Good morning, everyone. [Foreign language] Brazil. We're pleased today to host Luis Albano Tondo, the CEO of Jaguar Mining . The gold price is over $4,000 today, and Jaguar is reopening, restarting, and growing. Luis, tell us all about it.
Okay. Thanks, John. It's very nice to be here. Thanks for the invitation. I guess I'm going to jump into the presentation straight away. If you allow me to just project it. Can you see well?
Perfect.
Okay. That's a pretty picture of one of our plants, our complex R G plant. The normal disclaimers, I'm going to be doing some forward-looking statements, so please be aware of that. First of all, let's explain to people that are there, and thanks for the audience, who we are. Jaguar is a mid-tier gold producer in Brazil. We are, for those that are not very familiar with Brazil, we are in the Minas Gerais state, which is right in the center of the country. That's the mining hub of Brazil. We are right in an array of 200 km to the east and west of Belo Horizonte, which is the capital of Minas Gerais. We have three, what we call, complexes. By one complex, I'm talking about at least one mine and one plant.
The main one that is producing this year is the Caeté complex and the R G plant with the Pilar mine and the RG plant. We have the Paciência C omplex, which is formed by the Santa Isabel mine and the Paciência plant. This is in care and maintenance since 2012, but we are evaluating now for a potential restart by next year. We have the Turmalina complex, which comprises the Turmalina mine and the Turmalina plant. That has been stopped last, was operating until December last year when we had an incident with a dry stack tailings pile. I'm going to talk more about that. It's in good stand and planned for restarting in quarter one of next year.
In terms of resources, we have about 1.7 million oz of measured and indicated resources and about more or less the same amount, 1.68 million oz of inferred resources, all of them around 4 grams per ton. In terms of reserves, we have 664,000 oz at 4 grams per ton as well. We are TSX listed in Canada. I'm going to talk about valuation at the end of the presentation, but currently, our market cap is actually over $500 million. We've been benefiting with increasing in share price in the last weeks or so. As I said, we have three operating underground gold mine complexes. Where we are, we are in this famous in Brazil Iron Quadrangle, which is a very, very prolific greenstone belt in Minas Gerais. The Iron Quadrangle is where Vale started their iron operations back in the day.
It is very well known and famous to have iron on top and gold more deeper. Usually, the gold mines that we have there are all underground gold mines. We'll talk more about that now. First of all, talking about our team, which is now fully focused on accelerating the growth of the company. Just a brief resume of myself. I have 35 years of international experience. I started working for major companies like Rio Tinto and Kinross. In Kinross, I managed to implement the latest big expansion of the Paracatu mine that was like 20 years ago. Today, that mine is still producing, and it's the largest producer in Brazil. I think their forecast for this year is to produce 600,000 oz of gold. We have in our team some people that were in Jaguar now for almost 10 years or more.
Marina is our Interim CFO, Eric is our VP Business and Operating Vice President. We got Carla as our VP Corporate Affairs. Carla had a very important role in negotiating the compensation package of the Satenoco incident. I will talk about that. We just had a new addition to the team, which is Juliana Esper. She's got also more than 30 years of experience. She worked with me in Kinross back in the day. She was responsible for licensing the expansion project for Kinross. Between myself and Juliana, we actually were part of a strong part of the team that did the expansion for Paracatu. Finally, we have Armando Massucatto, our Exploration Manager. Armando is behind the five-year exploration plan that I'll detail coming shortly.
He's also got more than 30 years of experience in orogenetic geology, which is very important for the Iron Quadrangle here where we have our deposits. I encourage you to have a look in our Board of Directors and the resume of each one of them. We have a very diverse mixed board in terms of skills, starting with Jeff Kennedy, which is our Chairman. I encourage you to look. I think with the team and the board, we are very well settled and prepared to take this company to the next level. What is the strategy going forward, which I call now the new Jaguar going forward?
