Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Tim Bremner, and I'm the CEO of Foraco International. I'm based in North Bay, Ontario, and I'm very pleased to be able to present to you this afternoon. I'll be going through the investor presentation for Foraco. Foraco is a French domicile company based in France, of course. I'm based here in Canada, and we're listed on the TSX. This is the normal disclaimer that we're obligated to show you. So I'd like to tell you a little bit about our business. Foraco is a diversified drilling services company serving the mining industry and also the water industry as it relates to mining, but also for water for human consumption, particularly in developing parts of the world.
In the drilling services space, we are the number three service provider globally with some 290 rigs. And we operate in 22 jurisdictions around the world with 2,300 employees, and as I said, 290 rigs. The main focus for our business is on the Tier one customer groups, as you can see here by the badges. And one remark I'll say about the presentation, because we are a French-based company, all of our figures are IFRS. So depreciation is included into the cost of sales and the margins. And all the figures I'm presenting here are in US dollars.
You can see that Foraco has had some impressive growth from 2022 to 2023, delivering reasonable EBITDA margins and returns. Just quickly, the jurisdiction, the profile of the company in terms of assets, 290 rigs. 54 of these rigs are rotary. These are the highest revenue-generating rigs that we have in our fleet, and the ones that have the widest application to all types of drilling in the mining and water services industry. So they're not dependent on any one type of work. We have 184 diamond rigs or core rigs that produce a cylindrical rock sample. These are single-purpose rigs, generally used for mineral exploration. 12 rigs that are a combination, meaning they can do one or both of coring and rotary.
And then we have 40 underground rigs, and these rigs are predominantly core rigs, but we also have some drill and blast rigs. Foraco continually invests in new equipment. The 290 rigs includes 52... 50 new rigs that we've invested in the last five years. Some of that investment has been in diversification, and some of it has been to replace older rigs that are no longer serviceable in the business or don't meet the health and safety regulations that the industry demands. The current market value of the equipment is estimated conservatively of $200 million. A lot of questions we get is, "How long does a rig last?" Generally, the service life of a rig is somewhere between 15-20 years.
That doesn't mean it goes out into the field for 15 or 20 years. We generally do a refit every five years, which means completely updating the rig with newer technology, new engines, new hydraulics, PLC controllers, and inspecting the frame of the rig, which generally does not get changed. There you can see the jurisdictions that we work in around the world. We've recently exited some of the unfriendly jurisdictions, including Russia, and have entered the US juris-- the US market, which is our newest jurisdiction. This is one of the most important slides that I have in the deck. What I'm attempting to illustrate here is the life cycle of a mine. If you look on the far left, we're looking at exploration. No mine exists.
This is where our customers are out looking for the next mine. They've identified targets in prospective areas, and we would go out and drill holes and intersect those targets for them, and hopefully, there's mineralization. It's the least technical part of the business. The holes are generally left to go where they want, and it's the part of the business that is participated in mostly by the juniors. With success, a project will move on to the pre-feasibility and feasibility stage. This is where the highest concentration of drilling occurs at any time in a mine's life. So a customer could have up to ten to twelve rigs on this particular project, drilling it off, you know, proving out the ore body, and this is where technique and skills matter.
The holes need to go where they're supposed to. We're drilling off an ore body. You know, this has to be something that's going to withstand the rigors of audit, and they're drilling to a schedule. This is where the Tier one mining companies or the mid tiers often get involved and become the operators, and this is an area that we specifically target. Why? Because generally, the contracts are longer. They run 12 months a year, and it gives us an opportunity to set up a relationship with the customer that is going to lead us into the life-of-mine opportunity, which is to the right, which is where the biggest opportunity occurs. Unlike oil and gas, in an operating mine, drilling is a requirement that is needed throughout the mine's life.
If you think of drilling in a producing mine, think of it as an insurance policy. Definition drilling ensures that what they're about to mine is exactly what they expect. Definition drilling is low-cost insurance for them to make certain that what they put through the mill is what they expect. It also gives them a good glance at the structure. If you don't know there's a bend in the road, you're going to crash your car. It's the same thing in the mining environment. They find a lot of structure that is unexpected, and drilling is critically important. Drilling in a producing mine also was sustainable through the metals price cycle, where exploration is linked to it 100% .
