Joining us for this afternoon's session. We have John McCluskey, President and CEO of Alamos Gold. I think John is gonna make a quick, ten-minute presentation. It's been a very busy week, John, right? You put out, I think, press release after press release. So I'm happy to have you here so you can give us a summary. We don't need to read these press releases.
No.
You got ten minutes. You can summarize it for us.
All right.
So, go for it, John.
I'll go up here?
I've been asked if you want me-
You have a button pusher or-
I can advance your slides for you.
I think I can do that.
So I can be your timekeeper, but...
All right. So I guess it doesn't matter where I stand, really, because he mic'd me up. Thank you very much for coming. There's more people here than I actually expected. I think this is a bigger crowd than we had last year when everything was going swimmingly well. Nobody bothers coming to the presentation, so we decided to spice it up a little bit and have a whole bunch of problems last year, so here we are. We're sort of sitting at a 550,000 ounce a year run rate, but we've got a plan, and this doesn't require permitting. It doesn't require acquisitions or anything.
Based on our current portfolio of assets, we've got a plan to take our production up to 1 million ounces of gold a year between now and the end of the decade, and it'll also involve, because of the production that we're bringing on is substantially lower cost, you'll see our costs decline as these assets are developed. We've been around for quite a while. We poured our first gold as a producer back in 2005, so this is 20 years we've been in production now, and we've really pivoted as a company. We started in Mexico. The first asset we had was Mulatos project.
It had this wonderful open pit, but it had a six-year mine life when we started, and so we were sort of looking ahead at 2011 , thinking, you know, "We better move fast and find more gold." Fortunately, over the course of those years, the gold price continued to rise. We continued to drill, and truth be told, we were following a paint-by-numbers kit. Placer Dome had done quite a lot of drilling. They just didn't drill anything off to reserves, and certainly not to 43-101, which came long after they had done this drilling. So we kinda knew where to go, and Mulatos grew and grew and grew, and believe it or not, it's still producing to this day.
And based on anybody who saw our press release today, you can see that we're really opening up the whole district to sulfides, and we're gonna be producing there for a long time to come. Since then, we pivoted into Canada. We came into Canada in 2015, when we merged with AuRico and brought in our Young-Davidson operation. Then, we acquired an exploration project, albeit an advanced one, in northern Manitoba. We bought it in January of 2016, the absolute bottom of the market. At that time, gold was under $1,100 an ounce, and we followed that up with the acquisition of Island Gold in 2017.
So between 2015 and 2017, we did three back-to-back acquisitions right on the bottom of the chart, and those proved to be just excellent, and they're primarily what's driving the value in the company to this day. So now, by now, we've got about 90% of our NAV in Canada itself, and the average productive life of our operations is 20 years. So that's a very impressive story in itself. We've had a pretty amazing run. This is looking back to 2021, and you can see we've outperformed virtually all the indices, the GDX, the gold price itself, the S&P 500. I mean, Alamos has been a real juggernaut for this sector. It's really led the way.
You can argue that a lot of companies they caught up to us in that sprint over the course of last year, and honestly, I predicted it. Two years ago, we made the TSX top 30 performing stocks, and we were the only gold stock that made it. Yeah, they do the little interview, and you go through the Q&A. I said, "We're the only one here this year, but wait till next year, you're gonna see a lot more joining us," and that's exactly what happened. I think there was five or six companies from the gold sector that made the top 30. So, you know, obviously, the sector's on a real tear.
Nowadays, you know, people wake up to an $80 increase in the gold price overnight, and, "Eh, I don't know what you guys..." This morning, I shrugged my shoulders, "Yeah, yeah. What? Another day." I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal what we're seeing now. You know, gold breaking $4,800 an ounce. I mean, if you're not impressed with that, please show me what you are impressed with. I'd love to get involved in that. Island Gold, Young-Davidson, Mulatos, Lynn Lake, like, this is our track record in terms of value creation. One way or other, any way you wanna look at it, we've been at this for 20-five years. We did our deal to acquire our Mulatos asset in 2001.
Over the course of 20-five years, we've been buying things cheap, investing in them, primarily through drilling to begin with, and then ultimately through development. But we've consistently built value over the years on virtually every asset that we've acquired, and this is basically showing consensus NPV plus the cumulative free cash flow that we've generated from each of those operations. You'd see Island with a much bigger orange component, except we're investing so much in expansion, given how successful we've been on exploration, but on virtually all of these assets, we've created value for shareholders through M&A, and I think that's a real differentiator. We've also created value through the drill bit, and this is what mining companies ought to be doing: M&A that drives value and drilling that drives value.
