Hello and welcome to the OTCQX Best 50 Virtual Investor Conference. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are pleased you have joined us. Today's presenters represent some of the top-performing companies on the OTCQX Best Market in 2025, based on share performance and volume. Our next presentation is from Heliostar Metals. If you wish to ask a question, please submit it via the Q&A box on your screen. You can also view the company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. Today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Sulis, Vice President, Investor Relations and Development at Heliostar Metals, which trades on the TSXV under the symbol HSTR and on the OTCQX under the symbol HSTXF. Welcome, Stephen.
Great. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be back. Thank you everyone for joining us and taking the time to get an update on Heliostar Metals or an introduction to the story if you're new to us. At a high level, Heliostar set out to be the next mid-tier gold producer. We saw this as a space that was abdicated by the majors through mergers of equals and growth and really presented an opportunity in the gold market. You know, we are a growth company at our core. We like to do things fast, and we have a high-grade asset that will continue to drive profit margins and all of our growth ambitions from cash flow from there.
That's where our speed, grade, and growth is really anchored in. I will, of course, be making forward-looking statements throughout this presentation, and I'll leave you to read this at your leisure on our website. Why a mid-tier gold producer? You know, this has always been the company's ambition. I think at 300,000-500,000 ounces a year, you really create a full cycle company. A full cycle insofar as that, at that range, you have to be a potential acquisition target for larger companies. You're big enough to move the needle in their production profile. If you know, multiples remain robust and larger companies are paying for that sort of growth, it provides a profitable exit from that avenue.
On the flip side, if things roll over and the cycle doesn't continue, it provides you a strong enough background that you can continue to grow. You know, 300-500 thousand ounces, you can continue to tack on, you know, call it 100000-150000 ounce a year producing producers or additional projects. That's meaningful growth to your production profile as well. We believe we create a full cycle company and we'd be able to take advantage of opportunities throughout the whole gold market cycle. A little bit of history on the assets. We picked up our portfolio that you see here in 2 transactions from Argonaut Gold, a company that was wound down a few years ago.
Initially, we acquired the Ana Paula project, which was and still is the keystone asset of our company, I'll call it. This is a development project that we completely reimagined, and I'll go through how we saw value here that others had missed and our focus to be bringing Ana Paula online, which will really be a spectacular cash flow machine once we get it up and running. For a mere $5 million, believe it or not. What did we get there? We got 2 producing mines in La Colorada and San Agustin. The idea is that the cash flow from our 2 producing operations will fund the equity component of Ana Paula, and then allow us to get to 200,000 ounces a year of production without any equity dilution.
I frame our story as an organically funded developer more so than a true steady-state junior producer, where we're able to show the sort of rerating growth production and production profile that you would see from a developer without any of the equity dilution that's typically associated with that sort of pathway. Bringing Ana Paula online in mid 2028 will get us up to that 200,000 ounces a year, at which point we should be, if you look at our peers, around a CAD 3 billion market cap Canadian company. Our current market cap is just around CAD 600 million. You know, that implies you know a 4-6x kind of from here.
If we're able to do that without any equity dilution, that is, you should see that directly reflect the share price. Beyond that, we have a pipeline of projects in Cerro de Gallo and San Antonio. Bringing either of those online would add 100,000 ounces a year to our production profile, to get us to that 300,000 ounce a year target by the end of the decade. This is where Advance the slides. This is where our portfolio of assets sits. We are a Mexican-focused company. La Colorada and San Agustin are in Sonora and Durango respectively, about an hour outside their respective state capitals, both in very prolific mining states. A great access to infrastructure, great, local labor, you know, large number of mining suppliers, et cetera.
It's been a wonderful place to operate. Our Ana Paula, our flagship development project, is in the Guerrero Gold Belt, next to our neighbors, Torex Gold and Equinox Gold's Los Filos Mine. Then our other 2 projects are in Guanajuato and Baja California Sur. All told, if you added up everything, we've got about 7.5 million ounces in total resources in gold, plus about 125 million ounces in silver, predominantly at our Cerro de Gallo project. This represents a pipeline, like I said, that can get us to 300-400 thousand ounces a year, over the next few years. Just last night or early this morning, we released our full year 2025 financial and operating results.