Jaguar has been around in Brazil for more than 20 years, but I believe it was mostly focused on developing the existing mines and getting production going, which I think we have now a consolidated position, which but never could pass the 100,000 oz per year, which is a threshold that we think is very important for the company to get into the radar of, you know, other investors, institutions. That's the plan going forward. We have three pillars that we are developing here. The first pillar is exactly to maximize our core assets, the mines and plants that we already have, and get the most of it in terms of production and resources. The second pillar is going to be based on leveraging our exploration portfolio. I'll talk in detail about that. Finally, the third pillar is to pursue strategic opportunities, meaning M&A opportunities.
The idea with these three pillars is that we are going to have all of them working parallel in a way that if one pillar is not delivering the full results that we expect, we have the other two to do that and so on. I believe that's a very robust strategy going forward. Let's start talking about the first pillar, which is maximizing our core assets and resources. First of all, in terms of production, today we have only the Caeté complex in production, the Pilar mine, and the RG plant. These figures that you see on the screens are up to June this year. We produce almost 21,000 oz of gold at a 4 grams per ton grade with an all-in sustaining cost of $1,725 per ounce, which gives us an adjusted EBITDA of $43.3 million. That was with the gold price up to June.
As the gold price increased, obviously, we're going to have better results there. I would say that we are on track to, till the end of this year, produce around 40,000 oz of gold. Talking about Turmalina complex, that's the issue that we had back in December 2024, where our dry stack tailings pile called Satenoco had a slump. It was an incident that was promptly attended by the company. We did affect some people that were living close to the pile that had to be reallocated. There was no victim, fortunately, because there was an early alert of the incident. It didn't affect any bigger creek or any, we didn't have many environmental consequences, but obviously, we had to reallocate people. We had to take very good care of that, and that's very important. The company wants to be transparent and be accountable for any incident like that.
What we have.
Excuse me, Luis, I just want to understand a little better.
Yeah.
Whenever it rains a lot in Brazil, I live in Florida, where sometimes it rains like tropical monsoon. How does the dry stack tailings stay dry and not be affected by seasonal rains?
You have to have a well-designed drainage system around the pile so that you divert most of the rainwater from that pile. According to the characteristics of the deposit, you also have any percolation, anything that goes into the pile has to be well drained out. That's the idea. What happened there, John, was something that we were really in the rain season. Those piles in Brazil, and recently, they are now being regulated. Those are old piles that were formed on top of material that not necessarily had well-recognized characteristics over time. It was in the plan of the company to do some drilling to understand better what was the characteristics of the deposit or exactly the foundation of the deposit, what was going on. Unfortunately, the incident happened before that. As I said, we took care of that.
The pile is now well-formed to come up with the safety back. There is some background noise.
You have experienced some snap plowing moments or feedback on your side?
I heard a woman talking.
Let me try to call it.
Maybe there's a window open on your computer.
Wow.
Okay, I think the problem is solved, John. Sorry about that.
Very well. That's fine.
Okay. Okay. I was talking about understanding the characteristics of the foundation of that pile was critical. We couldn't do that before the incident, but now it's well recognized. We had to reconfirm the slope of the pile so that it reached the 1.5 minimal safety factor that is established by regulations. These piles in Brazil, you have a very well-regulated scenario for tailings, but not for dry stack tailings piles like this. The country has got, you know, I think, 17,000 piles like that. We are now learning a lesson with what happened. It's totally safe, but the authorities obviously had to stop the operation until we demonstrated that we were in good shape on that regard. Part of the process to restart Turmalina goes for negotiating the compensation for people that were affected.
We signed an agreement that's going to cost us $10 million, which is what is written there. That's well established now, the guidelines to compensate each one of those families that were affected. We have an environmental fine that had to be settled, which was another $11 million. The public prosecutor, by law, they have to file a lawsuit into the company, which also had to be negotiated, but that's also done now. We are advancing, as I told, the stabilization, the final stabilization work so that we have all the slope faces according to the standard. That dry stack tailings pile is now going to be closed. It cannot be used anymore. As soon as we demonstrate that all the geotechnical parameters are in good shape, the authorities will lift the embargoes.
