Okay. Can you see that now?
Not quite. While Mark's working out his screen share, let me just cover a couple. Oh, there we go, Mark. Thank you. As I was saying, my name is Michael Mathison. I'm an equity analyst here with Sidoti, and welcome to Sidoti's Small Cap Conference. We're fortunate to have with us today Cerrado Gold. Mark Brennan, the CEO, will be presenting in just a moment. Let me cover a couple of housekeeping things. We really encourage everyone to ask questions, and the way to do that, you'll see at the bottom of your screen, an icon that's a circle with three dots labeled More. If you click on that, you'll get to a screen where you can type in your questions, and we'll just read them off toward the end.
Mark, we had a suggestion from someone if you can just full screen that, if that's possible.
Okay. I have it full screen on mine. I'm trying to see how that's.
Okay. The bottom right, someone's suggesting.
Okay.
Above the magnifying glass. There's a little icon there just above the magnifying glass.
Okay. 'Cause the way I'm seeing it here, okay.
Um-
Mike, you wanna pop over here? Sorry, go ahead. I'm showing that it's full screen on mine.
Bottom right. Okay. Yeah. You know what? Let's not get too hung up on this. Everybody came to hear what you have to say. Why don't we go ahead and get started. Mark, please take it away.
Michael, sorry, I apologize for the late intro. Thank you very much, everybody, and, you know, the objective here will be to run through the Cerrado story. Can you see the screen now?
We can see it. It's not totally a full screen, but it's large enough. I'm sure everyone's able to read it.
Basically, the focus for Cerrado is to really focus on driving cash flows, where we're very strong emphasis on driving cash flow, bringing as much returns to shareholders as we can on a cash basis, which hopefully ultimately will drive our share valuation. We have three projects in. Sorry, I'm just having problems with my screen 'cause it's not sharing, but it's not moving anywhere.
Toward the right of your screen you have this.
Yeah, you'll see it. If you look at my screen, it's kind of got a weird. What's happening
I think you got stuck there in that magnifying glass. I think you have to hit the X where it says.
I don't have a magnifying glass on my screen. That's the problem.
You're showing something for a fine texture tool, so you've got a little bar up there. If you can hit the X, I think you'll get out of that loop.
Okay. I'm gonna actually just get rid of it for one second, then go back to sharing. Let's see if that works.
Sure.
Stop share. Okay, let's go back to share. Let's hope this will work better. Okay. Can people see that or no?
It's not showing anything at all yet.
Okay.
There we go.
Okay. How's that working for everyone?
It's not showing anything yet. There you go. Now you're up. Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Full screen?
Close enough.
Okay, sorry.
I recommend we just keep going.
I'm sorry, Michael. Okay. Basically, Cerrado is focused really driving on cash flows with limited dilution. We wanna look at the programs that we're gonna show you today without much dilution, if any dilution at all. That's been possible because of the very strong production that we're getting out of Argentina and the strong cash flow that we're generating for the moment. Our main operation and our current operation is Minera Don Nicolás in Santa Cruz, Argentina. We have a development project that we're looking to start construction on in the first quarter of next year in Portugal, called Lagoa Salgada. That'll be the equivalent about 50,000 ounces of gold equivalent and looking to be in production by sometime in late 2028.
We have a large project in Quebec, which is basically an iron ore, high-grade, high-purity iron ore project that looks to be in construction in 2028, with production in 2030. The equivalent on that is about 300,000 ounces of gold equivalent. All three combined, by 2030 our objective will be to be somewhere around that 400,000-500,000 ounces of production gold equivalent basis. Again, you know, we're driving our strategy right now through our project in Argentina, the gold production. We're looking at between 50,000-60,000 ounces over the course of the next three years.
You know, at the current prices we're probably generating somewhere in the region of about $120 million of cashflow a year, and about $90 million of free cash, looking at existing pricing around 5,000. If we bring that down to something in the region of 4,200. Our expectation is we should generate something in the region of about $75 million a year. It's extremely interesting project, you know, driving growth for the next foreseeable future. We have a number of objectives that we really wanna accomplish on this project. One, first and foremost, is to drive our life of mine and drive our resources. We're doing that in a number of ways.
