Good morning. Thank you all for joining. We're so pleased to have Scott K. Parsons, a Senior VP Corporate Development. He's a geologist by training and a wonderful spokesman for Alamos Gold, who's going to bring us up to speed on the plan to get to 900,000 ounces or better. Thank you.
Thank you, John. I appreciate the introduction. I have to admit, I'm not a geologist. But we do have another Scott Parsons that works at Alamos, who's our VP of Exploration, which certainly adds to some confusion. But he is our geologist and a very good one. I am going to be touching on some of the successes we've had on the exploration front through this presentation. That is certainly more attributable to our other Scott Parsons and his team. Thank you for having us once again. It's great to be back. We truly appreciate your long-term support of Alamos as well as the industry.
Today, I'm going to be providing you with an overview of our recent history, how we've been able to consistently create long-term value from within, and how we expect to ultimately get to a run rate of approximately producing one million ounces per year. I'm going to be making some forward-looking statements throughout this presentation. Please do review our cautionary notes. I'll start with an overview of Alamos and our strategy. First and foremost, we're a gold producer. We're a diversified intermediate gold producer. Above all that, we're a really strong business. If you look at our financial metrics, I think we stack up well relative to any sector. We're also a growth company. We're currently producing at a run rate of 600,000 ounces per year.
Through the completion of the phase three expansion we have underway at Island Gold, as well as development of our Lynn Lake project, we expect to take our longer-term production rate up to 900,000 ounces per year into the latter half of 2028. Above and beyond that, we're also working on an expansion study of the Island Gold District that we think ultimately takes our consolidated production up to approximately one million ounces per year. All this growth is fully funded internally. In fact, we're generating positive free cash flow over and above that reinvestment and growth. All that growth is also lower cost. If you look at our cost profile currently, our all-in sustaining costs are expected to average in the neighborhood of $1,300 per ounce this year. That's already well below the industry average, which is currently sitting north of $1,600 per ounce. It's climbing.
We're already a lower-cost producer. As we bring on this low-cost production growth from Island Gold and Lynn Lake, we expect our all-in sustaining costs to decrease by about 8% over the next couple of years to sub $1,200 per ounce by 2027 and decrease further still into 2028 once Lynn Lake is online towards something in the neighborhood of $1,100 per ounce. Already a low-cost producer, and we're going to see our costs continue to decline. Another key element of our story is we look to de-risk the business any way possible. We're a conservatively run company. It starts with focusing on really high-quality assets. We run a very clean balance sheet. Throughout most of our history, we've had little to no debt. That's the case today. We have a small amount of debt, but we're in a net cash position.
We're generating free cash flow. Seeing that cash balance continue to grow. In short order, we'll look to pay off the remnants of that debt. The other aspect of de-risking the business is focusing on operating in safe jurisdictions. That is where we are today. 90% of our net asset value is supported by our Canadian assets. That is anchored by long-life assets, the Island Gold District, Young-Davidson, and Lynn Lake. Collectively, between them, you're looking at average mine lives of 20 years with excellent exploration upside that we fully expect is going to extend the lives of those operations a lot further than that. We have been a significant outperformer over the past three and a half years.
Over that time frame, we're up about 250%, which has absolutely eclipsed the performance of the price of gold, the various gold equity ETFs, and the S&P 500 itself. It's not any one thing that's driving this outperformance. It's not one catalyst, one period of time. It's been a sustained outperformance over that time frame. It's really a collection of attributes that in aggregate are unique to Alamos. Again, it starts with having those really high-quality assets, having those assets concentrated in Canada, giving us one of the lowest political risk profiles in the sector, having high-return growth in an industry that's lacking good quality growth opportunities, the fact that we can fund that growth internally and generate free cash flow over and above that reinvestment in growth, a low-cost profile that's declining in an industry that's facing rising costs.
have got an excellent track record of hitting our targets over the longer term, so consistent execution. I think the piece that is most important in terms of the sustainability of that strong performance is the last point there. It is that ongoing value creation. I think we have consistently demonstrated that through ongoing exploration success, taking that success on the exploration front and putting that growth and reserves and resources into new projects and/or expanding and optimizing our existing operations. Smart and creative acquisitions like what we did with Magino last year is helping grow our overall asset base. That is really underpinning our rising valuation. This is our report card with respect to M&A. M&A has been a key element in how we have grown the company and where we are today.
