Now it's a high time to introduce our next speaker, Michael Hudson, CEO of Southern Cross Gold Consolidated . It's a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on its flagship, Sunday Creek Project, located near Melbourne, Australia. With that, Michael, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Carlo. Thank you, everyone. Thanks to Nordic Funds and Mines for having us here all the way from Australia. It's only a short step and a jump to come up to Sweden. I've spent a lot of time here, and it's lovely to be back. Sunday Creek is one of the few rare, very high-grade, 10 g multimillion-ounce discoveries in the space. It's one of the few discoveries in the space that's only been made over the last few years. We're certainly racing, and I'm glad to be able to present this to you for the first time here. We have many metrics to demonstrate that it is one of the better discoveries in the space. This is perhaps the key one here from a drill hole perspective.
If you take 100-gram-meters, so multiply the gold by the length down the hole, anything greater than 100-gram-meters is considered a very good hole in the business. You can do this when you look at projects, just see how many of these they've got and how many they've got in the number of drill meters. We've got 70 with 98 km of drilling. There's nothing better in the space that I can see, certainly, in terms of that frequency hit. We've got a lot of gold, and it's coming, and it's coming better all the time as we understand this and get deeper. We've got one of the biggest drill programs in the space ongoing. We're a 200 km drill program. We heard from Dave that building ounces takes lots of drilling. We're fully funded to do that. We've got AUD 150 million in the bank today.
We've got nine rigs today going to 10 shortly. We're permitting a decline, and when that happens, we'll have 22 rigs operating by mid-next year. We have all the mineral rights, of course, but what we have uniquely is all the freehold land above the project and going to the south of the project. That gives us a lot of flexibility in developing this project and building it on our land away from people and neighbors. The other key factor I think that you should focus on is that Victoria has been a home to some of the greatest gold mines on Earth that produced a third of the gold in the gold rush days in the 1800s. It's only the last 10 years that it's really been the rebirth. We're producing more gold there than we have for 100 years.
Fosterville, which is our neighbor down the road run by Agnico Eagle, was, for four of the last 10 years, the highest-grade gold mine on Earth, bought CAD 10 billion of market cap appreciation. It was the lowest ASIC, and it was thought to be an amazing discovery and a one-off and a fluke. Our discovery, Sunday Creek, has proven that that's not the case, and there's more there. The understanding of these deposits has really just emerged, very different to the deposits that made Victoria different 150 years ago. We're in a new paradigm. Most importantly, Victoria's permitting mines. They've permitted four mines in the last six months. It is one of the better jurisdictions to permit a mine globally today, just by those stats.
If you were going to sit me down and have a beer, and I look forward to doing that perhaps tonight with some of you, you'd say, why has this company done so well, and why is it going to continue to do very well? I'd say it's one of the few multimillionaire high-grade discoveries. We're going to build one of the highest margin projects on Earth. It's also because of the shareholder base. It's a perfect storm of meeting, a great discovery. Now we have a very good gold market, but this is a discovery that's three years old. For two out of the three years, it's shone brightly in a lesser gold market. We've got people like Darren Morcombe, Pierre Lassonde, Kiril Sokoloff, who are some of the best investors in the space, who own 30% of the stock.
It is really a masterclass learning from these gentlemen amongst a lot of the super funds in Australia, in North America, some of the larger institutions, and even up here through Europe. What this shareholder base has done is allowed us to focus very, very acutely on per-share metrics. Every decision we make strategically in the company is about making sure that the share price has a chance to go higher by that decision we're making. There's a lot of detail behind that, but that's maybe one of the discussions we can have after this. We're based here in Southern Australia, in Victoria. Sunday Creek is the name of the project, next to Fosterville that I spoke about. These are the key discoveries ranked by an independent consultancy in Australia over the last decade. All the gold discoveries there are ranked.
Sunday Creek, even three years in, is now identified as one of those top discoveries. As I mentioned, it's one of the few discoveries in the world that you'll hear here that is a 10-gram multimillion-ounce discovery in a tier-one jurisdiction. Because you're all probably new to this story, let's talk about how it's progressed. This is a longitudinal section through the deposit, about 1.2 km. You can see here, down 1 km depth, and this is how the discovery has progressed by the drill bit. We put a lot of drilling into it. You see nearly 100 km , and here are the grades. Just focus on the pink and the red, greater than 50 and greater than 100 grams. This is a very important aspect, the very high-grade nature of this deposit, as I've pointed out.