Just in the last six years, we've added eight million ounces through the drill bit at a finding cost of $30 an ounce. While we had some issues last year with production, we had no problems with exploration. We did a mid-year update to reserve expansion at Island Gold. That surprised a lot of people. Wait till we come out with our year-end update early next month. It's continued to grow. But you can see from that curve, essentially, we're bucking the trend that you see in our industry. Our industry has a big issue with resource depletion, and we've been growing reserves and resources virtually not just at our operations, but at Lynn Lake as well.
Even after we finished our feasibility study, we've continued to drill in that, and Lynn Lake has continued to grow. Our finding cost is about $30 an ounce, and given that gold is trading at, well, December contract, it's over $5,000 right now, that's gotta be a way of driving value. And I firmly believe, and I've seen this over the course of my career, the ebb and flow of the way the market values reserves. Generally, in a falling gold market, it puts no value at all on reserves, very little value on reserves, and the value is all on, you know, what's your free cash flow generation? But when the market turns and it starts going up, investors start to pay attention to reserves again.
Given that this has been our bread and butter, this has been our focus all along as a company, investing in exploration, building reserves, I think this is gonna really start to pay off. One of the examples that I gave is, if you were to say look at Island Gold and come up with a nominal value, I think $2,000 an ounce in the context of a $5,000 gold price would probably be quite conservative. On the basis of 8 million ounces, you're looking at $16 billion worth of in-situ value. That's extraordinary, and that's why I think this gold sector has still got a long way to go in terms of of the way it's gonna be valued by investors.
This basically looks at our 2025 production, and as everybody knows, we put out a mea culpa kind of news release last week, we missed, and we haven't missed for a long, long time. I mean, I look back prior to 2025, we hadn't missed in 14 straight quarters, and then we'd missed in 15 quarters ago, and then prior to that, we hadn't missed for something like 11 quarters or something like that. We had a very, very long-term track record of hitting our target. In 2025, I can say, having run this company since day one, we've never had a bigger gap between the ounces we guided to hit and what our actual production was. So that was a miss, and, you know, we've had...
We had a number of issues over the course of three consecutive quarters, even in the fourth quarter, where you know, we had eight weeks when we reset guidance, lowered our guidance, we had eight weeks to hit our numbers, and we got hit with, you know, we call it the weather. It's not so much the weather. We can deal with the weather. You can't deal with the Ministry of Transport closing the roads, and not every operation is gonna be affected the same way. In our particular case, we're kind of a hybrid operation. We do have a camp at Island. We don't have one at Young-Davidson, but when they close the road, you can't get people in and out. You can't get supplies in our case, we're reliant on CNG to keep our mill going.
You can't get deliveries in and out. Basically, you're stuck. You can't get emergency equipment in and out or emergency vehicles in and out, fire, ambulance, that kind of thing, and so you have to stand down. So we lost more days over the course of the latter part of December due to heavy snowfall, but just not the heavy snowfall, it was the fact that the province isn't really set up to plow those roads. You know, 80 km of road they've got to keep clean, so they close it, and that's effectively how we got affected. No Canadian gold producer is gonna say, "Oh, geez, I had a weather problem," because we always have a weather problem. We're in Canada, for goodness' sake. We're set up to deal with the weather.
This particular year was a real heavy winter, and you wouldn't know it from being here in Whistler, but we left Toronto, it was minus 25 degrees Celsius, and I haven't seen that much snow in Toronto since I moved there 20 years ago. So for whatever reason, there it is, but we've had a tough year. We're gonna have a much better year in 2026, and then, as you can see, going forward, things just get better and better, some of the key things that dogged us over the course of 2025, we're effectively addressing through this big expansion project that you've heard us talking about. We're actually gonna publish the results and show the market what we're going to do with that Island District in particular. It's basically gonna expand to a 20,000 tonnes per day operation.
You'll see costs come down in conjunction with that and production go up. I mean, the outlook looks really positive, and why we can be so confident about that is that the two issues that we have with milling on that site, one is to do with how we power it right now through that big CNG plant. What we're getting, that will be redundant. We effectively inherited that plant with the acquisition of Magino, but we're bringing in a power line upgrade that will be in place by the end of the year. It's 115 kV, all the power we're gonna need to run that. So not only will the power be reliable and consistent, but it'll be a lot lower cost.
The second thing we're doing in terms of the big expansion is we're going to change the whole front end. That's where the real problems exist in the Magino Mill. It's not well designed. We're bringing in a big gyratory that effectively pushes the whole operation to 20,000 tons a day, but it also solves all the issues that we have at the front end of the mill. That's why I can sort of stand here confidently, knowing that the two key things that are really dogging us there, we're dealing with just through the expansion alone. There's some interim fixes that we can do in order to operate at a more consistent rate over the course of 2026.
