Thank you, Adam. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today to hear the Amerigo story. I do want to start by acknowledging a lot of people in this conference. Can you hear me okay? Is this mic okay? A lot of people at this conference don't typically invest in resource companies. I understand why. Mining has a reputation. Exploration risk, permitting risk, dilution, capital raises, the promise of cash flow that's always a few years out. Let me put you at ease. If that's the picture in your head, set it aside because that's not what Amerigo is. Here is how I'd like you to think about us instead. Imagine a business that generates predictable cash flow, has no debt, requires the right amount of capital to keep running, and sends the cash it produces straight back to shareholders through a quarterly dividend, periodic performance dividends, and share buybacks.
That's the entire pitch. It just happens that the product that we sell is copper. We trade on the TSX as ARG and on the OTCQX as ARREF. The title on this slide is the simplest way to describe us. We are a copper factory. We don't explore, we don't drill. We don't take on the geological risk that probably keeps most of you out of this sector in the first place. We take a waste stream from one of the best copper systems on the planet, we recover the copper that's left in it, and we turn that into cash across a cycle, and we return it. I'd ask you to judge us the way you judge any cash flow business, the quality of the cash generation process, the durability of the cash, and the discipline with which it's returned.
Everything I show you over the next 20 minutes or so supports that one idea. I'll move through the slides efficiently and leave time for questions at the end. I'll be making some forward-looking statements today. These two slides lay out the standard cautionary language and the assumptions behind it. I won't read them to you. I'll encourage you to review them on your own time, but please keep them in mind, particularly anything I say about future production, copper prices, and returns to shareholders. Let's show you how the cash is actually made and then where it goes. On the production side, Amerigo captures lost value. We recover copper from mining waste, from tailings, without the traditional mining risk.
To put that in perspective, we replace the world's need for a 30,000 ton per year copper mine, and we do it without ever drilling a hole, blasting a rock, or chasing a resource. The right-hand side of this slide is the part I really want you to hold on to, because we don't require growth capital, we return capital directly to shareholders. That's the punchline of the whole business. The cash we generate isn't earmarked for the next expansion or the next acquisition. After ensuring the current infrastructure continues to work like a Swiss watch, it goes back to you through three tools. Safe, predictable quarterly dividend paid every quarter, performance dividends, which are flexible in every respect, and share buybacks. That combination is what we call the capital return strategy, the CRS, and it's that lens through which you should view everything else today.
This slide frames the investment case in four parts. First, we recover copper in a copper factory, a simple, sustainable business model with predictable operations and predictable cash flow. Second, we offer direct leverage to copper prices. You get full exposure to the copper price without the traditional mining risk, with minimal overhead and very low capital expenditure. Third, we provide additional upside through those quarterly dividends, performance dividends, and buybacks. As of the end of May, our quarterly dividend alone yields about 2.4%, and I'd ask you to think of that as the floor, not the ceiling, because it excludes the performance dividends that layer on top of it. Fourth, our capital return strategy has frankly outperformed the copper sector, which brings me to my favorite slide in the deck. This is the chart we're most proud of.
Since we deployed the CRS in October 2021, over a period where copper price itself was relatively stable, Amerigo has delivered a total return of roughly 669%. It's a compound annual growth rate of just under 55% over four and a half years. Looking at what we're being compared against, copper price itself over that window returned 52%. The major copper ETFs, Global X, Sprott, the S&P Metals ETF, returned somewhere between 185% and 210%. The mid-tier copper producers, Hudbay, Taseko, Capstone, returned between 200% and 413%. We're the blue line at the top, and we got there not by taking on more risk, but by being disciplined with capital. That outperformance is a CRS working exactly as designed. This slide shows you how that return was actually built, the plumbing behind that blue line.
On the left, you can see the steady march of our quarterly dividends, with performance dividends stacked on top of the stronger quarters. Those performance dividends are primed to grow under stronger copper prices. In fact, the dividend we declared in April of this year was our largest in history. It was CAD 0.16 per share. It wasn't a statement, it was just math. When the cash is there, we return it. On the right, you see the buybacks. Since inception, we've repurchased 25.6 million shares at an average price of about CAD 1.56, spending just under CAD 40 million. The result is the chart at the bottom. We've taken our share count down meaningfully from roughly 182 million shares at inception to about 162 million shares today. Every share we retire makes the shares you hold worth proportionally more of the same cash flow.
