And we are now presenting Peter Gleeson from BQE Water.
Okay. All right. Thank you, and thank you for your patience, everybody. Thank you for coming. We really appreciate it. Thankfully, we wasn't the first act, and we've had people warm it up, so that's good. How many people in this audience have already seen this investor presentation? Many of you? Most of you. I'm going to try and actually go through it a little bit quicker than normal just because we're going to try and do a bit of a fireside chat afterwards with Nicholas here. So excuse me for going fast, but I will try. If you miss anything, this is on our webpage. You can look it up. Feel free to contact us afterwards with any questions. Did it work? Yeah. I presume you've all read this and that's all good to go. Who are we?
We're literally growing a recurring revenue portfolio using our unique IP to deliver best-in-class solutions to the mining and metallurgical sectors, addressing regulatory compliance, social acceptability, and sustainability challenges in the resource sector. Long-winded way of saying actually that what we're doing is we're a company that's creating innovation in producing clean water in the mining sector. That's who we are. That's what we're doing. We're not new. We've been doing it a while, and we're proven, and the customers are buying into exactly what we're doing. By the numbers, we're showing 32 treatment plants built.
There's now currently, and I probably will spend a little bit longer on this, there's now a lot of smaller projects that are coming to us, and people are asking our expertise to actually come in and operate existing plants, which is good news for us and advancing our company, in a different way than we envisioned at first. Four technologies commercially proven since 2003. 4,000 tons of metals recovered, most of it given back to the miner. We're not a commodity trader. 1,700 tons of cyanide and 20 million cubes of water a year currently produced. What sets us apart from other companies that deal with water in any sector, but mainly in the mining industry, is our innovation and our ability to deal with pretty much any problem that comes up that the miners have.
If you look at the major players out there producing their cookie-cutter solutions, they do this and have done it for a long time, but they're really not innovative. We're looking at addressing the areas that the actual miners are dealing with. Selenium being a big one at the moment. Obviously cyanide with SART. Cyanide, for some who don't understand, SART is the recycling of cyanide. Everybody understands what cyanide is. Cyanide, the miner has to buy, uses heap leach, then eventually, if it has any other soluble metals in it has to be destroyed at the end of the process. If you have a dirty mining process, when gold was $2,000 or $3,000 an ounce, these mines were uneconomical.
You're seeing a lot of mines that have been in everybody's sight forever coming on stream now because we can do things like actually deal with dirty process in there. We actually recycle about 85% of the soluble metals that come through the cyanide. So the miner's getting the benefit of recycling the cyanide, not destroying it at the end, because that costs money, and recovering a small amount of soluble metals. That is open source, but we basically have been involved in about 80% of all the projects that have ever been built in one way or another. The other two areas of innovation, as you can see up there, and we're diversified across these sectors. SART and Detox now has accelerated in our business because of the gold price and everybody getting interested in all these gold plays.
Selenium, because we're the only commercially available non-biological answer to selenium. All the other areas. We can do what everybody else can do, but also we're innovative in this field. Pressing the button. 90% of minerals processing uses water. So, we're the guys that produce clean water. Often we'll get the comment that a miner will say to us that they have a problem, they need a wastewater plant built, or whatever way they want to approach it. We actually say to them, "No, you don't. What you need is clean water." We're the guys that come in and give them clean water. We don't just build a plant for a plant's sake, and unlike the majors who come in and just give cookie-cutter. This decision-making is becoming more and more complex for the miner.
I can go into that further, but if you just look at it up there, it's not getting easier for them. It's getting harder for them all around the world. As much as regulations are regulations being enforced are the important part, and social acceptability as well. If you're a major player somewhere in the world, you better be socially acceptable. Our business model is we can never understand how these guys build wastewater plants and then don't operate them. So they learn nothing from what they've built. They just keep repeating what they've always done. One of our things is not only do we earn recurring revenue from our operations, but it's staying there and getting more and more know-how and innovation from what we do. Every single site we're at. We change things pretty much every year.
Certainly when they are seasonal, when they close down, there is always something we can do better. The ore body is always changing, which is always something that when we are there, we are able to deal with for the miner. Literally, we come in, technical services. Basically, the hope is we go all the way through. We design a plant from it gets constructed, it gets built, we operate it, and then we are learning from that operations. We are all learning because every mine site is different. Every receiving water body is different. It is a creek, it is a stream, it is a river, it is a lake.
We are learning all the time. This, you guys can look up yourself, but basically either side of the active mines, there are about 4,500 active mines in the world. About half of them are in the Americas, 25% in North, about 25% in South.
