Perfect. All right, let's get started. Hello and welcome, everyone, to the adjourned annual and special meeting of shareholders of Equinox Gold. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. Shareholders who are attending the meeting in person can ask a question by raising their hand, and then please wait until we bring a microphone to you. Shareholders who are attending online can ask a question by submitting the Ask a Question form that is below the slides in the middle of your screen. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Mr. Ross Beaty, Chair of the Board of Equinox Gold.
Thank you, Rhylin, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the adjourned annual and special meeting of the shareholders. This is a continuation of the previously adjourned shareholder meeting held on April 24, 2025. On behalf of our directors, management, and employees, thank you for joining us today. I just came off last night a six-day tour of Greenstone, Valentine, Aurizona, Brazil, Nicaragua, two mines in Nicaragua, and our Castle Mountain project in California. Even though I sound okay right now, I actually woke up this morning and I could not talk.
I had some kind of weird laryngitis or something like that, and I was gracious enough to give it to our CEO, Greg Smith, who joined me on the trip, and also Trudy Curran, one of our directors, who is probably going to get it tomorrow, and then Maryse Bélanger , who's probably immune because she's a solid French Canadian stock and probably never get it.
There's Maryse there. We had a really great trip. We had the CEO of Calibre with us, Darren Hall, who we had a chance to spend six days together, and it was a really nice visit. Our three directors, Greg, myself, and Mike Vint, who's an incoming director from Calibre. It was a great not only opportunity to see the mines, interact with the six of us quite closely for the six days, but it was a tiring, somewhat busy schedule.
Luckily, in a certain sense, I usually do this whole meeting, but because I literally could barely speak a month ago, I have deputized this job to Susan Toews, who's our VP, Legal, and General Counsel, and Susan has been gracious enough to agree to basically carry on the meeting on my behalf. I'm going to turn it over to Susan, and then we'll do, after the meeting, we'll do a presentation, and I think it should be okay, judging from how I sound right now.
All right. I'm just going to read through this relatively quickly. Thank you to the shareholders who came in person and to those who are listening online. After the formal portion of today's meeting is done, Ross will test his voice again on Equinox Gold's business strategy and objectives, and then there will be a full Q&A. Okay. Since this is an in-person meeting, the following processes will apply for conduct of the meeting. For those registered shareholders or proxy holders attending the meeting in person, when asking a question, please raise your hand and wait until a microphone is brought to you, and then indicate your name, which entity you represent, if any, and if you are a registered shareholder or proxy holder.
The must has questions are procedural or directly related to motions before the meeting, they will be addressed in the corporate update after the formal business of the meeting. We will also address any non-procedural meeting-related questions that were submitted through the website at that time. Rhylin Bailie, Equinox Gold's Vice President, Investor Relations, will act as question moderator for the meeting and will read aloud any questions that we get from our online participants. Now I'm going to outline the voting procedures. Voting will be conducted by ballot. Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders will be asked to vote on each business item. Shareholders who are attending online, while we're glad that you chose to join us, I'm afraid you will not be able to vote your shares through the webcast.
We only accept votes that were submitted before the proxy deadline of 10:00 A.M. this morning or that are submitted in person today at the meeting. Please note that if you have already voted by proxy, it is important that you do not vote again here at the meeting unless you intend to change your vote or your initial vote. The preliminary voting results will be summarized at the end of this meeting. The final voting results will be included with the minutes of this meeting and will be announced in a press release that we are issuing later today in accordance with the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Ross has already mentioned this, but I would like to introduce a couple of our board members that are in attendance today.
We have Maryse Bélanger, we have Lynn Beaudoin, Trudy Curran, and of course, Greg Smith, who is also our President and Chief Executive Officer. Unfortunately, Gordon Campbell, Sally Eyre, and Marshall Koval were not able to attend in person today. Other executives and management in attendance, and there's actually quite a few, so I'm just going to name a few of them. Peter Hardie, our CFO, Scott Heffernan, our Executive Vice President, Exploration, Sebastian D'Amici, who's our SVP, Finance and Treasury, Kelly Boychuk, our SVP, Technical Services, and of course, Rhylin Bailie, our VP, Investor Relations. We will now proceed with the formal portion of today's meeting, which should take about 10 minutes unless I can talk a bit faster.
