Good afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to take you to Morocco. It's an unknown jurisdiction for mining for most, but it's probably now number one in the world. You want to see where we're going, what Morocco is doing. Morocco is the big winner currently of the war, because the States are landing all their planes in Morocco and then taking off from Morocco. The Middle East has now selected Morocco to be the world reserve of oil. The infrastructure, what's going on in Morocco is second to none. Plus, they have the World Cup in 2030 with Spain and Portugal. Morocco is buzzing. They just came up with their new mining code. You'd love that. Royalty, zero. Free carried interest, zero. Taxation, 32%. Permitting takes two weeks to three months on a PEA. Once you're permitted, you're permitted for life. You can't beat that.
You just cannot beat this. Morocco is, the geology is great, so I'm going to walk you through. You don't need the forward-looking statement. I've lived through 1990, 2000, when gold went up and up and up. We were in Burkina, Niger, Guinea, Mali. You name it, we were everywhere. You know what happened? Every place, tax went up, royalties went up, indirect costs went up, demands went up. It was out of control. Right now, if you look at West Africa, it's out of control. Its royalties are up to 12%. Jurisdiction in a fast-moving commodity price has got to be your number one criteria for looking at a project. In Morocco, jurisdiction ranks in the top three, top five in the world with other jurisdiction that we're familiar with.
Geology is the best because it was untouched for 100 years, and I'll explain that. Untouched. Now we're like, when we got to Burkina in 1995, SEMAFO , we obtained permit number three. Three, four, 18 permits to 21. We discovered the Houndé Belt because there was nobody there. Well, there's nobody in Morocco. There's one company. You want to invest in Morocco? There's one. It's us. Unless you want to go into the state-owned Managem or OCP, but otherwise, there are no companies. Jurisdiction, geology, people. We have a great board of director, and it controls 46% of the company. That's pretty interesting. The management team, we've built 10 mines. We just completed one on time and on budget. We've built four in Africa.
Mustapha Elouafi , who's right beside me at the top, ran the largest mining company in Morocco called OCP, 20 mines, 26,000 employees. We've done it. We've done it over and over again. It's a company that's got a good management team, a very good board that's fully invested, and have a very clean capital structure. We have 143 million shares. At the board, we control 40% of that. We have great institution. Many are in the room. We have a very clean balance sheet. We have one debt, EBRD. They're the best. They're fantastic. It's an ESG loan. I always joke around. I said, when we went out on tender for financing, we had seven offers. We kept two. EBRD did a 30-day due diligence, 28 days on social matters, two days on the project.
Everybody else did 30 days on the project, nothing on social matters. They are partners with us. Everything we do socially, they participate. If you followed this weekend, there was a rally called the The Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles . It's a world-renowned rally. You saw the Aya car. We have a car, we have a team, and we're part of what's being done in country to promote what we do and female involvement in business. Very clean balance sheet. Currently approaching $200 million in cash. The $100 million EBRD loan, which we can pay back, it's SOFR plus four. That's when the company was structured. The key thing with Aya right now is for the next three years, 100% of our revenue is silver. We produced last year five million ounces. We're producing this year close to seven million ounces. We produced last quarter 1.5 million ounces.
We're producing about 17,000 ounces of silver per day. It's extremely profitable in this environment. When you want leverage to silver, we are 100% leveraged to silver. It won't be like that on our second project because when it kicks in, it's going to add 10 million ounces of silver, but 350 ounces of gold on the second project. I talked about that. That's the government, the royalty. It's absolutely fantastic. Why for 100 years, nobody could go to Morocco? Because in 1914, they discovered the largest phosphate resource in the world. They created OCP, which means Office Chérifien des Phosphates. It's a phosphate company. They wanted nobody to touch that, not the French, not the Spaniard, nobody. Today, OCP is the largest producer of phosphate in the world. For us in mining, we like mine life.
They have today 700 years of mine life as being number one in the world. It is a mining country. We have first-mover advantage. As I said, in Morocco right now, there's either OCP phosphate, Managem state-owned, or Aya. The beauty when you arrive into a jurisdiction where there's been no work, you start drilling. Our drill program this year is 240,000 meters. Last year, it was 200,000 meters. We have 450 people dedicated to geology and to exploration. We have 18 rigs turning, 16-20, depending, at all time. We have discovered in five years close to 600 million ounces of silver equivalent. This is ongoing. We are drilling every day, 24/7, ongoing. Hence, the number in the little bubble is ounces per share outstanding. Because ounces is not so important if you've over-diluted the company.
We are increasing the ounces per share and now, of course, they even have better margins, so it's excellent. The first mine was built last year. That's why some of you saw we went into the Valley of Death or the Lassonde Curve. We took a real Ski-Doo ride right down the bottom from $20 down to $11, and that's the ride that people do take. They were ramp-up normal issues, and we're now coming out of the ramp-up period, and hence we had a very good quarter. Now the first mine is currently, as it stands, it's a six million-ounce producer, $16 cash cost, $19 AISC for 11 years as it is right now. We are spending $20 million-$30 million there on exploration as well to increase the mine life and hopefully to increase the production profile. Very good year last year, 2025.