What we did manage to do in the meantime was to start some preparatory underground workings in the Turmalina mine. The Turmalina mine wasn't affected at all, but also was embargoed by the authorities. After we started demonstrating to the authorities that we were meeting the plan to fix all the issues that we had with the pile, they agreed to allow us to get back into the mine and start some preparatory work so that at the end, once they do lift the embargoes, the mine is going to be ready to start producing virtually in the next day.
Luis, excuse me. How much did Turmalina produce in 2023 and 2024 in terms of normal output?
It was between 30,000 to 35,000 oz per year. That's pretty much what we're going to plan to do when we come back. We do have a new ore body called FAINA, which has a little bit more or less recovery than what you're used to have in the Turmalina ore bodies. That's more or less the idea. I'll talk about the growth profile in production in the coming slides. We believe we are on track to be back with Turmalina in the first quarter of next year. The other thing that we also had to do because we cannot use the stockpile anymore, that stockpile was to receive future waste material and future tailings from the plant. As we are not going to be using that, we cannot be using that anymore.
We had also to open up or prepare a new area to put waste and tailings, which we benefit by having this old FAINA open pit, which is just 2 km away from the plant. That has to be lined and so on. This work is still being finalized. Therefore, towards the end of this year, we believe that we are going to be in good shape to have this material ready to be disposed of there. We believe we are on track to start or to restart Turmalina in quarter one next year. By the way, if you sum up all the compensation fines and the lawsuit that had to be paid as well, most of these payments can be deferred in up to 60 installments. There is some upfront money that will have to be paid starting this year.
We believe that, so that's a total amount of $27 million U.S. Because we can defer most of these payments, this is not going to affect our balance sheet. Looking at the projected annual gold production going forward this year, as I mentioned, with the Pilar mine, we believe we're going to get close to 40,000 oz of gold produced. Next year, restarting Turmalina and also starting some of the oz that we can get from the Santa Isabel mine that I said was in care and maintenance, but now we are reassessing the startup of that for next year. We will be able to pretty much double the production, getting up to the level of 80,000 oz. Coming forward in 2027, the idea is to start up our new project, which is Onças de Pitangui . Onças de Pitangui was an asset that used to belong to IAMGOLD in Brazil.
Back in 2022-2023, when Jaguar Mining Inc. acquired all the IAMGOLD assets in Brazil, Onça de Pitangui was the main project that came with that. Onça is going to add something like 42,000 extra oz per year. You can see that from 2027 to 2028-2029, that's a ramp-up that we're allowing for Onça de Pitangui. In three to five years, John, the idea is with only our existing assets, we could go well over 100,000 oz per year, even getting close to 140,000 oz per year in five years. That's what I'm talking about, maximizing the current assets that Jaguar already got and not considering any new project that would come with the second pillar, which is the exploration plan. I don't know if you have any questions.
This would be from infill drilling and higher gold prices to raise the 764,000 oz reserves to a larger portion of the 3.3 million oz without discoveries. Any discoveries you make is gravy to increase your slot.
Perfect. That's exactly what it is. Being Onça de Pitangui, the main project, which is being licensed right now, that's a done deal, if you like. This is just some details of Onça de Pitangui. We have probably improved reserves to 184,000 oz with very close to, let me just move something here, to 4 grams per ton. What is interesting in this project is that that's a greenfield project that you have to open a portal. It's going to be an underground mine. We don't need a plant because there's only 30 km of distance from the Turmalina plant. That will feed the Turmalina plant.
What is interesting also is that the Turmalina plant has got spare capacity, at least 40% or 50% of spare capacity because the amount of the grade of material that you are feeding the plant, in terms of tonnage, wasn't enough to fill up the plant. Now with Onça de Pitangui coming online, we'll be able to fill up that plant. That will add, as I mentioned before, 42,000 oz per year on top of what we already have from the other deposits. The idea is that we are doing licensing for that. We start opening the portal. The plan is to open the portal by half next year. The first ounce is projected to come out in the second half of 2027. This is the first pillar of the strategy, moving along to the second pillar, which is talking about leveraging our portfolio of mineral rights in the area.