To expedite matters, I will move and second all motions. The meeting will now come to order, and I will act as chair. I appoint Jacqlin Anthony, VP, associate general counsel, as secretary of the meeting. For the purposes of this meeting, I appoint Computershare Investor Services Inc. as scrutineer. The objectives of today's meeting are set out in the company's information circular dated March 21st, 2025. I confirm that the notice of this meeting, the information circular, and the form of proxy were mailed to shareholders on March 27th, 2025.
The company has received an affidavit confirming proof of mailing from our transfer agent, Computershare Investor Services Inc. A copy of the affidavit will be attached as scheduled to the minutes of this meeting. I will dispense with the reading of the notice of meeting, or we would be here today. Copies of the information circular and other meeting materials are available on Equinox Gold's website and under the company's profile on SEDAR+ and on EDGAR.
The scrutineer has advised that proxies were received from holders of a sufficient number of common shares to constitute a quorum. As such, I declare the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. The formal report of the scrutineer will be attached as scheduled to the minutes of this meeting. As most of you are aware, at annual meetings, most shares are represented by proxies given to management. The scrutineer has advised that a significant majority of the proxies received by management have been voted in favor of each of the director nominees and in favor of each of the other items of business. We thank you for your confidence. As mentioned, voting for each item will be conducted by ballot.
If you are a registered shareholder or proxy holder, you should have received a combined ballot for all items of business to be voted on when you checked in for this meeting. If you are a registered shareholder or proxy holder and did not receive a ballot, please raise your hand now, and a representative of the scrutineer will bring one to you. If you have already voted by proxy, it is important that you do not vote again here at the meeting unless you intend to change your initial vote. Okay. Seeing no hands, management proxy nominees will vote all proxies in favor of all matters put before this meeting, notwithstanding the ballots being taken. Okay. Now I'm just going to run through the meeting business. The first is the share issuance resolution.
Present to the meeting to consider and to approve with or without variation an ordinary resolution authorizing and approving the issuance of Equinox Gold shares in connection with the proposed acquisition by Equinox Gold of all the outstanding common shares of Calibre Mining by way of a plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act, British Columbia, as more particularly set out in the information circular. I'm now also going to state a few of Ross's words and comments about this resolution.
Some of these are forward-looking, so please refer to the cautionary language on forward-looking statements in the presentation that will follow. So, now I'm Ross, but just speaking. As you know, we announced this proposed merger with Calibre Mining on February 23rd. We see many benefits from combining these two companies, all of which are laid out in the information circular.
The underlying logic of the merger was to combine two large, low-cost, long-life gold mines at the beginning of their mine life into one company to create the second largest producer of gold from Canada. Our Greenstone Mine in Ontario, should be ramped up to capacity in late Q3 this year and will be producing around 400,000 ounces of gold per year for at least 15 years, but more likely for decades. Calibre's Valentine Gold Mine in Newfoundland is on track to pour gold in Q3 and will be producing around 200,000 ounces of gold per year when it's ramped up to capacity. With those two mines together in one company, Equinox Gold will be producing 600,000 ounces of gold from Canada at a time when Canadian producers are trading at a significant premium to the market.
With an additional 600,000 ounces of production coming from our combined portfolio of mines in California, Nevada, Nicaragua, and Brazil, we'll be producing more than a million ounces of gold per year, selling that gold at all-time highs of well over $3,000 per ounce, and just an extraordinary amount of free cash flow that we'll use to pay down debt and start returning capital to shareholders in the form of a dividend and perhaps also a share buyback.
Each of Calibre and Equinox Gold could have carried on as a mid-tier producer, but combining these two companies will catapult us into that elite producers, maximize our production and cash flow, and deliver the market premium of having these two big mines in Canada. We feel this is one of those rare situations when one plus one really does add up to three.
Together, we'll be a stronger, more valuable company and create more shareholders than either of us could have done individually. We are absolutely thrilled that Darren Hall, Calibre's President and CEO, will join the combined team as President and Chief Operating Officer. Calibre held their meeting earlier today, and I understand that Calibre's security holders voted in favor of the merger, and the scrutineer has informed me that proxies for the Equinox Gold vote received before the cutoff are also in favor of the merger.
