Welcome to the OTCQX Best 50 Virtual Investor Conference. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are pleased you have joined us. Today's presenters represent some of the top-performing companies on the OTCQX Best Market in 2025 based on share performance and volume. Our next presentation is from Altius Minerals Corp. If you wish to ask a question, please submit it via the Q&A box on your screen. You can also view the company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. Today, I'm excited to welcome Flora Wood, Vice President, Investor Relations and Sustainability at Altius Minerals, which trades on the TSX under the symbol ALS and on the OTCQX under the symbol ATUSF. Welcome, Flora.
Thank you. Thank you, Michael, and thank you to everybody who's joined today. This is our first time at this conference, and we are a proud member of the OTCQX, with no plans at this time to seek a NYSE or NASDAQ listing. Over the past year, we've seen big increases in U.S. shareholders, so very happy to talk to you. I hope we'll get questions in the Q&A section. This is the forward-looking statements. It's gonna apply to everything we say. We'll definitely be making some forward-looking statements pretty much right out of the gate. I will start with showing you the analyst consensus NAV amongst the different commodity exposures that we have and also same thing, analyst consensus NAV by jurisdiction, so you can see really where these royalty assets are. We're a 29-year-old company still run by the same founder.
A kinda unique feature is that our founder, Brian Dalton, started this company along with a group of geology students who were studying at Memorial University in Newfoundland and basically were staking and then reselling projects, mineral lands onto juniors or seniors in order to raise money for tuition. This is in 1997. That activity coincided with some pretty big discoveries in Newfoundland, including Voisey's Bay, and what really put a bunch of students through university ended up being the basis to go public in 1997. That was, at the time, around CAD 800,000 valuation for the company. Now, almost thirty years later, we're above a CAD 2 billion company. If there's any students watching, it's pretty big success story.
I'll also spend five minutes saying what a royalty is 'cause I didn't notice any other royalty cos in the lineup for today. Essentially, it's a passive interest on future cash flows from what will be an extractive operation in the future. In our case, the operation is mining, and you'll see the percentages that we're taking are relatively small, so they don't burden the economics of the mine. We're talking anywhere from sort of 1% up to, say, 6% off either top line or what's called a net smelter return royalty. Royalty companies, you might know some of these royalty companies. The big ones in metals and mining would be, say, Franco-Nevada, Royal Gold, Wheaton Precious Metals, Orogen Royalties, et cetera. The difference between ourselves and those companies is that they're primarily precious metals, so they're going after gold and silver primarily.
We're going after everything else, so we're basically mainly base and battery metals. You'll see we got a pretty balanced portfolio here, with electricity being royalties on wind, solar, battery energy storage, iron ore, potash. There is some gold and mainly base and battery metals, and I'm gonna go through each of these segments in turn. We'll move on from that. The main thing we're looking for is we think that the longer the asset life, the more optionality we have as a royalty holder. Mine lives that are gonna go up to 100 years, in our case, they average more than 35 years, are likely to lead to expansions, to repowering, et cetera. As a royalty beneficiary, we get the full benefit of that without any of the operating or the capital expenditures.
This next slide is showing you our revenue growth profile looks like. We're starting here from a 2025 base, and the 2025 base is our royalty revenue that we reported at. That's CAD 62 million. What we're showing here is how that base is going to increase to over CAD 200 million by 2030 and significantly better than that in the following decade when our most significant development stage royalties come online. We'll talk about them a little more, but let's just start with 2026.
In 2026, we're expecting around CAD 90 million in revenue, and most of the growth over 2025 will come from the new lithium royalties that we acquired in an acquisition that closed March 6. This isn't speculative as that lithium company, Lithium Royalty Corp., had approximately CAD 5 million in revenue for their Q4 and expect that kind of royalty run rate and a little better toward the end of the year when a new royalty asset is coming on. It's labeled in this chart as Finniss. We'll talk about that a little further. The labels on this chart are basically showing you the either new mines coming on or expansions that are already in progress, most of them in construction. The timelines here are a little bit more conservative than what the mine operators are putting out as guidance.
I mentioned earlier that I'm gonna go through the segments one by one. First we're gonna start with potash, and potash is something that the audience probably knows quite well, especially if you're a US investor. Around 90% of the potash that the US uses is coming from these six mines in Canada. These are the Saskatchewan mines. They have around 24% of global market share, so that would be biggest contributor to global market share. We acquired these royalties at the beginning of 2014. Revenue since then have compounded steadily, and the Saskatchewan potash mines have well over 50 years remaining of mine life. That's probably the longest life mines in the world, and that's after having been in production for more than 50 years already. These started right at the beginning of the 1970s.
