My name is Scott Powell, President and CEO of Skyline Corporate Communications Group, LLC. On behalf of OTC Markets and Skyline Corporate Communications Group, we are very pleased that you have joined us for the second day of our Precious Metals & Critical Minerals Conference. The next presentation is from Heliostar Metals Limited. Please note that you may submit questions for the presenter at any time. You may also view the company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Mr. Stephen Soock, Vice President of Investor Relations and Development with Heliostar Metals Limited, which is an OTCQX Best 50 company and trades on the QX under the ticker symbol HSTXF, and also trades on the main board of the TSX under ticker symbol HSTR. Welcome back, Stephen.
Thanks so much for having me again. Pleasure to be here. Thanks everyone for joining today. As Scott mentioned, I am with Heliostar Metals. We are building the next mid-tier gold producer, through our tenets of speed, grade, and growth. Moving fast on a high-grade deposit to be able to accelerate our growth to become a 300,000 oz-500,000 oz a year producer. We have a clear path to achieve that goal from the 30,000 oz of gold we produced last year, from really being able to execute on our organic growth pipeline that we already have in hand. You will see we have two producing mines that will produce about 50,000 oz this year, producing our cash flow that will fund our Ana Paula development project, really our flagship project, launch us into that true junior producer status, and then that project will fund all further growth.
So taking a bootstrapping approach, so we are able to grow the company and hopefully the re-rate that we expect to see along with that sort of growth without any equity dilution, and that is a rare thing in the metals and mining space. I will take you through over the next half hour how we are able to achieve that. I will, of course, be making forward-looking statements. Please review this at your leisure. So why a mid-tier gold producer? We think a mid-tier producer creates a full-cycle company. It lets investors play both sides of the coin. At 300,000 oz-500,000 oz a year of annual production, you are forced to be looked at as a potential acquisition target for maybe not Barrick and Newmont, but the next tier down of major gold producers. You are a needle-moving target for them.
So if the cycle remains robust and they are paying elevated multiples for that sort of growth, that is a potential exit at the right time. Conversely, if the cycle contracts and things get tough, it is a broad enough base and a strong enough base to continue producing, pick up new projects for dimes on the dollar, and then be able to continue to grow meaningfully by building a 100,000 oz-200,000 oz a year mine. So again, we think it creates a full cycle company and gives us lots of options regardless of where we are in the metal cycle. So this is our growth portfolio of assets. We picked this up in two, and I guess recently three transactions. All told, we picked up our entire Mexican portfolio for $15 million in cash.
We own it 100% outright, and since we acquired it, we've produced more than $70 million in operating cash flow. That $15 million acquisition got us two producing mines, La Colorada and San Agustin, both of which were in shutdown or care and maintenance, both of which we've since brought online and drive our production and cash flow today. These two mines will generate about $150 million that we'll put towards construction on our Ana Paula development project. Ana Paula's something special, adding 100,000 oz a year at a $1,000 per oz all-in sustaining cost before the end of 2028. Really equity dilution free by having that internally generated cash flow to pair with a project financing and bring our new mine online.
Beyond that, we have the next two mines that we're going to build after that already in hand, Cerro del Gallo in Guanajuato and a recently acquired Goldstrike project in Utah. One of the deepest growth pipelines in the gold development industry. I think of us as an organically funded developer, I think is the right mindset to think about what we're doing, more so than a true single asset developer or your steady state junior producer. A true growth setup. Our mines are primarily based in Mexico. La Colorada in Sonora and San Agustin in Durango are both about an hour outside their respective state capitals.
Our Ana Paula flagship development project is in the prolific Guerrero Gold Belt, right across from Torex Gold and across the valley from Equinox Gold's Los Filos mine, both multimillion-ounce deposits in a part of the world that creates just elephant-sized gold deposits. With the rest of the assets spread throughout Mexico and the U.S. We've got about 7.2 million oz of M&I, and then if you add up all the rest, it comes to about 9 million oz total gold in M&I and I, and 125 million oz in resource, mostly at our Cerro del Gallo project in Guanajuato. This slide really tells the key story of what we want to do, how we grow from 30,000 oz last year, 33,000 oz of gold last year, a notable increase to 50,000 oz- 55,000 oz that we're on track to produce this year.