This map here shows pretty well the exposure that we have in the Iron Quadrangle. First of all, the Iron Quadrangle, some of the history of this, it's a greenstone belt, I think the most important one in Brazil in terms of gold production. It's been worked in the last 200 - 300 years from the days that we had the Portuguese colonizing the country. The records of gold that have already been produced in this area go up to 50 million oz, John. All the yellow targets that you see belong to Jaguar. In total, we have something like 46,000 hectares of mineral tenements. The ones that we show here that are in white, in this white square, the Cuiabá mine, Lamego mine, the Morro Velho mine are very well-known assets from AngloGold Ashanti. We are second in terms of mineral tenements only from AngloGold Ashanti.
In AngloGold Ashanti, you have at least two world-class deposits. One is Morro Velho. It's a mine that had operated for more than 100 years in the country. I think in terms of records, they produced 11 million oz back in the day. Cuiabá mine is still the main asset that is producing for AngloGold Ashanti in Brazil. It has produced already 10 million oz, and it has got more 10 million oz ahead. Those are world-class deposits. The very first question I made to Armando, our Chief Geologist here, when I arrived in the company, is if we have areas that are close to Anglo, geologically speaking, why couldn't we find another Morro Velho, another Cuiabá? The answer was, there is nothing that avoids us to find this. We just have to do the work, do the exploration plan.
That is when we came up with this five-year exploration plan. People may ask why this hasn't happened before. I think over the last 20 years, Jaguar was concentrated in the mines that had already been opened. To be fair, in the last five years, there was some very good work done into the mines that got us in terms of reserves and resources where we are today. In terms of greenfield or brownfield exploration, working in our 46,000 hectares mineral tenements, there hasn't been a systematic approach. That is what we are proposing to do now. If you look at this, there is a clear geological lineament that starts, for instance, in Morro Velho. There is one lineament that goes through exactly some of our mines and lots of our targets. The same happens to Cuiabá mine. There is another geological lineament.
We are part, we are in the train, the same train. Therefore, I'm very, very confident that we can find some significant deposits if we do the work that we are planning to do. This is the plan. You have here in front of you five years to come in terms of total meters to be drilled. We are talking about over 220,000 meters to be done during these five years. You can see the targets in each one of the years. For that, what is interesting to realize, our difficulty was not to find targets to drill, was prioritize them. We had as much as 400 targets already recognized by surface geology by Armando and his team. The difficulty here was how we would prioritize so that we maximize the value as soon as we could.
For that, we use a ranking system where they took into consideration, first of all, how close they were to existing infrastructure or plants that Jaguar has already got so that we could quickly feed the plant without having to spend CapEx on building new plants. That was number one. Obviously, the quality of each one of the targets in terms of information that we already had, some or lots of them have already some drilling done, maybe not for NI 43-101 compliant, but now we are going to be doing the work to become NI 43-101 compliant and so on. Once we start ranking, those are the targets that came up from the beginning for the first year going forward. In terms of endowment, here I'm talking about ounces to be investigated in each one of those targets in each one of these years.
We are talking about an average to identify as much as an average 1 million oz per year. When you sum up all these oz that are there, potentially, we come to the conclusion that we could find between 4.5 up to almost 8 million oz in the Iron Quadrangle. It's amazing to see that this area that's being worked, as I mentioned, since ancient times, still has got lots of potential to go. That's what we're going to tap on. That's what we're going to leverage on. Of course, as soon as we start identifying a good target that comes up with some good oz, the idea is to move on quickly into infield drilling and eventually get that online for feeding the current plants. I'll give you an example of that.
