I think we're probably just gonna get started. Thank you so much everyone for attending today, everybody in person, and then everybody on the webcast. Just a couple of quick things. We reckon this, the entirety of today's presentation should probably take about three hours. We think we'll be done by about midday. For any of you guys wanting to ask questions, we want this to be an open discussion really, so feel free to ask questions whenever you have one, and the guys are happy to answer those. For everybody on the webcast, you can ask questions through the portal that will come straight to me, and I'll ask those questions once they come through to whoever the question's directed at.
We will be making some forward-looking statements today, so as usual, when you get the chance, please, take a look at this slide. The agenda will be split into four speakers today. Ron will be giving some introductory comments, followed by Terry, our COO, who will be talking about operations. That'll be followed by Andre, who will be giving an update on our exploration strategy and some of the things that we've seen and the developments that we've seen over the last year particularly. You know, I was looking at the presentation that Andre gave last year, funnily enough, and it really is, you know, how much the exploration side of things has developed is pretty amazing in the last year.
And then finally, Juan Jose will give an update with regards to our business sustainability activities. So with that, thank you so much everybody, and I'll hand the mic over to Ron.
Thanks, Bentley. Yeah, and thanks everybody for taking the time this morning on Friday morning to hear a little bit about Lundin Gold. You know, when we're putting this together, we're coming up on 10 years. It was June of 2014, my first time I ever put boots on the ground in Ecuador with Lucas, Pablo Mir, and Peter O'Callaghan, and we look back at that journey now from 10 years and where we've got to today, and it's a pretty exciting and at times humbling experience to look at how many people's lives have been changed by the construction and operation of Fruta del Norte, but then, when I look where we're at today, I'm honestly saying this, it's not just something I say because we're in front of a capital markets investors day.
I'm even more excited about what the next 10 years are gonna show. You're gonna hear about today about where we've got to, what we're looking at in terms of expansion of the existing facilities, but the exploration. Where we are on exploration is essentially showing that the next 10 years are gonna be just as exciting, if not more exciting, than the past 10 years of building this operation. And so for us, this is. It's a very, you know, time where we now are generating the cash flow to be able to have a lot of opportunities in front of us. You know, if we look just at real, you know, low level, we've done what we said we wanted to do in 2023, proceeded to start cleaning up the balance sheet.
We met guidance and, you know, paying our dividends. In 2024, you'll hear that we're well on our way to meeting both our production and our cost guidance. We've now fully cleaned up the balance sheet, and just a few weeks ago, we announced that we're actually gonna be doubling our dividend from $0.10 a share quarterly to $0.20 a share quarterly, to further take that cash that we used to be giving it to the banks and now giving it to shareholders. Just recap , you guys have all seen, everyone's seen these. We produced just under 134,000 ounces in Q2, bringing the year to date to just under 245,000, so we're well on our way to meeting guidance.
Interestingly enough, we are, you know, as many of you have seen, all of us carry these backpacks around when we met a milestone of a million ounces. This month, within the next couple of weeks, we're actually gonna meet another milestone of producing two million ounces at Fruta del Norte in just under five years of operation, which really shows what a remarkable ore body this is. Cash costs for the quarter were about $875. Year to date, about $872. So we're well on our way to meeting the guidance for the year. But this is. We're not happy with $872, $875.
Our team at site, and you're gonna hear about a number of initiatives that we have underway from Terry, about what we're doing to really continue to reduce costs, either by increasing productivities or through just cost-cutting initiatives. And as I mentioned, we're well on our way to our guidance, the 450,000-500,000 in production for this year. In terms of all-in sustaining, we're kind of just in the upper range a little bit, but we're gonna continue to push to get those costs down. We will be updating the 2025 and 2026 guidance. We're right in the middle of the budgeting process right now, but based on preliminary indications, we don't see a lot of significant change in 2025 and 2026. With those costs and with that production, we're generating a lot of cash.
This is the history of the free cash flow of the operations since the start. First gold was November 2019, commercial production February 2020. We were extremely blessed, lucky, however you wanna put it, to have managed to get through construction and actually get into commercial production prior to March of 2020, when we all know what happened then. The country of Ecuador shut down for three months. We were able to get ourselves back up and running, and never looked really back since then. So just in the first half of this year, we generated just under $200 million in free cash flow. You're gonna hear from Terry about our expansion. We've constantly looked at ways of improving and increasing throughput. Fruta was originally designed for a 3,500 ton per day mill. The mine has always exceeded expectations.
The mine was everyone thought was gonna be wet, really bad ground conditions, and that was gonna be the bottleneck. We have not ran into a bottleneck in the mine to date. The mill, yeah, we originally expanded, spent $18 million to take it from 3,500 to 4,200 tons per day, and we're in the process of spending about $37 million, and Terry's gonna walk you through the details, to go from now 4,500 to 5,000. The team at site have told me and Terry, that based on what we see today, with then debottlenecking, after we get everything done here in the expansion, we should be able to get to 5,500 tons per day. We should continue debottlenecking, not a lot of capital.
The other part that hasn't quite met our expectations is recoveries, and that's what we've determined is the metallurgy has really been the challenge. But we've done a lot of work. We now think we have the solution to this. We're losing our gold in very fine-grained sulfides, and with the technology we have in place today, we can't grind finer. Recoveries actually go down. So we are now implementing some new technology, and Terry will walk you through that as well. We've cleaned up the balance sheet. We took advantage of some opportunities. Gold was low at the start of 2023. Ideally, we would've been able to do this in 2022 when gold was at $1,600, but we didn't quite have the cash.
But we did it in 2023, paid that off in full, and obviously, where gold prices have gone, that's been proved out to be a very astute decision. By the time we got to the end of last year, our debt was down to $72 million, paid it off without any penalties or anything like that, and then, with the acquisition of Newcrest by Newmont, we thought there may be an opportunity to open up the discussion to buy the stream back in full. We did have the right to buy 50% of that back for $150 million at in June of this year, but we approached Newmont, and they said, "Make us an offer," and we did, and we came to an agreement, and we announced that we buy back the stream in full for $330 million.
That's the stream and the offtake agreement. So as of June, as you've seen in our balance sheet, zero debt now. So we've paid off $750 million in debt in the four years. You're gonna hear about exploration. That's growth. That's our organic growth. But you're gonna hear a lot about that today. We have three programs, and André will walk through them. But just real quickly, conversion, focused on our existing resources. Near mine, in and around Fruta del Norte, and regional in that brown area that you see here, that's the what we determine as our regional effort here. Every Lundin Group company is focused on increasing shareholder value. Next year will be my... coming up, makes me feel old, but I'm also very happy to say it, will be 30 years working for the Lundin family.
So I'm now on my third generation of family. I first met Jack and Adam when they were in elementary, and now they're my boss. And I can't be more—this, I honestly say this, I can't be more excited than we are right now with what we see for the Lundin Group. We're driven by shareholder value. What are we doing about that? Lundin Gold, focusing on operational excellence. It's a great ore body. And we know, unfortunately, I've been in mining now for over 30 years, there are stories where good grades make good miners. There are also good grades make lazy miners. We don't let that in get into our culture. Our culture is always, "What can we do better?" And I give a lot of credit to the Ecuadorian people. That's their culture as well. And so we're always focusing on costs.
How can we get more out of the operations? We're gonna talk about the expansion, and then what can we do more? We're generating a lot of cash by keeping our costs low and improving productivity. So clean up the balance sheet, return capital to shareholders. Now focus on growth, both primarily organic, but never stop looking at inorganic opportunities. So you're gonna hear about what we're doing over the last three years. We really started exploration in 2021 with conversion and a little, small, little regional program, but you're gonna see how it's changed a lot. The key is none of this could have happened without the strong ESG culture that is also part of the Lundin Group. Shareholder value and ESG, creating wealth, changing people's lives.
I can remember meeting Adolf when I was much younger, just starting with the group, and that was one of the things that impressed me is that's why the family actually got into resources, 'cause they felt this is a way they could change people's lives. Taking something that's in the ground, at the time it was primarily oil, that's worth zero to the people of the country, the governments, and everything, as long as it's sitting in the ground. But if we can extract that responsibly, we can really create wealth for a lot of local people. I think Fruta del Norte, and I remember hearing from Lucas, has really been sort of almost the epitome of one of these stories, of coming into a country that had no mining. I remember the very first meeting with the government. Lucas said, "This is Ecuador's gold.
It's worth zero. What we wanna do is come into Ecuador and show you how we can create wealth from the resources you have in the ground. Create wealth for local people, create wealth for various levels of the economy, and also create wealth for our shareholders, obviously. Fruta del Norte is now showing that this can be done, and nothing we can do. ESG is something that is part of everything we do every day. It's not just three letters that we're worried about our scores with all the various rating agencies and everything. It's something. It's part of our culture, and it's part of that. I think one of the secret sauce, we wanna say, or key success of the Lundin Group.
On that note, I'm gonna turn it over to Terry to talk more about detail about some of the things we have going on in the operations.
Thanks, Ron. Good morning, everybody. Yeah, I'm Terry Smith. I've been with Lundin Gold for about a year and a half. It's gone by pretty quick, working with Ron and the team. And, you know, it's been exciting for me to be part of the success that Ron was just describing. You know, we've got a world-class ore body down in Ecuador, arguably the best precious metal asset outside of a major, at least that's what I think. We've got a great team in Ecuador, and that's delivered results and will continue to. But the key thing for me in this investor day, if you take one thing away, it's the exploration story, like Ron was saying. The... it's starting to come together.
Andre's gonna go through that, but for me, the geological endowment that we have in this epithermal field, in this district that we're starting to unlock is really exciting. And for me, it just is a milestone where we're just getting started here with Fruta, so very exciting times. I am going to give you a bit of a site overview. We've got VRIFY going here, so I'll do some magic with the iPad. I'll get into our life of mine plan and just give everybody a sense of how that looks from our underground, talk about reserves, our health and safety performance. I'll get into the plant expansion that's underway and then talk a little bit about ops excellence.
This is a site overview I'll walk through for those of you that haven't been to Ecuador or to Fruta del Norte. This is southern Ecuador, and if you were to come see us, you would fly to Quito, and you would then fly to a little town called Loja. From there, you've got about a four-hour drive to get to Fruta. That's close to the Peruvian border here. We've got a paved highway that goes all the way to a town called Los Encuentros. That's where a good bulk of our employees come from. Just in our ring one and two, there's about 40% of our employees come from that local area. You would then take a 22-kilometer access road up through some mountainous terrain to FDN.
So the green line in this slide is our access road. The blue line is a 40-kilometer power line that we have that connects FDN to the Ecuadorian grid. And you can see just off in the distance, that's the Peruvian border in the background. So as we zoom in on site here, I'm gonna step through all of these facilities, so this is just sort of an overview to give you a sense of the footprint that we have. We're very conscientious of the you know, the biodiverse environment that we're operating in Ecuador, so we try to maintain a small footprint. This is a great sort of eagle eye view of the site.
I'll walk you through the process plants. We'll take a look at the mine, the paste plant. Wherever here is our Las Peñas camp, that's where we stay. And if I pan to the right here, you can see our TSF off in the distance, and so we'll have a closer look at that in a moment. So this is our process facility. And I'm not a metallurgist, I'm a mining engineer, but I take a pretty keen interest on this plant. As Ron was describing, one of our big opportunities is increasing throughput and improving our recoveries, and a plant expansion that I'll talk about a little bit later. But just to walk through the flow sheet... We crush the ore at our jaw crusher.
It makes its way into our comminution circuit with ball and SAG mills. We've got a gravity circuit and a flotation circuit that's here, and then we leach the tails out of that circuit, and then it goes to tailings. So it's a very kind of standard gold flow sheet, and we're operating at the moment around 4,600-4,700 tons a day. This is our paste plant. Paste Backfill uses tailings so that we don't have to deposit as much tailings on surface. We combine it with cement, and it becomes a structural part of our underground. And so this paste plant takes about 40% or 50% of our tailings and sends it underground as paste.
You can see up on the hillside here. This is a set of ventilation raises. I'll highlight that when we look at the underground. This is our Las Peñas camp. So if I just spin around here, this road is about a fifteen-minute drive from the mine to get back to Las Peñas camp. You know, here we've got a really comfortable camp. We've got a soccer field, basketball courts, volleyball, got a little gym, so this is a great place to unwind at the end of the day. Some of the best camp food is in our cafeteria that I've ever had in my career. I've never heard anyone complain about the food, quite the opposite, actually.
Just in the hillside here, and I'm gonna use a gold color, is what Andre is gonna talk about shortly, which is the Bonanza Sur deposit. It's just on the ridge line behind our camp, so very close to our existing infrastructure. The other thing that I'll point out is our set of exploration decline is just past the hill there. I'll touch on those when we look at the underground in a little bit more detail. This is our tailings facility. This photo was taken when we were constructing Stage IV last year. We're completing a lift next year, Stage V, and we'll carry on with construction as planned, and this is a facility that's permitted till about early 2030.