None of this works without cash flow, this slide is the engine room. What I would like you to take away is a trend on the right-hand side of this chart. In the second half of 2025, operating cash flow reached $37 million. Our strongest stretch on the page. As the copper price, the green line climbed. Notice the two gray call-outs. Back in 2022, we had a weak copper price triggered by the invasion of Ukraine. In 2023, we had historic floods in Chile. The business absorbed both, kept paying dividends, kept buying back stock, and came out stronger on the other side. That's the whole point. This is a model that converts margin into free cash flow efficiently with no debt leakage, no expansion sinkhole standing between the cash and the shareholder. Of course, cash flow starts with operations.
This is where the team earns its keep. Table on the right, the last four years, the last four of the five years, we've produced between 62 million and 65 million pounds of copper. In most of those years, we've met or beaten our guidance. The one exception, 2023, was the year of the historic floods. Even then, we recovered fully by the fourth quarter. Plant availability has consistently run in the high 90s, and cash costs have stayed in a tight, predictable band around $1.90- $2 a pound. The drivers are listed here. Superb workforce, multiple sources of feed, real operational flexibility, and a deep safety culture. I'd single out that flexibility because it was stress tested last year when El Teniente, source of our feed, had a major incident and fresh tailings stopped flowing. We simply leaned harder onto our historical tailings and kept producing.
The system did exactly what it was designed to do. We closed 2025 at 62.2 million pounds of production, above our revised guidance, and we opened 2026 with another solid quarter of 14.3 million pounds. We don't need a perfect year to deliver. We just need a well-executed one. This is a slide that answers a lot of questions I receive. How long does this last? We process the daily waste material from El Teniente. That's the largest underground copper mine in the world. El Teniente has been operating since 1905, and its current projected life of mine runs to 2082. We have a long-term strategic agreement to keep processing that material to 2037 and expect to continue doing so through future contract extensions, as has been the case for more than 34 years now. When I talk about a long runway, this is what I mean.
Quite literally, decades of feedstock from a tier 1 copper system. The material is already mined. There's no exploration risk, no fantasy resource, no surprise grade cliffs. We know exactly what's there. A quick word on jurisdiction, because it comes up a lot. We operate in Chile, the world's leading copper producer. Our counterparty is Codelco, Chile's state-owned producer and one of the largest copper producers on Earth. Our relationship with their El Teniente division goes back more than 30 years. In Chile, copper is sometimes called the salary of the nation. It's a building block of the economy and the social contract. Amerigo plays a constructive role in that. We produce additional copper and generate additional income from Chile, for Chile, from material that would otherwise just sit in a tailings pond.
While no jurisdiction is risk-free, we view Chile and this partnership specifically as about as stable as a place you can be in this industry. Now, if operations and longevity are the foundation, this slide is the upside. This is our 2026 guidance sensitivity, built on 63.8 million pounds of copper production. If you look across the top row, that's the copper price, from $4.80- $6 a pound. We've already exceeded this range. Look at what happens at the bottom line. At $4.80, we're modeling about $74 million of EBITDA and roughly $35 million of free cash flow. At $6 copper, that becomes $100 million of EBITDA, over $100 million, and nearly $60 million of free cash flow. These are US dollars.
The copper price year to date has been, on average, $5.91 per pound. We need to update this chart to reflect the higher prices. That's the leverage. Because our cost structure is largely fixed and our capital needs are low, almost every incremental dollar of copper price drops through to free cash flow. Under our CRS, that free cash flow is a direct path back to you. This is our capital structure. It's very clean. As the end of May, we had about 161.7 million shares outstanding, a share price around CAD 6.65, and a market capitalization just under CAD 1.1 billion. We returned CAD 20.3 million to shareholders in 2025, and we ended the first quarter of this year with $57 million of cash, and importantly, no debt.
On the ownership side, our base is still about 52% retail, with institutional and family office investors around 34%, with management and board holding approximately 14% of the company. Point two things out there. First, management's meaningfully invested alongside you, and second, that institutional share of ownership has been climbing. A sign that that kind of investor who prizes predictable cash flow and disciplined capital allocation is finding this company. I'm going to close there, but I'll leave you with a question I get asked most often is, "With the stock where it is today, am I too late?" I've had that question a few times this morning. The stock has moved quite dramatically higher. Have I missed it? I would suggest that's the wrong question. Right question is whether this company can keep doing what it's been doing.