One that we put a news release some weeks ago, that's called the Chamé Bulk Open Pit Mine Opportunity. That's the main difference and a bit of a change of a paradigm in the Iron Quadrangle that you only can have underground mined. We believe this target could be an open pit bulk mining, which is a game changer for the company. What you can see in this picture here is the surface expression of some old excavations done by the old, you know, the Portuguese colonizers we call bandeirantes. When you go there to the field, you can see still some pits done by them. What the geological team did was to sample on the bottom of each one of these excavations. They took chip samples, and all of them came with very high grade.
I'm talking about between 2, 4, even 27 grams per ton on these rock chip samples. In the next stage of exploration, what the geological team did was to excavate, do some trenching in between these pits, what we call the high-grade zones. We did trenching, and to our surprise, we had a continuous good result of gold from this trenching that was done. Some lower grade, and by lower grade, I'm talking about 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, but some continuous results like 54 meters at 0.9 grams per ton. When you start connecting the dots with the, let's say, the high-grade zones, which are believed to be in these old pits, and in between the pits, you have these continuous low-grade zones, which is really a halo around these high-grade zones, we came up to the conclusion that that could be bulk mined.
The average that we believe that could have in terms of this bulk mining material would be around 1 - 1.5 grams per ton. 1 - 1.5 grams per ton with this open pit bulk mining, that's a very, very good result for starting an open pit deposit. This is a cross-section now. These are planned views. These are cross-sections, and you can appreciate what the geologists believe to be the geological model for this area. We are talking about here a true width of the ore body of 30 meters, and the strike length of this expression goes up to 800 meters. If you do the calculations and you consider, say, up to 200 meters depth, you could be talking about easily an endowment here of over a million oz only in this area.
With these results in hand, we obviously started to plan for a drilling campaign, and that drilling campaign is going to begin as soon as next month. We believe we are going to, and the idea is to put at least four drill holes that we can then intercept not only the high-grade zones or test the continuity that we have in between the high-grade zones with the low-grade zones and come up with inferior resources as soon as we can. If that's true, the good thing about that is that's only 3 km away from our Paciencia plant. We don't need to build a plant. That plant does need to be refurbished, but it's not starting from scratch. We have a new deposit that could start producing gold for Jaguar. That's only one target.
If you look overall in the area, this here is Chamé, this is Santa Isabel plant, as I said, 3 km away. Look at the other targets that you have in the same alignment. Chamé could be the tip of the iceberg of this whole zone. Here, what you are seeing is a 15-kilometer strike length. Chamé per se is only 800 meters of strike. In there, we believe that we could find, as I mentioned, an endowment of 1 million oz. That tells you the potential that we have only for this Paciencia complex. Around the Paciencia complex, we think we have an endowment between 2 million - 3 million oz, which is very significant to what we want to achieve. I'll have a stop now just to check if you have any questions about this.
In this map, could you just review which of the targets are 1 million ounce magnitude? I bet some of those dots are 100,000 oz, and maybe the audience has a hard time seeing which are the big boys.
I think the best ones here are the ones that are in red. We have Chamé, which we believe is going to be an endowment of over 1 million oz. We have Baú, which does have some drilling done as well. I think that's around 200,000 oz already recognized. Tilda's Pedras and Beef North. In our technical report, I'm sure people can appreciate that there will be some results or some resources listed there. This is all in the same trend, and that's a 15-kilometer strike length. Of course, we need to do much more work, and especially drilling, to become all this endowment to become an inferred resource that is compliant for NI 43-101 . That's all in the plan. Starting with Chamé because it's close to Santa Isabel plant, and it's very, very, I mean, if it becomes an open pit mine, it's going to be lower cost.
That will add a lot to our portfolio in reasonably short term, I would say.
We invite, of course, all the listeners on the webcast to submit questions in the question box.