We want to maintain or slightly increase that over the next few years. Really the step change coming in in 2028 when we bring Ana Paula online at 100,000 oz a year. Ana Paula will then be a significant cash flow driver, and the cash flows from that will then fund development of our Cerro del Gallo project, which we intend to bring online before the end of 2030. You see that stepwise progression of growth building up to that mid-tier producer status in the next few years. Our Q2 operating results showed that our approach is working. We generated almost 15,000 oz of gold, put additional cash on the balance sheet while still reinvesting in growth opportunities and acquisitions. Both mines producing steadily, driving that cash flow to support our future growth, building the treasury ahead of the Ana Paula construction decision mid-next year.
We expect the next few quarters to show a similar style of report. Cash being generated, steady production, and all those right moves towards supporting Ana Paula. Our formal guidance of 50,000 oz-55,000 oz, and we will come in at the high end of our all-in sustaining cost guidance due to the impacts of inflation, mostly on diesel price, slightly out of our control. Still, we are one of the highest margin smaller producers out there. At $4,000, $4,200 an oz gold, we are making $2,000 an oz margin on every ounce of gold that we sell. From a capital markets perspective, we have about 650 million market cap Canadian. All other figures will be in US dollars. $43 million U.S. cash on the balance sheet as of June 30th. Zero debt, so very clean structure, again, to be able to support that Ana Paula debt financing and construction.
All told, about 310 million shares outstanding. Our top shareholder is Eric Sprott personally, who owns 15% of the company, followed by Franklin Templeton, Adrian Day, alongside a long list of long-only institutional funds. Paired with that, we trade about 1 million, 1.2 million shares a day across our TSX listing in Canada and our OTCQX listing in the States, so very good liquidity as well for a company our size. I will not go through our entire team here, but I will summarize by saying we are a very technically driven and oriented team. Lots of big company experience, lots of strong technical expertise. Everything we say we are going to do as Heliostar, at least one and usually two people on this page have done it before. We just have not all necessarily done it as a group under the Heliostar banner.
Charles Funk, our President and CEO, his big commercial success was the VP exploration who found Vizsla Silver's Panuco deposit that launched that company to be a multi-billion market cap. Gregg Bush is our mine builder and operator. A long, storied career. Did almost 10 years of Capstone Mining as their CEO and has built multiple mines and operated multiple mines across the Americas. Of course, as our company grows, so too, we believe, does our social responsibility. We are very proud of the more than 600 scholarships we have provided in the local communities, as well as our focus on water conservation and access to clean water in our new VI communities. Ana Paula really is the core of our company right now. It is the true value driver, and Ana Paula is something special.
When we acquired this asset, we completely reimagined it from an open pit, low-grade project into focusing just on the high-grade bulk tonnage underground core. If you are familiar with mining, you will know that is a rare combination of terms to put together to describe a deposit. It is a 60 m, 6-0 m wide ore body, averaging just under 5.5 g a ton in our November 2025 PEA study. It is that use of bulk mining methods paired with the high margin material we are pulling out of it, and the fact that we only have to build a small mine to get a meaningful amount of gold production that keeps our costs very, very low. So an 1,800 ton per day mine will produce 100,000 oz a year at a $1,000 per oz all-in sustaining cost.
When Ana Paula is online, we expect it to be in the lowest quartile on the global cost curve, and really, again, be a full cycle asset with some exceptional cash flow generation. These are the economics from our November PEA. About $1 billion NPV at what is now a very conservative gold price, and a very robust return profile here that we expect to only get better as we do the work to support the upcoming feasibility study. We have completed 25,000 m of drilling by a focus on upgrading the inferred material. This 0.5 million oz has converted very well, and we believe we are on track to hit our target of 10 years at 100,000 oz of production in that upcoming feasibility study, which is on track for Q2 next year. We found a number of other optimization opportunities as we go through that engineering exercise as well.