There are about 10 times either side on mines in development, which as most of you will know, many will not get into production. Most will not get into production. Closed and legacy mines. All of these areas we work in, and we work in with. That is why some of the ones in development, you will see that we will not actually ultimately get into production for a number of reasons. It will not be because of us, but we earn money along the way. The interesting part with closed and legacy mines is we have a lot of investors come to us and go, "I know of this mine site that is closed down, and the government has got to deal with it. Can't you guys go in and help them?" That is starting to change. Over time, no, we couldn't. There wasn't any money to do it.
The government didn't want to spend the money. The miner had disappeared. Nobody. In the last decade or so, the bonds put up by government are substantial, as we have seen with the Eagle Mine, over CAD 100 million. There is actually one bond in Canada of CAD 1.6 billion. So now when these mines close, the miner runs away or does whatever they do, there actually is money to deal with these closed and legacy mines. That is actually becoming a bigger play in itself as well. This is a typical project revenue, CAD 4 million before the thing is actually built. Once it gets into operation, if it operates for over 15 years, that is CAD 25 million. Presuming we get renewed, we only really sign contracts for three to five years. It benefits, first off, the miner, because they don't want to sign for longer.
Secondly, it benefits us, because the ore body is always changing. There is always more we can get out of it or do better. That works. If you sign a miner up initially, the most they are going to give you increase is CPI. CPI doesn't always cover the cost overrun when you are going up there. Then closure, while it is not as big money, there is money in closure sometimes. This is where we are. Our main office is Vancouver, B.C. Hangzhou in China and Santiago in Chile. Obviously, they are all three important areas when you are looking at mining. The list of customers that we work with or working with and are trusted by. All these customers have done due diligence on us, and they are all asking us to do work for them. This is not going up. Recognition in the industry.
This is kind of stuff we're really proud of. This is not one of these have we ever gone and asked for. They've all come and found us and given us awards. Normally at the moment for the selenium process, Selen-IX, because it is now, it's truly disruptive in the market. It's the only commercially available non-biological. Again, I can explain it, but that middle one is really important. The MetSoc Innovation and Sustainability Awards. It's the first time a water company has ever done that and won both awards. The important part here is on the right. Since we stepped in in the leadership, David and I, and changed the strategy during a down market, mining market, building the company for recurring revenues, this just shows you in the acceleration in the last few years of the operations that we put into recurring revenue.
You can see it's starting to actually accelerate, which is not a bad thing. Revenue, you guys, it's very simple graphs looking at numbers. You can see there, I hope they're good to look at for you guys. They're certainly good to look at for us guys. Our margin, and obviously our costs and looking at keeping our costs down. Again, we sit in a— Our adjusted EBITDA to GAAP revenue at 27%, I don't think is bad when you're looking at companies out there. Growth in the last five years, working capital, compound annual growth, 36%, 25% income, 15% EBITDA. Our recurring revenue's gone up six times in that period. Our market cap's gone up four times in that period, and our working capital's gone up seven times in that period. Return on equity versus return on invested capital.
We don't use our own money, so we're not using it out there. As you can see, if you look at the, you can look up the symbols, Xylem, Veolia, whatever. We sit above everyone when you look at them two metrics. This gap, this is a really important part of where we're going. There's all the monster companies over there, over $2 billion, many tens of billions, and a ton of companies under $100 million trying to address individual parts of this market. But there's nobody in the $500 million to $1 billion space or $2 billion space. I basically say that we're going to fill that space, but we're going to eat or get eaten. So either we're going to fill it or somebody's going to fill it using us because nobody has the innovation we do. Protection of value basis for you guys.
It's a proven commercial strategy. It works. The world is coming towards us. 33% of revenue is recurring, linked to clean water in-house capabilities to continually and steadily grow. We're innovating all the time. Our business is aligned with the 21st-century values. Aquatic toxicity, and a quick look at the thing. Yeah. Our first M&A is aquatic toxicity. Why aquatic toxicity? They're the first guys to ever get called in to look at water before we are. They're always small companies, small few-men operations, few-men or women operations, but they're also the guys that get called into disasters. So you can actually be meeting your limits, but still be toxic and be killing fish. The aquatic toxicity guys get called in, and they actually never build the answer.
They just say, "It could be molybdenum, it could be chromium, it could be whatever." Then a company like ours comes in and builds the answer. This gives us more than. We don't want to be doing CAD 600 tests all the time. This is a marketing tool for getting us into operations earlier. So that's the first bit in M&A we've done, and we are obviously looking at others. And there's our team. That was as fast as I could go, guy, on this presentation. It normally takes me twice as long, so I do apologize. Nicholas, I know you wanted to do a fireside chat, so
Okay. Is this on?
