Okay. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the BQE Water presentation. I'm David Kratochvil, the CEO of the company, and with me here today is Peter Gleeson, the Executive Chairman of the company. Of course, I have to present the cautionary statement. For those of you who don't know BQE Water, who are we? We're a company that has a portfolio of very strong intellectual property around water, and we're using that portfolio of intellectual property to build recurring revenue from clean water production in the mining sector. The intellectual property allows us to actually help the industry with their goals of reaching social acceptability and environmental compliance. I understand that... Sorry. I understand, you know, you're here to learn about how we make money and how much money we make, but what's really important to us is why do we do what we do? The reason is very simple.
We really believe we can move the goalpost in making mining environmentally responsible and socially acceptable. Over the history of the company, we built 32 treatment plants, commercialized four technologies. That's the intellectual property. We're treating over 20 million cu m of wastewater annually and discharging into the environment. In the process of cleaning the water, we're recovering roughly 4,000 tons of value metals. That's copper, zinc, nickel, cobalt. We recycle over 1,000 tons of sodium cyanide in the gold production sector. Literally, in every one project that we have built, there is a component of waste, either reduction or elimination. Speaking about the intellectual property, it's basically four buckets of it. We have, starting with the cyanide, we're really the world leader in cyanide recycling. We probably have 90% of that market, and we're the go-to people on that technology.
The inventor is still sitting on our board of directors as one of the directors. We're literally the only company that's operating cyanide recycling plants in the world. On selenium, selenium is a contaminant that's actually present in... It's ubiquitous. We have selenium contamination in clients who are gold miners, base metal miners, coal miners, and uranium miners. It's everywhere. Our technology is the only commercially available technology out there that's non-biological, which makes us very unique in the space. We can chat about later why the importance of the non-biological component. In terms of metals, again, that was the IP that the company got started with more than 20 years ago. We're still recovering metals from waste: copper, zinc, nickel, cobalt. We're probably the only company out there as a water treatment company that's doing that. Finally, sulfate. I apologize for the font there.
That's, again, a strong IP, but we're not seeing the enforcement of some of the regulations in certain parts of the world. In terms of this distribution of the technologies, I think we're very well diversified, but the sulfate component is still pretty, pretty small. Likewise, we have pretty good client diversification. On our recurring revenue side, we probably have six at any given point in time clients. On the technical services side, at any given time, we're working on probably 10- 15 different clients' sites. A little bit about water in mining, because I realize it's a very unique sector, right? Most of people who invest in water invest in companies that are doing municipal desalination, you know, sewage treatment, et cetera. In the mining sector, what's important about water? First of all, most of the minerals get extracted from the deposits using water.
Every mine needs water for production purposes. Once the water comes into contact with the minerals and with chemicals, it becomes contaminated and it's subject to pretty stringent regulations. There's been a very strong trend in making these regulations more stringent. We'll talk about that a bit later. Finally, social acceptability. What is not acceptable is that, you know, years ago, it was okay to rely on dilution. Right? Solution to pollution is dilution. That's no longer socially acceptable. People want to know that the effluent that's leaving the mine site can actually meet all the limits at the end of the pipe, not relying on what's in the river or what's in the creek, as an example. All those are drivers of our business. Our business is basically a service provider business. We become a trusted advisor to the mining companies about how they should treat and manage water.
We identify the solutions that we then implement, and the implementation part is the operations that basically provide us the recurring revenue from clean water production. We operate water treatment plants that we scope out and design. This provides us with the technical services revenue that's not recurring. The operations give us the recurring revenue from clean water production, typically per cubic meter of water treated. What's important is that in both cases, there is a, in the Venn diagram, overlap with technical innovation. That's where the intellectual property comes in. You can also imagine that the operations themselves are a never-ending source of innovation because it's only through the operations that you learn what works, what doesn't work, how to do it better the next time.
I think we're very unique in this because other people in the market are just selling pieces of equipment, but they don't actually know what works, what doesn't, and how to make it better. That's the sustaining innovation that's driving our IP. On the advisory services, and you'll see it on the next few slides, some of these mining projects have a really, really, really long runway. They know it's going to take them 10, 15, 20 years before they put their mine into production. They're looking for water solutions that will be deployed decades later. They have time to look for better solutions. They don't have to implement something that Veolia can sell them tomorrow. This is where we get to play on technical innovation that's really disruptive in the industry, such as the selenium treatment, through actually being paid by the clients to do that.
A little bit about the mining sector. You've got mines in development, active operating mines, and closed legacy mines. I'd like you to basically... There's lots of information on the slide, but the three messages I wanted to send here. The runway is really long. It takes a long time to get these projects developed. They need advisors to help them way before they get into the contamination production phase to know how to manage water, to get them through permitting, to plan properly. That's where we start working with them. It takes a long time to get into production. Once they get into production, we start generating recurring revenue from our operating plants. The mine life is actually quite long. For average base metal mine, it's over 20 years now. Precious metal mines is about half that. We're talking decades of operations of these treatment systems.