We're just completing some permitting now that will extend this facility out into the 2040 s. We're planning on exploration success to fill this basin in the future, so planning for a long mine life. This is near the mine portal area, so we've got our mine administration facility. This is where the mine dry is, where the miners get ready to go underground. Tech services is located here, all the engineers that do all the planning. In behind is our maintenance shop, where we do a lot of our mobile maintenance, and if I just spin around here, you can see our two portals. We've got twin declines that access the underground. These are ventilation intakes for the underground as well. Here we are underground. This is a 3D view of the underground.
We were just looking at the portals up here, and to get underground, you snake your way down through these declines a couple of kilometers, and you can access FDN from there. I was pointing at the south ventilation raise near our paste plant earlier. That's there, and these are two key levels that I'd like to highlight. We drove these levels out further last year so that Andre could do some drilling, and you're gonna hear a lot about FDN South, which these two levels allowed us to do some drilling, and we're still drilling and unveiling some pretty exciting results out there. And this is a set of exploration ramp that was completed during the Kinross times.
So now, I'd just like to highlight, you know, I'll be talking about operational excellence a little bit more. This is one example. This is an underground shop that we just completed. It was about a $2 million shop. This just brings our maintenance folks closer to the equipment underground, so you don't have to bring all the equipment to surface to repair it all the time, and if I can zoom in on... Whoa! Getting dangerous here with VRIFY. Bear with me. If I can zoom in a little bit, gives you a sense of the scale of this facility. It's we're really proud to have self-performed this, and brought it online. And it's absolutely helping keep our equipment availability up.
This is showing in gray what we've mined out from the deposit, and red is what we're mining this year from FDN, and I'll just step through the life of mine, and we'll see some different colors pop up. Yellow is what we'll be mining next year in 2025, and you can see. Actually, let me just go back one. I wanted to point one more thing out here. Oops, pardon me. We actually connecting to the set of ventilation raises next year. That'll be some auxiliary ventilation for us, and it's also another exploration heading for us.
So if I get back to the animation here, we're jumping now in a five-year block between 2026 and 2030, and then, this is completion of mining to the end of 2035. So that's our current life of mine... Now, if I look at the 2019 reserves, this is kind of an interesting view. You can see, sort of how small the original deposit looked. We had quite a bit of drift and fill, that's now been converted into long hole. You can see all the, the small development down there. And if I compare this shape to what we now have for reserves, you can just see how much we've grown the reserves, and as Ron's talking about shareholder value, the longer we can make the mine life, the more NPV we can generate.
So this is a key for Andre and I to infill this deposit and keep finding the edges and pushing this out. One area that Andre will be talking about is here, called FDNS or FDN South, and if I just rotate this a little bit, you can see the reserves that we have out in this area, but the interesting thing is that we're finding lots of high-grade mineralization just literally going through the two exploration declines that we drove. So we're finding ore in all kinds of different directions there, so Andre will touch on that. So that's pretty exciting in terms of adding more ore and adding more reserves in the future.
As you see, we've got this inferred resource halo that sort of represents the edges of the mineralization as we know it, so we're still a long ways to go to keep adding reserves. You've probably seen this slide before. This is a view of our 2019 reserves at just under 5 million ounces to where we are today, so we've more than replaced the 2 million ounces that Ron was talking about that we've mined so far, and it's still a very high-grade resource. You know, we're at almost 8 grams, 5.5 million ounces, 22 million tons, so that's, and we're not even adding any of the exploration upside that Andre will touch on.
We see a very long mine life at FDN. I wanna touch on health and safety for a moment. This is a key part of our ESG, and you know, it's a value for me, it's a value for the company, and I think what we're looking at here is our total recordable incident rate, and this is the way the industry looks at safety performance. It's a calculation of the injuries and the number of hours that your workforce is occurring. You can see in 2013, we had a fairly low TRIR, and in 2024, it's increased. We're seeing a number of these injuries as hand injuries, and these are all preventable.
You know, we feel if we can get our workforce to understand these hazards a little bit better, and that's gonna take some management time in the field, some supervisor leadership, to help get that ingrained into everybody's mindset. And I think if we look at the injuries we've had, we could do a better job of investigating these things and driving to the real root cause. If there's a latch that falls in somebody's hand, we could engineer that latch from slamming shut. You know, put something in place or put a spring in place to prevent that from happening. So we're moving in that direction with our injury prevention program, and we'd like to see these injury rates come back.
We're still at, you know, in terms of the industry, I'd say that we're still a leader in terms of our safety performance, but that doesn't mean that we stop and rest on our laurels. From a plant expansion, Ron touched on this earlier. This is a 5,000-ton-a-day expansion. We foresee it pushing us beyond 5,000 tons a day once it's up and running. We'll see a recovery improvement of 3%. I'll talk about the Jameson cells that we're adding. We actually just received the three Jameson cells on site earlier this week, so that's kind of an exciting milestone for us.
One of the other things that we don't talk about very much is the Advanced Process Control aspect of this project, really taking this plant and adding a layer of technology to make the plant easier to operate, more stable, and it will help us in terms of recovery and pushing the throughput side of things. From the project perspective, the detailed engineering is complete, procurement is complete. We're making good progress on the construction. Our tailings line has been completed, and we've got our grinding circuit on Advanced Process Control already. Fabrication and other things are well advanced. So we're on track to complete this by year-end.
We do see a few things trickling into 2025 in terms of capital spend, but largely the project will still deliver the headlines that we've been looking for here.
Year end.
Hmm?
By year-end.
By year-end, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Ron. Yeah. So I'll just walk through some photos that we have. These are a couple of weeks old, from our construction on site. I'll highlight a couple of things. It's probably hard to see for those that aren't familiar with FDN. These two areas, this is the first one is our concentrate area that we're adding a third filter, and this is the Jameson Cell area that we're adding three Jameson Cells. In this photo, it's here and here. So this is the Jameson Cell area. This photo on the left is a pump box that's just been placed on top of some concrete.
And we're pretty proud of this pump box because it's the first you know structure that we're putting on top of a lot of hard work that went into getting these foundations in place. Just to compare this to the 3D drawing on the right, that pump box is sitting in all of that steel and infrastructure there. At the top of all of this are the three Jameson cells that we're talking about. These Jameson cells are strategically placed in our flow sheet in three locations: one at the head end of the flotation circuit to capture those fine-grained sulfides that Ron was referring to. Another is ahead of the cleaner circuit, so we can have the opportunity to regrind that ore and extract more of those fines.
And then finally, another Jameson Cell is right at the tail end of the flotation circuit before we move to the CIL circuit. So we feel like by placing the Jameson Cells in these three locations, we'll really capture a lot of that finely disseminated gold that we're losing at the moment. From the concentrate area, if I zoom in here, you can see the structure that's going up both in these two images. Sort of the similar view here with the engineering model turned on. You can see these air tanks are also here, and the structure that we're just assembling is the left side of this. So you can see we're making pretty good progress on installing the third filter press as well.
I wanna talk about operational excellence. You know, this is a key to unlocking cash flow and really setting up the mine for future success. We know that we may not have eight, nine, 10 grams to work with all the time, so we really wanna drive our costs down on a per ton basis. Even though we report on an all-in sustaining cost basis, from an operations team's perspective, we really focus on a cost per ton. Two of the things that I'll point out here are recovery and throughput, and these are really things that the plant expansion is going to address. We're gonna increase throughput, like I've been saying, to over 5,000 tons a day. Our Jameson cells will help us from a recovery perspective.
Something that we don't talk about a lot is the geometallurgy program. It's a pretty technical discussion that I'm happy to have with you, but we're really understanding the geology and the deportment of gold in the deposit, and the technological advances that we're making with the plant will help us really tie that geology to the recovery side of things, and integrate the plant team and our geology team. So that's kind of exciting. And we haven't had to do anything really from the mine perspective to support this plant's expansion, and that's been largely because our mine fleet has really been available to push the tons. So we're squeezing more hours out of the equipment we have to match the throughput rates that we're seeing in the plant.
I won't go through all of these, but from an operating cost perspective, I have a few examples and a couple of slides that I'll dive into. And from an environment perspective, there's some interesting things that we're looking at. Like a lot of companies, we're evaluating battery electric equipment to be implemented underground. And we've already got a number of good projects underway that are making our diesel consumption more efficient and using less power. So we're very mindful of our carbon footprint, even though we're a very low carbon emitter from on a per ounce basis already. Now, if you want to drive revenue, you focus on debottlenecking your plants, and this is a great history of how our process team has driven throughput over the years.
You can see that on the far right here, we're already at around 4,600-4,700 tons a day, and that's even in advance of any of the construction work that we've implemented from the project's perspective. So we're pretty optimistic that we'll be able to push well beyond 5,000 tons a day once we are complete with that project. But the thing that really stands out for me is here. You know, driving from 89%- 93% availability, it sounds pretty subtle, but the amount of work that it's taken for the process team to drive that level of improvement is very significant, so kudos to them for this. This is a great sort of history of operational excellence over the years.
From an operating cost perspective, this is a small sampling of some of the projects that we have underway. I'll just touch on a couple of these. We've reduced our cement costs and our backfill by playing with our recipe, figuring out how much cement we really need to add. We've also switched suppliers. So we found a cheaper supplier for cement, so we've made that switch, and that's saving us about $1 million a year. We're doing some basic things like, you know, measuring our tires. It sounds really simple, but you go through a lot of tires as a mining company, and so if you can run your tires a little longer, it saves you quite a bit of money, in this case, around $500,000 a year.
We've talked about rigid ducts in the past. For those of you that have been underground, this is a smooth ducting, and it's just a more efficient way to move air through the underground, and by doing that, we don't need as many fans, they don't draw as much power, and so it saves us on our energy costs significantly. The process plant has continued to look at different SAG mill liner configurations, and you know, we used to have to shut down twice a year to realign the SAG and ball mills. Now we can push that out to eight months, so we're doing that about one and a half times every 24 months. Those are some nice additions, but those OE projects, I would call them low-hanging fruit.
To get to the next tier of OE projects, you really need to leverage technology. So I've got a couple of examples here. I'll focus on the mine for a moment. This Starship Enterprise photo on the bottom right is our mine dispatch. We can see where the bottlenecks are, we can make maintenance improvements, we can do all kinds of things with this kind of information. The gentleman on the left is actually operating our underground vent fans from surface, so that's a nice way to save power. On the other side, I've talked about advanced process control with the process plant and the expansion project that we're completing. This is just a couple of examples of how the advanced process control will help us.
Not only will we collect a lot of data and have visibility similar to the mine and the dispatch system, but we'll see a lot of process improvements. This graph on the bottom right is a SAG mill pump box level. So you're taking slurry from the SAG mill, and you're pumping it to the flotation circuit. The flotation circuit likes nice, continuous flow, and so what the Advanced Process Control did for us is really took a lot of noise out of that pump box level. So the flotation circuits really improved in terms of the stability that it's seeing. On the left side are some flotation cameras that we positioned above the flotation cells.
You know, this is a view looking down on one of the flotation cells, and the froth is moving off the edge of the flotation cell, and the camera's actually monitoring the bubbles and looking at how fast they're moving, the size of the bubbles. What that's gonna enable us to do is to manage the flotation circuit better than we currently do. We're managing these variables by the minute, as opposed to by the hour that the manual operations are currently. With that, I'll hand things over to Andre.
Terry, one question.
Yeah, I was just gonna say, if anybody wants to ask any questions before Andre starts, I reckon we can open the floor up for those.
The 2040 tailings expansion that you're going to be doing, is that based on 5,000 tons a day or 5,500?
That's based on 5,000 tons a day.
Five thousand tons a day?
Yeah.
When you complete that 2040, is that enough capacity for the current reserves?
Yeah
... or do you need a raise?
No, it's all our reserves plus all reserves. So we're planning for success, like I was saying, and you'll see why when we get into Andre's presentation. So that expanded facility is a significant increase.
So the total tonnage that you can store in that mine, 2040, would be how many tons then?
I think it's upwards of forty million tons. Yeah.
Sorry, what's the capacity up till now, like, without the current expansion?
We have another 10 million tons to go before we need this expansion. Yeah.
That translates to how many years?
Around 2031.
Okay. What kind of facility is it?
It's a.
Downstream
... downstream, yeah, quarry rock, construction-
Downstream construction. We meet the Canadian mine standards construction, and we're in the process of moving towards GISTM.
Thanks, mine.
What is the distance from the port to the underground? So there is like-
Yeah, it's a couple of kilometers, a little more than two kilometers from the portals to the underground. Yeah. Go ahead.