Some of these that I will highlight are upscaling the plant capacity to 2,000 tons a day from 1,800 tons, just a better fit with the ore body, but really sizing some of that front-end equipment, the crusher and the ball mill, to accommodate 2,500 tons a day, step up later in the mine life to be able to keep a consistent production profile throughout the life of the mine on paper. We are also looking at doing dual declines that will allow us to put the crusher underground and convey the ore out, eliminating the need for underground truck haulage from the ore body out to the plant. This will also allow us to remove some of the ventilation infrastructure as well. All that has the impact of lowering our operating costs over the life of the mine for a very small increase in our initial CapEx.
This, again, should allow us to play with the cutoff grade later in the mine life. We will have the physical setup to be able to have an additional lever to pull as we, again, continue to design this mine over its life. The last thing we are looking at here is using a higher gold price. We used a three-year trailing average gold price, which last November was $2,400 an oz. We expect that to be around $3,500, $3,600 an oz in the upcoming feasibility study. Again, giving us a lot more maneuverability over the life of the mine in terms of the economics, while still focusing on maintaining that high margin, high impact production. Ana Paula is progressing on three tracks. There is the technical track that we recently provided an update on the feasibility study progress update.
We will provide one of those for the next couple of quarters until we drop the full feasibility study in Q2 next year, showing the market just how well that is progressing from the 35% that we recently announced and increasing that to full completion through next year. We are also advancing on the permitting front. We just announced that we submitted the full underground permit for Ana Paula. Interestingly, Ana Paula was shovel-ready from a permit perspective for that previous open-pit operation that I mentioned, that we have now pivoted away from to go underground. Nevertheless, we benefit from the fact that this has broad community support, has already been permitted for a much larger footprint, and we are reducing that by about 65% with the underground approach. The final track is also financing.
I mentioned we'll have about $150 million of our own cash flow generated from our operations to put towards Ana Paula. We pair that with about $200 million of project debt financing. We are in discussions now trying to identify the best partner to move forward with in the next several months and then have them be in a position to write the check in Q2 next year when we want to make the construction decision and start building the mine. We expect the mine to take 18 months to construct and pour in gold before the end of 2028. Beyond the 25,000 m of de-risking drilling, I'll call it in here in the upper part of the ore body, we also did 10,000 m looking for additional mine life extensions into this expansion zone.
Most of these won't make it into the feasibility study because we just don't have the drill density down there to support that, but it is visible mine life extension. Results like 100 m at 5.3 g a ton gold, 25 m at 8 g a ton, 9 at 9. So we know the high-grade system continues at depth, and once we're physically underground to continue to drill that off, we expect that to add to the mine life through the life of the mine. The other more conceptual target but could be a monster lurking at depth is this contact zone target. Our nearby deposits, Torex and Los Filos, are multimillion-ounce deposits mining this style of mineralization, the deeper mineralization that is that contact skarn.
Whereas Ana Paula Project is where some of those mineralized fluids have escaped higher up and have formed the deposit that we're going to turn into our 100,000-oz a year mine. Once we're underground, we intend to target this zone, which again, has potential to generate multimillion-ounce deposits. That's really the blue sky upside on Ana Paula here. Beyond that, we have one of the largest land packages in the entire gold belt, which has only been lightly explored since the discovery of the Ana Paula deposit, and we're just starting to put boots on the ground here to investigate the opportunity across that larger claim block. What you're looking at here is really the back end of the Lassonde Curve backed up by data.
These are the last eight or nine single asset developers and their outperformance versus the GDXJ benchmark from the time they make an investment decision until they reach commercial production. That average is about 100% outperformance, let alone the share price performance in a rising gold price environment. We expect Heliostar should be no different, and if anything, be at the higher end of this range, given that we're not a single asset developer. We have the next two mines. We have that visible growth trajectory in our portfolio to use the cash flow from Ana Paula, which will be about $200 million a year, and continue to grow the company to that mid-tier producer status. Another way to look at our valuation re-rate expectation here is at $200 million a year of annual after-tax free cash flow from Ana Paula.