We showed $72 million of free cash, $48 million of net income after tax, $200 million of revenue. The funny thing is 2025 is now repeating itself in Q1. The plant and all our KPIs are all really doing extremely well because when you do a ramp-up, people follow your KPIs, your Key Performance Indicators. Is your recovery good? Is your availability good? Is your throughput good at the plant, at the mine? They're all stellar KPIs. All stellar KPIs. To me, what's important is in the left, look at the margin. The margin has gone from $10 to $10 to $20 to $40, and in Q1 this year, the margin's over $60. That's key today. When people say, "Oh, your grade has gone down a little bit," I say, "You're missing the point.
You're totally missing the point. Don't call me about grade. Because we go into a structure, if we find a 100-gram pocket, we leave it there, we take it out. We take it out. It's not in the model. Once you're underground and you're opening stopes and you're open-pit and you're opening new area and you've got pockets at 80, 100, 120, they're not in your model. You take them out, you put them through, so the grade can be down five gram, 10 gram, but at the end of the day, our goal is to make sure we don't leave anything there. We take it all out. We process it all. Hence, because the margin is so good and it continues to be so good, we were in a price-setting environment in Q1, so we would set the price.
When you saw the price of silver go to $100, $105, $110, $115, $120, we were doing that. Because if you sell and you hit the bid, well, you sell, you hit the bid. At SEMAFO , we never did that. We assemble quantity, so we don't sell for a month, two months, and then we take this quantity, we look at the bid, and we go $5, $5, $5, $5, and we put very large quantity of silver. In Q1, it worked perfectly well. Now, not as much, because now the market's a little bit different currently. Probably changing soon, but currently not doing as well. The revenue, as you see per quarter, it's an open-pit plant. In Morocco, you have, what I love about Morocco is there's no NGOs, not allowed. You can't go and protect the frogs or stuff like that.
Your lifespan will be one minute. It's ESG control, but it's in business. They follow you. When can you build? How fast can you build? There's one element, as little expat as possible. When we ran SEMAFO , we had 3,000 employees, 10% expat. We're running this 2,000 employees, 11 expats. 11. We had 300 at SEMAFO . Morocco, they have their own people, and they want you to employ them. Beautiful construction, open-pit. The guidance, what's important to see in yellow is by 2029, we will be a 43 million ounce of silver producer. The first mine is six, and the second mine is 37. By 2029, we will be there, and we love to compare ourself with Hecla and First Majestic and see that we need to climb up.
There's got to be a re-rate of our valuation because that 37 million ounces of additional production is permitted. It's found. PEA is done. Feasibility is being done. Water is there. Power is there. Employees are there. It's now execution. And that will take us to 43. So the fault, the line, it's called the Atlas Fault, we have, beside the government, the largest land positionAnd there's so much more to be discovered because it's never been looked at. And we're doing a deal right now, 21 permits with a family. Because they produce barite, which is sand. So they all produce barite, and they never sample for anything else but barite. And so we go look at sometimes the core that they have, they've never looked for gold or silver.
This is why some of you saw that at our second project, we're producing one million ounces a year of gold equivalent because we had stockpile dating back 500 years, and they never looked for gold or silver. We got 240,000 tons of stockpile with gold and silver that were never treated because they were not looking for that. This is the first mine. It's 1.4 km long, 700 m deep, 200 m wide. It's a loaf of bread. It's all mineralized. In there, you have control zones, so you have sometimes very high grade that you see on the left. Sometimes you have 100. Our task is to get everything out at the best price possible, make sure we leave nothing. Now we're seeing extension to the west, which is at the end, extension to the east.
When you look at this is our ground. The mine is that star in the middle, and we are the only player in town. Now we're using geochem, geophysics, satellite imagery, AI, a lot of AI, and we're looking at new targets. We have a team there. It's not as big a budget as the first one. It's $25 million-$30 million. We're going to be drilling a lot of these new targets. This is our little baby. It produces $300 million a year. It's built, it's paid for except for EBRD, and it's funding the big brother. The big brother is a world-class tier one asset. Well, it's not true. It was discovered by the Portuguese, and they were there before. When we arrived, no one had seen what it was. They had been producing out of it for 500 years.
It's a district. It's very large. We did the PEA on the resource of 2024. The PEA is being updated as the feasibility is being completed. We did it on the resource of 2024, so there's 200,000 meters of drilling missing. Look at $2,800 gold and is it $30 silver? You've got an NAV of $2 billion and an internal rate of return of 68%. We're using a before-tax number because that size of a project will have its own tax agreement. We're not going to be at the 32% tax rate. We're going to be a lot lower than that in-country. When you take this and you look at the CapEx is $450, because the cost of construction in Morocco is about one-third of North America.