It's also been one of the many ways that we've been able to consistently create value. Our blueprint with respect to M&A has been simple, focus on high-quality assets with upside, pay a fair price for them, and then invest in these assets and grow them. That blueprint was established more than 20 years ago with the acquisition of Mulatos and its ultimate development. It's something we've been able to replicate across all four of our largest assets, most recently with Island Gold. We acquired Island Gold back in 2017 for $600 million. Many of you on the call today will probably remember that the market did not look favorably on the transaction initially. They thought we'd drastically overpaid. I'm happy to say that's not been the case.
The value of that asset has grown tremendously in each and every year that we've owned it, such that by the end of 2023, the value of just Island Gold alone was sitting at over $2 billion. With the acquisition of Magino last year, the value of the Island Gold District is now sitting at $4.6 billion. If you look across all three of our producing mines and you incorporate Lynn Lake in there, we've generated $7 billion in value over and above what we've paid to acquire these assets for and what we've invested in them. Given the outlook for all four of these assets, we fully expect that value is going to continue to grow. We touched on exploration at the beginning.
I'd love to take credit for our exploration success, but it's our other Scott Parsons who's leading our efforts on that front, although I do pretend to be a geologist at times. Exploration success has absolutely been a key part of our success as a company and one of the ways we've been able to create value. It starts with that focus on asset quality. The gold has to be in the ground for you to be able to find it. From there, you need a commitment to invest that capital into finding those ounces. You need really strong teams to effectively find those ounces. We have all three. That's led to tremendous success over the last six years and really over our history.
Just looking at the past six years, we've seen our reserves increase in each and every year for an aggregate increase of 44% to currently 14 million ounces. This is net of three and a half million ounces of depletion. We've taken three and a half million ounces out of the ground. In aggregate, we've discovered eight million ounces of resources over that time frame at a discovery cost of $30 per ounce. If you're ever asking the question, do I want to invest in the physical commodity or should I be looking at investing in the gold equities, I mean, I think this is a perfect example of why investing in high-quality gold companies gives you so much more torque than the gold price itself. We're finding gold in the ground at a cost of $30 per ounce. We're selling gold today for $3,300 per ounce.
This growth in reserves and resources is supporting new development projects in the case of PDA and Lynn Lake, which I'll touch on a little bit later. It is also supporting expansions of our existing operations, as is the case with the phase III expansion at Island Gold. Our exploration programs are very much success-driven. If we are finding ounces and we are having success and we have excellent targets, which we do, we will ratchet up the exploration budget as we have been doing the last several years. We have another record exploration budget planned this year at $72 million. Given the type of ongoing success we are seeing, I would not be surprised to see us exceed that budget through the year with another similar size to a potentially larger budget into next year. We are a growth company. We are growing, but most importantly, we are growing the right way.
We've never been focused on growing just for the sake of getting bigger. Our focus has always been quality, and quality is our primary driver. If you do see us growing, it's because we see an opportunity to create value and generate a strong return on that investment. That's something we've got a solid track record of demonstrating and something that I think comes across in the per share metrics across this slide. If you look at our rate of production, our reserves, our cash flow from operations, all have been sequentially increasing over the last six years. More importantly, we're seeing all of these metrics increase on a per share basis. Over that time frame, we're producing 30% more gold per share. Our reserves per share have increased by 35%, and our cash flow per share has roughly doubled.