Heliostar is trading at about 2.5 x cash flow. Your average junior producer trades at 6x-8 x cash flow. Again, we expect a significant re-rate over the next little while, which without any equity dilution, should be directly reflected in the share price appreciation. Where does that $150 million come from that we're going to generate ourselves? It comes from our two producing mines. La Colorada mine was a great opportunity that we were able to put back into production within weeks of closing the acquisition in late 2024. This was a mine that hadn't had a lot of reinvestment done into it by the previous operator.
We've since found a number of opportunities, staged cash flowing projects, I'll call them, to be able to generate the cash flow to put towards Ana Paula as well as grow the life of the asset. Our studies here show, again, a very robust profitability profile for a very low CapEx is what drives this high IRR on almost quarter-billion dollar NPV at, again, very conservative gold prices. This is a good picture to explain what's happened. Our initial production came from an area right here, which we called the Junkyard Stockpile, an old waste dump from the 1990s when gold was $300 an oz. When we bought this mine at $3,000 an oz and gold going higher, it was a very good opportunity. We made about $10 million by putting this since depleted stockpile into production.
We've since now moved on to doing the waste stripping at the Veta Madre pit, and while we're doing that, we're doing injection leaching on this big heap leach. This allows us to rinse the gold previously stacked that wasn't optimally recovered. We're producing about 1,000 oz a month from this novel approach, which allows us to keep producing while we catch on some of this investment in the asset. That reinvestment is from the Veta Madre pit. We started waste stripping there in August, and that'll start to release ore in Q2 next year where our cash generation will really ramp up from La Colorada. Beyond Veta Madre, that'll drive production 2027 and 2028. We'll then move on to the larger Creston open pit cut back, which will give us another four years of mine life.
Again, you can see that stepwise growth of this asset itself, all staged to maximize near-term cash flow to put towards Ana Paula while reinvesting in the growth of the asset itself. Outside of that, we see a very long ability to continue exploration on the asset. Everything I just talked about is right here in the center of the page, this main mine trend. Outboard of that has seen maybe 15 drill holes on the whole rest of the property. We're going to start to rectify that now that we have this set plan we're working through at the mine itself. We're going to start drilling on Las Duendas in the next little while, a past-producing small scale open pit that's never seen a resource expansion drill program run.
We would like to start to get active on some of these other targets before the end of the year as well. Stay tuned for what is more to come at La Colorada. We think, beyond the six years of mine life on paper right now, we will be mining here for more than 10 years by the time it is all said and done, but we need just a little bit of time to do that exploration and point to exactly where that comes from. San Agustin is our second mine. This is an asset. We got the first new open pit mine permit from the Sheinbaum administration in July of last year. We took the first blast in December, poured first gold this January, and ramped it up to steady state in March.
We have now reached that steady state production, and this is a very strong cash flow generator for us. Short mine life on paper, 14 months, but over those 14 months, we will generate over $70 million of net free cash flow. Beyond the 14 months, which again takes us to Q2 next year, we believe we have already drilled off the next six, nine months of mine life extension here at the Corner expansion and phase III southwest. We believe that those two will allow us to dovetail right into a mine life extension and carry on again through the bulk of 2027 into 2028, which nine months doesn't sound like a lot, but it represents about another $40 million of net free cash flow to be able to put towards Ana Paula and onto our balance sheet. Very meaningful from a cash flow perspective.
Think of this as a short term cash flow ATM for the company. Just for the sake of time, we will cover quickly the next two mines we intend to build after Ana Paula. Cerro del Gallo, an open pit heap leach project in Guanajuato, as shown by a recent pre-feasibility study. But we see really good scale potential here. The almost 5 million oz that is already in M&I. We think we could grow to more than 8 million oz very quickly. We are also doing the work to see how to stage the oxide heap leach mine versus a sulfide larger open pit and mill circuit, how to appropriately engineer and sequence those to really optimize value from this asset, as well as collecting more data on the ground to support that sort of larger deposit that we think is present.