We don't very often see mines close when metal prices fluctuate, so the fluctuation in the drilling demand for an operating mine is relatively shallow at about 15% from peak to trough. The other opportunity in the life of mine is that it gives us the opportunity to deliver the eight different types of services that we provide. Core drilling is the one that is used the most frequently in exploration. But as you advance further along the life of mine, especially when you're underground, you can get into underground exploration, underground definition drilling, underground drill and blast.
On surface, you can be doing dewatering work, you can do infrastructure drilling, and there's a whole host of opportunities that come with it, as well as geotechnical work, a lot of geotechnical work done around tailings dams and whatnot. Foraco is very much focused on the right-hand shift of the mining life cycle. When I mentioned to you the different types of drilling that we provide, exploration is the one that people talk about the most. It's probably the most fun part of the business, especially when the business is good, but it's also the most vulnerable. The industry is very fragmented.
You can liken it to the trucking business, where there's lots of owner-operators, and we find it difficult to differentiate ourselves much more so on price. So unless the market is pretty heated, that's not a big part of our business. The development drilling is something that's much more important, and this is where we do that on the feasibility. You can see here, for example, we're taking some particularly large diameter cores on this particular project, which is going to be going through as a bulk sample for a test mill. Then there's the production drilling that we do in an underground environment, where we actually drill and blast. This really is getting on, infringing on contract mining, but is increasingly an important part of our business.
And then linked to all of that, and very, very important, is the water segment. You can appreciate that every miner must deal with water, whether it's an open pit or an underground mine. And that means understanding how water is impacted by the mining activity. So monitoring wells continually track the groundwater levels, especially in arid terrains like in Chile, where it is mandated. So we're doing a lot of monitoring wells for our customers there, or in wet environment like Northern Canada and Labrador, where we drill for Iron Ore Company of Canada in Northern Labrador, or in the Pilbara in Western Australia, where even though it's dry on top, the ore body is saturated.
Our job is to move the water temporarily so they can access the ore, and that requires a large number of very sophisticated and complex dewatering wells. Increasingly, that's becoming a bigger part of our business. The growth pillars for the company, I mean, exploration is driven by the metals price. I often get asked the question, Tim, how are you going to grow the business in a market where the metals prices aren't really, you know, lighting the world on fire? We're gonna do it by focusing on developing our portfolio with Tier One customers. They're the ones doing the pre-feasibility work and the life of mine. There's a gap in our portfolio with, particularly with gold customers, so that is a focus of mine. Those relationships stand long-term.
When you're at a producing mine, it's really an evergreen contract and providing you're delivering high-quality services at reasonable rates, the job is yours to lose. The other area, and these are ranked, by the way, is strengthening our position in water services. We see that as a real growth opportunity. We do a lot of work in Brazil, for example. We work for Vale. They're our number one customer globally, yet we don't do any water well work for them, and there is a huge opportunity for us. We're also working in the transition metals. We quite believe that the long-term sustainability of EV transition metals will pave the way for us in the future, not only copper and nickel, but others as well. And then the last pillar for growth is differentiating through innovation.
This can be sometimes overused, but it is an incredibly important pillar in our growth. We've learned that innovation is really our future. Remote-controlled rigs are not only safer, but enables us to hire the younger generation, a demographic that don't really get turned on by working out in the rain and the snow, much rather want to work in a controlled environment. So it's also a safer way to work. This is a little bit of the financial performance. You can see that, we've had, up until the beginning of this year, we had 20 consecutive quarters of continuous growth. The first half of this year is, you know, still quite reasonable. There has been some softening in the lithium market, which impacted our business a little bit.
But the biggest driver for the change in the top line revenue was the decision of the company to exit unsafe jurisdictions that we were operating in. And those unsafe jurisdictions included Russia, which we have now exited completely, and we've taken a number of our assets and moved them across the border into Kazakhstan. Not a great place to start a drilling business, but they're there, and I need to figure out what to do with them. New Caledonia, where we were impacted by the situation in New Caledonia, where we have a number of rigs, and certain jurisdictions in Africa. Remember, we're a French domicile company, and we must respect the sanctions that the French government puts in place, so we're prohibited from working in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.