Good morning. Aaron Swanson. Quite impressive technical presentation, I must say. As an operator, that's a lot of details here. That's very impressive. Dollars per ton is very important for us as analysts. What is the target that you can see, the range getting into?
That's a good question. I think we're our tech report, even though it's a little bit old now, has us in sort of the $145-$150 a ton range. And we've been able to maintain that. A lot of the OE initiatives that I was highlighting are really offsetting a lot of the increases that we see, so we're sort of maintaining that level. I do think that as we ramp up production, you're gonna see those fixed costs diluted out by the denominator. So I don't have a number that I can give you, but I know it will be lower than $150 as we ramp things up.
Can you break that out for mining, milling, and G&A?
Yeah, I'll... Let me get back to you. I don't wanna-
Process is about 32, mining's 56-
Yeah
... $ per ton mill, right?
Yeah.
... I mean, you had some G&A and site services, surface ops that would make up the rest, Anita.
To get to 150.
The process was 30.
Yeah, around 32. Yeah. But Chester? All right. Great. Thanks, everybody.
Hello. Yes, it's working. First of all, good morning. Thanks for the presence. I'm gonna talk. I'm gonna cover the exploration. I have split it in four sections, and exploration is the future, right? The best way to start to talk about exploration is with the past, how the deposit was formed, how's this unique gold system, of course. I'm gonna start with the geology of Fruta del Norte. Fruta del Norte is a deposit formed around a hundred and fifty million years ago. For those of you that are not familiar with the geology of Fruta del Norte, Fruta del Norte is also part of the Andes. That's the home of some of the largest gold and copper deposits in the world.
Specifically, Fruta del Norte is located in the Sub-Andean zone, the eastern foothills of the Sub-Andean zones of the Andes. This is a new frontier, for major deposits has been only explored more systematically in the last 25 years. Since then, some important discoveries have been done, not only Fruta del Norte, that's the main example of a gold epithermal system in this part of Ecuador, but we also have another important gold deposit that is Condor, located to the south of Fruta del Norte. Several other copper porphyry deposits, some of them with gold, like Mirador, that's another operating mine located to the north of Fruta del Norte. Another important deposit is Warintza, actually being developed by Solaris Resources.
Other important discoveries like Porvenir, Bonanza, and we believe that actually we do have several exploration projects active there, and additional discoveries are still to be done. When Lundin Gold acquired Fruta del Norte, they also got a significant land of mineral concessions in this highly potential geological environment. Around 65,000 hectares, covers 90 km along the north and south direction. Since the north, where Mirador is located, crossing to Fruta del Norte, the south extension of Fruta del Norte, so it comprises 100% of the geological environment that hosts Fruta del Norte. I'm gonna talk later about this. Condor deposit, the north of Condor deposit, and then the south. When we look at the data, we see that exploration has been done systematically only where Fruta del Norte is located.
Now, let's add more color to our map. So Fruta del Norte, as most of the epithermal gold systems, is hosted by a magmatic arc. In our map, our magmatic arc is represented by two main units. The area represented by light pink color are the plutonic rocks. As you can see, a significant part of our concessions cover these plutonic rocks that has a high potential, especially for porphyries, but also for skarn systems. And the green units, that are the volcanic rocks, this is the main environment for epithermal systems like Fruta del Norte, and we cover almost 100%, we cover 100% of the south extension of this geological environment. And we also have Chinapintza. It's a much younger epithermal systems. We also have part of those geological environment. And as you can see, we have different episodes of mineralization.
We believe that this is an important aspect that provide us several exploration opportunities for new discoveries. In this highly geological environment, we see different types of gold deposits. Of course, the most important is Fruta del Norte sub-blind epithermal target, as you can see, is covered by the sedimentary rocks of the Suarez Basin. But another great example is our most recent discovery, that is Bonanza Sur . It's that disseminated epithermal system that's exposed on surface. So now let's move to the Fruta del Norte deposit. That's our most important deposits so far. So Fruta del Norte is one of the premier discoveries in the last 20 years. I always like to say to Ron that it's possibly one of the highest gold concentration per kilo in the world. I did not find any other example like that.
We're talking about more than 12 million ounces of mineral resource in only 1,500 meters along the north-south strike. As you can see, we can divide Fruta del Norte in two main parts. The north present the main breccias and veins. This is where most of our mineral reserves are located. This is where we are mining today, but also the south. The south is an important aspect, mainly for the future of our operation. That's composed mainly by volcanic and vein domains. This is where part of our exploration is today. As you can see, Fruta del Norte is also covered between 200 and 300 meters of a sedimentary sequence, and this is one of the reasons that make this deposit so special. It is for an epithermal systems, 150 million years is really old.
The sedimentary cover allowed the preservation of the system against the erosion in this long period. As a high quality deposit, the Fruta del Norte has allowed us to maintain a minimum mineral resource base of eight million ounces since we have started to operate. As Terry mentioned, we have already mined more than 1.8 million ounces, even though we still have a sustainable mineral resource base. We have not only converted year-over-year, but also added new mineral resources at Fruta del Norte. Now let's move to an important part of the presentation, that is our exploration strategy. Before starting, I would like to mention the following statements, that the true size of a given resource is not fully recognized until you start to mine it. This is exactly what happened with us when we started to...
So we acquired, we built, we had the ramp up, and then the alteration, and after that, we started to realize the high potential geological environment that we had on our hands. We decided to redefine the exploration strategy, and especially prioritizing all the large and unexplored areas that were around Fruta del Norte, close to our plant. We do understand that our highest available ounces are those that are close to our processing plant. At the same time, we keep the exploration program in our regional concessions, looking for the next FDN, mainly because the geological environment still needs to be much better explored. We have five main pillars in our strategy. I'm gonna cover each one of them, but I'm gonna start with, for me, is the most important. That's the land.
'Cause whatever we invest, how many meters we drill, or we can also have the best people, but if you are not in the right place, in the right search space, we'll not find anything. So Fruta del Norte is a truly world-class deposit, right? So it's located in a highly prospective land. As you can see on the top of the map, this is where we have more than 10 million ounces in only 1.5 kilometers. We realized that 95% of the drilling was concentrated in this area, and the deposit, as we are gonna discuss, is still open for expansion, several directions, especially at depth. But we started to identify that, in fact, the Fruta del Norte footprint, the hydrothermal alteration footprint, was much larger. We're talking about 50 kilometers, and this is not only the hydrothermal alteration.
We're talking about geochemical anomalies that had not been explored, because the main focus had been the discovery and the development of Fruta del Norte. For example, the first anomaly that is tested, we found Bonanza Sur . We are talking about this later, but it's just the first anomaly, and we still have several others, and this is Bonanza Sur , and look at how large are the anomalies and hydrothermal alteration footprint in relation to those, to both deposits. What is interesting is that part of those targets are covered by sediments, by the sediments of the Suarez Basin, that provide us opportunities like Fruta del Norte. But some of those are also on surface that provide us opportunities like Bonanza Sur . I always like to say that epithermal systems are never alone. Epithermal systems make generational mines.
We have great examples in the world, epithermal systems that have added more than 30 years life of mine, because as soon as it starts to mine and it starts to explore, you continue to find more. They are never alone, so when we realized this potential, we started to invest, we started to explore, and as you can see, we have seen a large increase of our exploration budget since 2022. It's important to mention that it's not only driven by the near mine program, but especially driven by the results that we have had so far. Our exploration budget in 2024 is gonna be around $43.5 million, mostly dedicated to the near mine program, around 7%, the remaining for the regional program.
Recently, we have added additional two million dollars to increase the drilling, especially to accelerate our exploration program at Bonza and targets around. I would say that this was possibly one of the largest exploration budgets in the industry today. It's important to remember that this is fully dedicated to exploration. We do not add any conversion drilling in this budget. It's fully to explore. So as we increase our budget, we also increase our drilling. We are going to complete a minimum of 8,000 meters of drilling. This is, as you can see, the largest drilling program ever done at FDN. Most of this in the near mine, a significant part of this in the conversion, but it's still an important part looking for another, the next FDN in our regional concessions.
I always like to talk about this because for me, this is a key part of our strategy. So that's our team. So we have a team that was involved in this amazing discovery. We have plenty years of cumulative expertise in this geological environment, but we have also reinvigorated our team with 18 new geologists, 10 woman geologists, which for us is very important. And all of them, 100% of them, are from areas around Fruta del Norte, so they possibly saw Fruta del Norte being discovered when they were young, and now they are part of the history of this history with us. A new leadership, we have a new exploration manager, starting to develop not the Fruta del Norte exploration culture, but also the Lundin Gold exploration culture. We have also international expertise.
We have international geologists that has experience in other epithermal systems around the world as part of our exploration group. And another important part of Lundin Gold, this is. I'm happy to say this is because we are a company that we do not fear the technology. We never forget that exploration are boots on the ground, but technology can really help us, mainly in what advance in the exploration targeting process, reducing the time when the core box, the drill core box arrive, generating data, and accelerating our process. Some examples, we are going to spend around 7% of our total budget in different kinds of technologies, not only geological artificial intelligence units, but different types of geophysical surveys and directional drilling as well. But in fact, we have a very simple exploration approach. Three main fronts.
A very important one for me is the conversion drilling, is this one that allow us to keep replacing what we mine day after day, year after year. Our near mine program that aims to add new inferred resources, not only exploring Fruta del Norte, but also defining new sectors around Fruta del Norte. Our regional program, that's part of our long-term program, looking for the next FDN in our regional concessions. I could list several achievements and milestones we have had in the three years, but I think that we can summarize this. We have replaced all that we have mined, but we have also grown our reserves. We've added new inferred resources at FDN. But also, we have understood that we have a really large system to explore, where several sectors have been discovered only in the last eighteen months.
And we have no doubt that this is just the start of the exploration history at Fruta del Norte. Again, epithermal systems like Fruta del Norte make generational mines... and possibly this is the history that are gonna happen with us. Now I'm gonna jump to the results, jump to the program itself. And let's start with the conversion program. As I said it to you, this is a key aspect of our strategy. It's very important to us. It plays a significant role in the extension of the life of mine at FDN. We have converted more than 30,000 meters of drilling in the last three years. As you can see, those areas represented in the yellow color are areas that we have drilled in the last three years, and we see a significant expansion of the indicated resources along the south of the deposit.
In 2023, one million ounces of reserves were added as part of this program, and we believe that there is still more to come, represented in the gray areas. As you can see, the planned drill holes for 2024 and 2025, so we'll continue to add new indicated resources in the north on depth, and also along the southern extension of Fruta del Norte. Now I'm gonna start to explore the VRIFY model, so this is where we were in 2019 before we started the conversion program, and since then, we have drilled several parts of the south, also on depth and to the north. These are our main results so far. In the areas that we have expanded our indicated resources, that supported the addition of the new mineral reserves.
When we look at this in relation to the existing inferred resources, we see that there are still to come. Just let me go back. Our current program in 2024 are mainly concentrated along the north extension and in several sectors at depth, and on the top of the deposit. Possibly in 2025, we should continue to cover in the southern extension of Fruta del Norte. These are just some of the results that we have reported in the first and in the second quarter. I will not highlight all of them, but just showing that we still have high grade and wide drilling intercepts in our inferred resources. Some great examples are 60 meters, 63 meters, 14 grams per ton, 69 meters, 8.6 grams per ton.
This is still not on our life of mine. This is still not part of our reserves, and possibly will be part of the process of the mineral resource estimate that we should present to the market next year. Now let's jump to the exploration program, right? Our main focus has been really to explore the Fruta del Norte system, but we are also exploring FDN. A great example is FDN Depth, where we have identified mineralized sectors inside Fruta del Norte that are still open for extension. As soon as we start to move around FDN to the north, to the west, to the east, and to the south, we found Bonza Sur. Then we found FDN East, and now we are developing FDNS in the southern limit of FDN.
As you can see, we see a consistent track record of new sectors identified in the last eighteen months. This is just an overview of our current exploration targets. Most of them are. We do have positive economic drill holes showing mineralization. All of them are still very close to Fruta del Norte, so they are located in the limit of the main deposit. All of our drilling completed since the Q3 of 2022. And now I'm gonna talk in more detail about FDN Depth. This is an important target. This is the first. In fact, this is the first target that we have started to explore in 2022. It has allowed us to add three hundred and fifty thousand ounces of new inferred resource last year.
Our first job in 2022 was evaluate Fruta del Norte and see if there was some exploration opportunities there, and one of the things that we realized is that we still have some positive drilling intercepts in the deepest boundary of the deposit, or also in the deepest or in the boundary of some high-grade geological domains inside the FDN. We did a very simple approach where we identified a positive intercept with no additional hole we just decided to drill. As you can see, we should cover several sectors of the mine by the end of the year, but we have just started. We have identified, for example, intercepts above 80 grams per ton or above 12 grams per ton in outside our mineral envelope, that we have no doubt that should represents additional inferred resources in the short term to FDN.