You do not hear much about Cerro del Gallo in the next little while we are focused on Ana Paula. But once Ana Paula construction is really up and running steadily, this will come more into the limelight as our next mine to follow Ana Paula. It could be of substantial scale. We believe this 85,000 oz a year more likely turns into 150,000 oz a year for more than a decade. So again, give us a little bit of time to go through the engineering work but stay tuned. Our very strong economics, even from what we already have in hand, again, almost $1 billion NPV at $3,900 gold price. So we think in and of itself, Cerro del Gallo could be a company maker. But again, more optimization and growth opportunities here still being investigated. Last but certainly not least, our Goldstrike project.
We recently acquired this from Liberty Gold, 1 million oz of gold in a Carlin-style system in the Great Basin in Utah, for which we paid $70 an oz staged over five years. While we are doing our technical review of the gold project, which we think has a lot of growth potential given how shallowly drilled it is, we are able to get moving on the antimony side very quickly. The east side of the property hosts a past-producing small scale antimony mine, and we did the first ever systematic exploration there recently. A series of channel samples that returned up to multi-percent antimony and 0.6 g a ton gold over decent widths right at surface. We have just completed the first ever drill program on that antimony target and expect to release results in the next little while from there.
We were able to get active, learn the ground, learn the property, learn the geology, figure out the logistics, et cetera, while we are doing that study work on how to advance the gold project. We expect all that to accumulate in a go-forward work plan starting early next year, and we will start to progress economic studies in the Goldstrike project from there. So advancing across multiple fronts. We believe that we have got one of the strongest growth pipelines supported by cash flow and production that will allow us to grow into multi-billion market cap company as we continue to execute. As we de-risk and build Ana Paula, we expect a substantial re-rate to start in the coming months and continue as we advance through our growth pipeline and as we reach that junior producer and eventually mid-tier producer gold status. So we have got a lot going on.
We think we have got it well sequenced. We have got a strong set of news flow from across our asset base, again, with a focus on Ana Paula but certainly with drill results and quarterly results to support that alongside. That concludes the formal portion of my presentation. Thank you all for listening. I see we have a number of questions in the chat, so I will go through here and address those as time permits. Where do you see the biggest opportunity to improve Cerro del Gallo's economics? I kind of addressed this. I think it is primarily on scale, being able to look at that larger sulfide footprint the majority of which was not captured in the recent pre-feasibility study that was really focused on the oxide heap leachable portion of the gold.
From doing more advanced metallurgical testing and studyings on the sulfide portion, understanding that better and being able to see what that whole other side of the deposit is able to bring to the table, I think is probably the biggest growth opportunity and value driver at Cerro del Gallo right now. What is driving the stronger production, and how repeatable is it? I think our Q2 is fairly steady state. That uptick in production in Q2 was for kind of twofold. One, it was again, that full quarter of production from San Agustin, again, after a ramp-up quarter in Q1. So expect that to tick along again for the next year or two kind of at that tenor. Then La Colorada, that injection leaching, again, is fairly steady state until we start to bring on new fresh ore from the Veta Madre pit, in Q2.
I think there are opportunities to increase our production as different parts of our sequence projects come online. But what you saw in Q2, I think is very repeatable over the next several quarters. Where do you see now that San Agustin is back producing, where do you see the next opportunity to unlock more value? I think unequivocally Ana Paula. Our de-risking, our advancing on Ana Paula, things like our early works program, where we'll start to de-risk the timeline. Benefit of having cash flow, we will put $15 million towards long lead time items, namely the electrical transformer equipment and the crusher, in Q4, secure our spot in line at the fabrication shops, and again, be able to keep Ana Paula on track.