We have an exploration program underway, which is a minimum of 50,000 meters planned for 2026. We expect that we're gonna see significant improvement in our resources as we progress through 2026. At the end of 2025, we bought three rigs, excuse me, giving us a total complement of four rigs. We're drilling about 4,000-5,000 meters per month. From that perspective, we expect to see some very strong yields coming from there, and probably the targeting there will be the end of the first half of the year to see the first initial stages. Right now, we have two areas of high interest to us that we're focusing on.
The second thing we're looking at is we initiated an underground operation in June of last year. So we've made some significant progress with respect to underground development. What we did is we drove an adit below an existing open pit target. We see really strong potential for that as we move forward, as we have seen in the balance of the neighborhood in which we're in. I'll get into that in a moment. Our second asset is in Portugal. It's Lagoa Salgada. Basically, initially, this is really a VMS project, polymetallic VMS project, which initially had a strong focus on zinc.
However, you know, with gold prices and silver prices moving as strongly as they have, the asset will be about 40% precious metals based at current prices. Really emphasizing and continuing our precious metal concentration at the moment. We anticipate a construction decision by the third quarter of 2026 to be in construction by the first quarter of 2027 and in production by late 2028. Again, we have a very significant project in Quebec that we're completing a feasibility study on by the end of the quarter, so by the end of June. From that perspective, we expect to see that having a substantial value contribution to Cerrado from the feasibility onward.
We will file our EIA by the end of the year for the permitting, and we expect to be permitted by late 2028 to be in production in 2030. We have a cash balance as of September thirtieth of CAD 16.5 million. With current gold prices, that balance has grown very substantially, and we continue to see strong cash growth as we move forward. You know, we have a very strong technical team. We're builders. This is probably the fifth or sixth project that we've actually developed and are bringing into production. When we acquired this project, it had under 20,000 ounces of production. Today we're running at that 50,000-60,000 mark.
You know, our guidance to The Street was 50-55 thousand. We're fairly comfortable with the way things are looking today that we should meet that guidance and probably the upper end of the guidance fairly comfortably. If we look at our company as we bring in Lagoa, again, we'll retain a 62% precious focus. But what's really important here is, you know, we currently have a market cap of approximately $200 million. If we look at our opportunity to move forward, we see this potentially having asset valuations which are significantly higher. All three of our assets, Argentina, Portugal, and Quebec, are very young, and they're in their infancy.
We see a lot of potential for upside and exploration and resource development and growth in Argentina, and we see the same in Portugal. While we're completing a feasibility study here, which builds on a feasibility study completed in 2023, what we were looking at is currently about 27 million tons in Portugal. We did not get involved in this project for 27 million tons. We think there's potential to get this resource closer to 150-200 million. All three assets have very strong asset value and production and cash flow generation growth, that we think is gonna substantially add to the value to shareholders over the medium to longer term.
What's interesting is both Argentina and Portugal, we have third-party funding that we believe we can bring these projects into fruition without any or significant dilution, which is a very critical element for shareholders. Again, I go back to NAV and the importance of NAV is the fact that it's really gonna drive cash flows, and NAV is determined by cash flows. Where we are now, we're looking at MDN, about CAD 111 million NAV based on a PEA that we did a year and a half ago. That NAV at today's prices is much higher, probably double that, if not more.
If we bring in Lagoa Salgada based on our historical feasibility, which again, we're gonna complete an optimized feasibility study by the end of the first half of this year, we should see this NAV also improve. The important thing to note here is that we're growing this business to be a fairly substantial business, even though we're a small company today. That NAV translates into this type of cash flow and EBITDA. You know, going from $44 million, with respect to a previous PEA that was done, like as I mentioned to you, at today's prices, we're seeing much higher numbers.
In terms of adding Lagoa will take us up to CAD 112 million, adding into Quebec, we're there at CAD half a billion within the next five years. For us, that's our kind of path. There's nothing significant that we need to do with respect to the assets. They're all conventional assets that we're using common practices and principles and processes. There's nothing unusual about the path which we're undertaking. Again, the last year, we really focused on transitioning MDN, which is our lead asset. What we're looking at there is we optimized our heap leach operation, where we can see 55,000 ounces of production over the course of the next three years.