And quite frankly, I wouldn't put anybody to work in that jurisdiction because they are unsafe, and we would have made that decision on our own anyway. And then there was some softening in the lithium business, as I mentioned, which had a slight impact. But the underlying margins and the EBITDA performance of the company are such that we're quite able to fund the activities and manage the debt and carry on the business. And when this pivoting is complete, we see the opportunities to grow the business for the reasons that I mentioned, which include now entering into the U.S. market, which is the only significant safe jurisdiction that Foraco has not worked in until now, and that is well underway. So, a few...
Actually, I might skip this slide and just go right to the end because it is duplicated, so pardon me for that. So how do we differentiate ourselves? We need to do it through scope and size. We can't take on these large feasibility projects without having the rigs available in the right jurisdictions. There's significant barriers to entry into the water business, for example, that it's anybody can go and buy the rig, but when you look at some of these water wells that we do, about 35% of the work is drilling the hole. The rest of it is constructing the well, developing it, installing the pumps, the screens, doing the surface infrastructure.
We do this all with the same drill crew, and they're a pretty, pretty skilled group of people, and not hard to find. Incidentally, the other water services companies, you may think of them, that are drilling holes for the city of Vancouver, for water supply, well, maybe not Vancouver, but. And then the agricultural water drillers, they don't really have an appetite to go and work in the mining industry. They don't want to work remotely, they don't want to work twenty-four hours a day, and they don't want to follow all the safety regulations. So the water industry for a mining services company is very much aligned with what we do. We are also concentrating on specialty projects. Specialty projects, specialized operations that might be overused a little bit.
When I mentioned the pre-feasibility drilling, and being able to hit the targets where the customer wants them, is critically important. Increasingly, those targets are getting deeper and deeper. If you look at the Sudbury Basin, or you look at some of the gold mines in Northern Ontario, they're now, pardon me, encroaching on 3,000 meters deep. Mining in Canada, and in fact, around the world, is going deeper, in part because of EV metals and batteries, allowing our customers to mine deeper with remotely powered electric mining equipment, which reduces their manpower and ventilation costs. They are increasingly going deeper, and this requires a completely different skill set than for exploration. We are pioneering innovation. That too has been talked about a lot. Innovation sometimes, most often actually happens in the field.
We figure out the drilling challenges while we're there. We've done a lot of work in Canada, in the Elk Valley, for Teck, now Glencore, dealing with the selenium problem that is a problem from the thermal coal - sorry, the met coal operations up there. We're doing a large number of water wells in waste dumps, which is really the drilling from hell, in order for them to be able to access the selenium and deal with it. Otherwise, that just ends up in the groundwater in the Fraser River and Columbia River, and it's not a very good outcome. That's estimated at about a $4.5 billion cleanup that those mines have to deal with, and the only way to do it is to get at the water and treat it.
That's taken some pretty innovative drilling techniques, because in the waste dump, you not only have rock, but you've got the old haul truck, you've got the tires, you've got wood, you've got everything that went into the dump, and we have to get through it and get to the bottom to get to the water. A little bit about innovation. We have been innovating for a number of years. You might have read in the press, some of our competitors are innovating. We have been too. We're pioneering our first remote control rig in Australia almost 10 years ago now for Rio Tinto, when they mandated that they wanted all of the people moved away from the rig. We weren't hurting anybody, but they said, "You know what?
We're gonna make this remote control, so we definitely don't hurt anybody." And it was the right thing to do. And Australia leads our company in innovation, where now almost the entire fleet is remote controlled, and it has enabled us to not only keep our workers safe and put them in a much better controlled environment. It's very hot in Australia, as you know, and it's great to sit in a small office, running a screen and running the drill, which is, you know, some 12 meters, 15 meters away from you. And it's also allowed the younger generation, including ladies, to join our company with great success, where we now have about 25% of our field workforce in Australia is women, including some of the best drillers in the fleet.
So innovation is definitely something that is part of our mandate. Directional drilling and being able to take the holes exactly where they are supposed to go, that used to be something that was a third-party service that was provided to us by our customer. We now have that capability fully in-house, and that de-risks the project for our customer. I better speed up here. So just the revenue exposure. As I mentioned, we work mainly for the majors. You can see here that the revenue split is 85% for the tier one. The geographies that we work in are predominantly North America.