We should accelerate this program, mainly in the last quarter when we stop the conversion drilling. After we have one full dedicated drilling for this type of program and two underground drilling for the conversion program. Now move to the FDN, FDNS. So we have just reported some positive holes at FDNS, I guess two months ago, as part of our second quarter exploration press release. So represented in green, what we see is a volcanic domain. This is important. It comprises most of the southern extension of Fruta del Norte. It's a lower grade envelope when you compare to Fruta del Norte. We are talking about four point five, but no more than five grams per ton, the average grade of this envelope.
We had some former drill holes that showed it was a different geological mineralization in this environment, in this area of Fruta del Norte. As Terry had mentioned, when we decided to start the underground development, then 1080 and 11 70, we started to mine. We started to find some narrower but high-grade material along the development. We started to reinterpret the target, and we have defined it. So, a new, I would say a typical epithermal system, a vein, a vein style mineralization in this part of the deposit. We defined a geological model, a new geological domain represented by the veins, and of course, let's test that. So this is just showing the evolution of this program, right? So this is where we are. The new domains that we have defined.
We have decided to advance with an exploratory program, and we have intercepted a high-grade mineralization in this part of the FDN. We have intercepts like 30 meters, 27 grams per ton. This is the best intercept ever returned at this part of Fruta del Norte. The most important is that it started to show to us that this mineralization really exists in this part of the deposit. We also have things like 90 meters, 7 grams per ton, 80 meters, 8 grams per ton, 80 meters, 17 grams per ton. These are just the first five results. We have several others, and I can say to you that 100% have confirmed this mineralization system, and different from what we thought about the, this part of Fruta del Norte.
It's a bit narrower when you compare to the main branches in the north, but it's really it still preserves the high grade nature of the Fruta del Norte system. As you can see, we can really access it. It can be easily accessed from our underground development. Now let's move to Bonanza Sur . I think that it's possibly the target that we have most that has concentrated most of our drilling in the last two years, the last year, in the last eighteen months. Fruta del Norte Bonanza Sur is a new epithermal system, right? As I said, located to the south of Fruta del Norte. How we discovered the Bonanza Sur , it was just drilling a geological anomaly that was on surface. We did a drill hole, the drill hole 22-2022-16.
That intercept at the time, 243 meters, 1.5 grams per ton, including 39 meters, 8.2 grams per ton. When we reported this in... I think that was in the first quarter of 2023, we just reported the higher grade zone. At that time, we had not realized that in fact, Bonanza Sur was a high, high-grade core comprised inside a much lower grade mineralized zone. It's hosted by the same volcanic rocks as Fruta del Norte. The only difference is that these volcanic rocks in this case, is exposed on surface, and Fruta del Norte is undercover.... We have just completed 50 drill holes, and all of them showed the continuity of the mineralization for more than 1,800 meters along the north and south direction.
And now we are planning our first mineral resource estimate into the first half of 20 25. So this is FDN, and this is the anomaly of Bonanza Sur . And this is the location, as you can see, of the discovery hole in 2016 . Since then, more than 50 drill holes, as I said, have been completed. An overview of Bonanza Sur in relation to Fruta del Norte. As I said, it's exposed on surface. And now I'm gonna show you a cross-section in the middle of the deposit. So it's a shallow mineral envelope, different than Fruta del Norte, right? As you can see. What we have at Bonanza Sur , it's an inner core, an inner high-grade zone that usually has around 4 grams-5 grams per tonne average grade.
This is what we have reported in the first exploration press releases, a higher grade zone, because this is a vein system. This vein system is also enveloped by a large mineralized zone. Just for example, some intercepts, the drill hole 2024-17, it has 113 meters at 2 grams per tonne, including an inner core of 40.8 meters, 3.1 grams per tonne, but also includes a vein, the vein part of the system, with 90 meters, 8.5 grams per tonne. The vein system was our first target until we started to realize that Bonanza Sur was, in fact, much larger. What is interesting at Bonanza Sur is that this discovery give us mining optionality.
We can maybe we can decide to mine just the best part of the system, the vein. We could even start to mine the higher grade part of the system, especially those the higher grade part of the system, as nothing exposed on surface. But even go to the entire low-grade mineral envelope. We are talking about low grade, but again, we are talking about more than one grams per tonne in all the intercepts that define Bonanza Sur . The other drill hole, I think that's the best drill hole of the target so far. 123 meters, 4.34 grams per tonne, 79 meters, 6.4, including 40 meters, 32.3. This is not fair because there's a drill hole that was parallel to the main zone, right?
But just show to us how interesting can be Bonanza Sur for the future of Fruta del Norte. This is the current status of Bonanza Sur today. As I said, more than eighteen hundred meters along the north and south direction, well defined along this continuity by good drill holes that show the continuity of the mineralization. Our exploration program today is fully dedicated to fill the gaps inside the deposit, but also to extend mainly this high-grade core. And as you can see, this high-grade core is exposed on surface, and the deposit still remain open to the south and to the depth as well. We see at Bonanza Sur a very good continuity between the surface and the first three hundred meters. But we also have some great intercepts on depths as well.
For example, our deepest hole that intercepts Bonanza Sur show the continuity of 500 meters at depth. Now I'm gonna show you just an overview of Bonanza Sur in relation to Fruta del Norte. Let me... So as you can see, it's a deposit that fully exposed on surface. As I said to you, actually, our program is dedicated to expand this high-grade core to the west, expand the mineral envelope to the south, and also covering some parts inside the main deposit.
Actually, to the east, not very right.
Yes, to the east. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's so wrong. Oh. So just to return again and just to show the location of Bonanza Sur in relation to FDN and to the surface as well. Now I'm gonna move to the next discovery, to the other discovery that we have, that's Fruta del Norte East. I always like to remember that when we started this program, it was assumed that the potential for gold mineralization stopped in the east fault. This is the east fault, so it's interrupted the gold mineralization Fruta del Norte, and there was no drill hole in this part, in the east block of FDN. We decided to do some exploratory holes, and they intercepted gold mineralization. We had some good initial results, like five meters, 76 grams per ton in one zone.
It was exactly in the zone, six point four meters, 12 grams per ton in another completely different zone. Studies which showed to us that we not only had mineralization in this block, but mineralization with high grade. This area is very large. The Fruta del Norte East is at least three times larger than the area that hosts FDN. As you can see, I'm also comparing here, take a look, this is Fruta del Norte, and this is the area that hosts Fruta del Norte East. This is also an exploration challenging to us because it's not covered by this Suarez Basin, but it's covered by the Hollin formation. This Hollin formation generates several hills that are they call, like, mesetas, that make us an important operational challenge for drill.
We have just completed a geophysical survey in order to have a better targeting at Fruta del Norte East, and now we are starting to accelerate the exploratory program. I'm gonna show you Fruta del Norte East in relation to Fruta del Norte, to the main deposit, and just note how close Fruta del Norte East is in relation to the main deposit, but also in relation to our underground development. One of the plans that we have now in the last quarter, as soon as we finish the conversion program, is to start some exploratory holes from the mine, inside the mine, inside Fruta del Norte, exploring the continuity of the system in several parts. But again, we believe that Fruta del Norte East is a great opportunity, not only to add new resources, but still keep the high-grade nature of this mine.
All that I showed to you so far is concentrated here. It's important to note how large is the near mine, is the near mine district. Bonanza Sur was just the first anomaly to be tested, and we still have more than 30 to test, to drill. For this region, we have started a more aggressive drilling program that intends to test systematically all those anomalies. I think this is one of the importance of Bonanza Sur , that showed it was a new type of mineralization, and showed it was that the entire areas that are represented in green, that are volcanic rocks, are a potential geological environment for new discoveries. But at the same time, as you can see, we still have several gold anomalies along the south extension of FDN that could provide us additional opportunities for new FDN.
We are also exploring our regional concessions. This is also an important aspect of our exploration program. What we intended to find with our regional program, the main aim of our regional program is to explore the same geological environment that hosts Fruta del Norte in our regional concessions, right? As Ron mentioned in the start of his presentation, this is a Suarez Basin, presented in brown color, and this as well. This is the geological environment that hosts FDN, and the objective of this program is to test systematically for the presence of another FDN. In 2024, we have found some gold mineralization hydrothermal alteration, and we honestly believe that we hope to provide good news to the market soon.
As part of our innovation and technology program, as I said, 7.5% of our total budget is fully dedicated to acquire data in different ways. This is one of our initiative that was to cover the entire near mine, but also some regional areas via IP and deep AMT. It, as you can see, it's not only included all the geochemical anomalies, all the targets that are gonna start to drill, but also includes the extension of the faults that hosts FDN, and we have already identified some great targets, especially at Fruta del Norte East. As you can see, this is where Fruta del Norte is located, and this is the extension of Fruta del Norte East with several important geophysical anomalies that are pretty similar to FDN, and these are our priority targets to us.
We have already started to drill some of those. We are also going to complete a seismic program, a 2D seismic program by the end of this year, dedicated also to the extension of the structures that causes Fruta del Norte, to the north, to the central part, and also to the south. This is another initiative, so we have now an artificial intelligence at the site. The main aim of this technology is to advance, so find data that we needed 10 days- 30 days to get in our database, now we need just five, 10 minutes, especially for the multi-element analysis, right? So we don't need to send. We still send all the samples to the lab, but we have those data at the same time that we're drilling.
It allows us to take much faster drilling decisions, accelerate our exploration process for our new discoveries. And in order to summarize our exploration strategy, actually, we have two main fronts. The first one is continue to maximize what is Fruta del Norte, continue to maximize the quality of this amazing gold deposit, not only by converting Fruta del Norte, but also extending Fruta del Norte, keep exploring opportunities inside FDN. These are an important source of mineral resource in the short term to us. But at the same time, explore the Fruta del Norte system, this large hydrothermal footprint, where we're just the beginning, but we have already identified the new mineralized sectors that possibly could provide additional resources to us in the short term.
We have seen a constant track record in finding new sectors outside FDN, and we believe that just a minor part of the system has explored so far. We are just in the early days of the exploration. So all that I have to talk to you is located in this white square. And take a look, note how large are our exploration concessions in relation to where we are today. And again, our exploration concessions cover one of the most exciting geological environments, not only for epithermal systems, but also for skarns. Porphyry system have large copper porphyry deposits discovered in this geological environment, and we have several important geochemical anomalies that were not even explored by us.
This is one of our priorities as part of the medium and long-term program to accelerate our exploration in this highly potential geological environment, covering by geochemical sampling, geophysical survey, and possibly generate new targets for drilling in the future. A great example is one of the belts that we have, that's called that we internally call Gata Salvaje Las Nubes. It has 13.5 kilometers, with several gold and copper anomalies in areas that we have already identified the hydrothermal alteration, and that are ready to be developed. I always like to say to Ron that mega porphyry system is also another important access to a large mineral gold inventory, and we can add value to the company exploring those regional concessions. So that's what I have.
Thanks, Andre.
So, yeah.
Any questions? Oh, what?
Just several, actually. I mean, starting off with FDN, obviously. FDN is looking like you're just moving on to conversion, you're looking on to expansion. Obviously, you're kinda hitting that 5,000 tons per day right now. Where is this gonna go? Like, I mean, you've obviously got a large resource base. Like, how are you looking at this?
I said when we started, this is what's actually really exciting, because now we're seeing FDN as now it is just a start. You know, we actually, you've seen what Bonanza Sur looks like through those models. So could this be an open pit type operation? We have done preliminary metallurgy at our site. The samples are at the labs right now, actually, in a full metallurgical program. Metallurgy actually looks a lot simpler. Essentially, we're getting 90+% recoveries just with a con, flotation and gravity. We could be looking at, you know, what could this look like? Building another mill that's 10-15 thousand tons a day, you know, with an open pit operation, you know. Yeah, it's, you know, we're talking about...
We've been continually trying to improve production to get us to and be able to maintain that 500,000 ounces a year. But obviously what we could be looking at now is a step change. And we're gonna be going through, so we've got a couple of days planned at the end of October, really kind of blue skying it. You know, the key is, it's all this work on near mine is on the La Zarza concession. So that's covered by our exploitation agreement, and all of this actually is within the operative area, as defined by our environmental management plan. So we would definitely have to look at an amendment to our environmental permit, but we're not looking at like, sort of like a brand new baseline type environmental.
It's exciting times, like, what does FDN look like in five years?
And then just, I mean, you touched upon Bonanza Sur , obviously, and in terms of, you know, it could be an open pit opportunity here. In terms of the resource update that you're planning to kind of provide in 2025, I mean, where's the cutoff point there? And then secondly, you know, it just keeps getting, the strike keeps extending. You've got potential on the east and west, I think-
Yes
... about.