This is a track record we're very much proud of, a track record we're very much focused on building upon. We fully expect to build upon this track record as we execute on our growth plans over the next several years. We reported our Q1 results back in April. It was a slower start to the year. Our production for the quarter came in at the low end of the range of our quarterly guidance. Our costs were also higher than planned. This was really a function of just slower starts at two of our operations. Young-Davidson mining rates were lower than planned to start the year. At Magino, milling rates were also lower than planned. I'm happy to say both operations have demonstrated significant improvement into the second quarter.
Between higher mining rates at Young-Davidson, higher milling rates at Magino, increasing grades at La Yaqui Grande, we do expect a much better second quarter in terms of higher production and lower costs. We expect that growth to continue into the second half of the year. That is going to be supported by increasing mining rates at Island Gold, as well as higher grades at Island Gold and La Yaqui Grande. We are going to see growth continue through the rest of the year. We are on track to achieve our full year production guidance. We expect that growth to continue over the next several years. We started the beginning of 2024 producing at a run rate of about 500,000 ounces per year. Today, we are producing at a run rate of about 600,000 ounces.
By 2027, with the completion of the phase three expansion at Island Gold, we expect to be producing at a consolidated rate of about 700,000 ounces per year. With the development of Lynn Lake, we expect that to add an additional 200,000 ounces or so over its initial years. We expect that to take us up to 900,000 ounces per year. Again, this growth from Island Gold is lower cost. The growth from Lynn Lake is also lower cost. It is going to drive down our costs on a consolidated basis from something in the neighborhood of $1,300 per ounce this year down towards $1,175 per ounce into 2027, and ultimately trending down towards $1,100 per ounce. We have a clear path to get to 900,000 ounces right now based on the development plans we have in place for Island Gold and Lynn Lake.
We're also working on an expansion study for the Island Gold District, which we'll have more information on towards the end of this year. We think that ultimately is going to give us the capacity to take our rate of production up to approximately one million ounces per year by the end of this decade. If you look back to where we were in 2024 towards the end of the decade, we have the capacity to double our rate of production in the span of approximately five years. We're also in the unique position that we can not only fund this growth internally, but we can generate positive free cash flow over and above this reinvestment in growth. We're fully funded on all of this growth.
At current gold prices, we expect to generate north of $200 million of free cash flow this year above all of that reinvestment in all of that growth capital that we're spending at Island Gold, Lynn Lake, and PDA. You are going to see that free cash flow grow over the next several years. On the back of the completion of that phase III expansion into 2026, you are going to see our capital spending start to come off at that operation, as well as that increase in production and decrease in cost propel our free cash flow up north of $300 million into 2026. That is going to grow further still into 2027. That is driven by a full year of production from the phase III expansion at Island Gold, as well as the completion of the PDA project in Mexico.
That is at $3,000 gold, which is conservative relative to today's gold prices. You're looking at $600 million of free cash flow. Once we bring Lynn Lake online towards the latter half of 2028, we see a pathway towards $1 billion of annual free cash flow at current gold prices. We have three key growth projects underway that really underpin our strong outlook. You have the phase III expansion at Island Gold, PDA, which is an underground project within our Mulatos district in Mexico, and then our Lynn Lake project. All three of these projects share similar characteristics. They are all high-quality projects. They all carry strong returns, and they are all located in good jurisdictions.
The other key element of this slide to highlight is the fact that these projects are sequenced in a way that we can build them all through our existing cash flow and generate free cash flow over and above that. It also allows us to ensure that we've got the appropriate technical capacity to build these projects at a pace that makes sense and ensure they're built the right way. If you look at the phase III expansion, that's on the top of the screen, that's tracking well for completion into the middle of 2026. That capital spending will be winding down into 2026 as we're ramping up heavier construction activities on our Lynn Lake project. We are starting construction activities on Lynn Lake this year, but really the more heavier activities will start up into 2026.
That dovetails nicely with the completion of that phase III expansion at Island Gold. If you look at the next three years, Lynn Lake is tracking for completion into the middle of 2028. The other project we're working on is PDA. It's a relatively smaller project, $160 million. It's within the existing Mulatos footprint. This is a project that our team in Mexico can handle internally. This is the same team that's built La Yaqui Phase I, Cerro Pelon, La Yaqui Grande, three projects that were built on schedule and on budget. We very much expect the same with PDA. Three projects on the go, but the reality is we're really only actively working on two projects on a full-scale basis at any given time.