I now move and second a motion to approve the share issuance ordinary resolution of the company, pursuant to the terms and subject to the conditions of the arrangement agreement dated February 23rd, 2025, as amended between Equinox Gold and Calibre. For those shareholders and proxy holders attending in person today, please record your vote on the ballot. Okay.
The next item of business is to review and approve the audited financial statements of Equinox Gold for the year ended December 31, 2024, together with the auditor's report on the financial statements. Copies of these documents have been mailed to the shareholders who requested such statements. I certainly don't intend to read them at this meeting, or we would be here as well for hours, but we would be pleased to deal with any questions regarding the financial statements during the corporate update following the formal business of this meeting. The next item is board size. The company's articles require that its board consist of the greater of three directors or the number set by an ordinary resolution. Equinox Gold is seeking approval to fix the number of directors at eight.
I move and second a motion to decrease the number of directors of the company from nine to eight. For those shareholders attending in person today, please record your vote on the ballot. Okay. Seeing none. We go to the next item of business, which is the election of directors. Management nominates the following eight individuals to hold office until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed: Ross Beaty, Lynn Beaudoin, Maryse Bélanger, Gordon Campbell, Trudy Curran, Sally Eyre, Marshall Koval, and Mike Vint. Each nominee has confirmed that they are prepared to serve as a director of Equinox Gold.
Equinox Gold has adopted an advance notice policy that requires shareholders to give the company advance notice of proposed director nominations at the annual shareholders meeting. Equinox Gold did not receive notice of any such nominations for this meeting. As a result, I declare the nominations closed, and I move and second a motion to elect each of the directors. The vote to approve this resolution is required to be taken by ballot. I direct that a ballot be taken. For those shareholders and proxy holders attending in person today, please record your vote for each nominee on your ballot.
Next item is appointment of independent auditor. The next, I move and second a motion to appoint KPMG LLP as auditor of the company to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting of shareholders and that the board be authorized to fix KPMG's remuneration. For those shareholders and proxy holders attending in person today, please record your vote on your ballot. Okay. The next item of business is the amendment of Equinox Gold's restricted share unit plan.
The company wishes to amend its, I'm just going to call it the RSU plan, dated effective May 4th, 2022, from a fixed maximum plan to a rolling plan. It is proposed that instead of having a fixed limit of 12.400 million common shares that can be issued under the RSU plan, the maximum number of common shares issuable under the RSU plan be limited to 5% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the company. It is also proposed that all currently available and unallocated rights and other entitlements issuable pursuant to the amended RSU plan be and are approved and authorized for grant until April 24, 2028.
I move and second a motion to approve the amendment to the RSU Plan by Equinox Gold's shareholders. For those shareholders and proxy holders attending in person today, please record your vote on the ballot. The last item, I know you're happy to hear the last item, is the say-on-pay advisory vote. This is only non-binding on the company and the board. However, the board and the compensation committee will review the results of the vote and expect to take them into consideration in addressing future compensation policies and decisions. I move and second a motion that on an advisory basis and not to diminish the role and responsibility of Equinox Gold shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the company's information circular dated March 21, 2025, delivered in advance of the meeting.
For those shareholders and proxy holders attending in person today, please record your vote and ensure that you have signed and printed your name on the ballot. Once you have completed your, please raise your hand and the scrutineer will collect it from you. I just want to confirm there was nobody with ballots today, correct? Yep. Closing of polls. These are all the resolutions before the meeting. I will provide a more, or actually, I do not need to provide more time for proxy holders to complete their ballots.
All right. Now I get to talk.
Actually, on behalf of Computershare, I confirm then that all votes have been collected and all the polls have closed. Now, Rhylin, based on the proxies provided prior to the meeting and the preliminary voting results provided by the scrutineer, all matters brought before the meeting today have passed by the requisite number of votes. I ask that the scrutineer compile the report regarding the results of voting on all business matters, and then, as I mentioned earlier, the results will be included with the minutes of this meeting and will be announced in a press release later today in accordance with the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Is there any further business for the formal portion of the meeting?