Again, we started an exploration program last year, and we enhanced that by bringing in 3 rigs at the end of last year. We also have underground. What I would say here is if we look at this asset, if we look at 55,000 ounces of production within an all-in sustaining cost of about $2,000, you can do the math yourself. If we can expand this life of mine, then obviously we're gonna see substantial NAV. The important thing here is that this project, again, is very much in its infancy, and we see lots of potential to expand the resources and expand the life of mine.
We're targeting a 5- to 6-year life of mine in the coming months. From that perspective, I think we'll get a very strong rerating when that occurs. Likewise, Lagoa, I'm not gonna go through all these, but Lagoa, and likewise Mont Sorcier, we see substantial potential to expand and improve on the economics that we provided. If I look at Minera Don Nicolás in Argentina, we're in elephant country. We're just directly north of Cerro Vanguardia, which is Anglo. We're directly to the west of Cerro Moro, which is now Pan American, was Yamana for a while. We also have Cerro Negro in the neighborhood, of which is Newmont. We own 355,000, 332,000 hectares, excuse me.
This is the size of Rhode Island. It's a big property mass where we've only just started the exploration game. We've probably done less than 50,000 meters of exploration drilling on this whole property since we acquired it in 2020. A large part of that was we got involved a week before COVID, but also we weren't generating a lot of cash when gold was only down at about $1,700. Now we're fully equipped and fully funded to drive this asset forward. If you look at the history of producers on this belt, there are some very substantial assets. The belt has probably produced about 20 million ounces to date.
You look at Cerro Vanguardia from Anglo. They've grown their asset base from nothing in the early 1990s. Now they've produced probably somewhere close to about 6 million ounces. They have approximately now about 2 million ounces in resources. It takes time to build these things. What's interesting here is if you look at the golden color is the open pit mine, the silver color is the heap leach, and then the black is the underground. You can see that everyone, they've kinda started it with this process very similar to what we did. What we've done is go start open pit, then heap leach, and then going underground. Cerro Negro was the old Goldcorp and now Newmont property.
It's producing about 350,000 ounces a year. They got into Santa Cruz with Goldcorp in the mid-2000s. From that perspective, you know, we see the potential for our asset to grow over time. I'm not gonna promise you that we're gonna get to the sizes of Cerro Negro or Cerro Vanguardia, but what I will say is that we don't know how big it'll be, and we don't know that it can't be one of those assets. Cerro Moro, they've been involved for about 15 years, so lesser time and, you know, they've produced and they have substantial asset base.
We think there's strong potential here to grow our asset base, given the correct ingredients, which is really drilling and resource growth. That said, on the production profile, we've managed to grow our profile from when we first acquired this mine. Our operating costs we've kept pretty low. You know, we're operating between that $1,600-$1,800 mark, where if you look at the other producers in Argentina, some of whom are much bigger than us, producing a lot more ounces, we're actually doing better than. In that regard, you know, I think it speaks very highly to the technical competency of the management team.
Not only have they been able to, you know, with lower units or ounces sold that keep the unit cost low, but also we've been able to also move to the heap leach, open pit, and now underground mining methodology, which is what's required with the belt that we have. We're looking here at substantial growth opportunities. Underground is very key for us. We're going down below a pit that we mined for a couple of years. It's open in terms of there's been very little drilling below the pit that you can see here. We think this is gonna be a very substantive growth vehicle for us. The heap leach is our core operation, producing between 4,000-5,000 ounces per.
Sorry, about 4,000 ounces per month. Excuse me. From this perspective, we anticipate that there's a lot of potential to grow this operation as well. I come back to the underground, which is underneath this pit. Coming back to the 50,000-meter drill program we're looking at, what we're seeing here is that this property, you know, only over 10 kilometers that we see is highly prospective, which is up in this Paloma area. We see really strong potential for growth in resources, and that's what we're focusing our 50,000 meters for this year on. For the most part, it's all within the central block and the south block.