I'll go into a bit more detail on the phase III expansion at Island Gold as it continues to be one of our biggest value drivers. The photos on the screen illustrate the progress to date. The head frame on the left-hand side of the screen, Paste Plant, which is well underway on the top right-hand side of the screen. You can see we were down at that point in March to the 1,050-level shaft station. You can see the Galloway there, which is used for the shaft sinking. This expansion is well underway. We're about 75% of the way through the capital in terms of what's been spent and completed. Today, it's an $800 million overall capital spend. Three-quarters of that is now spent or committed. The shaft is now down to a depth of 1,250 meters.
We expect it to reach an ultimate depth of just under 1,400 meters into the latter part of this year. Everything's tracking well with this expansion. We expect it to be completed towards the middle of 2026. Once that is completed, it's going to be a game changer. What we're doing with this operation is taking a really high-grade underground mine that's currently being mined via a ramp access at 1,200 tons per day. We're sinking a shaft, which is going to double the throughput to 2,400 tons per day. Double our output from the operation at significantly lower cost, given the productivity gains we'll get from utilizing a shaft versus hauling ore and waste up a ramp system from underground.
Once this is completed, the Island Gold District is expected to be producing approximately 400,000 ounces per year at all-in sustaining costs of about $1,000 per ounce. This will be one of Canada's largest and lowest-cost gold mines. As I'll touch on shortly, we think there's additional upside from there. This chart on the left-hand side is a great illustration of why we are sinking a shaft and why we are expanding Island Gold. It's been the pace of exploration success that we've had at Island Gold since we acquired it back in 2017. At the time of acquisition, it contained 1.8 million ounces of reserves and resources. Since then, we've invested heavily in exploration, and we've seen that reserve and resource base grow in each and every year that we've owned it to now sit at 6.7 million ounces of greater significance.
Not only have we seen the reserve and resource base increase significantly, we also have seen reserve grades and resource grades increase over that time. Back in 2017, we were looking at a reserve grade of 9.2 grams per ton. That reserve grade is now currently sitting at 11.4 grams per ton. Similar story with our inferred resources. They were averaging around 11 grams per ton back in 2017. They are now sitting at 16.5 grams per ton. It is really these higher-grade additions that we are delineating at depth, which is helping drive the growth in the ore body as well as the increase in grades. This growth in reserves and resources has supported multiple expansions of the operation. When we acquired it back in 2017, it was operating at 900 tons per day. We subsequently took it to 1,100 tons per day.
We're now operating at 1,200 tons per day via the ramp system. We're nearing the final stages of completing the expansion, which is going to take it to 2,400 tons per day. Given this ongoing growth of the ore body, we're also working on an expansion study we expect to release later this year, which is an expansion of the Island Gold District and really an expansion of the Magino Mill, which will allow us to explore pushing mining rates even higher than 2,400 tons per day.
Between this growth in reserves and resources and the multiple expansions that we've undertaken with respect to Island Gold, you can see the value of Island Gold has increased in every year that we've owned it, starting at $600 million, which is roughly what we paid for it back in 2017, to now sit at $4.6 billion based on consensus analyst estimates. Based on the work we've undertaken with this expansion study, we fully expect that value is going to continue to grow. We also think there's much more on the way to come from reserve and resource growth. This is a long section of the Island Gold ore body. We've got some of the highlights from our reserve and resource update earlier this year.
To summarize what we're doing at Island Gold, we're drilling from surface, we're drilling from underground, and we're having success across multiple locations across the ore body. Within the main structure, we're having success extending it laterally, upplunge, downplunge. Through our underground drilling programs, we're also having success defining higher-grade reserves and resources, both in the hanging wall and footwall of the deposit. That success contributed to a 32% increase in reserves with our year-end statement announced in February. We also saw our reserve grades increase 11% to 11.4 grams per ton. Inferred resources also grew, and we saw the grades increase by 13% to 16.5 grams per ton, rather.