Those quarterly updates showing the market that progress in Ana Paula I think will be important and that'll be a key value driver going forward. Sorry, going through the questions here. As La Colorada returns to primary production, what's the opportunity to grow beyond stockpile processing? I think I've addressed that. Again, the stockpiles were depleted in about March this year, so we've now gone onto that residual leaching, which is a novel technology that's working very well for us at La Colorada, to fill any gaps while we go through some of those waste stripping campaigns right now, primarily at Veta Madre. I think the next big one there will be both the fresh production at Veta Madre, onto the heap leach pad at 0.7 g a ton versus the 0.2 g a ton from the stockpile.
Then the exploration across the larger claim block, I think is a real opportunity at La Colorada. What's the timeline for the permit amendment, and are some of the long lead time equipment orders on track for Q4? The second part of that question, yes, the long lead time equipment orders are still planned for Q4. Again, we just need enough engineering that is ongoing right now to be able to know what we want to order. But we fully expect to place those orders in Q4 this year. And the timeline for the permit, again, we submitted it very recently in the last couple of weeks. We expect that to be turned around back to us in six to eight months, from the government. Again, not a controversial permit. Torex Gold got the same style of permit to transition from a previous open pit permit to an underground.
Again, very benign, again, especially in terms of the scale of other recent permits granted in Mexico for larger scale new operations. With the feasibility study about 1/3 complete, where do you see the biggest opportunity to improve the economics? I mean, Ana Paula I think already has exceptional economics. I think the biggest opportunities in the feasibility study will again be those operating cost savings from some of those optimized material movement designs. An optimized mine design I think is another one. Then being able to show those mine life extensions. That'll be a little bit further down the road. We're locked into what we want for the feasibility study now. But I think showing that 10 years is just the start of the Ana Paula will be a big value driver there over time as well.
With the recent GDXJ inclusion for Heliostar done and the TSX listing live, what is next on the index list? Lots of recent recognition from a capital market standpoint. Inclusion in the GDXJ Junior Gold Miners Index ETF and our uplisting to the TSX Big Board from the Venture recently. Hopefully, you know what you have seen notable uptick in liquidity and out-performance has been great. I think next the full GDX. We are a few steps away from that but with a solid plan to get there, increased visibility and probably also increased percentage of the GDXJ before that. I think again, we will look at stepwise growth here at Heliostar. Little bits along the way, continue to grow the company to a multi-billion market cap. Looks like about twp more minutes here and a couple more questions, so apologies if I do not get to yours.
Please feel free to reach out for a meeting or on email to have them addressed. For a new investor, what is the biggest catalyst over the next six months? We do have one more set of drill results to come from Ana Paula, both a combination of infill and expansion zone drilling, so stay tuned for that. We will have the feasibility study progress update in probably early December for our Q4 update on how that is progressing. Our Q2 results will be out November 12th, showing again, hopefully that the system is working, that we will be able to build cash, steady production to continue to support that cash build, as well as some deployment into these growth projects. The sprinkling of drill results here and there, of course, and then really our 2027 guidance likely in the second part of January.
Again, hoping to show a continued strong margin production and production steady state for growth. Okay, last minute here. Last question. With $43 million in cash at June end, how much growth can you fund before tapping shareholders? I think as I addressed, we have no intention of raising equity. We are able to at any gold price above $3,800 an oz comfortably fund Ana Paula from that combination of internally generated cash flow and project debt. Now that $43 million, people ask what our burn rate is. We actually do not have a burn rate, we have a generation rate. So we expect we will be able to continue to keep that system going without having to issue any additional equity potentially from here forward. We do reserve the right, of course, if we find a good growth opportunity to grow the company faster, bolt-on production, that may require equity.
However, the business plan I have laid out here in the presentation does not require any, certainly not at these gold price levels. That is it for my time here. Apologies if I was not able to address the few other questions coming in now. As I mentioned, please feel free to reach out for a meeting or on email. Thank you everyone for tuning in today and listening to the Heliostar story. Thank you so much for your time and have a great day.