There are two areas in particular that we're focusing on right now that look very appealing. The second project we have is Lagoa Salgada. It's in the Iberian Pyrite Belt. This is the richest area in the world for VMS deposits. We have a polymetallic project here with, you know, all forms of. We got gold, silver, zinc, copper, tin. The fact of the matter is that what we're looking for here is to find assets similar to grow this asset similar to the size to Aljustrel and Neves-Corvo. Neves-Corvo is the old Lundin property that they sold to Boliden. Aljustrel is a private company owned by a group called Almina.
We have Aljustrel and some other very famous mines that produced a lot over time. Where we are right now is we're in the final stages of a feasibility study, and we're in the final stages of getting our environmental impact assessment permit approved. We expect that we'll have a construction decision by the third quarter to be in construction in late Q4 of 2026, but realistically probably more Q1 of 2027 with production in 2028. You know, the nice thing here is that again, we're fully funded to construction. We can use a number of different elements.
We believe very strongly that, you know, with the project financing that we have in place with UKEF, UK Export Finance, for about 70% of our capital requirements, combined with traders and combined with our own cash, we can fund this without actually raising any capital, which is very, very important for shareholders. You know, what we see here is the potential for this asset to be, again, among the lowest cost producers of zinc-equivalent production in the world. Over the life of mine, $0.79 in the first 5 years. It's about $0.59. From that perspective, we're looking at a very strong economic project. What we're also, you know, again, looking for is very, very strong growth.
This project will add, according to the feasibility study that we published, about $75 million a year, starting in late 2028. The fact of the matter is that, you know, that'll add to our portfolio count on an ounce equivalent gold basis of about 50,000 ounces. It puts us well over that 100,000 ounce kind of production mark by late 2028. This is a very important slide because most of the assets on the Pyrite Belt have grown as a consequence of geophysics. We are the same. We've done a total of 40,000 meters of exploration drilling here with a 27 million ton resource. The important thing here is it just shows that, you know, geophysics has a very strong correlation with growth.
We're now fully funded in a position where once we get our permit and we get the construction decision made, we're also gonna come in here and do a lot more drilling. We believe that there's potential for us to be similar to Neves-Corvo, which is Boliden or Aguas Teñidas owned by Sandfire. I don't know if you guys saw, but Sandfire was acquired by Trafigura and Mubadala in 2024 for CAD 1.8 billion. There's lots of scope here and lots of scale to grow and have substantial assets. Our final asset is the Mont Sorcier project in Québec. This is a high purity, high grade iron ore. This is totally distinct from the iron ore that you read about in most cases.
The common iron ore that you hear quoted at about $100 per ton is basically 62% iron ore, largely produced out of Australia and Brazil. What we're producing is actually a very unique and highly sought-after product, which trades at about a 35% premium to conventional iron ore. Conventional iron ore. It has a growth rate of about 1%-2%. Our product growth is growing at about 9%-10% and is really limited by supply, not by demand. Which brings us to Mont Sorcier. Mont Sorcier is located in Chibougamau, an old mining camp, with about 7,000 population. Basically, it's everything is set up for this project to succeed. The infrastructure is very, very strong with the local community there for labor.
We're also 25 kilometers away from a rail spur. That rail spur leads down to 370 kilometers down to the Port of Saguenay. It's a common carrier owned by CN. Today it's running at about 30% capacity, so it can easily accommodate our needs. The Port of Saguenay basically is a port that's being sponsored and grown by the Quebec government and the federal government as part of their kind of Canadian initiative for self-sustainability in metals. You know, this is basically all gonna come up all this corridor where we are.
Three or four years ago, you had lots and lots of, you know, probably five or six lithium projects, a number of battery companies, other types of specialty metal companies, and those have all gone away due to pricing and other scenarios. However, we are certainly set up here, in our view, to be one of the first projects that's gonna come into production to drive the Port of Saguenay. What's also interesting about this project is we have 1.2 billion tons. It's an open pit mine. The average grade in the ground is about 27%-30%. We upgrade that to 67%.
In conventional iron ore, you can basically grow iron ore to you know you get a premium at 65% and it's you know 67%, you get an additional premium. This is a PEA that we completed quite a while ago. We're gonna see some changes to this. We're gonna see the initial capital costs go up fairly substantively. Our estimation is somewhere around CAD 800 million. But we're also seeing because of the new metal that we're producing, this high-grade iron ore, that our NPV is expected to still come in around that 1.6, 1.5 billion on an after-tax basis. Now I just you know
Mark, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we need to leave a little bit of time for questions.