Thank you. Oh.
I don't know if this is working.
You step on there.
Okay.
Yeah. They're yours.
Hi, everyone. You might know me. I'm Nicholas Cortellucci with Atrium Research. We've been covering the company for a few years. They're a client of the firm, for full disclosure. Yeah, a couple of questions that I had, and then we can open it up to the audience as well. But the first thing I was wondering was, if we look at the last year in terms of where the mining cycle has gone, how has that gone in your guys' favor and positioned the company and changed things?
Well, yeah. Is this working?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is.
It's definitely working to our advantage. There's certain sectors that we're seeing more out of than others, particularly the gold one with the cyanide recycling, as I said earlier. I'm old enough now, and I'm probably older than most of the people in this audience. All mining cycles end. This is a nice one. We're in a nice position in this one. There's arguments to say it will last longer than the others, but it will end. We're seeing. We've brought on 25% more staff this year. We're literally looking at our company now and going, "We're seeing more than we can handle next year." I think that's down to the mining cycle. As a company, we also have a long tail. We are truly the guys that are shovels and pickaxes. We're not just one junior miner.
We're a company that a lot of miners need out there. When eventually we get over this bell curve of this mining cycle and the juniors can't raise any money anymore, which they can today, we have a long tail. First off, we're building a company on recurring revenue. Secondly, we found out something during COVID, which even we didn't realize. Now we know. During COVID, every mine site that closed down that we was on, we were the only people there, because the water doesn't stop. Water doesn't stop. Precipitation carries on. We have a long tail with people that will be pregnant with us and whatever. It's your guess, everybody, how long the mining cycle is. Even when it gets over the bell curve, we have a long tail going forward.
Okay, great. I thought there was two main contracts that I think are worth talking about. One is Britannia as well as Kemess, the restart. Maybe just tell us a bit about how those two came to be and why they're significant.
Sure. Kemess, if I take the second one first. Kemess is really important because that was the first Selen-IX plant we built, so the first commercially available, non-biological answer to selenium. We built that, and obviously when you build the first one, you are very, very excited. We learned a lesson there that the regulators told Centerra, "You need to build the wastewater plant before you can build anything else. You need to prove to us you can actually deal with the water." They did that. The project was going to be CAD 1 billion. Then in 2021, the parent company went, "Yeah, no, we are not going to build the mine." We went, "Oh, crap." We had a five-year contract. We was really excited about it.
They put it into care and maintenance, and they put the five-year contract into abatement or whatever we want to call it. Now with the gold price being where it is, they actually want to restart the project. The company has got the budget to build it, and they have asked us to come back in. So basically, we have about four years, nine months left of that five-year contract, which we are just starting again. So that is really exciting for us because also being the first Selen-IX plant, it was hard for the industry to understand how something had been started, run for two or three months, and then not operated. Whereas now we can say to everyone, "No, we built a great plant, and even after five years, we can start it up again and do that." Britannia is-- We very rarely go into open bid.
Two-thirds of our contracts are sole-sourced. The Britannia contract was an open bid. There was a lot of players in it. The three finalists were us, the incumbent, which was EPCOR, a giant, and Veolia. So we was against two monsters, and one being EPCOR in there. The only reason we won it is exactly what we do. We looked at how they was processing it and said to the BC government, "Actually, you can save a lot of money here. What we will do is, the money we save you that you are spending on reagent and capital costs and things like that, we will split it with you." The government loved it and gave us a 20-year contract. So, we do not normally get a 20-year contract, but a 20-year contract off a government, it is a nice foundation for our company.
Amazing. In 2025, technical services was the leading segment for you guys. How does that turn into operating revenue over the coming years and what should we expect for growth of the whole pie?
Well, I think technical services is really, really hard for you, certainly for us, but for you guys to evaluate what of that is going to change into operating. The reality is many things start and stop. Some continue streamlined wonderfully. Others don't come into. Every year when we build our strategy for the next year, a third of what we look at will not happen. That third will get filled by things we don't even see that come along. Technical services is always a great indicator for you guys that the pipeline is really strong. But sometimes them technical services are CAD 50 grand lab reports, and sometimes they're CAD 800 grand pilot or CAD 500 grand pilot. So there can also be lots of ups and downs in each quarter as you look at it.
Never look at us quarter to quarter, but understand that we're literally sitting in a position now that we've increased 25% our workforce this year, and we're looking at how we're going to have to increase it next year because the workload is heavier than we actually envisaged.