One of the key areas that is driving that growth in both reserves and resources, but also that increase in grades, is the success we are having in the Island Gold East portion of the ore body. If you look at this deposit over time, before we acquired it, this was a relatively shallow underground mine with an average grade of about 5 grams per ton. Again, before we acquired it, previous owners undertook some deeper drilling down to the 1,000-meter level where they started to hit 7, 8, 9 gram per ton mineralization. That trend has continued as we have drilled deeper with some of the best and highest-grade intercepts ever drilled on Island Gold in the deepest part of the ore body in this Island East area. I will zoom in on this area just to show some of the success we are having.
I touched on that increase in reserves and increase in reserve grades over the past year. This section in Island East has been a key driver of that. This reserve block, which is right in proximity to where we're sinking the shaft, doubled in size to 1.1 million ounces with grades averaging 13 grams per ton. That compares quite favorably to the average overall reserve grade of the ore body, which is sitting at 11.4 grams per ton. What's feeding that growth in higher-grade reserves is the even higher-grade resource block below it. This blue inferred block sitting below those reserves now contains 1.9 million ounces of inferred resources with grades averaging 21 grams per ton. The best intercepts we've ever seen have been in this area. This deposit is completely open at depth.
Our deepest holes are down to the 1,700-meter level, and they hit high-grade mineralization. There is lots of potential for this deposit to continue to extend at depth, as well as extend laterally. If you were to take this deposit, turn it sideways, and look at the cross-section of the ore body, you would see all of these new hanging wall and footwall zones that we are defining on either side of the main structure. This is a 6.7 million-ounce ore body that we fully expect is going to grow. I think there is an excellent chance this ore body is ultimately going to get up to 10 million ounces and beyond. Island Gold has been an incredible success story for us. The question is, is there a way we could make it even better? The answer is yes.
Find another asset right next door to it with a much bigger mill, buy it, and integrate it. That is what we have done with the acquisition of Magino last year. You can see this picture tells a thousand words. These are two operations that are literally right next door to each other. If you were to look at a cross-section or, sorry, a long section of the ore bodies, you would see the deposits are actually within 300 meters of each other. You have two mills, two tailings facilities being operated in vicinity of each other. By shutting down the Island Gold mill, shutting down the Island Gold tailings facility, and utilizing the much bigger Magino mill and tailings facility. Can you still hear me?
You broke up for a moment, Scott.
Okay. Can you hear me still?
I can hear you. If you shut your camera off, it uses less bandwidth.
Okay. Okay. Maybe I will do that. But yeah, if you look at this acquisition, it has been attractive on multiple fronts. Attractive financially, accretive across all metrics. We have already started realizing and are going to realize over the life of mine significant synergies, most notably by processing this higher-grade Island Gold ore through a much more productive and lower-cost Magino mill. The part that we are most excited about is actually the upside potential that this Magino acquisition gives us. By getting access to a much larger mill, which is scalable, a much larger tailings facility, it gives us the capacity to expand Island Gold further and faster than we would have been able to do with our existing Island Gold mill and tailings facility.
This is the roadmap to expanding that mill and ultimately unlocking the potential of the district over the next several years. We're expecting milling rates through Magino to average a little over 11,000 tons per day this year, with 10,000 tons per day of that ore coming from Magino and 1,200 tons per day coming from Island Gold. We're currently still operating two mills. We're processing Island Gold ore through the Island Gold mill, and we're processing Magino ore through the Magino mill. We're getting close to the point where we're going to shut down that Island Gold mill and start processing that Island Gold ore through that Magino mill, which is going to allow us to start to benefit from those processing cost synergies. Looking out to next year, we're going to put some additional capital into that mill to expand it to 12,400 tons per day.