The answer comes down to three simple things, operational execution, cash generation through cost control, and disciplined capital allocation. If we keep hitting those three, the equity works because the business works. Amerigo won't give you overnight excitement. What it gives you is rarer than that. A generational investment, predictable cash flow, a long runway, and a management team that treats your capital as their own. We'd rather surprise you with execution than disappoint you with promises. Everything else is noise. Thank you, and with that I'll open it up to questions. The question is, what are we doing to grow production? As of right now, the plant is at full capacity. We doubled capacity in 2015. We took down $100 million of debt to do that.
When that debt got down to a more manageable level in 2021, we refinanced, and that was the initiation of the capital return strategy. Going forward, everything else being equal, this is the business. We are open to replicating this business in different projects, specifically within the Codelco family of mines. Those options are being evaluated, discussed, but very early stage. It does take a long time to make a decision, build a plant, et cetera. There's nothing in the near-term horizon to grow production. What you see is what you get right now. Yep. Yep. Yeah, the fixed costs, labor, power. Labor, every three years in Chile, you have to renegotiate with the unions. Basically, a small bump in pay and a bonus. It's pretty standard. We just finished that exercise last year, so we're locked in for three years. Power's locked in till 2037.
There is slight variability with tariffs and inflation charges, but it's not meaningful to the overall cost structure. There's lime, grinding balls, the essentials for the concentrator plant. Those are the three main buckets of cost. The power is 99% hydro. We have generators on site for backup, but costs are pretty well-controlled. There's a sliding royalty we pay. There's a slide in here that's currently. Typically, this is a slide I'll talk to. It's the royalty slide. We get access to fresh and historic tailings from Codelco. We don't pay them for those, well, we pay them in a way through royalty. It's a sliding scale royalty. Lower copper prices, lower the royalty. Higher, obviously, the royalty goes higher. What I like to say is, in lower copper price environments, we survive, in higher, we thrive.
For access to these tailings, Codelco participates in half of the profitability of the business. That's a general rule. It's not exact science, but the reason why this chart is blank is because there were price thresholds that ranged from $1.95-$5.50 Obviously, we're well through that price, we had to go back and just renegotiate and extend the price. We should see an update to this soon. Any others? Yep. The question is, what can cause it to continue? Not continue. We've extended it twice in the past. We don't see that being a risk. Obviously, on paper it's a risk. Codelco considers our production as theirs due to the agreement of the contract. Right now, our operation consists or makes up 8% of El Teniente's total production, so they would be losing that production.
Another question I get asked a lot is, why doesn't Codelco do this themselves? The answer to that is, this is not Codelco's business. Their business is throughput, size, maximizing production. This is a very different business. This is cost-controlled. You have to be very nimble. Codelco is not that. Codelco is a big government operation and could not do this profitably as we can. It's a good relationship that's been in existence since 1992. Yep. Yeah, we get this question a lot as well. There's no formula. For example, the copper price did very well in the first quarter of this year, and we had an influx of sizable cash. The board elected to pay it, and we paid CAD 0.16 per share, equivalent of our entire quarterly dividend in one shot. We have the flexibility to do that. However, I know management prefers buybacks.
We have a large amount of shareholders that prefer buybacks, it's also balancing what shareholders want, what management wants, prefers. There is no real formula. It's a wishy-washy answer, I know that. What you can think about the performance dividend is if you see cash growing on the balance sheet quite steadily, you can probably expect the performance dividend in the near future, because we're limited on what we can buy back in the market due to the rules and the NCIB. Yeah. In my experience, again, there's no real formula, but in my experience, when copper moves up CAD 1 from here next month, we would dramatically outperform the copper price, in my experience.
On the way down, because of the dividend and the cash flow nature of the business, we will be affected, obviously, on the way down, but compared to other copper vehicles, we always outperform. I know that doesn't totally answer your question. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a good question. It's not a direct answer because one thing I will say is the company has never had to halt production due to copper price. That's copper being as low as $0.60. Break even and still maintaining dividends and buybacks, that price is probably closer to $3.80. Breaking even with no capital return strategy, that price is probably closer to $3. In that range. You're welcome. Yep. Yeah. Also get that question a lot. Our investors like the dividends. A good chunk of our investors like the dividends. Some board members like the dividends. They're shareholders.
Any more? Yep. No. Great. Well, thank you for your-