Potash, it's one of the three components of fertilizer, so potash, nitrogen, phosphate. It's one of the most consistent, stable demand profiles, basically a royalty on food. This average growth of approximately 2.5% per year, which doesn't sound like much, but it means that since the time we acquired these royalties in early 2014, our production from them has increased by 50% with the expectation that that steady growth continues really until food demand starts to decline with population. Next, we're gonna speak about high purity iron ore. In this case, the iron ore is coming from the Labrador Trough. There's a bifurcation in the iron ore market that really is between ores that can be fed into blast furnaces and the blast furnaces are the real high carbon emitters, but they can accept low-grade, low-quality iron ore.
The mixture is basically the iron ore plus metallurgical coking coal. The other type of steel making is electric arc furnaces, so that would be Nucor's business, basically. Coking coal there is not part of the equation. The Labrador Trough is producing the high-grade, high-purity iron ore that can be converted to DRI-grade iron, and that's ideal for new and existing electric arc furnaces, and it commands a price premium of about $12-$15 a ton higher than what your low-grade or what's called standard 62% Fe grade iron ore. Our two exposures here in the Labrador Trough are the IOC mine, that's through our ownership of Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corp. More importantly, through our 3% gross revenue royalty on the Kami Project, owned by Champion Iron in partnership with Nippon Steel and Sojitz.
The Kami royalty alone, I would go back one of these slides to show you the revenue profile, but I could screw up our whole presentation. I'll just say the Kami project alone would more than double that CAD 62 million in revenue that we saw in 2025. It is a big project. There's still a lot of steps to go through before Kami is a reality. It's a large capital investment, and it's a four-year construction cycle. Nippon Steel's the fourth largest steel maker in the world and committed to the general replacement of blast furnaces with EAF furnaces. Odds are looking pretty good. Base metals. Here in base metals, we've got three base metal operations either in production or coming online by 2027. The big one would be Chapada. Chapada is our only stream.
The rest of our assets are royalties instead of streams. Chapada's a 3.7% copper stream. Production is expected to increase by 25%-35% from this mine starting around 2029, and that's coming from a higher grade deposit, basically displacing some of the lower grade ore and resulting in higher output. The chart here on the right shows what the resources and reserves were at the time we made this purchase in 2016. Now, 10 years later, you can see that the resource is almost 50% larger despite all those years of depletion. The other two are Voisey's Bay, it's a much smaller royalty for us, it works out to kind of a 0.3% royalty, but it is a multi-generational mine, and we it was our first royalty. We bought it in 2003.
The other one would be Curipamba, that's in Ecuador, and it's expected to start contributing in 2027. It's currently in construction. I mentioned earlier the closing of our acquisition of LRC that occurred March 6. Timing was very good. We announced that acquisition December 2022, and the lithium price, both spodumene and carbonate, is up more than 50% since we made that announcement. We paid around CAD 140 million in cash, plus we issued 9.6 million shares at the time. Total consideration, depending on what our share price is, be around, say, CAD 530 million-CAD 550 million. The revenue contribution from that acquisition, you can see we're expecting it to be over CAD 70 million a year starting by 2030, and it's a big contributor this year in 2021.
The boxes on the chart are basically showing you the existing operations in 2026. One of them includes a restart, which is Finniss just announced Tuesday that that should start producing and shipping ore by the fourth quarter of this year. You have both new builds and expansions showing further out in 2028 and in 2030. This one, electricity generation, this requires a little more explanation. The electricity generation royalties, we started this concept. We're a joint venture owner. We have a 29% effective interest in a company called Great Bay Renewables, which was really the first to pioneer this idea of royalties on renewable power in the U.S. These royalties are on U.S. wind and solar generation, along with battery energy storage.
I think some people would probably be surprised to see how the price of power has gone up in the power purchase agreements shown on the right-hand top corner, despite a lot of negative sentiment about renewables really since Trump's election. The fact is that these are usually the fastest ways to get power to the grid. The data centers have pretty much embraced them, and the power price that you're seeing is reflecting that fact. The revenue growth is aligned with it. You can see on the chart on the left bottom that CAD 45.3 million 2025, that's actually on a 100% basis. So think of our contribution from that being around 29%. I said earlier, we don't go after gold royalties. That's true when we're purchasing royalties.