Okay. This is the second pillar. The third pillar of our growth strategy is going to be, as I said, looking for new opportunities in Brazil and doing some M&A activities. We do have a set of criteria that we are putting to identify which are the right opportunities that we want to get involved. Here in the Brazil map, what you see, some of the color states is where we already have identified some of those assets. Mainly, what I'm talking about are projects that are either in pre-feasibility or feasibility stage, and mostly that are held by junior companies. What is the niche that we want to find out some good projects? Just some background information. In Brazil, for you to do any new project, you need to get at least three main permits.
First of all, the preliminary license, which you call LP, is the one that you develop the concept of your project. You do your environmental study, and then you submit that to an environmental agency in Brazil. Once you get the LP, that means that you prove to the environmental agency that you identify all the environmental issues that could be caused by this new project, but you are taking care of that. Obviously, that goes through public hearings. You also have to consult communities nearby. If you have any, for instance, any national park nearby, you need also to demonstrate how you're going to avoid or mitigate any negative effect of your project in there. It takes a long time, and I would say it's the hardest license to be granted.
After you get the LP, then you have to ask for the LI, which is the installation license, which pretty much is once you finalize your basic engineering, you also submit your plans, and that's when the authorities will grant you the installation license. That can take between 6 to even 12 months, but should be straightforward. Finally, once you got the LI, you build your project, and then you have to apply for the LO, which is the operating license. That operating license is just for the authorities to confirm that what you said you are going to build is what you built, and then they allow you to start operating. Our niche here, what you are targeting are companies or projects that get, for some reason, they got stuck between the LP and the LI.
In that way, they were managed to be granted the LP, which again was the hardest permit to have. For some reason, they are challenged, and for some reason, they are not granted the LI. That can happen for various reasons. For instance, if the environmental study has some component missing, or you haven't consulted properly a nearby community that then challenges the project and so on. It gets entangled in this. We believe that we have in Jaguar, our team is very skilled on this situation so that we can resolve the situations. Obviously, we can acquire this property or this project or even merge some of these junior companies that have gotten projects in this situation reasonably in a very good price. Of course, it would be nice to acquire a near production asset, but that would cost a lot of money.
Our target is going to be to focus on these other projects that are ready to be built, but still with some issues to be resolved. As I said, we have already got some opportunities that are being investigated. We have NDAs, so I cannot disclose which they are. We believe that in short to medium term, we'll be able to make some good announcements to the market and have these projects into our portfolio. What Jaguar has got today, we've got production in one side. We have now, we believe, a good exploration plan that we can then identify new resources. What you are lacking now is to have a ready-to-build project. That's what this third pillar is all about. These three pillars, as I said, they are meant to complement themselves.
As soon as we can fill up our pipeline of projects, I believe then Jaguar is going to be well set for the next growth. One project like that, for instance, could bring at least, let's say, 100,000 oz per year on top of the 100,000, 140,000 that we are planning to have in three to five years with our existing assets. All of a sudden, you are a 200,000, 300,000 oz producer in Brazil, which I think is going to really put Jaguar in the radar for more sophisticated investors and so on. That's pretty much the plan. If you want to get involved, I think that's the time. That's still the time. We've seen a very good appreciation of our share price over this year. Obviously, with the Satenoco event last year, we had a drop in the share price. That's being progressively recovered now.
We are still, when you look at some parameters here and compare with our peer group, for instance, if you take P/NAV, we are at 45. We are still trading at a 45% discount. When you consider price over cash flow, we are with a 53% discount. We are already, in terms of free cash flow generation, on top of the list. For me, that's a very nice time to get involved with the company and still get a very good appreciation of the share price, especially taking into account this strategy that will pan out as we go. We believe that we're going to have very, very interesting results that will get very good appreciation to the share price. In terms of a summary, in terms of the investment highlights, we are an experienced leadership team with a proven track record.
We believe we have a robust strategy with this three-pillar growth approach that we believe is going to create consistent value. We are operating in Minas Gerais here, which is a Tier 1 jurisdiction, something that I didn't mention a lot. Minas Gerais, in terms of infrastructure, has everything that we need. We have water. We have power. We are not in the north part of Brazil where most of the time you have to do your own power lines. That's not the case for Jaguar Mining Inc. We are cash flowing, so we are generating strong financials as we go, especially with the gold price that we are having now today, over $4,000 per ounce. We are demonstrating now with the authorities, even with the incident that we had last year, how quickly and accountable the company demonstrated to be for the communities around.