As I've been kind of pushing the team to say we want to put our resource estimate out Q1. I would love for you to be calling, "Ron, you said Q1, now it's H1." I'd love for you to call me a liar, because the reason we pushed it to H1 is because we don't know. Some of the drilling that Andre's just started, we just started putting some holes to the east. Yeah, when do we put a pin in it? There's a nice problem to have.
Sure.
So it may get pushed. You know, we originally, not that long ago, were talking about Q1, but it may get pushed now to, you know, today's latter half of latter part of H1.
Within that resource then, I mean, you know, what kind of spacing are you looking at? Is this gonna be more inferred? Are you gonna move towards Andre?
This, from the top, in the first 300 meters, we intend it to cover a minimum of 100 meters drilling spacing. But of course, for example, if you do assume that we're gonna mine just the best part of the system, the veins, and if you want to develop an underground operation, possibly we need to have a tighter drilling spacing. Actually, even for FDNS, for example, that's a vein type of mineralization. We do understand that a minimum of 50 meters drilling spacing is required, right? But actually, what we do intend at Bonanza Sur is to cover the entire 1,800 meters by 100 meters spacing between holes.
Now, stop there and pass it on.
Yeah.
The 100-meter spacing would get you inferred category or M&I?
Possibly, we know that easily for the inferred. Let's see what the variography tell us, but maybe I have no doubt. I already worked on deposit that's a hundred meters were enough for indicate an open pit resource, right? So it's. Let's see. But in theory, no doubts that we are gonna cover a hundred by a hundred, but possibly part of this we could even consider as indicator. So it depends of the geostatistics and how much the geological model is reliable as well. Let's just remember that it has only fifteen months of drilling, and Bonanza Sur just now became a high priority target just after the second quarter of 20 23. So just now we're really accelerating the exploration at Bonanza Sur . But as you saw, it's a really continuous mineral envelope and can be-
So-
A great opportunity for us.
We have 11 rigs in total turning right now?
Yes, 11. Yes.
And how many of those?
Bonanza Sur today.
Three underground and eight surface. Of the eight surface, how many are four?
Four.
Four.
Up to four rigs at Bonanza Sur in order to accelerate. Of course, that's comparing Fruta del Norte to several other exploration sites that I worked in the past, so it's much more challenging, technically saying in terms of where we can drill, right? We need to follow several environmental procedures. The area of the drilling platform and things like that, so sometimes takes more time. But up to have four, could even have more rigs at Bonanza Sur in the near future.
How many more holes would you need to drill to get to 100-meter spacing along that 1,800-meter strike at Bonanza Sur ?
Honestly, we're almost there.
You're almost there.
We're almost there.
So you'll have that drilling done by you?
Yeah. Yes, we are almost there. We have several other results that it could be important, but we didn't do that.
Okay.
But what's changing, Carrie, is, as that drilling to the east, we've started moving to the east a bit.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
The east of Bonanza Sur , right?
Yes.
Yeah, okay.
The east is where you get higher grade.
No, we haven't announced anything yet on those east holes.
Yes. The east of Fruta del Norte, yes. The east of Fruta del Norte, you are right.
I totally with you, Tony.
Yeah.
No, now we're talking east of Bonanza Sur .
Yeah.
Sorry.
Okay. I can. Maybe I can return, but yes, because you're talking, we still exploring the east of Fruta del Norte, and now we are concentrating the east of Bonanza Sur . Right? And we have announced it, some, all our new holes that we have reported are in the main Bonanza Sur . And now we have just explored the hydrothermal alteration to the east, and we are still intercept the same system.
So the updated resource estimate, what areas will it include?
We're looking at an updated resource estimate for FDN, which would be in Q1 of next year. So that's FDN proper. Bonanza Sur , it would be a new resource because it would have the potential to be like a different type of open pit and that sort of thing, and we've looked at it, probably a separate 43-101. That H1, I guess now. I used to be saying Q1, Maria, but as you know, now probably H1, based on continued success he's having.
What about the east areas?
Yeah.
Is that inclusive of-
Sure.
Okay, that's fine. But is it inclusive of the east areas, like, other areas?
No, I think the east is still too early yet. We just scratched the surface on the east.
Yes. Yes, we have just received the first results.
You've seen the geophysics is generating a lot of targets for us, so there's some more we need to do on the east.
Yeah. At the northeast, yes, that's right.
Yes, sir.
If you put a 10,000 or 15,000 , that's the kind of mill that, that's your blue sky, right? You're thinking also that the grade will be lower, if I understand?
Yeah, if you're open pit, we're probably preliminary, just blue sky. Don't hold me to this, probably two grams per ton. Right, Jerry?
Yeah. Yeah.
Another 200,000-250,000 ounces, potentially.
Just on number one thing, so, and I mean, maybe I'm trying to get ahead of myself here. So, when do you expect to put out, like, a PE or some sort of report post the insurance?
You know, you know what? We're a Lundin Group company, so you never take the foot off the accelerator. So, you know, ideally we'd be looking at a resource assessment in H1 of PEA by the end of it, by the end of next year. Right?
Next 2025?
Yeah.
Will that maiden MRE for Bonanza Sur include Bonza East then, or that's too many?
Depends on how much continued success Terry, he continues to have, right? That's the whole. It goes back to what Olga said about when do you. Key is when do you put a pin in it?
After we have two rigs fully dedicated to the east, especially because most of the drill hole is inside the immediate bosses have already been concluded. Let's see what the results tell to us.
And if you want to deliver an MRE in second quarter, when would you have to cut the drilling off? Would that have to be February or-
Yes, maybe, or even March, because the geological model has been built day after day. So I think that. And that's an inferred resource category, so I don't think that's gonna be so difficult, so critical. Yeah, I think that full time can do this.
What about the cost on the open pit? I mean, it would be-- because you're, it's a lower grade.
Yeah. It's too early to tell. That's some of the stuff we're gonna be going through later this year.
Mm-hmm, but it's probably higher. I mean, because they're not mining in grams anymore.
Terry, do you have any comment on that?
Yeah, I mean, 10,000 tons-15,000 tons a day mill, like, we'd be mining at, I don't know, 5 or 6 to 1 strip or something like that. So we'd be mining at, you know, 70-80 thousand tons a day out of an open pit at a total mining rate. So, I mean, this would be comparable to some of the big open pits that you see, you know, here in Ontario, where you're getting unit costs that are in the, like, $2-$2.50 range per ton mined. So, process cost would be $10 a ton-
Oh.
You know, like...
Yeah.
So, you know, it's a totally different scale of operation than underground mining with a 5,000-ton-a-day mill. So we would rightsize it to generate enough margin for an open pit like that, a lower grade open pit.
Terry?
Just kind of a leading question on what you said earlier about the concession discussion, the environmental issues. When does that trigger again, in terms of ownership or operation? In other words, if you bring a joint venture partner on board in time, let's say, okay, does that trigger a different format than what we have on the agenda?
We bring a joint venture partner, and we're generating enough. The only time people bring joint venture partners in is because they don't have the cash to do it. We've got the cash, so why would we want to share something so juicy as that? Yeah.
Just-
One more question, then we'll move on to sustainability.
Just in terms of then, obviously, Bonanza Sur looks like your next leg, in terms of how you're looking at the whole picture in Ecuador right now.
Today, unless he hits, you know, the way he's going...
Good point.
Yeah.
Good point. Based on that, then, how are you then looking at, you know, any sort of M&A outside? You know, clearly-
... you don't really need to do anything based on-
Sure. No, that's a good question. Our focus obviously is on organic. What you're seeing today is why we say that now, our focus is organic, and where we see some great opportunities to create shareholder value is organic. That doesn't mean that we're not looking for opportunities. We, you know, we have we did look at something, and unfortunately weren't successful earlier this year. But doesn't mean you stop, and you never know when something may turn itself up. You've got to remember, Lucas Lundin used to say, "I don't want to get after Red Back. I'm never getting into gold again.
“I don't understand gold.” Then he had lunch just down the street, actually just across the street here in 2014, with Peter and Jeff at Kinross, and I got the phone call after lunch: “What do you know about Fruta del Norte?” And hence, Lundin Gold is today. You're always, with the Lundin Group company, we're always looking for opportunities, so, you know, it's this is our focus, but doesn't mean we stop looking.
Let's say if once the store becomes a go-ahead, a green light-
Yeah
... or call it, obviously. It's looking like an open bid situation. There's gonna be a development, you know, obviously.
Yeah
... according to that. Then would your strategy change in terms of how you're looking outside, in terms of a development versus a producer?
Possibly, but yeah, I think, again, what really drives us is looking for opportunities, right?
So stage is.
Yeah, I think sometimes you don't like to put the blinders on yourself. You need to stay focused, but you never know when an opportunity presents itself, and I think that's one of the real... If you look at the history of the Lundin Group, that's what's been, I think, one of our key successes, is always keeping your eyes open and always don't shutter yourself in to say, "I'm only focused on this jurisdiction." Always be looking for opportunities, but at the same time, you don't allow yourself to get scattered or whatever. You have to quickly just sort, "No, no, that doesn't work," but keep your eyes open.
Yeah, I think it's a good point as well, is that now, you know, maybe a year or eighteen months ago, you know, and we talked to all of you guys about how, from an M&A perspective, ideally, the perfect thing that we would've been looking at was something development, right? But now we do potentially have some of this development in front of us, which allows us maybe to start looking at some later-stage opportunities as well.
More early stage.
Yeah, sorry, sorry. That's what I meant, as in later down the line. So it, in fact, if anything, it grows what we've been looking at and kind of extends the different opportunities that we can look at. So it grows that pool even larger.
Okay. We'll have time for questions a little bit later on, but let's turn it over to Juan today. Thanks, Andre.
Hola. Is it good?
Yeah.
Okay. Morning, everyone. It is a pleasure for me to be here today. Very difficult to match Andre's presentation. You saw in that presentation the potential of FDN. But also I have seen some other projects with high potential, amazing potential, but also with bad relationship with communities, with governments, and those projects have many challenges to move forward. That is why I think it's very important today to cover three main topics. First of all, the political, economic, and mining landscape of Ecuador, very important. You saw from Ron, Terry, Andre's presentation that FDN has a remarkable potential that goes beyond FDN and that FDN is doing great.
That is why it's very important for you to understand the context in which we operate, and more importantly, the role that we, as Lundin Gold, play in that context. We have a sustainability strategy that implement as part of in that environment. It is important for you to understand, at least in a broad level, our sustainability strategy and the main impacts, economic and social impacts, that sustainability strategy has caused. To start with politics, a lot of things have happened during the last 12 years. For the ones that were here in the last Investor Day, many things have happened in Ecuador. The most important one is that we have a new president. President Daniel Noboa took office in November 2023.
That happened after a process called Muerte Cruzada, so cross death. That is basically a constitutional mechanism in which former President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the National Assembly and called for early elections, so basically the dissolvement of the government and the Congress. He was having some challenges with the National Assembly. He was in the middle of an impeachment process, so he needed to activate that Muerte Cruzada mechanism. Daniel Noboa managed to position himself as a clear outsider of that election. So after that, he became president, but it is important to mention that he inherited first an unprecedented security crisis, I'm sure you all have heard of that, but also an unprecedented fiscal and economic crisis, which I will elaborate later. The security crisis escalated to its highest level early this year.
I'm sure you read a lot about that. As a response to that, he activated actually another constitutional mechanism that it is called internal armed conflict, basically an internal war. That war earned him a lot of political support. He issued many decrees focused on the state of emergencies that allows him to send a military, especially to the coastal provinces and cities in which the situation was harder. He worked with the police, and that earned him a lot of support that basically he reached approval ratings of about 80%. He became a very popular president in Ecuador early next year, early this year, and that allows him to work with other key institutions in Ecuador. First, the Constitutional Court and also the National Assembly.
He passed many bills. He sent many bills to the National Assembly that then became law through a mechanism called urgent economic laws. So those were mainly focused on tax reforms, energy reforms, and others, but the tax reforms included, for example, increase in the VAT from 12%- 15%, and also temporary taxes that were mostly focused on the private sector. So private banks, and also what the SRI in Ecuador calls large taxpayers. In April, so later that quarter, first quarter, he called for a national referendum. That national referendum had many questions, most of them focused on security. Again, he won that most of the questions of the referendum, and that allowed him to keep those high levels of support, you know?
After that, he took many challenging decisions, for example, the elimination of subsidies, or the ones that follow Ecuador, that has, for former presidents such as Lasso and Moreno, that has caused massive national protests, so they needed to revert that decision. This was not the case. He managed it very nicely, the situation. He reached agreements with the transport sector, for example, and we didn't have those massive protests. As a result of these unpopular measures, his support has declined in recent months. Although his support is now lower, he is still a very popular president in Ecuador, and if you compare his approval ratings with other countries from the region, he is one of the most popular presidents in the region. He has high possibility of re-election in 2025. I will elaborate on that.