I'm not aware of any questions.
Okay. Since there's no further business, I move and second that this meeting now terminate and declare the formal part of this meeting to be concluded.
Perfect. Thank you, Susan. We're now going to move directly into the corporate update. Greg and Peter, can you please come up here and join us at the head table so you can answer some of the questions and save Ross's voice? While Greg and Peter are getting settled, I'll remind everybody that we will be making a number of forward-looking statements today, so please do visit our website, SEDAR+ and EDGAR, to read our continuous disclosure documents. I will now turn the floor over to Equinox Gold's Chair, Ross Beaty.
All right. Thank you very much, everybody. I'm going to start by saying this is a very unusual event because, to my surprise but delight, we have a lot of goodies in the back, and I really encourage you to eat them because otherwise you're going to be thrown out. I used to have all the Pan-Americans meetings here for literally decades, and I can tell you this, the Metropolitan Hotel probably is in Vancouver. They're just great. There's a whole bunch of them, and I really don't want to have them all thrown out.
We're generous just this afternoon. We usually were pretty frugal. I was quite shocked when I saw all that food, actually, but what can you do? That's that. Let's get into it. My voice is actually a lot better than it was a couple of hours ago, amazingly. We're going to roll through this relatively quickly, and I think give a chance for Q&A to anybody who has questions specifically relating to either Equinox's assets or any of the Calibre transaction questions that might arise. Again, my thanks to everybody for coming.
It includes, by the way, all of our senior management who are here. Really great to see all of you, and we really feel like we're a family, and I'm happy that you've joined us today in our unit of shareholders. So uhm, we're going to start, yeah, we're going to start on page one eventually. I've got to get to that first. You can see our mission here. It's unchanged from when we started at the beginning of 2018, end of 2017, and it's really to create a company that offers superior leverage to gold. How you do that is you build a company with a lot of production, and you build a company with a lot of reserves of resources. It's pretty simple. We've worked very hard to do that from a sort of a standing start at zero in 2018.
This is the record of what we've been able to do. We've acquired, we've spun out, we've created three spin-out companies. We have sold some assets, and we've built a bunch of mines. The biggest mine we've built just entered production last year, the Greenstone Mine. And really now, I think with the Calibre transaction on their mine that they're just about to finish, we're really solid now. We've really hit the first major goal of the company, which is to become a senior gold producer producing more than a million ounces a year. I'm going to see if this works. Yeah, good. This is what we look like today.
I'm going to say today plus like a month because with the successful votes on the Calibre side and Equinox side today, we now have only one real gating item to get to the conclusion of the merger, and that is Mexican competition approval, whatever it's called. That's a no-brainer, but it requires obviously an application, some discussion. They have to have a vote, and their committee meets once a month, I think, and hopefully it'll be done in, where's Susan? In May? Yeah. I'm hoping end of May. Hoping end of May. That's the only real gating item before we conclude this with. Basically all the other matters, and it's a formality, but it has to be done. Otherwise, there's no other impediment, I think, to making this deal happen. What does it look like?
I'm going to talk about today the combined asset. Seven producing mines, Valentine yet to be built, and then we have all this huge growth, internal growth in the company that will take us beyond our production base for this year, way up into the 1.x million ounces a year, just increasing our leverage and increasing our scale, and with scale, our valuation and multiple gain, which is, I think, one of the big stories here. I hope today's valuation will be like the base of what will become a multi-year run that will make us a leading outperformer in the gold space.
I always like to do a report card on what we set out to achieve a year ago and what we've actually achieved, and then talk about what we're trying to do this year that a year from now we can talk about how well we did. Obviously, the big one was to achieve Greenstone production. We did that in May last year. We had first gold on May 22nd. We declared commercial production effective October 31st. I will say the startup has been a little bit slower than our lofty hopes and expectations, but it is ramping up almost every month and scaling up to the scale that we expect this mine to produce sometime later this year.
