The stage is yours. Take it away.
Thank you. Let me take you to a trip into Morocco. I know you're all familiar. It's not far. It's one of the greatest countries to visit, but it's for sure one of the greatest countries for geology. We produce silver, beautiful silver like this, pure native silver. It's not a mine where you have lead, zinc, copper, and a little bit of silver. It's a pure, pure silver mine. They're rare. There's two of them in Morocco, maybe just two in the world. And it's native silver. Leaches very, very well. 92%- 94% recoveries. Most of the silver mines are in the 65%- 70%. It's very unique. It's very rare, and it's pure. Aya is, and Aya in the language means your most precious possession. Many times you will call your first daughter Aya, because it's your most precious possession. We called it Aya Gold & Silver.
We are a pure silver producer right now. It will change. We will be, you know, adding gold to that in the next few years. We have one of the fastest growth profiles in a resource, which is how you create value in mining, is by, you know, adding ounces to your balance sheet as you're drilling. We have one of the largest drill programs in the sector. We drill 200,000- 300,000 m a year, in Morocco. You have the forward-looking statement. You're familiar with this. This is where we are in the Atlas Mountains. You fly in from Sweden to Casablanca. You fly into Agadir, or you drive down to Agadir, and then you drive up into the, it's like the Alps. It's the Atlas, 4,200, 4,400 m. The mine is at 2,000 m, and it is untouched territory.
It's like it hasn't been, you know, explored in many, many years. We have outcropping of gold, silver, copper at surface. That's how we, and we built this last year. We debugged it this year. We did the commissioning and the ramp-up this year. Now it's in full throttle production. Team, we've been together. We started SEMAFO in 1995. We built many mines. We sold that $1.6 billion to Endeavour, a couple just before COVID. We came in into a company that was called Maya, which we took over and now changed the name to Aya. I brought the team over, plus a couple of local representatives from Morocco. What's unique about the Board is that the Board we control 45% of this company. There's one Board member missing. He just took a medical leave of absence.
At the Board level, with the people that are related to the Board members, we have 45% of this company. Very few shares outstanding. This is a tight share register. There's 141. I must have done something not too good here. Sorry. Mr. Technician? Oh, thank you. Sorry, my mistake. My mistake. All right. I was going to say 141 million shares. The options are just with management. We have a clean balance sheet, no lawsuits, no issues. We have $140± million in the bank . It's actually going up every day now. We sold silver this morning. I got a call from the office. We sold silver at $48.90 this afternoon. You know, all-in costs below $20. Every day we are very, very profitable. The debt, because we're in Morocco, because this is a green mine, the mine has solar energy and wind only, very little oil.
We recover 88% of the water. We are almost self-sufficient with water. We qualify as a green mine, and we get green financing. We have financing from EBRD at SOFR+4, which in mining is extremely, extremely low. It's more SOFR+15, but we're at SOFR+4 because we're a green mine. Very clean balance sheet, no issue, nothing. You know, I don't have anything. We're waiting for a permit. We're waiting for, no, we have everything. It's very, very clean. The company was created before our time. We were in SEMAFO. It was created by local businessmen. They bought the assets from the government. It was, and they ran it for 10 years. Then we came in, the whole team, we took over, and we started what very people have the guts to do, is spend millions and tens of millions in drilling.
We started drilling 100,000 m, 200,000 m, next year 300,000 m. When you do this, you increase your ounces in the ground. We are a pure, pure play silver, as we mentioned here. You see, this is us. It's only silver. Our revenue for 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028 will be only silver. In 2029, we're going to add to that gold and silver. We will quadruple our revenue by that time coming from our second mine. Morocco, I've built mines all over Africa, in Canada, in China. I can tell you the best place in the world to build mine, but the best place in the world also to operate. It's way more than the tajine and the couscous. It's really, people are there. They're educated. They have a major mining industry. The real thing is permitting.
How many people you will see today and tomorrow are waiting for a permit, an environmental permit, a construction permit? There, you get permitted on a PEA study. Once you're permitted, one permit, you're permitted for life. You have to renew it every 10 years. It's an automatic process. I really believe that Morocco is one of the top five, maybe top two jurisdictions in the world. Permitting is quick. People are there, and you can operate a mine with less than 1% expats. The mining code is super interesting. You have it here. You have a royalty of 3%. Africa is now 9%. You have a tax rate between 20% and 32%. You have no free carried interest. The government doesn't keep free carried interest. You have ownership, foreign ownerships permitted, repatriation profits permitted, and permitting is a couple of weeks or months if it's a mining permit.