But by and large, you know, when I look at the long-term perspective and where we intend to take the company, we're effectively on this track to go to 1 million ounces a year. You can kinda see step by step how we're doing it, basically with the Island Gold growth, Young-Davidson, we're not really predicting a lot of growth in Young-Davidson yet. You know, we've made a really nice discovery in the hanging wall there. We've got some of that data out last year, but really, the key driver for growth in that hanging wall will be a result of the drilling that we can do off of a drift that we put into it. We had to put in an exploration drift going right into that hanging wall structure. It's in place now, we're doing the drilling.
I have a lot of confidence that we're gonna be seeing some really interesting new growth there, and then otherwise, adding Lynn Lake is gonna be a real key to driving us towards 1 million ounces a year, and effectively, we've basically got it all intact, so with that, I'll end my presentation, and we can have some Q&A.
For sure. Thanks, John.
Oops!
This might be my last chance in terms of asking you why you know, 2025 was so tough, 'cause as you said, Alamos has had a long history of delivering. So again, with that backdrop of what happened in 2025, what should we expect for 2026? You have not put out guidance yet for 2026. John usually also put out three-year guidance. So how are you utilizing that knowledge that you gained in 2025, and what happened in 2025, in formulating what we should expect for 2026 and onwards?
Yeah, with respect to guidance, we would normally have had it out by now, but because we're working on this big expansion plan at Island Gold, and it won't be out until early February, there wasn't much point in putting out guidance when a lot of it is gonna be predicated on this particular study. So we did publish our results for 2025, but the guidance will come out in conjunction with the disclosure around the expansion plans.
I guess my question is...
Big differentiators, though.
... the process around it.
Yeah, the big difference, the big drivers that I think that we can expect in 2026 versus 2027. Well, one of the things we learned is that there's no point in sitting on a great big pile of cash in the bank and not having virtually everything you need sitting in inventory at the sites. So what do I mean by that? Well, what they typically do when they... You essentially audit your operations. The insurance companies wanna do that, too. They want to audit your operations, and anything that's gonna cost you more than, say, 20 days of downtime. If you've got something, if it goes, you're gonna be down for three weeks before you get it up and running again. Sounds like my old phone at home.
If it's gonna cost you more time than that, then they want you to have inventory spares, and we do. But I would say that makes perfect sense in a $1,500 or $1,800 gold price environment. At $5,000 gold, you don't wanna be down for five minutes, frankly.
Mm.
And so essentially, what we have been doing is, we're identifying everything that could take us down for more than 72 hours. And everything involved in terms of spares, equipment, that kind of thing, we've got backup on site now. So and with that, I mean, Scott and I were just looking at where we were on a cash basis. We ended the year with net cash of about $475 million. We're sitting on over $600 million in cash, and what did we begin the year at, Scott? It was about $200 million or something like that?
Net seventy.
Net seventy. So I mean, we basically just put on a pile of cash, and that's after, you know, a big share buyback, dividends, massive exploration program, lots of capital investment. Despite all that, and despite the fact that we didn't hit our production numbers-
Mm
... we just generated an absolute ton of cash over the year. No point in sitting on a pile of cash and not having the spares in place that helps you generate that gold production. So that's one key thing. The other thing that we've done, I mean, but the company's been growing pretty dramatically, and we haven't kept pace with that rate of growth in terms of the engineering personnel that we need-
Mm
... to run those operations efficiently, and we know that. So we've been on a hiring spree, you might say, for the last several months, and we're adding a lot of key people that I think will help make a big difference in operations going forward. And you know, it wasn't like we want. You know, the whole industry is basically in a talent deficit.
Mm.
You know, we're well aware of that. What I find very gratifying is we're not having a great deal of difficulty attracting people to come to work for Alamos, particularly at Island Gold. I mean, that is such an exciting project. We're attracting some phenomenal new talent, and I think that's gonna help us a lot over the course of 2026. Otherwise, you know, some of the things that hit us, unless you've got a telephone line directly to the Almighty Himself, I don't think we can do much about it. I mean, we got hit by two lightning strikes. We had flooding with the overflow of Otisse Lake for absolutely bizarre reasons.
We had, you know, a seismic event, and it wasn't even that big of a seismic event. It just happened to hit right at a critical spot. You know, if we had have... If it had have been literally 10 meters to one side or the other-
Hmm
... it wouldn't have bothered us very much. In fact, when we disclosed it to the board, as you know, Shaun Usmar is on our board.
Yes.