After all these political dynamics, he distanced himself from the Congress, from the National Assembly. That is, I think, to maintain his, like, name of his position as an outsider. So he calls himself and his cabinet and his government, the new Ecuador, the Nuevo Ecuador, against all the Ecuador, so the Viejo Ecuador. And that it is very attractive for young population and in general, for the population in Ecuador, the citizens. So another important aspect to highlight is that his opposition is very weak now, and also is fragmented. As an example for that, next year, in 2025, we will have elections, and we now have confirmed 16 candidates for president. So you can imagine how divided his opposition is.
As I said, he remains a favorite to win the next year's election, but now this is a different moment because he's the favorite. He has possibilities to win next elections in what we call first round, but if not, he will be definitely the first during that first period, and that will allow him to have majority, or at least an important part of the National Assembly. That didn't happen last time, and that is why he's having now some challenges with the Congress. That will be definitely useful for him to move forward with other tax reforms or other legal frameworks that he wants. This will depend. We are having many challenges.
I will elaborate on that, but this will depend also on how he manages, he keeps managing security and other economic issues that are now challenging for Ecuador. As I said, we will have elections next year, first round, February ninth, and the second round will be in April, if we have a second round. So we have a new president and a new Congress in May 2025. Okay. Regarding economics, and I said that he inherited a very challenging fiscal and economic situation. We have weak macro figures, so GDP, debt, rev, deficit, et cetera. This is not a new thing, not a one-year thing. This has come from several years due to multi-year economic stagnation.
That also causes an important lack of investment in certain areas that are key for Ecuador, such as health, and infrastructure, education, agriculture, among others. What are the key areas of concern of citizens now in Ecuador? Security, number one, by far. You know why? But all the others are somehow related with economic, the economic situation, so unemployment, arrears, among others. IMF, World Bank, other multilaterals are, even our central bank, are forecasting almost zero growth in Ecuador this, for next year and for the foreseeable future. And as I said, there are persistent government challenges. Arrears is definitely one of them, with local suppliers, with public sector suppliers, with local governments, and with important institutions such as the Social Security. This government has improved that situation, but it is still a structural challenge.
As I said, many, many new taxes, tax reforms, structural reforms such as the reduction of subsidies, and that have allowed him to improve the fiscal situation. They are very positive about the second half of this year. Public investment will increase. The government said that on an ongoing basis, thanks to these reforms. Another key issue here, and good news, is that the IMF approved a couple of months ago a loan, a $4 billion loan to Ecuador, and that had also opened the door for other multilaterals to start conversations with Ecuador about another and complementary loans, which is very important. That actually stabilized our economic situation that was critical at the beginning of the year. Ecuador, for all these aspects that I mentioned, is formally in recession.
That is because we have faced consecutive economic contractions in many quarters. This, Noboa and the next president will need to deal with the structural challenges of the economy, such as labor inflexibility. There's political and institutional instability, historically low foreign direct investment, among others. After these two slides, I want to have a quick reflection as an Ecuadorian. You know, the last two governments were ineffective, inefficient. A lot of industries, a lot of sectors were basically frozen on hold for many years. Some of them faced important setbacks. And now we finally can see how in just, remember, just 10 months, less than a year, things are moving forward. So I can. Despite all these challenging situations, I am optimistic about the future of Ecuador.
What role mining plays in that landscape is key. Every stakeholder, analyst in Ecuador, economic analyst, political stakeholder, recognize the importance of mining in this context. For example, the World Bank just published a report a couple of months ago about what are the three main alternatives in the short term for our economic situation. What they call responsible mining is by far the most important alternative in the short term. As I said, this new government has publicly backed up responsible mining. I am sure you all know that the presence that the government had in PDAC during PDAC early this year, the president himself came here and backed up mining. That has been translated into improvement in permits, licensing, and other things that I will elaborate after.
So what is the role that we play as Lundin Gold in that environment? We are a very important part of the industry. Ron talked about production, exports, but we represent between 35-40% of the total mining exports in Ecuador, and mining itself is the fourth most important product for exports of the country. So you can imagine our role in this event. We have a very good partner for that, the CME, that is the Chamber of Mines of Ecuador, and we both together are having constant relationship and ongoing conversations with the president himself, his cabinet, his advisors, and his main team. That is not only focused on the executive, and that is important to mention.
The National Assembly, the Congress, has on their plate now important reforms that can either benefit or harm the mining industry. So that is a key stakeholder, and we have an ongoing relationship with them, conversations. For example, a proof of that is that Ron and I were a couple of weeks ago at Fruta del Norte with more than 10 principal National Assembly members, the most important ones, in what was our first ever visit from a group like that to FDN. And what it was amazing is to see how their mindset changed before and after the visit regarding mining, and what they are saying now about mining. So important to mention. Illegal mining is a problem. It has expanded a lot in the country. There's a clear link between illegal mining and narcotraffic.
Diesel prices also exacerbates that challenge, so there is an increasing problem with illegal mining in the country. And, last but not least, we have experienced very good news for the sector, for the mining industry. So, as I said, last governments, no, almost zero advances regarding mining. There were many projects on hold. Now, two of the main projects received their main permits and moved through several judicial decisions and now have green light to advance. These are mid-scale mining projects, so El Domo and La Plata. And not only that, well, those will be important to mention, those are about to start construction and will be the first mining projects that start construction after FDN. That was 2017, 2018.
You can see how the mining industry has been frozen for a while. Besides that, the government just signed exploration agreement, for example, with Cascabel, SolGold. The government has announced that the final stages of the negotiation of the exploration agreement with Cangrejos, another important project, and they are about to sign an addendum to the exploration agreement for Mirador, the other operating mine, Chinese. You can see how the sector is advancing. That was not happening with the previous governments. What is our role? And just to update you, I know Terry showed some of these maps, but where we are now. This is the Amazon region. Oops! This is the Amazon region in Ecuador.
We are located in a province called Zamora Chinchipe, which is the green here, you can see, and that province is what we call Ring Three. We divide our area of influence, our closest area of influence into rings. That basically means our priority is focused towards those rings. So ring one is Los Encuentros, ring two is the Canton of Yantzaza, and ring three is the province of Zamora Chinchipe that I just showed you. So within that province of Zamora Chinchipe, remember ring three, we are located in the canton, so is the city of Yantzaza. This is the city of Yantzaza. More than 20,000 inhabitants, and this is what we call Ring Two. The closest town, we call it in Ecuador, parish, so parroquia, to our area of influence is Los Encuentros.
So Los Encuentros, you can see here, is a town of almost 4,000 inhabitants. Oop! I don't know where I need to be. Sorry. And it is what we call Ring One. So our priority is our local procurement, our local hiring, our community investment, our focus divided on rings. Another important aspect to mention is that within FDN, direct area of influence, no one lives. There's no one there. That is important when you think about FPIC, for example, and another permits that are part of our environmental plan. Ready?
There you go.
Okay.
Good.
Sorry about that. So, if you read about other mining projects in Ecuador, you can see how they can not have challenges at the national level with local authority, with national authorities or with politicians, but they have many challenges. They face many challenges at the local level, either with politicians or also with indigenous or activist groups. That is not the case for FDN. So in our case, we have an ongoing engagement and sound relationship with local authorities and local communities, and also we have developed, from the very beginning, a sound relationship with the main indigenous group from the province, that is the Zamora Chinchipe Shuar Federation. What are the key local issues?
Illegal mining, as I said, is number one, security and security, but also you can, you can imagine, due to the central government fiscal crisis, they have priorities towards local procurement, local hiring, increase of benefit or investment from the mining companies, and also local governments and citizens are concerned about the increase of the presence of gangs and criminal groups in the province. And I cannot stress enough point number six: we have a very good relationship with our local stakeholders. That is the government, but that also is communities, means company, private companies, among others, and when I say this is not just PR, we measure this, and I will elaborate later on that, so what is our role in the middle of this challenging context, you know, national and local context? We have a comprehensive stakeholder engagement strategy.
That strategy is focused on deliver tailored messages to these key stakeholders on the importance of mining, but most importantly, on the impacts that FDN, social and economic impacts that FDN is having. We have very good partners for that. One of them, I already talked about it, is the CME, the Chamber of Mines of Ecuador, but we also work with a range of partners. For example, a group of ambassadors that want to foster responsible mining in Ecuador. We monitor the implementation, and I will elaborate on that, of a community dialogue process, the mesas temáticas, the roundtables... and we have an important component of our stakeholder engagement strategy is the communication strategy. Internal, but also external.
So we measure how we are communicating to our main stakeholders, nationals, and locals, and we divided that for ranges of ages, for example, and we measure how we are getting to them. It's important to develop capacity in the local governments to access other sources of funds, not just mining, and given the national level constraint, maybe international sources of funds. I will talk about, but we have a comprehensive community investment plan, which is key at the local level, and also, as I said, visits to FDN. We are the industry. This is a new industry. No one knows at the national level the industry, so we organize permanent visits to FDN.
We receive between two, three, even in some months, four visits a month from different stakeholders, so media, politicians, NGOs, other mining companies, among others. And I said that we have a good reputation, that we have a strong social license, and we measure that. So this what you see here is an international rigorous methodology to measure social license, so basically the acceptance that stakeholders have towards the mining industry. That has been taken by a Colombian group into a report that is called Brújula Minera, so Mining Compass, and basically compares how is the perception of mining industry among all these countries. What we did is we took that methodology, applied into our yearly perception surveys, and make it comparable.
So you can see there where Yantzaza is located, which is the city in which we operate, and you can also find where Ecuador is located. So two things to highlight. Ecuador is increasing its acceptance towards industrial mining. Now, it's in the threshold of acceptance, but there's still a long path to follow there. But if you see Yantzaza, when they can now experience the impacts, social and economic impacts of mining, we are in the top of this chart. So this is very important to highlight.
It's important to mention Juan José, Ecuador, last year, 2023, was actually in a legitimacy threshold.
Correct.
It's moved up and out to acceptance.
And that is thanks to our, like, work through the CME, through the Chamber of Mines. We have seen how the mindset at the national level regarding industrial mining is changing. So when people see these acceptance levels, our reputation at the national level and local, they ask me a lot, "What is your secret sauce for that in such a challenging environment?" So my first response is we have a comprehensive sustainability strategy. So as Ron said, everything what we do is embedded in ESG. So everything what we do is respond to a sustainability strategy.
What I should highlight here is that this strategy is not part only in my team, in my department, but it is comprehensive, cross-cutting to all the departments and areas of Lundin Gold. So we have headline targets for each of these pillars. We measure how we are advancing towards those targets. We have a set of KPIs for that, and we monitor how we are doing every quarter. As I said, community investment is a key part of the sustainability strategy, and as mentioned it too, this community investment respond to that strategy, and we track every of those agreements, convenios, that we sign at the local level, how they are moving towards the targets I mentioned.
You can see here that we have invested, since the very beginning, almost $40 million on this regard, a big part of that through one of our main partners, the Lundin Foundation, and you can see the main areas of investment. I will not spend much time in these two slides, in the next two slides, but what I want to highlight here is that since the beginning, we had a strategy. This was, these are our main milestones of the sustainability strategy that we implemented during at the end of construction. The context was different. The priorities of the communities and local stakeholders were different. You can see how many projects and milestones that we achieved during this time. You can find projects focused on education.
There was a gap there, but also the main priority was the creation of labor opportunities and other economic opportunities when so we needed to close that gap, we needed to develop suppliers, and we also needed to develop capacity in local people that wanted to work for FDN during operations. During the pandemic, a lot of our community investment was focused more on the health issue, but after that, we developed, and now we are implementing the sustainability strategy to just so. So now we have infrastructure projects, education projects focused on both infrastructure, but also the quality of education, and most of our investment is focusing on Los Encuentros parish.
So in one, in Los Encuentros town, and you can see here many projects, such as the urban renewal or all the projects that we are implementing, that are focused on key infrastructure for that parish. We are changing their lives, and I will show you that afterwards. I will just go through some of the main community projects that we're implementing now in the last year. So the first one is a recreational, educational, and mental health program. This initiative responds to many challenges, situation that are very common in rural Ecuador, and especially in the Amazon region. Namely, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, family violence, for example, and a lot of other difficult challenges to approach. Teenage pregnancy is another one. So what this program do is approach that issue through two components. The first one is extracurricular activities.