We also had a very large transaction in May of last year buying the other 40% of Greenstone for approximately $1 billion. We didn't predict timing on that a year ago. We just were hoping we could do it, but we ended up doing it, and that was a major achievement for the year. Of course, we guided to a certain production level a year ago, and actually we didn't hit it. We had to revise guidance. We had a problem at Aurizona with a land slump that affected production there.
We had some recovery issues at our Mesquite mine, and we had some hiccups at one or two of the other mines, including Greenstone, actually, in terms of how quickly we had predicted it to ramp up and how it actually did. We ended up producing about 623,000 ounces or selling about 623,000 ounces. However you cut it, though, it was a pretty successful year of development in all of our assets with annual all-in sustaining cost of $1,870 per ounce of gold produced.
We did an absolute ton of corporate finance like we had done the previous year, and I really want to take my hats off to our finance team led by Peter and Seb, just the really extraordinary work you guys did in 2024, leading up to where we stand today. We also, at the end of the year, were able to reduce our debt by $180 million, and we see a lot of continuing debt reduction coming in 2025 and 2026. Of course, we also replaced reserves.
We grew our resources, again, thanks to Scott Heffernan and his exploration team for all of that hard work, particularly highlighted by the Fazenda Mine in Brazil, which had a relatively short life ahead of it. With some really successful exploration, we've managed to extend the mine life to more than 10 years. When I say more than, I expect it to be well more than with the whole new mine plan. With that, obviously, you're amortizing the capital cost of that mine over many, many more years. It is going to be a great contributor to Equinox Gold for a long, long time. Of course, we have all of this growth built into what we've got right now, growth in three main projects,
I'd say that first one last one first, Castle Mountain, where Greg and I were yesterday in northern California, sorry, in central California, just near Las Vegas in sort of south-central California. Big heap leach project, very low risk technically and very large, producing about 200,000 ounces for maybe 15 years. We've been waiting for permits. This has been a California/U.S. federal land permitting world that we've been working through all of the different requirements.
It's quite considerable, as you can imagine, in California. I can tell you that we're very close to being at the end of a lot of that stuff, and we'll have some formal submission in. We should have a formal designation in mid-year this year that will give us a two-year timeline to get our final permit, allowing us to begin construction in about two years. That was very big news we heard yesterday. We can continue to advance that under the current pro-development regime in Washington and feed into that.
That is Castle Mountain. That was really nice to see. We have Aurizona. We expect to advance this year in underground development of Aurizona. We started doing a lot of work last year. The open pit mine right now is about a 4km long gold belt, beneath which is a continuation, very, very deep, the lowest hole is 600 m below surface. Up to a kilometer. Up to a kilometer. It is a sheet of mineralization that just goes below the pit, and it is decent grade. It is nice and wide. It is in good rock, and it is very exciting for me to go underground and get into that and do some more exploratory drilling to test the underground zone. We are going to hopefully do that later this year to advance that project.
It'll add anywhere from 20 to probably 100,000 ounces of gold production, depending on when we get into it. It is a significant development. We have Los Filos. If there has been one disappointment to me, it's the fact that despite a huge amount of effort and I would say logic on all sides, we're not able to do something we set out to achieve a year ago, which is to settle a new agreement with our local communities at Los Filos, allowing us to build a new mine at Los Filos that will allow us to develop higher-grade but more complicated ore that's coming from deeper in the mine, higher cost, higher value.
It's higher grade, but it's got more copper in it, and it simply doesn't respond well to the heap leach process that's been there for so many years, 15 years of historic production. We had a very, very seminal meeting in January this year with all three communities and the government, the federal government, the state government, the local municipality, the heroic work by Georgina Blanco, who was our lead on the Los Filos social world, and also our great Mexican lead as well, Armando Ortega. We had agreement from all three communities. We signed a heads of agreement. Two of the communities ratified it and adopted it.
New agreement that allows us to move forward with this new mine, what we call the new mine, really Los Filos 2.0. Regrettably, one of the communities has been a rather difficult community really throughout our tenure, our five-year tenure at that mine, when renege on its original agreement and would not sign the revised terms. They remain like that unless they agree with us. We cannot enter their land. They own the land. We have the minimum rights. They own the land. Really, in my opinion, it's illogical. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is.