He's the CEO of Vale, for those who don't know. He said, "Geez, you had a seismic event of 2.7, and it took you out of that whole area." He said, "We had a seismic event of four, and it didn't stop us at all." It just depends on where it hits, and in our case, it didn't prevent us from getting into the stope at all. I mean, you get in there, but what it did is the key point of egress that we have to establish. You have to have two points of egress for safety in-
Yeah
... in Canada, and it basically damaged it. And in order to get in and repair it, we thought we could get it. We kind of misdiagnosed it. We thought we could get it repaired within about six weeks. It's gonna take us longer. We probably won't have it fully rehabilitated until the end of this quarter. Fortunately, it was about 50,000 ounces of the highest grade ore in the mine, in that particular stope. There's a couple of stopes involved. And, you know, it's a good thing it wasn't sterilized altogether. You know, we can get back into it. We will mine it, but it's gonna be in 2026 as opposed to the fourth quarter of 2025, where it should have been, and we should have made all our numbers and so forth. So, you know, we. It is what it is.
You know, we've just gotta take ownership of the fact that we had a bit of a, a crappy year. You know, one of the investors this morning called it the death by a thousand cuts type of year. That's true, that's sort of how it felt. Every time my phone rang and it was Luc Guimond on the other end, I kind of thought, "Not you again." I just knew it was gonna be more bad news. But anyway, I think we, I think we've got that behind us now, and we're looking forward to a much better year this year.
I think that's good. I think the Almighty might just have helped you kitchen sink everything last year.
I pictured-
Clean slate 2026.
Exactly.
Right?
I pictured all these Greek gods just hurling lightning bolts down at us, you know?
Yeah, that's maybe a picture that might not get out of my head anytime soon. But, John, as you mentioned, in a bullish market, you know, you get kind of value for your reserves. You get credit for your reserves. And so, as we mentioned, gold prices is not $1,500, is not $2,000, it's a $4,800 an ounce. So how does that impact your reserve, your resources? What number do you plan on using for your reserve resource updates, and, you know, how should we look at it for Alamos?
I'm gonna say something quite surprising. I mean-
Okay
... where most of our reserves lie, they're not that sensitive to the gold price. Like, at Island Gold underground and at Young-Davidson underground, they're not really that sensitive to the gold price.
Yeah. Mulatos?
Mulatos, when we were mostly open pit, it was more sensitive, but now we're going underground, less so. It's really the Magino open pit that's somewhat sensitive to the gold price.
Yes.
You'd be surprised. Like, our... We're not gonna change our economics. We're not gonna change our approach to mining as a result of this increase in the gold price. I mean, what's driving us. Nothing has really changed for Alamos. It's all about, you know, taking on things that were small, and drilling off bigger reserves, and then investing in the infrastructure to allow you to increase the scale of the operation. I mean, that is as dead simple a business plan as you're ever gonna hear, but I just don't see that many companies really focused on that. That's, you know, the way you uncover that tier one asset that the former Barrick CEO was looking for all over the place. You don't wait for somebody else to develop it and then go and buy it.
You know, that's effectively what Barrick was trying to do, but I think what we have been doing, though, and it's the way to get at the asset. You've got to effectively be willing to buy a colt with the expectation you're gonna train it into a Triple Crown winner. You know, you-
On that, maybe I have one last question here, as you talked about, you know, we are in a bull market. You've done a very good job in the past, John, on M&A. Where should we see Alamos positioned for M&A?
Well-
That was a-
It's-
... That was a long stare.
The thing is, you know, I showed a slide that demonstrates our M&A track record over 25 years, and it's a money-making strategy, and it doesn't typically involve buying assets in a raging bull market. Now, having said that, we kind of kicked off the whole thing when we acquired Argonaut Gold a couple of summers ago, and, you know, the gold price was $2,300 an ounce, and we were thinking, "Geez, you know, gold's already ran from $1,600 to $2,300." But we kind of knew that we were in the early days of a gold bull there. But we've...
It was the exception that proved the rule, that despite the fact that gold had run to $2,300 an ounce, Argonaut had come from $4 an ounce down to $0.22. So you do find exceptions in every market, and you've got to be, you know, open to them and willing to do deals on good terms when they present themselves, and we always have been willing to do that. And so being opportunistic, I think is the hallmark of an entrepreneurial-driven management, which is how I would describe the Alamos team. But that said, we can grow our existing production from 500,000 ounces a year to 1 million ounces a year just by investing in our own asset base, and that's effectively what we're gonna do.
So we don't wake up every day thinking, "Geez, what are we gonna go buy?" You know, we're thinking about developing what we have and generating profits from, for our shareholders, on that growth trajectory.
That's great to hear. That's all the time we have. Thanks again, John, for joining us today.