Keep these kids, young students, occupied during their free time. And the second component, and I think that is the beauty of this program, is mental health, because actually, this is a very innovative approach in Ecuador, and it is becoming a more relevant issue. That second component is directly connected with the first one, so there's a methodology for that. We partnered with an international Mexican NGO called Educación para Compartir, so Education for Sharing. They have a methodology to approach challenging structural issues through the game, through soccer, basketball, dance, and other activities, and we are registering how the situation on those challenging and social aspects are changing. So to move on with Junior Achievement Ecuador, as you should know, there are many challenges in rural Ecuador, especially in the Amazon region.
One of them is education. So we needed to fill that gap. When we arrived, almost zero students were accessing to university. So this program basically focused on, first, eliminating dropout rates in school, so get these kids until high school, at the final years of high school. Once they are there, to access the main universities of Ecuador. And the third component is to avoid dropout from the universities. So it has three components, and it closes that circle. And I just want to highlight with this is like Evelyn's case. Evelyn is a girl, a lady from Los Encuentros, from the parish, that was beneficiary on each of these stages.
So Evelyn received support to get to the final years of the school, then to access university, and we understood that she was having challenges to keep in university, so we supported through that path. Now, Evelyn is one of the first clinical psychologists of Yantzaza, so the city, and she's about to be a master's in human resources. So you can see how that circle is closed. She's back in Los Encuentros, working for the mental health program, and this is just an example of one person whose life has been changed. I am proud to say that we have many examples of that. Kids are returning from universities to Los Encuentros, and that almost 70% of them now have a job. Agriculture. This is a traditional and historical activity in Zamora Chinchipe, so how we can improve that activity?
You can find here many components for that. First of all, technical assistance through veterinarians, but also vaccination, for example, of livestock, very important. Once they have improved their products, how they can access markets. ECOLAC is focused on milk. They want to explore new products, pitahaya, so dragon fruit. And the most important here is Somos Semilla, former Takat. That is, our local, our main local suppliers, local procurement program. So Catering Las Peñas is a local supplier, now is the third largest private company of Zamora Chinchipe. They need a lot of food. As Terry said, we have the best food in FDN, a camp, so they need a lot of food. That food, as a Canadian company, has very high standards.
So how the Lundin Foundation can support local farmers to reach those standards and to become suppliers to the camp, Catering Las Peñas. And we have many cases, successful cases here, you know, eggs, pork, meat, fruit, vegetables, of local farmers that are now selling to the camp. And you can see through Takat, now Somos Semilla, the linkages we are creating. Indigenous groups, indigenous people, I talked about the importance of them for the mining industry. If you see some other cases in Ecuador, indigenous organizations are the main opposition for certain mining projects. In our case, that is very different. We have a sound relationship with Zamora Chinchipe Shuar Federation.
We created trust with them from the very beginning, and now we have a general agreement, so a convenio marco, that it identifies their priorities and also how we can contribute to those priorities. This is just a sample of the programs that we implement with them. They have two main priorities: rescue of their values, cultural values, and a fair one from my side, from my point of view, that is the generation of income for their people. So you can see how we are implementing productive projects, such as the cocoa farming, now the phase III. They want also to explore in other projects, such as panela processing through sugarcane farming, and they want also to become part of our education programs. That is difficult because there are bigger gaps with the Shuar.
But for example, now they are part of the Junior Achievement program that I mentioned, and they are going now through the university. And I want to highlight the Shuar Num Company case. This is a 100% owned Shuar company, that at the beginning, was focused on tourism. Now is a company that is focused on all that, those aspects, and that uses the inputs, for example, from the cocoa farms to sell their products, chocolate, guayusa water, coffee, and others. They have a brand for that now. They are accessing other markets outside Zamora-Chinchipe. And what is the next step? That, for me, it will be a challenge, definitely, but it is a nice challenge to have, is that they want to become mining suppliers.
So we are working in early stages in a project focused on the distribution of supplies for our mine fleet. It will be challenging, but we have a path for that, and we will use the Lundin Foundation to implement that project. Hopefully, next year I will have very good news about that project. Women are another vulnerable group, especially in rural Ecuador and in the Amazon. You can call it an historical debt towards women, especially in the Amazon. So what this program, Soy Emprendedora, I am an entrepreneur, seeks is to position the importance of their role into business.
So far, we have more than 100 beneficiaries that have received training, and from that group, we have picked 24 businesses to receive seed capital and also, and most importantly, technical assistance for one year from the Lundin Foundation to accelerate their businesses. You can see here, for example, Sonia Sarango. She sells tonic water with Amazon plants. Actually, it's very good for G&T. And she's only one example of those 24 small businesses that now are accessing to other markets outside Zamora Chinchipe. You can see in the bottom of this slide that this initiative has now become one emblematic project in Ecuador, and all the awards and recognitions that they have received. Local procurement is very important to create employment, to create linkages at the local level. The Lundin Foundation has a methodology for that. It is called Nexo program.
It is being applied in other places in other operations of the Lundin Group. You can see here what is the process of the Nexo program. Through Nexo, we have developed many stages for local suppliers. During construction, we developed big local suppliers, as Catering Las Peñas, the case I mentioned, but also many other cases, such as light vehicles, companies, heavy vehicle, hardware stores, among others. Once those businesses were consolidated, we started with the creation of new programs, new local suppliers through Nexo 2, during our first years of operations. The beauty of these programs are that most of them were created from scratch, and you can imagine the challenges that we faced. I am glad to say that now those companies are consolidated, and we are moving forward to Nexo 3.
That is looking other alternatives to develop local suppliers. It is challenging. We are pushing a lot, supply chain team, but we will give an extra mile here. Shuar Num will be one of the first beneficiaries of this Nexo 3 program, and just to end with this section, I want to talk about our enablers of success. The most important one, definitely, is participatory dialogue. Upon our arrival to Ecuador, we needed to create a solid base of trust among our stakeholders, national and local. At the local level, we developed and implemented a dialogue process, and I should highlight some unique things about this process, since it has been an ongoing process from 2016. We don't own the process. It is not our process. It is led by other parties.
In this case, during the last years, the local authorities are the ones that own the process. We are part of it. Senior managers and senior staff of Lundin Gold and of LF are closely engaged with the process. They are decision-making, so a lot of decisions should be taken during the dialogue roundtables. As I mentioned it, it happens every six weeks. It could be six to eight weeks, but since the very beginning in 2016, this has been an ongoing process. So that talks about the importance of the process for local people. We have been through different local governments and also through a pandemic, and people keep considering this an important process.
You can see here what are the key thematics that we discuss during the process, but as I said, is one of our main enablers of success. Partnerships is the second one. You saw our sustainability strategy, many topics, many projects, and we are a mining company, so we need the best partners to implement those projects. This is just a sample of our partners. All come from public sector, so national level. You can see there the public institutions, but also local authorities, NGOs, national and international, academia, among others. And our final enabler of success is being transparent, being transparent with you... and being transparent with all our stakeholders. So we have one important mechanism for that. That is our sustainability report.
I encourage you to read it, but also at the national level, we have, as I said, a strong communication strategy that is based on social media. I also encourage you to follow those. Just to finalize, I just want to talk to touch base on the impacts that that strategy is having in Ecuador, social and economic impacts. To start with, you can see here what we call the FDN virtuous economic cycle. It is for 2023, and you can see the main components of it. Ron already talked about our production. That production is translated into exports. Remember, Ecuador is a dollar economy. Those exports are key, but more importantly, to get that production, we create a lot of employment, direct, indirect, and through linkages, and we also buy a lot locally.
By locally, I mean national, but especially in Yantzaza. You can see how we bought more than $200 million in 2023 in Ecuador, and a big part of that was in Yantzaza. For reference, Yantzaza is a canton, a city, that before our arrival had a GDP between $60 million-$65 million. You can imagine that level of local procurement, the impact that it has. Last but not least, tax. That tax is very important. The mining industry now is the fourth largest taxpayer in Ecuador, and we are an important part of it. In 2023, we paid about $110 million in taxes and royalties. Just to close this presentation, I want to talk about two realities that we are changing here. One is the Zamora Chinchipe.
The mining industry is changing the reality of Zamora Chinchipe, the province, and afterwards, I will talk about the reality of Los Encuentros. That is our main area of influence, but for Zamora Chinchipe, some context here is important. It, the Amazon region has always been the poorest region of Ecuador, and, you pick any socio-economic indicator, some of, the Amazon region has always been faced challenges on those indicators. Important to mention that in the North Amazon, most of, the oil industry is located there. Despite that, a lot of poverty, so now what is happening with Zamora Chinchipe is that that reality is changing. Here you can see employment. Now Zamora Chinchipe is close to the national average, and you can see how it was one of the few provinces that increased their formal employment during the last years.
Again, it is by far the highest. It has by far the highest formal employment among all the Amazon provinces. Poverty. There are two ways to measure poverty. By income, it is commonly used by economists and also by national statistics institution, but you will see later by unmet basic needs, that from a social perspective is very important. Regarding poverty, you can see here that Zamora Chinchipe now is a green province, that has been, again, one of the few provinces that reduced the poverty and that reduced it significantly. As you can see the trend, it is the lowest. It is the province that has the lowest income poverty among all the Amazon region. If we analyze UBN, so unmet basic needs poverty, Zamora Chinchipe is doing even better.
What I want to highlight here is that Zamora Chinchipe, an Amazon province, is basically at the same level that the national average. That, for me, is remarkable. When you talk about the economic situation, sales is a nice indicator to analyze that. It is related to taxes, to wages, to employment, to others. Here you can see the comparison between the first half of 2024 versus the first half of 2023 regarding this indicator, sales for all the country. Remember that this is a period in which we have faced one of our major economic crisis. Zamora Chinchipe increased its sales by 36%, and it was the province with the highest growth rate in sales of all Ecuador, which for me, again, is remarkable.
This is my final slide, so it is focused regarding Los Encuentros, the parish, the town that it is our house, our home, basically. We are changing the reality of Los Encuentros. We are changing lives, and you can see here why. I will not go into detail in all these aspects, but you can see, for example, regarding employment, that more than 90% of the economic active population has a job. That means from every 10 persons in Los Encuentros, that one want a job, nine have a job. An indicator that always surprised me is poverty again, UBN. We saw for Zamora Chinchipe, now we are seeing poverty, UBN poverty for Los Encuentros, a rural town with spread communities in the Amazon region.
Poverty now is basically at the same level than the national average, and if you compare that with 2010, poverty was in the levels of 84%. Just to closure, one emblematic case for us, I think we all know here, the importance of internet in our lives. So in Los Encuentros, in the household with internet, so the access to internet by households plus 16% in 2015, I think. That makes sense. This is a town with a lot of spread communities. Almost 1,000. I would say 1,500 people lives in the main part of town. The other live in spread communities. Now, 100 of Los Encuentros has access to internet.
That is the first parish in Ecuador that has this kind of access to internet, and I will say, if you compare with other towns of the region with similar characteristics, will be one of the only that has it. So, I'm sure Finlay will share with you this slide. I encourage you to read it. We have a lot of data. I'm happy to be a data freak, so we measure everything, what we do, the impact that we are having, it is not just PR, we are changing lives, and we can prove it. With that, I will pass the floor back to Ron, unless there are any questions.
Somebody have?
Just a quick question.
Yep.
Typically, mining attracts a lot of population because of the income, steady. How much population have gone up in Los Encuentros and-
In Los Encuentros? It is a very good question, and we measured that. We have local census, so we did a census in 2015, and now and then we updated a household-based census in 2021. And what we found about that is that the migration rate to Los Encuentros is very close to the normal migration to any town in Ecuador. I think that is that is also a result of the location of FDN. You know, the workers, maybe Terry can work can talk more about it, but the... In other parts of Ecuador, workers move with their families to work in sites, right? In our case, we have different shifts, and that also have contributed a lot for that reality.
But yeah, we measured that, and as I said, the increase in migration is very close to the normal rate in other cities in Ecuador.
I've been seeing the most interesting and most expensive spice, vanilla.
Mm-hmm.
Vanilla, I think the other centers-
Yeah
... have vanilla plantations, and you don't have any. You didn't really affect that in your-
No, and you know, we also measure inflation, for example. Inflation is also another-
Vanilla. Vanilla.
Spice.
Spice.
Oh, vanilla.
Vanilla.
Yeah. No, I don't think we have it, but-
No, no.
No, we don't have it.
Ecuador's never been a producer of vanilla.
The Shuar up north, further north did that.
No, you know, we were talking with Terry today about that, and the beauty of Los Encuentros is that it has different altitudes along the town. So there are a lot of things growing there that people experiment growing products. Farmers experiment a lot, but no, I haven't heard of it.
Maybe Madagascar. Okay.
You had said that the Congress was considering some reforms which would potentially be negative for mining. What are those?