We took full accountability with the issue that we had and with the authorities as well. We are working to develop things in a responsible way. We believe we have all the ingredients to grow as a company. In terms of final data for us, in terms of capital market profile, that's actually one or two weeks old. We are now over a CAD 500 million company with a share price appreciation. We are being covered by a number of independent researchers. Red Cloud is actually not independent, but all of them are showing that we are going to get a share price still in the range of CAD 9 - CAD 10 per share in the near term.
Marcus Kienberg worked 30 years as a geologist at Placer Dome. He had a tenure 25 years ago as an investor relations person. He was Senior Vice President of Exploration at Kinross. He was president of a company briefly. He's very, very eminent and experienced, maybe more experienced than me, Luis. He's not a baby analyst like some of the others you may not know. That's very good. The CAD 48 million cash is June 30th. Haven't you raised equity subsequently?
Yes. Last week, we announced a bought deal using the live format. Some clarification, that was an unsolicited raise, but we saw that as a very good opportunity to get some more funds into the treasury exactly to accelerate our exploration plan. I think we managed to do a very, very good negotiation for the deal. That was using Red Cloud. No warrants involved, some reduced commission rates. The amount that was raised was CAD 25 million . I think not too much, but not too little, exactly what we needed, as I mentioned, to accelerate this exploration plan. We're very happy.
You're talking about $18 million U.S.?
Yes, around $18 million, exactly. And Eric Sprott, who is our major shareholder, was happy to back us up in this. So Eric, from the CAD 25 million , he's adding CAD 10 million, which again is a testament of how much he believes that the company is going to grow going forward. Overall, I think we are now in very good shape in terms of funds, in terms of strategy, in terms of portfolio, existing assets, and all the exploration potential that we've got in the Iron Quadrangle to grow. You mentioned Ron Stewart and I, we go back to the Kinross days exactly when I was there in Paracatu, and Kinross bought the other half from Rio Tinto. I remember once Ron got on site the first time, I was the one that presented the potential for Paracatu to grow.
Following that, there was a major drill-out program that was coordinated by Ron on Paracatu. I remember the reserves went from 5 million - 18 million oz at that time. That triggered the bigger expansion that I got to build at the end. I told Ron, I believe we may be sitting now with some proportion to Paracatu, but I believe we can repeat that story with Jaguar, John, and I hope so. I really hope that's the case. He agreed with me. He got Ron in Beaver Creek. We met in Beaver Creek. I was there with Armando, Armando, the Chief Geologist. He got very, very excited by looking at the targets that we have in the Iron Quadrangle in terms of the geological potential. I'm very happy to have Ron involved in the story as well.
Super, super. It brings you a nice cash check from the life offering too.
Exactly. Anyway, that's most of what I wanted to talk about, and I'm very happy to answer any question from the audience and yourself.
There is one question in the question box. What do you expect the all-in sustaining costs to be of Turmalina when it restarts?
Okay. That's a very good question. Right now, we are having costs. All the fixed costs of Turmalina are still on the company because as a result of all this event, we were actually required by the authorities not to, you know, we could not dismiss any manpower and so on. We keep paying the people. Obviously, we try to use the manpower that we had in the access now because Turmalina is down. We move some of this manpower to the Pilar mine to accelerate some of the development in the underground. We've been paying this extra fixed cost with no gold production. Naturally, for next year, once we got Turmalina back in operation, we expect to dilute some of this fixed cost.
If we are talking about $1,725 up to June, we believe that's going to be less, maybe $1,600, $1,500 per ounce as we restart Turmalina and we bring some new mine online like Santa Isabel, more or less in that range.
You said $1,600?
Yeah.