The result of that was the have with them round out at the end of March. With the absence of a new agreement, we were forced to suspend the mine, terminate all of the employees, most of whom, by the way, came from that community, some big contracts from that community. I can tell you that I'm surprised that the financial pain hasn't yet brought them back to the table, but it hasn't. I can't give you any timeline on when that's going to happen. As illogical as it may seem, it is a lose-lose really for everybody until that happens. It's the way it is.
We are anxious to resume communication with them and see if we can move back to development of that new mine at Los Filos. Until this is a two-way street, it's just not going to happen. That's unfortunately the update for Los Filos. That was a disappointment. We really thought we would get that agreement last year and certainly earlier this year, but that's the status of it right now. Of course, I mentioned the big transaction in May of last year where we acquired 40% of Greenstone. I think those reasons were all well described a year ago. Let's now talk about what this merger with Calibre creates. It creates a company where, if you can see that brown 390,000, that's our Greenstone run rate production base. Then we have 200,000 from Calibre on the right.
Adding those together, you get to a real Canadian powerhouse, second only to Agnico Eagle in terms of Canadian gold production base. Those are the high-value ounces, low-cost ounces, Canadian location that has been driving real premium valuations for companies in the gold space. We expect we're going to get there as soon as we get this transaction behind us. With that, Canadian exposure drives a re-rate. We expect this will happen. We're now on the far left of that curve with 0.6 multiple.
Our peers are running around 1 or 1.1, and we expect over the course of the next year or so, we will have that kind of valuation bump that comes from this combination of these two mines in one company. These are some other metrics that you can see where production base or increased cash flow. I mean, these are some pretty big numbers.
You probably can't read them from where you are, but I'll tell you our gold production base 2024, 622,000 ounces. New Equinox 2025, 1.2 million ounces plus or minus going to 1.4 in 2026. These are pretty significant numbers. You're going to see a valuation change for the positive. In terms of EBITDA and cash flow, the EBITDA in the center, you can see from $515 million last year, $1.8 billion this year, very much H2 weighted. You're not going to see those showing up in Q1 numbers particularly, but you're going to see them as the year goes on, as production builds in Ontario, in Newfoundland, in other parts of our portfolio, you're going to see these numbers, pretty astonishing growth.
Of course, in terms of that's the number at $2,750 gold, $2,780 gold, if you do it at $3,200 gold, more or less today's numbers, it's even more astonishing. A lot of that cash flow is going to be used to repay debt, which should be reduced at a very prodigious rate. This is all the kind of happy stuff that's going to come later this year for all of us. It's kind of a win for all of us. I think it's just bigger, better, stronger, more diverse, much more capacity to make our balance sheet better and our whole business pretty exciting. That's what we've been working really hard for the last sort of seven years to create.
I'd say we're up over that plateau of growth, and we're looking a long way down the plane, and it's a pretty happy view. Beyond those assets, we have all this other growth. I talked about earlier at Greenstone, Valentine, Aurizona, Castle Mountain. We have not talked about Los Filos here, but of course, Los Filos could be here if, as in when, we get the social contract. Los Filos should be capable of producing around 280,000 ounces a year with a CIL plant and a new investment in what we call the new mine at Los Filos.
This is where we are today. We are certainly hitting our first target of a million ounces plus. We think this is going to drive significant shareholder value, and we should see this reflected in per-share performance, share-based performance, generally speaking. Our liquidity is crazy right now. We are trading at 10 million shares a day on the U.S., on the New York Stock Exchange, a couple million a day in Toronto. I'm very, very happy with all of that. It's really panning out as I would have hoped. I'm losing my voice again.
For our share price, which I think is severely devalued when you compare it to any other company in the space of approximately our size, I can think of very, very little reason why it isn't going to reflect, isn't going to bounce very sharply upward once we complete this merger. 2025 targets, this is our report card for 2025. What I hope a year from now, we're going to be able to show you we've completed the Calibre deal, completed Valentine in Q3, hitting design capacity at some point after that, ramping up Greenstone this year to design capacity. We're very near that in the mill. We're very near that in the mine.