There are many there. Some of them focus on mining, for example, there's actually on debate mining reforms, reforms to the mining law. So you can imagine how they can... That can benefit or harm the industry. But there are other private sector laws, such as, for example, disabilities law. They want to increase the percentage of people with disabilities working in private sector, including mining. There are many other laws. We have a track and a mapping of which of those laws can be more, let's say, can harm more the industry and which others, and we try to advocate at least for the most important ones.
What is important to mention here is that we have laws that can affect us as an industry. For example, there's the Amazon law that is focused on local procurement and local hire for people from the Amazon. Very high percentages and numbers there that makes impossible to hire that kind of workers. But there are other laws that can affect the industry as a whole. So we work as Lundin Gold. We have a national assembly strategy, you can call it, but also as CME. Of course, the first one is more focused on the laws that affect us, but the second one, through the Chamber of Mines, is more focused on the laws that can affect the industry. So we have both arms to advocate on those laws.
Two questions. First, what is the deficit in relation to GDP in Ecuador right now? And the second one, is your workforce unionized?
Unionized?
Yes.
We don't have a union.
No, we're not unionized.
So far, we don't have a union. What I should mention about the second question is, 50% of our workers are local, which is a very high number if you consider that mining is a new industry. Industrial mining is new in Ecuador. More than 90% of our workforce is Ecuadorian, which is very important, too. For example, what you asked about the laws, what the Amazon law says, is that it establishes that 80% of our workforce should be from the Amazon region, which is impossible to reach. So we are talking to them and educate them to understand how the mining industry works. Regarding your first question, I will get back to you later with a number.
... And what's their plan to deal with the illegal mining problem in the province?
You say the plan from the government or-
It's not just the province, it's the country.
Okay, it's the country then.
The country? Well, as Ron said, there are many hotspots of illegal mining. For example, in provinces such as Imbabura, in the highlands, but also in the coast, El Oro. Those in the North Amazon, Napo, have more challenges with narcotraffic groups, so a lot of violence. There are provinces such as El Oro, with cities like Portovelo or Puerto Rico , in which there are assassinations. Basically, the gangs have... So one specific gang, the Los Lobos gang, has basically taken the processing plant and the mining sector-
One of the mining points.
Yeah. Yeah, and, well, the plan from the government is basically use military. Some of the questions that I mentioned are focused on that. So seize machinery, even destroy that machinery, or use the machinery for the government. In Zamora Chinchipe, the situation has not escalated to that level. We see an important increase in illegal mining, but it is not at the level of El Oro, for example, that has a lot of involvement with the narcotraffic groups. The plan basically is to use the military. However, now the military is focused on the security situation in the coast region, but that is coming. The government is working with international organizations such as UNODC, the illicit crime agency from the UN, to address this issue. They expect to receive US-
Yeah, bringing in a lot of international support.
U.S. support, yeah.
But also, too, dealing with corruption within the government, because part of this is, too, you know, corruption within the regulatory agencies.
Yeah.
That, you know, they say, "You know, when we see artisanal or illegal mining on any of our concessions, we file with the ARCOM to have them go in then and to remove," not us, they are. But what happens is, the military goes in, and boom, they're gone.
They are not there.
Because, you know, they've got inside sources that they're paying for this information. So the government's really trying to focus on trying to clean up that corruption.
Yeah.
And so, kind of trying it at two levels here.
Big part of it is the strength. They try to improve the regulation agency, so now they have divided again the energy regulation agency into three. We are back into ARCOM, which is the mining regulation agency that deals with illegal mining issues. But it's a big issue now. Yeah, definitely.
Okay.
Any other questions?
Thanks, Juan José.
Thank you.
I think the thing with what Juan José just talked about is, for me personally, having lived this now for 10 years, is this is showing the vision that Lucas Lundin had. When we went to Ecuador, and we told... I remember some of the first visits with the church and with local politicians and everything, and said, "Responsible mining can change people's lives." And I think you're seeing over some of these recent slides, how that is really coming to fruition. But just in closing, you know, we've talked about the exciting growth and exciting things. One of the things key is capital allocation, and what we want to assure you is that we're disciplined. We're disciplined in how we're approaching this. Number one, pay a sustainable dividend.
We get asked a lot, "Well, why didn't you do a dividend that floats with gold price or cash flow?" or all this sort of thing, and we've always said from the start, "No, what we want to do is pay a dividend that was sustainable, whether gold prices fall, whether we do something on an M&A front and issue equity, we can still afford to pay that dividend. Or we see some phenomenal growth opportunities, we can still pay the dividend." We've now gone and doubled it because now that money, like I said before, that was going to pay the banks, now we can return that capital to shareholders. But again, it's sustainable. The other thing, create organic opportunities.
That's what you've just started to hear today about all the work that Andre and his team is doing, is creating opportunities for us, that then we can use that cash flow to develop those. I think some of the questions today, I think many of you are starting to see the potential of Bonanza Sur . We've got the cash, the capital allocation to be able to do that. You know, one of the things, too, that we're talking, that Chester and I are talking about, too, is now, okay, we're debt-free. We've got some. Let's add. Let's maybe look at doing something on that side to, you know, have an additional tool in the toolkit if we even do more, or want to do more, to, you know, potentially have some, just a small revolver or something online. Should do that.
Our balance sheet is there to be used. And last but not least, continue to look for opportunities, and when we see something, pursue it. That's the key. So this is how we look at our, essentially our, capital allocation. It's discipline. You've seen discipline when we talked about how we're approaching the operations. Exploration, I hope you got the feeling that, yeah, there's lots of opportunities there, but we're, what really keeps driving and increasing our exploration success is not because we've got the money, and we just throw more drills at it. No, it's because of the success we're seeing. But by that success, we're increasing our drilling program, and we still have opportunities. It's a growth story... growth in so many respects, and none of it can be done without the foundation of the ESG that you've just talked about.
Anita, you had a question?
Yeah. So I mean, you talked about, broadly about, what you were looking for from the inorganic opportunities. I mean, could you narrow it down just so, like, as you see, you know... Okay, so you've got your operation expanding to 55,000, maybe 5,500, and you've got finances soar. Like, to you, what's the ideal sort of complement to that, to that sort of, you know, 750,000 ounce producer that's focused in Ecuador? Like, do you look at diversifying your geographies? Do you look at, like, what specifically are you looking at?
Definitely diversifying geographies for us. You know, we've got so many opportunities within Ecuador, and we've got asked the question a lot, "Well, you know, you guys have done so well, why not take that political capital you have in Ecuador and expand? There's lots of opportunities there." But no, I, shareholders, if they want us to do something and do something different, it would be outside of Ecuador. Ideally, today, we've been looking at development stories because that's how we got to where we are today. That's the skill set we have, and that's where we feel we can best leverage. You know, the things we've done that you've just heard about on the sustainability side, you know, being able to go in those types of regions, and that's the one that we had identified.
As I say, unfortunately, we were unsuccessful, but that's kind of where we're looking at, Anita. Again, that may change, but that's really... Look, we're not looking at Australia or West Africa, that sort of thing. Our fairway is the Americas.
So would you look, like, a more developed to sort of reduce the risk, like a developed country, to say, "Okay, I'm not, you know, just Ecuador, that is very risky"?
What's really gonna drive us is the asset, and then those other factors may come into play, but yeah, there are opportunities. There are places, yeah, that would be challenging.
You'll have to think, you know, one of the things is the potential opportunities out there, let's call it, the vast majority of them are smaller than what Fruta is right now. So ultimately, your main jurisdictional risk is still gonna be in Ecuador.
Yeah.
The majority of it will still be that.
So, I mean, I guess we'd be looking for geographies that may lessen your geopolitical risk. Is that fair to say?
or diversify it. Yeah.
Yeah, I think in general, we're very comfortable in Ecuador, right?
Mm.
We feel that we have a strong social license there, and so we really don't. And obviously, we've got a great growth story in country as well that's upcoming. So we don't necessarily feel pressured to diversify for the sake of doing so. We would look at it from a disciplined approach, and it doesn't need to be a tier one safe jurisdiction. It's, as Ron said, gonna depend on the asset.
Well-
I think-
... Sorry, when you said developed, did you mean like a dev, like a developer that's maybe just about to go into development mode, or it's?
Uh-
... like, you wanna build a mine?
Maybe a pre-feas, feas type thing, or maybe even a bit, little bit earlier. Yeah.
Yeah. I was gonna say, I think your cost position puts you in a very competitive side of things. But I mean, on the flip side, if you're gonna look for an asset out there, like, I don't think there are a lot of assets that are sub $100,000 per ounce. So would cost be
Yes
... an important thing to take?
Yeah, cost would be... Yeah, we're not gonna, we're not gonna grow for the sake of growing. That's the key thing. You know, we're, we're gonna grow 'cause it makes sense for our shareholders. Like, that, if we look back, that was one of the, the why investors aren't moving into gold today is because this industry grew for the sake of growing. In the past-
Mm
... it didn't really grow, but didn't generate any cash flow or any returns for shareholders, really. So yeah, cost will be definitely a factor.
And so what's gonna be, like, a sweet spot for you? Would it be something along, close to at the end or just, slightly above?
Again, there's a variety of sweet spots that we've seen, and there's lots of opportunities.
You're not gonna use your shares, that'd be-
No. If we got cash, we'd share or, you know, we're gonna do a combination of cash and shares.
Balance sheet.
We got a strong balance sheet. Again, we've got flexibility. We don't feel pressured 'cause we've got a 12-year mine life. We've had a 12-year mine life now for five years, and you saw what Andre is saying, that we got 12-year, potentially more. It's not like we've got five years of mine life, and we are out there racing to try and replace it. We got the balance sheet. We've got generating cash flows. We've got a lot of flexibility. I think the key is that we're not gonna take that flexibility. We're gonna stay disciplined.
Where is Newmont in all of this? Like, what's their position on all of this in this? So?
Newmont's been, is a great partner. Our level of discussion at the highest levels, you know, with the Lundins, Jack and Adam and myself, regular conversations with Tom Palmer and Peter Toth. You know, we have two members, fairly senior people within Newmont on our board, Scott Langley, VP of Corp Dev, and Melissa Harmon, who actually just got a new promotion, head of Technical Innovation and Non-Operated assets, I believe. Yeah, so she's got responsibility for all the things they have with Barrick. You know, very good conversations with them. You know, you have to ask them what their thinking is, but, you know, we've seen a change in them, in their appreciation of Ecuador and Fruta del Norte.
You know, Brendan, the very first discussion right after the announcement of the transaction, Jack and Adam and I had with Tom and Peter, where they were focused on tier one jurisdictions, Canada, Australia, and United States, you know, and that's where our focus is, and we'll see how things pan out. You've seen them now talk about Ecuador as a top-tier jurisdiction, and they have sent people to Ecuador. You know, they also have their interest in SolGold. They have now sent people to Ecuador to visit our site and learn more about Ecuador. So I think they have to get their, the rest of their things sorted out, but it's a very good relationship, and they've been very supportive in supporting us as management and the company.
One of the things that success story out of was the construction costs at the time of the G Mining built mine for you. Will you be using G Mining again, or do you compete?
We'll see. We'll see. G Mining is very good at what they do. They, you know, they've just successfully built TZ and others, but I do remind people at least , you need a strong owner's team as well.
You're not gonna build another class or build from scratch of construction?
No, not at all.
Chester, if you're considering a line of credit or a facility, how big might that be? Like, what are you looking at, like $500 million or bigger, or?
I will have to have discussions internally. It's gonna be a balancing act, as to, you know, how much we think we need. It's looking at our treasury as well, our minimum treasury levels that we plan to hold. So, there's gonna be a balancing act between, you know, how much do we really need and the cost of doing that. You know, it's pretty early stage right now, so we'll have those discussions further at the-
Yeah. Okay. So should we expect that you would make that announcement this year, or that's at 2025?
No, we're-
So you're just... It's preliminary. Okay.
Yeah, very preliminary.
Okay, got you.
Historically, you guys haven't really liked buyback. Any thoughts on that? Any changes?
A buyback? That makes no sense for us, really, because you have the Lundin family at 27% and Newmont at 32%. You know, one of the issues then is the free float for us. We originally had CD Capital and Orion in there. They were just under 10%, and when they sold their block, that improved our free float enough that we were able to get on the TSX index, and that significantly improved our liquidity, right, Finn, that-
Yep
... doubled our liquidity by getting on that index. Yeah, there we see that that's not a tool necessary. I think we hear more about liquidity as things that shareholders would like versus us buying back shares. I'd like to thank all of you that attended. It's very much appreciated, and for all those online for sitting in today, and thank you very much. As I started out, it's been 10 years. It's been a pretty exciting 10 years, but the excitement hasn't died, and we're very excited about what we can see potentially for the next 10 years at Fruta del Norte and in Ecuador. Thank you very much.
It was a very comprehensive presentation. Thanks very much.