It's very, very quick. Where else in the world do you have something like this? I'm not aware. We've built mines all over the planet. What's interesting, if I told you, let's go to Ghana in 1800, before it's called the Gold Coast, and we have the whole Ashantri Trail to ourselves where you have all these mines. Or when I went to Burkina Faso in 1995, and there were no mines discovered, and we discovered the Houndé Belt , and now there's like 15 mines on the Houndé Belt . In Morocco, when we arrived, nobody had done work on the belt here. It's called the Atlas Fault. It's 1,600 km long, a beautiful geological structure. Nobody has worked there.
Yes, Managem, the State-owned enterprise, did some work, and the government, but we are now the number one company in Morocco with about 1,500 sq km of ground, which is not always mineralized, but has great, great geology. Why we've done so well, if you became a shareholder with us in 2000 or 2001, you came in at $1 like (Inaudible) did and bought millions of shares, and he was a shareholder in SEMAFO, is we had not a lot of shares outstanding and not a lot of ounces to back it up. The drill program started showing real growth in finding new ounces. We found 500 million ounces of silver in three, four years of drilling at $0.10 of discovery cost. Those ounces at the time had $10, $12 margin. Now they have $30 margin, and you're backed up.
When you're a shareholder in Aya, you have, now we say 4.5, but it's increasing every day. You probably have 5 ounces of silver at $25 margin for simplicity. There's $125 to back up your share of value in the company. It's really, and it's growing because this is just the beginning. I know I'll go a little bit faster because we're going to be running out of time. When we took over, it was a small company, a bit of production. Then we went 400,000 per quarter, and now we're approaching 500,000 per month. We're producing 100,000 ounces of silver every, so this is 1 ounce. We're producing 100,000 ounces of silver now every week, which we sell every week. We sell it into Europe, and 100,000 every week is sold, as I said today, at $48.90. We're growing this.
Now we are on a run rate currently of 5 million ounces a year. Next year, we'll probably be 6 million, and growing like that until we put the second mine into production. On a silver equivalent basis, we're going to be producing north of 30 million ounces of silver equivalent or silver and gold. The new mine, that is, that's the profile. What we've done is we've changed, and Rick before me was explaining it, is we did this model at $20 silver, and we were high grading it a little bit. Now we've changed the model, the geological model. We're mining it on a lower grade basis, but a longer life. Instead of having an 11-year mine life, we've already mined it for five years. We technically should have seven years left.
We actually have now 12 years left because we're mining it on a lower grade, different cutoff, but a long-term production profile, which is absolutely normal given the value of the commodity. What we did is we built a new plant. It's brand new. It started in December, and we did the commissioning of the plant in December in three weeks, which normally is three months. We did the ramp-up very quickly, Q1, Q2, the ramp-up. You can see it here very well. You see the ramp-up here. It was really quick. The ore process, and then we're now at 3,500 tonnes per day. The recovery is 86%. We're now at 92%. The plant availability, you can't be better than 98%. I mean, it's, it's, you cannot be 102%. We have done a very quick and beautiful ramp-up. It's gone very well. Same thing with mining.
The mining of the underground went from 114,000 tonnes to 241,000 tonnes per quarter, and it's now up to over 300,000 tonnes . It's going very, very quickly. The only little issue, and if some of you read some of the criticism, is our grade in increasing the throughput of the mining. We went a little bit from selective mining to bulk mining. Because instead of mining 900 tonnes a day, we were mining 3,000 tonnes a day. The teams were going fast and took too much material out. We did not lose metal because we reconciled the metal and the model to the metal that we take out. We were taking too many rocks out that didn't carry enough mineralization. We are fixing that now. Sorry. Okay, there we go. Here, what I wanted to show you is the margins. You look at the margins.
In Q2 last year, margins were like, you know, we were selling at $26. The cost was $17, $10 margin. That's what I said. We worked on $12 margin. In Q2 of this year, cost was $21. Selling price was $33. In Q3 of this year, selling price will be $40. Cost will be probably $18. It's now going this way. Costs are coming down in the commissioning because you're finished your commissioning. Your costs are coming down, and your selling price now is going up very, very quickly. We are going to be seeing here margin expansion, profitability expansion, cash flow expansion very, very quickly. Beautiful construction, beautiful plant. As I mentioned to you, 85% recovery of the water. Of course, now worldwide, water is always something that you have to be careful with.