Until a few years ago, the deepest hole on the project was a shaft put in in 1880. Nobody had really looked, and they'd certainly not found any of the high grades near surface. This is when we listed it on the ASX. We are dual-listed, I should say, on the ASX and TSX today. We had a few hits, a few of those pink 100-gram hits at depth. By December 2022, we'd made this key discovery at depth. It just looked like something was very special. It was 300 m at five grams, made up of a lot of high grades. Fast forward a year, we drilled that out, and it lived up to its expectation. We've continued over the last year, and now we have an exploration target, which is drill constrained, not all enough to put into a resource today.
We're drilling and funded to infill this area here. It's 2.2 million- 3.2 million ounces at 8.3 g- 10.6 g gold equivalent. That's the range that we've quoted. We quote gold equivalent because 20% comes from antimony. Antimony is a key element. It's what will help us permit this project. 20% only of the mix. It's a gold project with 80%. You don't have a munitions business without antimony. You don't have many other industries without antimony. China has banned export of antimony over the last year, and the Western world really doesn't produce much at all. This will be a key part of rebuilding that supply chain as one of the top three antimony projects in the West. If I look and take this slice that I've just shown you, like the slicing through the long section of a loaf of bread, here it is again.
It also just gives you a bit of a look in. It's a very technical slide. It's arsenic over antimony, but these deposits get better at depth. That's all you really need to know. They're antimony rich up at the top, and then you lose the antimony as you go down, but the gold goes up in grade. It becomes much higher grade. That's why we're seeing much better results. Four of the top 10 hits in this deposit have come over the last six months. Basically, you want to look when you get into that red rather than the blue parts of the system. You can see we've drilled it out here, but we're just starting to see it in all these other areas. We're just arguably coming into the better parts of this deposit. Even though it's been great, it has a very high potential to become better.
If we take that slide and just look at it in that area at a different scale, here we have that same area that I've just outlined in blue there. That's where the exploration target sits and where we're doing most of our drilling. We are putting a hole down here, 500 m below as we speak, to demonstrate the system can continue because it geologically should. Our neighbor here at Fosterville is drilling down at around those two levels. This is Fosterville at the same scale. There's the 10 km scale. It certainly has a chance to get bigger. Even more excitingly, we've drilled under old mines here. We're not that smart. We just drilled under some old mines that people hadn't thought about with a new geological understanding. Here's the rest of that trend, around about 12 km of old mines and geological continuity of the same horizon.
That hasn't been touched. We put about 2,500 m out there in the yellow today and about 100 in the blue. We've only really been exploring 10% of our trend. It's not all going to be mineralized, of course, but you want exploration optionality in these plays. You don't want us just to be in a small postage stamp without getting bigger. This can get a lot bigger. Let's just take you down to Victoria just briefly. The trend of mineralization extends over that one kilometer. This is what it looks like. We do have neighbors to the north, and there's about 12 of them within two kilometers. We've got this hill here that buffers us. You can see some of the drill rigs here in the photo.
The secret of this project, as I mentioned before, is that we own, we bought 10 properties, and we own the land pretty much as far as you can see and can develop into that valley where there's nobody. It's only 60 km from Melbourne. Only 60 km from Melbourne. People who work here will be able to go home every night and have dinner with their family. Nobody's ever told me that in the mining industry. I've had to spend a lot of my life in a lot of places that are less desirable. It is already and will be able to attract very good people. Here's our plan. Our plan is to drill those 200 km of drilling that I spoke about, CAD 53 million , AUD 60 million . The decline is going through permitting. We expect that to be permitted by the end of the year.
That's CAD 27 million . We're fully funded to do all this work. We've got CAD 20 million for regional exploration. We don't forget that exploration upside. This is building fundamental value. We're building a project here. We're putting a decline into it. What gives market value is that exploration success. We've got two and a half rigs focused on that regional exploration. When that's finished in Q1 2027, that drill out here, we'll be able to go to our first economic studies. I mentioned Victoria. I just want to mention it again. It's permitted four mines in the last six months. It's open for business. We're getting a lot of support for this project. The antimony helps hugely. Bit of a detailed slide. Metallurgy, AOK. We have gravity, flotation, very marketable products, free gold, not refractory. This is where we sit in the antimony space in the Western world.
You don't have a munitions business without it. I've just spent the last week, in the last two weeks in D.C., meeting some of the key leaders in the critical metal space in D.C. We get a lot of support through Australia for this project. That's how it ranks number three, and it's getting bigger in terms of inventory of antimony in the Western world. 80+% is controlled by China and Russia, and it's banned from China today. To leave a bit of time for questions, I'll finish on this slide. We've got a very rare asset, a multimillion-ounce discovery growing very quickly in a tier-one jurisdiction. It's got a wonderful mix. Gold will pay for it. Antimony will permit it. We're only 10% of the way into the discovery. You see, it's going to get a lot bigger. We've got a government that is open for business.