Yeah. I'm just wrapping up right now. What I'll say here is that this project we have, again, fully funded, with the UK government and with TD Bank, for project finance for 70% of that CAD 800 million, and we believe that our own cash, likewise off-take agreements should be able to fund the balance of the equity required. What we're looking at is a project, a company that looks to grow very substantially, while at the same point not needing to dilute shareholders. Thank you very much, Michael. I apologize.
Oh, no problem at all, and I apologize for interrupting. In fact, you sort of beat me to the punch. My question was going to be about financing. You're producing gold now. Maybe could you talk a little bit more about the financing arrangement with TD Bank and how that relates to the income you're getting from gold production?
Well, sure. In terms of our financing, we have a very now what's becoming more conventional funding, which is export credit agency funding, and we have the support of the UK government and UK Export Finance, and they're prepared to provide us 70% of our capital requirements for both Portugal and for Quebec. In Portugal, we're gonna use our lead managing agent is Santander Bank. In Canada, it'll be TD Bank. Basically, the exchange that the UK government get is if we to use this facility, we have to use approximately, you know, 30%-40% of the UK government companies in order to fulfill our capital.
What we're working on right now is, you know, again, complete the feasibility study in Portugal, complete the feasibility and permitting in Quebec, and then we'll be very near to getting to a construction decision. It enables us to get 70% of our capital upfront. In Portugal, we feel that we can fill up the balance with traders' capital. In Quebec, we feel we can use off-takers for it.
Great. There are some questions that have come in. Let me read off the first one. Do you ever seek larger partners for these projects, or is that sort of what the off-take financing amounts to?
I mean, we can use other partners. The fact of the matter is we're building a very strong cash position right now. As I mentioned earlier, there's nothing technically challenging about these projects, outside of what all other projects within the jurisdictions are doing. We're very comfortable with our technical competency on this project. We're very confident that we have the capital available to us. For right now we don't really need, frankly, to dilute ourselves on what we think are very high return projects.
A couple others along this same line. With your off-take financing agreements, as you produce gold, is the price essentially fixed in advance, or are you selling into the spot market?
We're selling fully into the spot market right now.
Okay. Terrific. Well, that's certainly benefited you.
Yeah.
Can you just talk more generally about factors you consider as you're evaluating an additional asset? I know you have a couple sort of on the runway here, but what is it you like about projects that makes you say, "This is the one for us"?
Well, one, you know, they have to, you know, we like size. We want things that we can afford without diluting ourselves, that have the capability to be world-class projects. All three of our projects, we believe, have that capability. That's the first thing. The second thing is we want them to be low-cost producers. We want to be able to sustain production and cash flows, positive cash flows, irrespective of how the commodity interacts. You know, we've got a great gold market today, but are we gonna still be there in three years' time? That's another issue we consider.
Just the cost and the potential dilution that it'll have to our existing shares where we are today, because we certainly believe that we're way undervalued, but it really has to be accretive to the growth story that we're presenting to you. Which adds another bar, you know, it makes it a little bit of a higher bar for us to challenge. We've looked at a lot of projects. We continue to look at a lot of projects. We just, you know, we wanna be very selective that anything we bring into our portfolio will be strongly accretive.
Okay. Great. Just one other question about the Portuguese project. Someone who briefed us at a teach-in mentioned that there had been a little bit of a delay. I believe it was a water resource or water quality issue that they wanted you to look into further. Has that been all wrapped up?
That is underway and you know we're working together right now with the Portuguese government and our hope is that we'll have a resolution to that by the end of the first half of the year. That's a work in progress. We are sitting right now with confidence that we'll get this resolved.
Well, terrific. Thank you, Mark, for an excellent presentation, and thank you everyone for participating. If I wasn't able to get to your question, I'm sorry for that. Please contact your Sidoti representative, and we'll run your question down for you. Again, thanks everyone for joining and thanks in particular to Mark and Cerrado Gold.
Well, Michael, thank you very much and thank you all for listening and hearing the Cerrado story. We're very excited, and we hope that we'll be able to bring you much good news in the near term.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.