Here we have thickeners, which are seven thickeners, which recover about 85%, 88% of the water, which is super important. This is well built. Our guidance for the year was 5 million this year. That's where we're heading for. Our guidance for next year will be 6 million, which is where we're going to be heading for. That mine at $48 silver like today, or $49, is a mine that will be producing between $150 million and $180 million of cash flow next year. We are fully funded to, of course, it's built. We can pay back the debt. The EBRD debt is payable over four years, $25 million. Our G&A is $7 million. We have all the money to complete what we need to do. The upsize here is above the production. It's really the exploration, which I will take you through. We have two districts.
We have the Zgounder District, which is over here, where we have 700 sq km. We have the Boumadine District, where we have 800 sq km. If you're in Canada and you have ground like that, there's 50 companies working with 5 by 5, 10 by 10. We're by ourselves. We have no neighbors. We have all the ground in Zgounder. We have all the ground at Boumadine. We just keep doing the exploration. When we started, the Romans had discovered this mine 2,000 years ago, and they were mining this. They had walked, and they were mining the top. For 2,000 years, they were mining a little bit of silver. The coins in Morocco that go back 1,000 years came from this mine. When we arrived with new technology, we said, let's do geophysics, geochem, satellite imagery, spectral. Let's bring technology in.
We discovered that the deposit was going all the way down to the granite, which is 25 million years older. There was a geological trap. The fluid stayed in place. It is 700 m deep, 1.4 km long, and it's 20- 40 m thick. It's like a piece of a loaf of bread. Here, there's a fault, so there's half the baguette missing. Our job is to find out, did it push over? Is it lower? Did it go East? Did it go West? We're doing that. We're looking for it. Now we think that it was pushed down following the granite, and it's probably somewhere over here. We're looking for this. Same thing at the other end. We're looking for another piece that could be missing. All of that, this is the pit. This is the deposit. Now we think that the deposit has been pushed this way.
All of this is this, and all of that is our ground. This is work that we are doing where we're finding the proper rock. What we did is we took all the data, all of it, geochem, geophysics, spectral, name it, millions of pieces of information. We gave this to AI, and we said, AI, take this. Where we have a deposit, what is it that it, what's the signature? Is it sand? Is it a flower? Is it a chemical that you have in the data? Tell us where we have the same signature. AI is identifying where, so it's like putting 10 geo in a room for 100 years. They do all the data, they review all the data, and they tell you where you have the same signature.
Then you go and you do the work, you do the drilling, and you try to find another of those. We take each section and we work through each section and we decide where we're going to be drilling next. This is what we do with technology, which is very, very quick and very fast. This is our small asset. It's in production. It'll generate $150 million, $180 million next year. The next asset is much, much bigger. It's called Boumadine. In the language, Boumadine is the father of all deposits. It's the biggest deposit that was identified over the last 2,000 years. It's over here. Same thing. We have 800 sq km. We arrived there. This was in the company. It was purchased by the previous CEO. We arrive and we say, okay, this is interesting. The Portuguese had been mining this for a number of years up here.
They were mining up here. They had no clue what they were mining, but they were mining. They didn't take the gold, didn't take the silver, took the lead and the zinc, stockpiled the gold and the silver, still there. We brought geophysics to understand that the blue is an intrusion of fluids that push the fluid against the wall. We started drilling it to realize that it's a slab of concrete, 6 km long, 5 m wide, 600 m deep, perfectly mineralized. We did 200,000 m of drilling. We came up with 450 million ounces of silver or 5 million ounces of gold at 5 g gold or 450 g silver in equivalent. That was at the end of 2024. We've now added 200,000 m of drilling in 2025, which we will do the update in February next year.
The PA that's coming out in three weeks is based on a base case on 450 million ounces of silver. What we did, only in Morocco you can do this. In Morocco, we said, we went to the government and to our people, and we said, has anybody walked the ground? Like, just walking the ground to see what's on the ground because we see copper, we see pyrite, we see silver, and nobody had walked the ground. We have 250 people in geology at Boumadine. We said, everybody in their trucks, everybody takes two weeks, you walk every square meter of 40 km by 40 km, send us what you find. It was one structure after the other, one structure after the other.