That is to accommodate the expanded output from Island Gold once we complete that shaft expansion towards the middle of next year. We are also working on this expansion study that I have touched on earlier in this presentation. We are exploring expanding that mill ultimately from 11,000 tons per day currently to something in the neighborhood of 15,000 tons per day-20,000 tons per day and probably something closer to the higher end of that range. What that will do is it will allow us to expand processing rates from the Magino open pit. It will also allow us to expand underground mining rates from Island Gold and process additional ore from there. It also opens up different opportunities across the region where we have intersected high-grade gold near our existing facilities. A good example of that is the North Shear where we have hit 5, 6, 7 grams per ton mineralization, which is great.
This is high-grade ore, but it was not as high grade as Island Gold. So it was never going to compete with Island Gold through the Island Gold mill. With a much larger Magino mill, that 6, 7 gram per ton mineralization starts to look really attractive through a centralized milling facility. But that's longer-term upside that we're working on. But this expansion study is really just going to incorporate what we think will be an expansion of the Magino pit, as well as pushing mining rates from Island Gold beyond 2,400 tons per day. So instead of Island Gold being a base case 400,000-ounce per year producer with all-in sustaining costs at $1,000 per ounce, we think there's ultimately the potential to take this up north of 500,000 ounces per year. And we'll have more detail on that expansion study towards the latter part of this year.
Just touching briefly on our other growth projects, PDA in Mexico is something that we'll also be starting on towards the middle of this year. It's an underground deposit right off the side of the main Mulatos Pit. In fact, you can see on the plan view of the site here, this is PDA, and it's located right between the main Mulatos Pit and the old El Victor Pit. We'll be able to ramp right off the side of the Mulatos Pit into the ore body. We're planning on building a 2,000-ton-per-day mill to process these higher-grade sulfides. Total capital for this is about $165 million. That's something that the Mulatos District itself can fund internally. To put that in perspective, Mulatos in 2024 generated $240 million of free cash flow in that year alone.
This is a project that the team in Mexico can absolutely handle from a technical standpoint internally as well as from a financial standpoint. It is a really attractive project. It has got close to a 10 year mine life. It will start out producing at a run rate of about 130,000 ounces per year, all-in sustaining costs in and around the $1,000 mark. We did a study on this last year. The upside case that we did with this study utilized a gold price of $2,500 per ounce, and this project carried an after-tax IRR of 73%. This is a really attractive, low-capital, low-cost, high-return project. We think there is a lot more to come in terms of exploration potential here at PDA, as well as in the district.
The really attractive part about this project is it supports the development of a new 2,000-ton-per-day mill that will process higher-grade sulfides. That is going to open up new opportunities in the district where historically we have been very much focused on finding and developing and operating open pit oxide heap leach projects. We have hit higher-grade sulfides in the past, but we did not have the processing capacity to accommodate that ore, so we did not follow up on it. With this new mill that we are constructing, which will be online in 2027, we are now going back to some of these targets where we previously found higher-grade sulfides. One of those is Cerro Plon. We are doing some additional drilling. We are defining some resources, ultimately some reserves. We think we are going to have multiple different sources of ore feeding this PDA mill.
We've got 10 years based on PDA, but we expect we're going to be mining in the Mulatos District a lot longer than that. Lynn Lake is our other key growth project. Again, another long-life, low-cost asset located in northern Manitoba. In January, we announced a construction decision, putting this project on track for initial production into the middle of 2028. Over the first 10 years, Lynn Lake's expected to produce about 180,000 ounces per year at first quartile costs. You can see the grades are actually front-end weighted. It'll have several years north of 200,000 ounces per year. On a standalone basis, this is an attractive project. It has a 30% IRR at gold prices much more conservative to today. I think the upside case that we did with this study in 2023 was utilizing a $2,200 gold price, and it had a 27% IRR.