We're going for it because we want to support their aims, which match ours. That very key shareholder base, some of the best value investors in gold in the world, are backing this company. I look forward to meeting some of you today. Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you. Michael, a couple of questions here. Raise your hand if you have any. Just coming back to antimony, as you mentioned here. Enlighten me, why is that a critical mineral? What's its use for?
Yeah, this is a good question because it allows me to go in a little bit more detail. It's mainly used in fire retardants. Every bit of plastic in the world is doped to stop the copper wire from shorting. 20% of antimony globally goes into solar cells. That's also a large use. Its critical nature is in munitions, semiconductors, night vision goggles. You don't have am munitions industry without it. It makes lead harder. It's used a lot in lead-acid batteries, but they're fully recycled. That's not primary supply. A very critical metal that's like many, but Victoria has always been an antimony producer during our project, along with one or two others next to us. We're the only sources of antimony for the British during World War I, for example.
OK. How come a Canadian company managed to get hold of an Australian asset, apart from, not including you as the Australian asset here?
No idea, mate. I actually owned many of these projects 20 years ago. In Victoria, I mentioned that whole rebirth and reunderstanding of the geology. You've got Ballarat and Bendigo here that were the main mines in Victoria. There is another orogenic event that formed Fosterville and Sunday Creek. We really didn't understand a lot about that until the last 10 years when Fosterville found a jewelry box at depth. Now we know we've got to go to depth. We understand a lot more about the geology. I bought back into the projects at the start of COVID is how it went. We are listed in Canada, where I've had 25 years of my career, and also listed in Canada, which is home. I'm fifth generation from beside this project, literally from five kilometers away. The local park is Hudson Park. I've come home literally.
OK, combining the best of two worlds, Australia and Canada in that case. You mentioned, let's see if we have anything here now. Just raise your hand and you get the mic. The management and shareholders focused on per-share metrics. Could you just rank them? Which ones do you want us to look for?
Price.
Price?
Price.
Price for the share?
Price.
Yeah?
You're all only investing not for us to create larger companies by market cap. It's easy through a good discovery to make a company that can have a larger market cap. It takes a lot of learning on how to make a larger share price going along with that. The model of this industry is tough. Basically, as our key shareholder says, this deposit was formed 380 million years ago. It's going to have a value. The price for a share is just going to be how many shares we divide it by. We're quite miserly in that aspect.
You showed the map where you had your project. I will quote, "You got two of the richest and highest cash flow margin gold mines globally as your neighbors," as I understand it. Do you have any discussions with Agnico and Mandalay?
It's a small business. We all know each other. Agnico Eagle are an amazing company to be a peer of in a region. They're wonderful operators. I've done that in Finland for many years, and now we're doing that in Australia. We all know each other, and we're all very happy to be participating in the rebirth of Victorian gold fields.
You are discussing, but you couldn't possibly comment.
I gave you an answer that said neither. We're friends.
All right. Any more for any more? If I understand it here, there will be a very hectic news flow coming out from you here going forward. What would be the next important milestone that you want the market to focus on?
Yeah, there's no shortage of news flow from Southern Cross , nine rigs. We've always, it's a real machine of geologists and drill core and assays. Of course, the deposit getting bigger. As we drill more, the grades are becoming more certain about that head grade. It's actually increased 20% in the last six months as we're becoming less conservative by collecting more data. There's always great news flow in terms of drill results. That permitting of the decline, of course, will demonstrate that Victoria continues to remain open for business. Some of the regional exploration that I spoke to will have one rig going to two regionally. That would be very exciting if we were to make a key discovery along that 10 km strike beyond that 1.5 km that we've drilled.
One thing is out of your control, more or less, because it's the permit. You have the ducks in the row there, and then it will be the drilling that we can look forward to.
Yeah, the drilling was made 380 million years ago. It's for us to test, but it's not going to change it.
Yeah. One final question here, if we can get the mic. Thank you. We got one minute.
There's antimony. Can that be used for some kind of soft financing if you want to start the mine?
That's a very good question. Yes. In our view, we deal across, of course, in the U.S. to look at opportunities to lower our cost of capital by dealing with the antimony as a separate piece, either via an offtake or a government type of loan, because there is genuinely a desperate need to get antimony into the market. If government support can help that happen quicker, we'd very much be interested in entertaining that. Lowering the cost of capital, another decision about creating a higher share price, ideally.
Interesting. Michael, thank you so much.
Thank you, Carlo.
We'll give him a round of applause.