That's, of course, the average. Everybody's familiar with the Sudbury Basin operating and generating nickel for the last, how many, 60 years, 70 years? We're working at the Glencore Raglan mine in Quebec now in its 25th year of operation, and they've got another 25 years to go based on reserves. These are generational projects. They're not short-term things that go away. Finally, the message on the closed operations, what I want to emphasize here is typically this sector historically has been dominated by government contracts, right? Why? Because historically, governments did not have enough financial security to clean up closed mines, or when the mining companies went bankrupt, the government basically inherits it, and then they have to clean it up. These government contracts were very lucrative, but large and not a fit for a company like ours. Now that's changing. Why is it changing?
Because the governments are now getting financial securities that are very significant. The closed mines are not going to be administered by the government. They're going to be administered by the mining companies with the bonds that they put up. There's a natural segue from operations to closure. Just follow the project. These are actual average figures from our portfolio of projects, the kind of revenue generation over the lifecycle of a project for us. On average, you know, we would be just over CAD 30 million per project. It starts with the early stage of development and permitting, engineering, advisory service. Then they build a plan and operate it. Assuming 15 years, on average, you would generate about CAD 25 million there. In closure, so far, that is a very small part of our portfolio that I think is going to grow.
This is kind of a map out of how we make money and how much over a lifecycle of a project. You know, the mining industry is global. We are global. We follow our clients. They may be Canadian companies, but they do business all around the world. We had projects literally all around the world, including Mongolia, Turkey, Australia. We have actual offices and people in three critical locations. Obviously, North America. We are headquartered in Vancouver. We have an office in Santiago, Chile, to service the Latin American market. We have an office in Hangzhou, China. I'm very proud of the recognition we've received recently for all the work that the team has done. I'm particularly proud of being recognized by our peers in the industry. That's for the MetSoc Society of Canada. We got both the Innovation and Sustainability Awards in the same year.
Definitely, the industry is taking notice, and we've built our reputation in the industry to the extent that I think it's natural for us to start thinking about expanding into geographies where maybe historically we haven't been present. A little bit about our revenue. I talked about the two buckets being, you know, the technical services, non-recurring, and then recurring from operations. The current split is one-third, two-thirds, roughly. We're building gradually the recurring revenue. That's the goal. The build-out is not necessarily a straight line. It's a bit step function because a project, it's kind of a, it's happening or it's not happening. The services, the technical services also are lumpy, right? Because, you know, there's a start-stop to every study, every feasibility study, every permit you start-stop. It's not recurring. The timing is outside of our control.
Timing of the revenue, the services revenue is also at times lumpy. Over the years, from 2021- 2025, we've built this recurring revenue significantly. When you look at the results of our efforts over the five years, this is showing the five-year trend, we increased the recurring revenue 6x . Technical services revenue doubled, market cap quadrupled, and increased our working capital by a factor of seven. It's really a ramp-up business. The important thing to realize is that the technical services are the leading indicator of the future operations, right? When we work on these projects that are in development or in permitting, you will first see it on the technical services side. The bigger the technical services are, it means later on they will translate into the bigger recurring revenue when those projects actually happen.
On the financial performance overall, on the left-hand side, you see the metric of adjusted EBITDA to our GAAP revenue and to EBITDA to proportional revenue. As you can see, those percentages are very high. Very healthy, very healthy margins. The difference between proportional and GAAP revenue for us is because we have some joint ventures in China. When we're doing our financials, the China revenue is actually not recognized as revenue through the JV because of the GAAP rules. We cannot recognize that revenue in the top line. That's why we produce the metric in both ways. Most importantly here, you can see that as we ramp up, scaling up the business, we're seeing basically a lower and lower percentage of G&A as a percentage of GAAP revenue, right?
Because we have a solid base and we're not necessarily scaling up, you know, G&A growing proportionally to increase in revenue. Again, the metric, the compounded annual rate of growth in the key metrics is pretty healthy. Very proud of that. Now, this catalyst for a step change in valuation, that's probably a mislabeled slide by now. Everybody is asking us, so what's next? You know, what can we expect? What's going to happen with the company? What's the goals? I think, you know, we have a really healthy project pipeline. That's been historically developed during, you know, times when the commodity prices were not all that favorable, right? If there is a commodity boom, if there is going to be a continued interest in mining, I think this pipeline is only going to grow faster compared to the rate of growth historically.
We're also anticipating there's going to be some consolidation in the water environmental services sector in mining, specifically in mining. I'll talk about that on the next slide. Finally, I think people recognize that investing in our company is actually protecting value in uncertain economic times, and we'll touch upon that as well. Based on the previous slide, when I showed this consolidation in the sector, what we recognize is that in the mining sector, there is a big gap on the market. The market is underserviced. You either have these monstrous companies that are doing disservice to the sector. They're offering very expensive solutions. They're not agile. They're not innovative. They cannot respond to the new requirements of the industry. Most of these large companies are water companies. They say they're water companies, but not water in mining.