We went to the government, we said, you know what, would you let us do geophysics on 40 km by 40 km, but we don't own the ground, but would you let us fly the helicopter and do all the work? Absolutely. Only Morocco can say yes to that in the world. They said yes. We did it. Bang. Edgio calls me, he says we were drilling in the wrong spot. I said, David, you have 500 million ounces of silver. It was the wrong spot. I said, okay, how is that possible? He said, look, look at the structures. What we drilled was this year, that one here. Oops, sorry, it's hard to, we drilled this. He said, look at this, look at this, look at the South. It's the same, same geophysics, same material, same thing, and it's all aligned with what we saw on the ground.
We've announced recently here a 9 km structure, just over here. We've announced a 9 km gold structure here, which is mainly gold and copper. Here, it's gold and silver. Here, it's copper and silver. At the bottom, it's lead, zinc, and silver. Here in Canada, there's 100 companies working on this. There's nobody else but us. We're by ourselves. We will be putting out in two weeks, three weeks, the feasibility just on this year, just on this. All these little boxes that you see are all mining permits. If we want to need, if we want to build today, we could start building today. They're all mining permits. We can start, and we will show you that this small project is going to be a very, very large silver and gold producer.
Morocco, the cost of construction, and if you've been to Marrakech or you've been to Casablanca, you see how great the construction is. The cost of construction in Morocco is 1/3 the cost of construction anywhere else around the world. We built that first mine, Zgounder, for $140 million, which would cost in North America $400 million- $500 million. It is a very unique project. We do a lot of work. We do a lot of drilling. We have a very big team. The geophysics is really showing us where the structures are. We're using geophysics, geochem, satellite imagery. As I said, we have 20 drills turning, or we will have, because they're not all there yet. We will have 20 drills turning. We'll do 200,000 m this year, 300,000 m next year of drilling.
We're going to grow this into a camp where there's going to be probably two plants over time, over time, but now start with one plant and go into production, silver, gold, a little bit of lead and zinc. We've put it all together. We had too many projects, so we created a little spin-out called Mx2. We did this with an experienced team, the guys who did Red Back Mining, Simon, and not Simon, Rick, and Adam. We created Mx2. We rolled some assets into Mx2. It's going to go public next year on valuation of a few hundred millions. We own 42% of that. We took assets that we were not going to develop. We put that into Mx2, which will be a subsidiary of Aya, focusing on gold-only assets that we didn't have time to take care of. Look, this is what we've put together. It's clean.
It's got cash. It doesn't need to finance. It's got 141 million shares. We own 40 million shares or a bit more. No legal issue. Very motivated people. 1,500 employees. Best tajine, best couscous, best place to visit. Three flights a day from Canada to Casablanca. Three flights a week from Toronto. Best surfing in Agadir. I mean, on and on and on. Marrakech is Ibiza on steroids if you want to visit. It's a real fun place. That's what we, you know, this is what Aya is all about. We're there to develop that. Of course, it's attracting, you know, there's a lot of people looking at it because it's a very unique asset.
Thank you very much. I think we'd give Benoit an applaud. Do we have any questions here on the floor? We have people with the mics. I'll kick up with one here because you mentioned that you have a very good relationship with the State and the local authorities. The mining permit is renewable every 10 years. Remind us here, when it comes to the State and let's say changes in the top of the power, it's been very, very stable for the last, what, 100 years?
600 years.
600 years.
Morocco has been the same family for 600 years. It will definitely stay like this. It has a king, but there's a parliament and there's a government which is elected, which is center-right. It's mainly business people. In Morocco, the thinking is job creation for the young people. Their unemployment rate is around 13%. They're very keen on job creation. When you present a project and you get permitted very quickly, it's really based on how many jobs you're creating. We have 1,500 employees and we have 11 expats. That's very rare. At SEMAFO, we had 10% expats. Here we have 1%, less than 1% expats. That's what they look for because they're very skilled. They have good universities, very good people. Yet the relationship is very good because they see us as their flagship company developing assets that have never been developed in the past. We're developing those assets.
We have full support from the government. You go and see them to renew some exploration permit and they say, oh, you know what, we'll give you a mining permit because it's too much time to renew an exploration permit. We know you're going to put it into production anyway. It's a different philosophy on what mining is all about.
They know you and you know them. With that, thank you very much.