, you know, because I think it happened so quickly.
Yeah, okay.
I think the supply chain, including Sandvik, because Sandvik costs went up by 15% over that period of time. I remember that specifically because we were buying equipment at the time. We have not seen that here. I think the supply chain was more prepared this time around. It's, you know, lead times on equipment isn't that bad, really. It's, yeah, we're in a pretty good market.
If we summarize First Majestic Silver, you're one of the few pure silver plays, and obviously silver is booming. You also have a dividend policy because you produce and sell. Give us one or two milestones to look for next year.
I think, you know, getting our revenues over $1 billion, that's a pretty darn good milestone. You know, getting the treasury over $500 million was a big achievement as well. I think we've done quite well. You know, our acquisition strategy over the last 20 years has paid off. We're always looking for M&A opportunities. You know, we have a whole team of professionals in-house that scour the planet looking for good assets. We've got a long list, but, you know, I built this company through acquisition. That's not going to change.
No, okay.
We're always got our eyeballs open, but, you know, keeping our costs down, increasing production, and just keeping, you know, improvements through technology. Now with AI coming in, you know, there's further improvements. I know our geological team is using AR right now, and it's been quite helpful for them.
It will continue to be a busy place. Keith, an absolute pleasure.
Great.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Keith.