There's a lot of competition in that sphere, and there are large companies, as I mentioned, Wheaton, Franco, Royal Gold, et cetera, that have a lower cost of capital than us. They're always gonna be better positioned to win a competitive process. Now, having said that, we are the beneficiary of one gold royalty called the Arthur Gold Royalty that came to us through our project generation business. We acquired a company called Callinan in 2015. Callinan was a project generator royalty co. They had backed a generative explorer by providing early-stage capital at a time when no significant discoveries had been made in this area of Nevada.
Arthur Gold has now turned into one of the most significant discoveries of the past 10 years, and it's expected to become the center of gravity for AngloGold Ashanti, the operator, according to their CEO in the quote there from their Q3 conference call. First reserve was declared in Q1 this year. It's expected to produce over 500,000 gold ounces per year from an oxide open-pit mine. From a revenue contribution perspective, this 0.5% royalty that we retained after selling a 1% royalty to Franco-Nevada could be worth over around CAD 30 million a year in revenue starting in the next decade. That is an example of the project generation business. It's absolutely core to us. It's how we started. Our investment in the Arthur Royalty is CAD 400,000 that you can see.
We sold the 1% royalty, so two-thirds of that royalty, for CAD 375 million, and then we kept the 0.5%. That's the kind of value windfall that can be created from that kind of business. Doesn't happen every time. We make a lot of these that may take 20 years to turn into something, and we absolutely expect that a lot of them will never turn into something. That is what really started our business, and it's kind of what kept the business going and continues to keep the business going. I'm gonna go fast here because I love that we're getting questions, and I want to make sure that I address the questions. This is the balance sheet after the LRC transaction. You can see it's still lots of cash.
The shares outstanding after we issued 9.6 million for that acquisition, shares outstanding are still 56.8 million. For a 29-year-old company that's never had a rollback, we're proud of this fact, and we still measure everything we do on a sort of growth per share basis. When our shares are undervalued, we're active in our buyback program. We do pay a dividend. The dividend is CAD 0.40 a year, so CAD 0.10 a quarter. This is really just recapping what we've talked about. The cash, the CAD 294 million here, this is actually before the CAD 140 million came out, so really cash is around CAD 144 million. With that, I think I'd be happy to take questions.
I am just going to read the question, and then I'm going to answer them. The first one is this is a good question. It's on the U.S. renewable royalty exposure. The question is, if PPA prices and power demand stay where they are or improve, could that platform alone justify a higher valuation multiple for Altius than what the market currently assigns to the whole company? It's a great question. It's a really interesting one because one of the things that you're thinking about in asking that question is really, you know, you look at the revenue profile from it, and you look at the PPA prices. It looks like that growth just keeps going. The growth profile is real, but sentiment can really affect how renewables are viewed.
In 2024, you know, it was among the worst categories in the TSX was that renewable energy sector. We would have a mix of shareholders who love the renewable energy royalty part of the business, and then we would have some who would say, "Yeah, I don't really understand renewables like I understand, like I understand mining." Those two forces kind of offset each other a little. It's a great question, and the renewable revenue growth is really valid. We got somebody who is asking. Here's someone asking, "Do you think the current setup in potash is still underappreciated by the market?" That's also a great question. We would say 100% we think that. Because a somewhat boring 2.5% compound annual growth profile, it's easy to overlook that.
When you look at the potash revenues and then the potash price really over, say, 20 years, it can be flat looking for a decade. Then you'll have a big spike. We had that in 2022 in the invasion of Ukraine when the combination of Russia and Belarus potash tons, there was concern that those were never gonna go to market because of sanctions, et cetera, and the price doubled from what it is today. The price, it came right back down. You do have kind of largely flat prices with, say, a spike once a decade, although that's a gross oversimplification. It's easy for people to think that's not the sexiest market out there, so absolutely underappreciated. The great thing about these mines owned by mega corporations, Nutrien and Mosaic, they are the easiest.
They have the most unused capacity and can get that capacity, brownfields capacity to market. Expansions are a reality when we've got incentive pricing conditions, and that alone makes the potash market a really unique market and, yeah, 100% underappreciated. Thank you for the question. Another one talks about the deck suggests potential for a material step up in royalty revenue over the next few years. Which assets or catalysts give you the most confidence that this growth is becoming more visible in 2026 and 2027? That's a great question, too. I think to single out a couple, in 2026, the big contribution is coming from the Goulamina lithium contribution from the acquisition of LRC.