Most of their water sales are in domestic sewage treatment desalination plants. You have these small companies, and that's including BQE , that are too small to underservice the requirements of the industry. There is truly a gap. What I anticipate is for us to grow into this gap and/or be part of what's going to fill that gap. Peter, do you want to speak to some of these slides?
Yeah, just, you know, let's...
Microphone?
Yeah. Just as investors, obviously, you know, you're looking at things in a lot of companies here and where they're at. A lot of the things that you look at that would be risks in companies of our size, we've already dealt with. You'll see that at the risk thing when it comes up later. We've got, you know, with the management, one of the things I always said when I was doing due diligence on companies was management, management, management. You can see our track records out there for you to see. We've proven the commercial strategy, and we've proven that the industry will buy into it. We have unique, truly disruptive technologies. I don't say that lightly. We use that word, and we mean that word. Certainly, our selenium, as David mentioned, is the only commercially available non-biological solution out there.
It truly is disruptive to the industry because the biological solution was [audio distortion] really kind of inefficient, not in every case, but in many cases.
We have basically also, through that aquatic toxicology service, new entry points into mining projects because every mining project has to meet aquatic toxicity. The service allows us to bypass channels of gatekeepers to get directly to the customer who has a problem with the toxicity, fix it, and then get into the operations on that side, guaranteeing that non-toxic water.
We can explain that a bit more if you come and question us afterwards. There is a lot more to that story, but it's something we've identified for 18 months that we wanted to do two forms of NNA. That's one of them. Here we've just put risk elimination.
When you're looking at any company here, as you look down, management, I've mentioned technology proven, the ability to execute. We built over 30 plants, customer retention, due diligence done by some of the largest companies in the world in the mining sector. Cash in bank and our cash is continuing to grow. We don't need cash. Sadly, for any capital markets people to come in and try to sell us services, we don't need it. All the other, a new substantial, actually, potential IP. We're not going to invent a process or widget that nobody needs. Our research and development is actually paid for by the miners. We only do work that they ask us to do because they know where the regulations are going. We're not trying to say, oh, this is where it will be in seven to 10 years.
We get the miners to tell us that and pay for us to do the research. We'll do that. Our partnership, actually, very small with indigenous groups, is really important to us. Because we've got a couple of minutes left, I'll open it up for questions. Any questions, guys? Okay, we've got lots.
You started since 2003 working on core technologies. Not to get a lot of them. When was the last, what was the last technology?
The last one was the selenium. That was the first plant built and commissioned in 2020.
Were there others?
Yep.
Six plants operating and I'm clear with the...
We kind of look at a run rate where we're hoping to put in a run rate of two plants a year getting into operating stage. We'd like to obviously ramp that up. Right now we look, and we're lumpy, we can't say that's every year. If we can get two into operating a year, maybe three, that's the run rate we're at at the moment. We obviously hope to grow that as we grow.
Say we don't need any cash and CAD 14 million in the bank. It's the last time you had cash?
We don't dilute shareholders.
I'm guessing it was 2013, maybe 2012 or something.
Before we took over.
Yeah, there is. What's the percentage held by insiders?
Oh, yeah. Actually, there's 58.5% held by insiders, 40% free float. 8.5% of that is management. The rest are three major shareholders. I'm just under 20%, just under 20%, and I'm just under 10%. Basically, me. We wish we wasn't sometimes because we're public and we're public. When we were smaller, we looked at it and said, you know, why are we public? We've continued to grow and we're past the point of being private now. Effectively, every shareholder that's bought in us believes in us and we're going to carry on down that route. You know, you know.
We can't all go on our own back to the presentation by 100 shares.
Why can't you? Go for it. What's the difference if you was... [audio distortion] Yeah, we kind of, but we are public. We've gone through that stage of wanting not to be public. We're now public and we're staying public. If you said to us today you wanted to take us private, and people have said that to us, I'm saying you're not going to do it at the rate we're at today. You're going to have to, shareholders are going to want a lot more money than their current price today. Taking us private is going to cost a lot of money if somebody wants to do it, if we want to do it. Our CAD 14 million is certainly not going to do it. We agree with you, there's no benefits to being public, but we don't have another route. We're obviously going to stay in there.
On that buy-in of 100 shares, and I know I've run out of time, it would be exactly the same thing if you wanted to buy 1,000 shares tomorrow. If we'd done 10 for 1 and you wanted to buy 1,000 shares tomorrow, it wouldn't change that metric. Anyway, we have to leave, guys. We're going to be in our one-on-ones. I'm actually going to sit at our table between now and 1:00 P.M. when our one-on-ones start. If anybody has any further questions, please come to our table and feel free to chat to us. Thank you, everybody.