We've got to get a new shovel, which will come in in June. Greenstone is looking great right now. From an operation standpoint, obviously, we're trying to establish a great reputation in every aspect of the mining business from engineering, exploration, social work, safety, environment, and all that. The whole important category, all the important categories where companies are judged for excellence. I think we're already there in a number of these, and we're still working hard to get there in all of them.
Obviously, doing some asset optimization. We're not going to end a year from now where we are today in terms of all these mines we have. We'll almost certainly spin out some of them and use the proceeds to pay down debt. Obviously, we're going to look very hard at where we can optimize things generally. Development, Aurizona, underground, Castle Mountain, permitting, as I've talked about, and of course, exploration constantly to replace reserves and grow further. The balance sheet side, all of Pete's work and so on, his team will be working hard on decreasing our debt.
That's a way of returning value to shareholders as well. A couple of words on gold. Who can complain about what's happened this year in gold? My God, nobody would have expected, including me. I was all rah-rah when gold was $1,350 when we started this adventure in Equinox Gold saying, "It's going to hit $2,000, I hope, soon." I was sort of feeling pretty good when we got to $1,900 and $2,000. That call was pretty good. Building a company, increasing gold prices is a good thing to do. You're rewarded when you try to create leverage and you get the leverage.
Then it blew through $2,000, like, what, four months ago? You know. Yeah, not much more though. What, December? When did gold go through? It was not much, like four or five months. Through $3,000. No, $2,000. $2,000. It was only $2,000 four or five months ago.
We can go back and check that.
Let's look at it.
I gave you a short chart.
Yeah, yeah, you did. You started your chart in January. It was, oh yeah, of course, it was before that. Yeah, of course. Not that much long ago. Anyway, I was sort of going, "Yeah, I was predicting, yeah, January 2024." I was predicting it was going to blow through that. It did. Okay, fine, good. Then Trump gets elected. It was very hard to imagine a bearish case for gold within the world of the Trump agenda.
I was a nobody, nobody in November 2024 could have predicted gold going to $3,500 so quickly. It is just remarkable in my own 50 years in this business, having seen that kind of a move. The surprising thing was all the equities traded flat. We traded flat. In fact, we have been down. Can you believe it? $1,000 move in the gold, and we trade flat or down. Even the big guys are like that, Newmont and Barrick, they have been flat.
The juniors, particularly, have been cash-heaven. They do not have any ability to raise money. There is no new exploration going on. It is just a weird, crazy world where there has been this big disconnect. Gold is running and the equities are flat, which tells me there are very different groups of buyers. That is a very unusual disconnect. It will not last.
Gold price is probably not going to go down. Every analyst in the industry is bullish on gold. From today, by the way, from today, they're still bullish on gold. They're predicting higher prices, much higher prices by year-end. If that's going to happen, there will be a return to the standard case that's been around for 50 years where gold prices, when they go up, gold equities go up. I'm not going to talk about what happens when they go down because I don't think that's going to happen. Right now, we're in a bullish environment. The bullish environment is actually on steroids. Now, normally, contrary to investor, I like to buy when everybody's saying the bottom is like when no one else wants to buy and sell when no one else wants to sell.
That would mean today is a kind of a contrarian signal to sell. I can't see it. I just can't see it. There are some really profound things happening that I just think are going to continue to drive gold. You've got this secular weakness in the U.S. dollar that should be strong for gold. You've got a tend to higher yields that should be strong for gold. You have Asia wanting to get off the dollar for gold. What's happening in Asia generally is retail investors are buying gold like crazy, particularly China, and central banks around the world are shifting from dollars into gold. Why is that going to stop?
I don't think it will. I think the factors driving that are profound. There are factors that have built up for many, many years, and they're unfolding today. That's a profoundly bullish long-term driver for higher gold prices. Supply. Gold supply has been more or less flat for many years, 11, 12 years ago. Flat. Can you imagine that? Gold's gone from $1,100 to $3,200 in the last 10 years or so. There's almost no new gold supply.
Mines are harder to build, harder to find. It takes longer to develop them, much more difficult. You will see a rise. There's a lot of gold production coming on now. I mean, like Greenstone and Valentine, there's a bunch of mines around the world that are coming on. There's also mines that are shutting down because they're depleted. You will see a supply reaction, but it hasn't happened yet. That's a very bullish factor that very few analysts think about. There's some really exciting moves in the concept of digital gold.