So we built the first plant, which we had priced in North America at around $400 million to $500 million. We did it for $140 million. This plant, everybody was expecting 1.2 billion CapEx. It's actually 400 million CapEx. So when you look at it on a spot price as of February, that was before the war, we were at $5,000 gold and $80 silver. The NPV is seven billion. Don't forget, missing one year of drilling. And 148% IRR and a beautiful CapEx ratio, efficiency ratio. So it is a tier one world-class asset going into production by 2029. It will produce in silver equivalent, 37 million ounces. And all of that, what I just showed you, all of that is the X, the little bubble underneath the X, that's what we're putting into production. That's it. That is 550 million ounces of silver. Everything else is ours. It's all ours.
This is the geophysics. We've done 50 different types of geophysics, and I'm showing you just one. We're tracking the resistivity and the conductivity, and we're tracking it extremely well. We have positive results on all the pink color there. We have gold results, silver results, copper results. When people say, "What are you going to do after Boumadine?" I say, "Well, after Boumadine one, we're going to be producing 37 million ounces, but then we'll do Boumadine two and three and four," because that's that kind of a project. We've done all the work. We've done the mine plan. It's changing because we're putting more drilling. We have done the layouts, the concentrate, everything's been done, what it's going to look like in 3D. We have already gone out with RFPs on mining contractor, underground, open-pit. The design has been given to Lycopodium.
We're going all out on EPCM contract. We have nine bidders, and that's going to be done before year-end. People were saying, and I know not you, but some people were saying, "Oh, yeah, but the recovery is not going to be good." Yeah, you're right. It's going to be 96% for gold, 96% for silver, 74% for zinc, and 82% for lead. The recovery is fantastic. To that, we're going to be looking. The government is looking at a roaster, but the country has got port, so we can ship the concentrate to Europe, Finland, Poland. They're all bidding for the concentrate. The government last week calls us and say, "Okay, we read the PEA. You need a railroad." I said, "That would be nice." "Well, no. Come and see us, we're going to build a railroad for you from Bou Azzer to port." "No, no.
It's us." Why? Because it's a $37 million a year moving contract. They come to us first before we call them. Same, the power line at Bou Azzer, when they arrived, they say, "Yeah, you need power with the team you have here. Here's the power line." Okay? You don't see that anywhere else, and the beauty of what's happening, I'm sure you're all following the price of sulfur. It's gone from $100 a ton-$700 a ton. Okay, the price of sulfur. In here, you have gold, zinc, the concentrate, the lead concentrate, you can see what it looks like. The pyrite concentrate, the pyrite, one million ton a year, has 4.8 gram gold, 84 gram silver, 45% sulfur. That's not yet priced into those numbers, because that's something new. We haven't signed a contract.
When we started the feasibility study, the payability was at 73%. They came back to 75%. They called us back for 80%. Last week, they were at 84%, and they say we haven't priced sulfur yet. It's a project that is extremely powerful. CapEx $446, manageable. OpEx, that's what I wanted to show you. The OpEx, you see the shipping, $38 a ton, a million ton a year, $38 million. Sure they can build a railroad line. This is what Morocco is all about. It's like, we deliver, you deliver, we'll put the money, and we're going to make this into something really big. Now, the question is maybe they'll want a roaster in country, which they'll take care of, maybe. If it's that, we'll decide with them. We're pushing this in the project timeline. Historically, we were in to be in production 2030.
We'd like to be 2029. We're pushing that in as much as possible. It's a very simple story. One ATM machine runs super well, Zgounder running well, will produce $300 million. A world-class asset that's being developed. Lots of results coming out because we have 240,000 meters of drilling, so lots of results coming out. We will start trading on Nasdaq. We heard the previous company, their volume is five times. We were penalized because we don't trade on an American listing. A lot of the ETF reduced their position in Aya because we did not have enough volume in the States. We are starting before the end of April on Nasdaq, which is important. Coming back, one element. Geology is great. Jurisdiction's fantastic. People have done it. It's not a lifestyle company. People have done it many times.
Strong growth profile from six million-43 million of production. Core assets are fantastic. Exploration track record, that's not me, that's David Lalonde. David was with me at SEMAFO. He found 10 million-12 million ounces of gold. He's a gold retriever. He's like a little dog. He just retrieves gold. Some of you were at site last week. Some of you are going to be at site in two weeks, and many, many people are visiting right now. David knows his stuff inside out. He's got a team of 450 people just thinking about finding more ounces. That's it. He's not involved in operation. There's another team doing that. That's the story. It's very simple. Best couscous, best tagine, fantastic hotels, and a third of the price of Europe. You're invited. Thank you.
Thanks, Benoit. That was a great update.