We are the single largest services provider in Canada, ahead of major drilling, and Australia, Latin America, 32%, and the rest of the world at 12%. Heavy exposure in EV metals, running at about 51%, 2% of that is lithium, and the remainder is nickel and copper, equally, and I remind everybody that not all nickel is EV nickel. The lateritic nickel is not. It's only good for the saucepans and stainless steel, so the battery nickel that we focus on is coming from our customers, such as Valley, and McEwen and Glencore. Long-term relationships are extremely important. Mining services and the whole mining industry is a relationship business. When I first joined the company 18 years ago, the owners of the business didn't understand it. They came from the oil and gas business.
They wanted to, you know, challenge every single contract that we had and look at the T& Cs. And I said, "Gentlemen, this business is built on trust and relationships, and the sooner we understand that equation and deliver what the customer wants, the better off we'll be." When I started the company in Canada 18 years ago, we worked for Falconbridge, then Xstrata, and we still today work for Glencore, 18 years later, without a tender. So that is a testament to how important these relationships are. Because we're French domicile, we're also mandated to report on the... Oh, pardon me. That's the wrong slide. We're poised to take on the most dynamic commodities. We still believe in the energy transition metals as the ones that are going to drive our business going forward.
We're seeing that uptick in Argentina, where copper is coming on stream, Brazil and Chile, and also in the US. Water management is going to be huge, going forward, as we grow our business, and as I mentioned, we're underweight in gold, but that's also a very important commodity for us for the reasons stated earlier, that there's lots of opportunities for, producing mines, particularly in the US, where you can enter long-term contracts. Rig utilization is a little bit off from last year at 40%. When you have a look at this deck, which we can send to you, you can look at the effect on the revenue when we increase the utilization rate back up to 50%, 60%, where it was. Maximum utilization rate runs at about 74%.
Nobody can do much better than that because rigs need to be maintained and moved. So the top line can grow significantly, as well as the earnings with an improved utilization rate. That will come up as we finish our movements of rigs around the world and reposition ourselves in the better jurisdictions. A little bit about the balance sheet. Foraco incurred a lot of debt about 10 years ago as a result of M& As done in a much different market and incurred several refinancing restructurings.
We have managed to return to normalized commercial banking relationships as of November last year, and we are now focused on deleveraging the balance sheet and have the debt now down to a much more manageable level, with a leverage ratio of about 0.92, and my mandate is to continue to manage that down to around 0.5. The go-forward capital allocation plan is simple. We will maintain, at all times, a minimum $30 million in cash to mitigate against anything unexpected forces or challenges that we may see come upon us. We will keep our gross debt equal to or less than our EBITDA, so always have a leverage ratio of less than one. I'd like to see even less than that.
We'll use our free cash to service our debt as required and pay down more debt, if available. Then we will distribute free cash to shareholders up to 3% through a dividend up to 3% of market cap. I get a lot of questions about an NCIB. We have an NCIB, which is in place now, that funds our free share plans. I've only got three minutes left. One of the things I want to point out is the value proposition for Foraco. We are undervalued compared to our peers. As you can see here, there was one transaction which occurred in April when Boart Longyear was taken private, and you can see the multiples here.
The EBITDA enterprise value multiple of six and a half, compared to us at three point four. So the upside for us is somewhere between 550 and 650 , if you apply these multiples. ESG focus, as I say, we are mandated to report that. So why invest in Foraco? We're a global market leader with a differentiated focus, especially on drilling solutions and pioneering prior proprietary innovations. We're well-diversified with our revenue exposure. We're not overly dominant in one, in fact, a little underweighted in gold, and that's quite balanced. We're in the key commodity markets, and those markets right now, especially copper, are experiencing good tailwinds in the macro economy. The go-forward strategy is focused on increasing the utilization of our rigs as opposed to investing in new for high growth markets.
So we're going to be de-deploying more rigs to the U.S. We're starting our rotary business in Brazil. That won't require new capital. We're going to increase our capital market activity. I need to get out on the road a little bit more and tell the story. And last but not least, the reason is the highly experienced management team at Foraco, which most of us have in excess of 40 years and understand the business intimately. I think that is about it. I don't know if we have time for any questions. One minute left. I'm sorry if I rushed. Thank you very much for your time and attention, everybody. It was a pleasure to present to you.