What was the range? Please repeat.
Sorry?
Please repeat the range that you said. I didn't get it down.
Okay. Between $1,500 - $1,600 with Turmalina back. Of course, we do see some inflation going on right now in the country, especially in this very bullish gold price environment. Everybody wants to profit, like the providers, you know, the suppliers of reagents and so on. We do expect some inflation to come. Everything being equal, we would have to expect to have some reduction because we are bringing extra production from Turmalina and diluting some fixed costs that we already have.
Luis, I know you've only been on board four years, four months, and you're a mining engineer. Could you give us a little background on the evolution of the company and the board and their bringing you in? For example, did the board want the company to be run by a mining engineer after the incident with the dry stack at Turmalina and to restart the different facilities where a mining engineer might have fewer mishaps than a financial person or a lawyer or a geologist or some other discipline?
The previous CEO that was here was a mine engineer as well, was Ver Bake. The company, I don't believe the board has established you have to be a mine engineer or you have to be a geologist or a financing guy. I think when I was being interviewed for this job, what came clear to me is that the board wanted to have more kind of a developer leading the company. That's what I bring to the table, with my experience in developing like the expansion project from Kinross in Brazil. Before, I was in Chile for 14 years. I also worked in junior companies over there. I worked a lot for copper. I believe I'm more like a developer than just an operator. With the amount of opportunities that we see in Brazil nowadays, first of all, in Jaguar
itself, with the exploration potential that we've got, which will lead to new projects and also M&As, projects that are ready to be built. With my background as a mine engineer and as a developer, I think that called the attention from the board. Exactly, I think the last 20-ish years, Jaguar was kind of happy to continue as a producer at this sort of level. Eventually they got up to 80,000, but could not pass this 80,000 oz per year threshold. Now we believe that that's the time to a bigger jump, really bring this company to be a mid-tier producer, maybe 200,000, 300,000 oz producer. I think my background and my profile was what caught the attention to the board. That's what I'm ready to do here.
Luis, are any of the directors nominated or selected by Eric Sprott, or is Eric purely a passive investor?
Our Chairman, Jeff Kennedy, was nominated by, was requested by Eric Sprott to be on the board and to be the Chairman. I must tell you that I had already got some meetings with Eric Sprott. He's a hands-off guy. He really believes in the company, but he's not there to do any micromanagement. The board has all the autonomy to operate as the management team. I'm very happy how the company is set up.
Eric Sprott believes in higher gold and silver prices or other commodity prices, and he would only want you to produce more and support that.
Exactly. He's a big believer of the company. I think he got involved back in 2018, but he keeps participating. Like we just had this raise last week, and he was keen to participate. He's a long-term shareholder. I think he can see the value of the company long-term. For us, of course, it's very nice to have a supporter like Eric Sprott. I think many junior companies would like to have that as well.
How long is your contract, Luis?
As currently stated, I don't have, let's say, a definite time. Of course, it can be terminated at any time. It depends on the results. You know how CEOs operate. You have to give results to the company. If you're not giving the results to the company, then you better move on. There is not such a definite time establishing a contract for my work here.
How old are you, Luis?
I'm 60 years old this year.
You're a young man. You have at least five years till your retirement age. Maybe if you have energy and health and God gives you more time, you work longer.
That's why I want to develop as quick as I can, so that I'm still here to see this flourishing. I believe I'll see that.
Good, good. Luis, thank you and congratulations on your progress, your $76 million cash position, and all the opportunities and unused infrastructure that make it a little quicker path to increase production.
Thank you, John. Thanks for the opportunity and for everybody that's hearing. I can tell you, if you are not involved in this story, this is the time to be. The train is leaving the station, but you still can catch this train. As I said, I think we are well set to demonstrate very good results in the near term and long term as well. Of course, gold price, I believe, is just going to go up, at least for now. Thank you very much. I appreciate your interview, John.
Thank you. Have a good day, everyone. Thank you for your attention.
Bye-bye.
Bye.