It would be very easy for investors to have missed that because the acquisition went through really right at the same time that our announcement of taking over LRC went through. Goulamina is the fourth largest spodumene producer in the world. It's in Mali, and its revenue alone in Q4 was $2.9 million. If we convert that to Canadian, we're getting most of that CAD 21 million we're expecting in additional revenue in 2026, most of that is coming from Goulamina. In 2027, you've got Curipamba, the copper gold mine coming online, and that should deliver, depending on the price of gold, around CAD 10 million a year in revenue. Those would be the big ones that I'd single out in 2026 and 2027. Next question. Okay.
Some of these questions are kind of similar around the growth and what the big contributors are. Here's a question. One of the things I like about Altius is the long-life diversified nature of the book. How much runway do you think you have to keep compounding without needing to take on much balance sheet risk? We have really more cash than we've had. Even after the LRC transaction is closed, we have more cash than we've had on the balance sheet probably since the kind of. Well, definitely since 2015, when we made our purchase of Chapada. This is a good amount of cash for us. We absolutely have opportunities that we can see coming in. You also see how our revenue growth profile is ramping up. Our debt is pretty small.
Our debt is just under CAD 90 million. We do have added revolver room. We don't see any need to take on more debt or to look at issuing equity unless there's really a great opportunity where our shareholders would say, "Okay, that return is worth the extra leverage or issuing more shares." We're in a very good position right now that way. I think I got time for a couple more here. One is: What should we be watching most closely over the next 12 months? I think I'm glad that question got asked because it reminds me of some things I should have talked about more. We should have at the end of 2026, like into early 2027, there should be results from the feasibility study on Kami.
That, like I said earlier, would be our single biggest royalty contributor. The feasibility results should speak more to what kind of returns are associated, and then the next moves really are Champion and Nippon Steel. I mentioned a couple new mines coming on. You'll see new mines and expansions in lithium over the next five years. The next 12 months is really you'll see the lithium contribution come through for Goulamina and some of the other expansions. More news to come as the Arthur Gold Project continues to get further advanced into permitting. This one is about the dividend. Someone pointing out that we've steadily increased the dividend. They say, "You've steadily increased the dividend and now have another step up coming with the March ex-dividend.
How do you balance the case for even faster dividend growth against the opportunity set you see in royalty investments?" This is something that's always a live discussion for management and the board. It is the case that we're committed to a steadily increasing dividend. We were part of the Dividend Aristocrats Index, which recognizes steady growth over years. We want to keep that up. Don't forget we've got both the dividend and we've got the buyback. In 2024, for example, we spent the same between those two categories. We absolutely will continue to take a kind of slow, steady approach to increases there. We do see a decent opportunity set for new royalty investments in the coming kind of 12 months.
I think first priority would be, let's see what new opportunities exist, and if they really create better value for shareholders, you'll see money go to that first, and then we wanna keep on that same path, continue to be a member of Dividend Aristocrats and continue to revisit the growth in the dividend every sort of 18 months to two years. I'm not sure if I have time for one more, but I assume I'll get cut off if I don't. One more would be. Oh, yes. Given the underinvestment across parts of mining over the last decade, do you think Altius is entering a period where more operator-led expansions and new builds can lift royalty revenue faster than the market expects? The underinvestment is this and the. I guess critical is incentive pricing.
You can have these, this underinvestment and just steadily decreasing supply, but often the expansions is often just, is the incentive price high enough to really catalyze these new operator investments? I think you're definitely seeing operators study it and move on it. A really good example is Tuesday night, the announcement was made by Core Lithium, the operators of the Finniss mine, that they're restarting. That's a great example where the incentive pricing for lithium exists, plus some new efficiencies in operations to kickstart that. We're certainly seeing the potash operators look at their brownfield capacity and make decisions on really what kind of increases they can make. Both Mosaic at Esterhazy has a new higher range of what they're expecting from K3 , and Nutrien's been public about studying expansion cases for their mines. I think there is.
Oh, I think I'm kicked off 'cause my questions have disappeared.
Thank you, Flora. You're welcome to say goodbye to the audience, and then we can wrap it up.
Okay. I wanna thank everybody, especially these questions, really great. I hope we get to talk to you again, and there is the ability to book one-on-ones if you want. Thanks again. Bye-bye.