The World Gold Council is working on a digital gold stablecoin, which will allow insurers to use gold as collateral. That could be a profoundly bullish factor in the gold market. In China, insurance companies are already allowed to use gold as collateral or as assets, allowing them to put some of their money out of conventional asset classes into gold. That, again, is going to drive a lot of value into gold. These are long-term bullish factors that I just do not think are going to slow down at all. I talked about this crazy disconnect a little bit.
I think with Equinox Gold, all these great metrics that we are coming with accelerating sales, not a doubling of our EBITDA, but like a tripling or quadrupling, that is going to drive some pretty extraordinary value for our shareholders in 2025. I am looking forward to that. 2024, pivotal year. 2025, all this hard work and all this development is going to really manifest for shareholders. I really look forward to it. Great leverage to higher prices. I think we have a good case for higher prices.
Huge amount of production growth with all the stuff I've talked about, increased cash flow, lower costs, stronger balance sheet, less debt. Of course, the two big mines in Canada making us a real Canadian powerhouse. With that, I'm going to, I actually blasted through the meeting. I'm going to ask if there are any questions. I think we may have some online for anybody listening online. I hope that there are more financial that Pete can answer or operational that Greg can answer. I'd like to thank everybody again for attending today, including those online. Now turn it over to you, Rhylin.
Thank you. Thank you. I'll remind people online, if you would like to ask a question, please fill out the form that's below the slides in the middle of your screen and submit that to us. We do so far only have one question. People are taking pity on you, I think, because of your voice. What do you think has held the shares back so much? What does the market want to see for a proper re-rate, given that the recent gold price rise hasn't done much to the shares?
Greg.
I mean, it's hard to say specifically, but I think in part, at least over the first quarter here, we've been in a transaction. When you're in a transaction, you have all sorts of trading around the stock and around the deal that can have an effect on the share price. We've seen volumes over the last couple of months since we announced the transaction that are substantially higher than we've ever had before.
There's probably some trading and maybe the stock's held a little back until this deal gets done and closed, and then we're moving forward as one company. We saw that a little bit with a transaction we did in the past when we merged with Leagold. Same type of thing. Once it closed, we had a very rapid re-rating in the share price. On the other side, we're ramping up a very large mine. We took on some debt to do that.
I think the market wants to see success at Greenstone and then see the company start to use that success to deleverage all things that we're planning in 2025. I think this period where we sort of traded flat here for a while while some of the other peer stocks have increased with the gold price, I think that'll start to shift as we close this transaction and move through the year.
Anything to add, Ross?
Any questions from the audience?
Yes. Oh, hang on one second for the microphone, please.
Thank you. One question. Los Filos, do you have an estimated CapEx number if you got social license today? Just spitball. And then secondly, with the more robust cash flow happening, would the plan be to finance it through cash flow or some other mechanism?
I can take that. Uhm, w e had a feasibility study that went out in 2022. That's obviously dated now that we're in 2025. Rough, rough, we've got to redo the engineering, update the detailed engineering, call it $500 million, roughly, depending on what we do with the fleet. We do not have a timeline because there is no path forward at Los Filos until we have long-term agreements that would permit for that investment.
If you just look at a timeline that would involve advancing detailed engineering toward a construction decision and ultimately building, that's probably a couple of years out. In between that period and today, we're going to be producing a substantial amount of gold at a very high margin, which will allow us to reduce our current leverage, giving us a fair bit of flexibility when and if that time comes at Los Filos. Same thing with Castle Mountain.
As we permit that, two years, if we can get to a point where we can make a construction decision, we'll have had these next two years to generate a fairly substantial amount of cash flow, reduce our leverage, and put us in a very strong position to finance that build.
Perfect answer. Thank you.
We have, surprisingly, no further questions online. In the room?
All right. We have a, obviously, very satisfied shareholder base. Anyway, we'll close it up then. Thank you all for joining us. I look forward to seeing you a year from now. Thank you.
T hank you, everybody, for joining us today.