This is an attractive project. Much like PDA, there is a lot of potential for additional deposits to come into this mine plan and feed a centralized milling circuit. As we are developing Lynn Lake right now, we have the McClellan and Gordon Deposit feeding a mill that will be constructed at McClellan. As we outlined earlier this year, we have some advanced-stage deposits nearby this milling facility that we can incorporate into the project. Burn Timber and Linkwood are a perfect example of that. These deposits are about 25 km away, so well within trucking distance of that McClellan mill. We have drilled off about 900,000 ounces of reserves. Our plan with these deposits is to reallocate mining equipment from Gordon and McClellan.
Once those deposits are depleted, move those over to Burn Timber and both extend the mine life of the Lynn Lake project as well as bring in higher grades sooner. The beautiful part about these satellite deposits is they can leverage the existing infrastructure that's being built for the Lynn Lake project. Very high-return projects, and we think there's going to be a number of these deposits that we're ultimately going to define across the Lynn Lake District. We've tied up 80 km of strike. This is going to be something similar to a hub-and-spoke model. We've got a centralized mill at Magino that's being fed by multiple deposits over at least 27 years based on what we've defined thus far. John, I'm going to close it out there.
Our outlook as a company has never been stronger, and we have everything we need to be successful within the company today. We're growing. All of our growth is fully funded. It's all lower cost. We've got a number of catalysts coming up through the year, meaningful exploration updates across our asset base, and Island Gold District life and mine plan to be released later this month of greater significance, that expansion plan for the Island Gold District that we're looking to release later this year. A number of what we expect will be positive catalysts for Alamos Gold. I think we touched on it earlier in the call. All of this is underpinned by what is a very strong environment for gold.
Scott, thank you for your remarks, and thanks everyone for your participation. Please feel free to submit questions through the question box. Scott, before I ask questions about the first quarter, I just want to emphasize from a perspective standpoint, especially 18 years I've had my own office, and I don't have hundreds of brokers in a trading desk asking me 10 minutes after you print a release to have an instant interpretation. I don't think quarterly earnings are meaningful for a gold company. The ore grades have a tenth of a gram measurement and sampling error, and the ore grades vary from quarter to quarter, such as in Mexico the last quarter. It's almost like a welcome opportunity to have a little panic and get the stock at a discount for a few weeks. Could you just explain how the production fell just over 50% year-on-year in Mexico and the less than 10% production decline at Young-Davidson?
Sure. I had to turn my camera off because I was dealing with audio issues, so I missed part of that question. I heard the part of the question.
If you could elaborate on the 50% output decline in Mexico quarter on a year ago, the less than 10% at Young-Davidson and the mill delay at Magino.
Yeah, absolutely. The decrease in Mexico is absolutely planned. What we are looking at is, well, in 2024, we were producing from La Yaqui Grande. We are still producing from La Yaqui Grande this year, but we were also seeing a more meaningful contribution from residual leaching of the main Mulatos operation. That is winding down to the point that the vast majority of our production this year is coming from La Yaqui Grande.
The reason you saw a more significant decrease in production from Mulatos into the first quarter was just the sequence of the mine. If you look at our grade guidance for La Yaqui Grande this year, the range is 0.8 grams per ton-1.6 grams per ton. It is a really wide range, and it just really speaks to where we expect to be in the ore body through the year. We do expect that grade to climb sequentially through the year. We were expecting to start out the year at around 0.8 grams per ton, and that is exactly where we were during the first quarter. That decrease year over year in Mulatos is a combination of seeing less of that production from the legacy Mulatos operation through residual leaching, as well as getting into lower grades at La Yaqui Grande to start the year.
We are expecting grades, and we are seeing grades increase into Q2 at La Yaqui Grande. We expect those grades to increase further still into Q3 and trend up towards 1.6 grams per ton into the fourth quarter. You can expect much better levels of production from Mulatos through the rest of this year. With respect to Young-Davidson, the decrease was really just a function of lower mining rates in the first quarter of this year. We had some equipment availability issues, which limited our access to more productive, larger stopes in the lower portion of the mine. If you take a step back and you look at Young-Davidson, we completed the lower mine expansion in 2020. The lower mine infrastructure at Young-Davidson is much more automated. There is far less rehandling, and we also benefit from larger, more productive stopes.