Okay. And what of the specific technologies are you most excited about for the future?
Oh, God. Well, looking at all the areas, nitrogen is one for us. There's answers out there for nitrogen, but we feel it can be done better. And we feel as though we got a shot of doing with that, like we did with selenium, that we can actually produce a truly disruptive thing to the industry. But it's a big ask, and these things take years, but we're very much, we don't want to bring about an answer to a problem that doesn't exist. So actually, when we spend money on research, we get clients to spend it alongside us. So the clients are actually proving that they want it. So we're saying, "We're working on this. Are you prepared to pay alongside?" And there's thiocyanates, whatever. As you know, I'm not the technical one. David is the technical one.
Yeah. Okay. Last one before we open up to the audience is more of a live question, but you have a long history with the Eagle Mine in the Yukon. It seems like there's some news that came out lately with a Singaporean firm trying to buy it and restart it. What are your views on that, if you guys can get involved again?
Yeah. We're currently operating it still. They haven't decided if they're going to operate through the winter. Obviously, with water, they're going to have to keep heat in it, so there's a cost basis there. But it mitigates the freshet next year if they carry on through the winter. Boroo's bought it. We understand from them, obviously to persuade the government, that they want to do a good job environmentally. Realistically, they're not going to be able to build a new water processing plant in the next year. So the temporary plant that we put in in very short notice is going to be run next year, and it'd be complete suicide to actually pick someone else to do it. So I think, although it's not signed, I think we're good for the temporary plant next year. We've also designed the permanent plant up to 30% design and engineering.
There, Boroo have asked us before they purchased the mine, would we be willing to operate for them? That's as much as an indication I've got, and of course, we said yes. I would fully expect that a miner coming in as against PwC, a receiver, may ask us to sharpen our pencil a little bit. It's just natural negotiations. But at the moment, we seem to be in a good position, but we're still on that run rate that was with PwC of only three months at a time. So I make no promises, but we're in a great position.
Okay. Well, yeah, we have five minutes left if we have some questions from the audience.
I'm just a little bit confused about competition.
Yeah.
With regards to yourself, there are some huge players. There's yourself. What really is the competition?
Actually, it's interesting because nobody actually does what we do. Nobody. But the real competition is first off the miner himself. So the miner says, "No, I can operate." Certainly, my generation of miners are like, "We don't need your guys to operate." And we look at projects from the beginning. Do we have a chance of getting recurring revenue from operations? And then, of course, it is still, even though the big boys do cookie-cutter solutions, they are competition. Nobody will get fired for picking Veolia or Xylem or whatever. They may waste a lot of money. They may pay three times as much as they should have paid. But you have to admit their competition, because a guy sitting in a mining group who calls Veolia, his CEO is not going to fire him for calling Veolia.
He may fire Veolia, but he's not going to do. But regarding the innovation we do and where we sit, no, there's nobody doing exactly like we do. Our lab is in our offices. You're all welcome to come to it in Vancouver. We're just doing the M&A with the aquatic toxicity. We've got that lab literally a five-minute walk from our offices there. So we don't see anybody else, and there's nobody else giving the guarantees we got. We currently guarantee our process that, if it doesn't work, don't pay us. We've never been called upon, ever, on that. But now we're going to be able to give an aquatic toxicity guarantee as well, and that doesn't exist anywhere in the world. So it's all about differentiating ourselves and that. But I don't see any direct competition, but of course, there is competition. Yeah. Anybody else? There we go.
You have like project for how much? Is it $1 billion, $800 million? How much have we got at the moment?
CAD 16, CAD 17 million.
Yeah. We are a cash cow, but people ask us about what we are going to do with the cash, and we are obviously looking at further M&A with the cash, because we do not risk our cash on any other business. Yeah. Did you say analyst coverage? Sorry? Analyst coverage? Only-
You are looking at it.
Yeah. That is it. We wish. We get criticized because of our share count, 1.2 million, 60% held by insiders. The reality is it 6 or 16? 60. 60. Yeah. If you look at us as a company that you want to get in and out of quickly or whatever, we are not the company. We are really not. The reality is almost you look at us and go, "We do not need cash. We are out there." But you guys coming in as investors, almost investing in a private company where you have all the advantages and we have none. So you do get quarterly reports. You do get annual audits. You do get PR announcements. But this is a long game.
We are going to fill that gap of CAD 500 million to CAD 1 billion either with us or us doing it. But, yeah. So, yeah, we are done.
All right. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you. Thanks.