The upper mine is how the mine was originally built. You've got smaller stopes, more in the way of rehandling, and we were just more concentrated on the upper mine or limited to mining in the upper mine during the first quarter. If you look at where we're going to be into the second quarter and through the rest of the year, we'll be mining more stopes into the lower mine. These are bigger. You're picking up the ore via the scoop right into the ore pass into the crusher onto the conveyor straight up to surface. Far less in the way of rehandling. That's going to lend itself to higher throughput rates as well as higher production rates. That's the crux of why you saw lower production in the first quarter.
We did see mining rates improve into the latter part of the quarter, and we do expect throughput rates to improve into the second quarter relative to the first quarter. That will support higher rates of production as well as higher grades. Over at Magino, the lower throughput rates were a function of bottlenecks within the crushing circuit that we're continuing to work through. If you look at what we've done since we acquired Magino last year, we've addressed all of the significant bottlenecks in the circuit, and we're seeing throughput rates continue to increase. In the third quarter, we replaced the secondary crusher. In the fourth quarter, we replaced the primary crusher. The issue we had in the first quarter was this was our first winter with the operation.
We encountered broken ore that was frozen that was being put through a crushing circuit that had undersized transfer chutes. These frozen blocks of ore were getting hung up in these transfer chutes. We took the crushing circuit down. We opened up these transfer chutes to address that deficiency. On the back of that, we've seen much better throughput rates. You saw that month over month in the first quarter, throughput rates continued to improve. We are expecting higher throughput rates into the second quarter. Combined with better grades from Magino, we expect that to support higher rates of production from that operation.
In terms of the questions from the group in the question box, of course, everyone's welcome to participate. There aren't any. Yes, there are. Yes, there are. How have the fires in Northern Ontario, Manitoba, impacted Lynn Lake?
I mean, we're just in the early stages of getting going on construction activities at Lynn Lake, just getting going on earthworks. The fires have impacted us the same way they've impacted the town. We've had to evacuate our staff, and the town of Lynn Lake has been evacuated as well. It is really a tragic situation across Manitoba into Saskatchewan and Northern Ontario, just the impact of these wildfires. The weather seems to be cooperating of late. The wildfires look to be further away from the town. We're hoping that we're going to be able to get our people back up to the project in the next week or so and hoping the same that the people of Lynn Lake can return to their homes over the next week or so. In terms of the impact on the project, it hasn't been significant thus far because we were just in the early stages of getting going on construction activity. Not much in the way of infrastructure that was constructed that could have been lost. We've lost some core, but we have some flexibility in the timeline and don't expect to, at this point at least, see this have a significant impact on our overall timelines.
Super. Super. You have a really tight business plan. Is there any bandwidth in your management team to consider an opportunity and acquisition? There's a lot of project companies whose shares haven't rebounded very much. They're relative to $3,300 gold look awful cheap. Do you think you're just so busy being focused on delivering that there's no time for that?
Yeah. I mean, I put this slide up to really illustrate where our focus is. I think you hit the nail on the head at the end there. It's not that we're so busy delivering. It's more a function of the fact that we've got a lot of really attractive organic growth within our pipeline that can take us up to 700,000 ounces, then 900,000 ounces, then a million ounces with a larger expansion of the Island Gold District. That's where our focus is, executing on this organic growth. We're always keeping an eye on external opportunities, but there's really no pressure to do anything significant given the type of growth we have within the portfolio. Frankly, yes, there are what appear to be a lot of attractive opportunities from a relative valuation perspective. Based on the work we've done, very few of these opportunities stack up as well as what we have internally. This is what our focus is on, just executing on organic growth and ultimately taking our rate of production up to a million ounces per year.
Super. I'm so pleased at all your success. You make the analysts look smart for being your friend, Scott. Congratulations to John and the entire team.
Thank you, John. Appreciate the kind words. Once again, appreciate you having us and your long-term support of us and the industry.
It's my pleasure to learn from so many good friends. Thank you.
Thanks, John.