We produced 34,000 gold equivalent ounces in 2025. Our cash cost came in actually below our guidance range, with AISC just in our guidance range, just a hair over $2,000 an ounce. This provides a very strong operating margin through last year and is something that we're very proud of to have executed on quickly. 2025 truly was a transformational year for the company, picking up these assets that were going into care and maintenance in 2024, quickly finding opportunities to put them into production and more meaningfully, generate cash flow from that gold production in a rising gold market, and to continue to reinvest in the business.
We did generate almost $18 million in net income in the fiscal 9-month of 2025. That's because we shifted our year-end to December 31st, so a bit of a wonky year this year as a one-off. We ended December 31st with almost $41 million in cash and no debt on our balance sheet, so very strong position and very strong financial platform to continue to grow the company. All of these metrics, you know, were net of investment in the business, $13 million plus in exploration spending through 2025 across the portfolio, and almost $8 million in capitalized growth projects to continue to unlock the growing production profile.
We did release our 2026 guidance earlier in the year, stepping up from the 34,000 ounces of gold equivalent. It was about 33,000 ounces of gold up to 50,000-55,000 ounces of gold plus a good chunk of silver. Our cost structure remained relatively flat, still just a hair over $2,000 an ounce on an all-in sustaining cost basis, and something that's gonna continue to generate cash flow through this year as we continue to execute on our growth prospects. This was updated today. Obviously a bit soft in the market this morning in the gold space, but we're market cap of just around CAD 550 million. You know, about 300 million shares outstanding on a fully diluted basis.
We did just have a large amount of warrants roll off earlier this week, so only down to just under 6 million warrants, which should help lift a bit of a trading overhang on the stock over the last little while. Some very strong institutions that follow us. You know, Eric Sprott personally owns 15% of the stock, of which about half he's built up in the open market, through purchases there. Franklin Templeton, Adrian Day's Euro Pacific Fund, and a slew of other, marquee long-only, institutional funds, as well as a very good, high net worth and retail, base that provides us, some very good liquidity. Our team is headed by our CEO and President, Charles Funk, who founded the company, over 20 years in the business.
Initially an exploration business development geologist with Newcrest in Australia. Spent the early part of his career kicking tires on projects all over the world. His big commercial success once he moved to Canada was the Panuco discovery for Vizsla Silver, and then wanted to do something that was his own vehicle, that was Heliostar, and that's been his focus for the last 5 or 6 years. I won't go through everyone on the page, but a few others worth noting. Greg Bush, our COO, was the COO of Capstone Copper, the copper producer in Mexico for the better part of a decade. Prior to that, SVP, Technical Services for Equinox Gold based out of their Los Filos mine. He's built mines, he's operated mines. He's operated mines that he's built.
He's an incredible, technical, cornerstone of our team. Myself, VP Investor Relations and Development, joined the company just over a year ago. Prior to that was a sell-side research analyst with Stifel covering the junior precious metal space, and before that was an actual mining engineer bouncing around Canada, so I'm able to speak both in terms of technical and market dynamics. One other person I'll point out on our board, Mr. Ramon Davila. Who's not someone many people know, but he was Mr. Mining Mexico, is how I refer to him. He's built First Majestic along Keith Neumeyer from the ground up. He's worked in government. He's worked in permitting agencies. His reach for the Mexican mining sector is incredible, and he's a great piece of firepower on our board.
Everyone else, you know, has a lot of technical experience. We do think of ourself as a technically oriented team, and everything we plan to do, we've done, you know, at least on an individual basis, if not as Heliostar. As any responsible North American miner, we do have investment in communities as a core focus, namely education and water. We do operate in arid areas, so trying to be good stewards of the water and help communities with clean access to clean water. Education, we think that's where you can really provide a lasting impact in the areas in which you work. The other 2, quite frankly, are easier.
Mining is a cornerstone of the Mexican economy, so procurement and employment are a natural follow-on of just finding the right talent locally in Mexico. We have 2 operating assets, the La Colorada mine. This was a mine going into care and maintenance that we very quickly put back into production weeks after closing the acquisition in November 2024. Open pit heap leach operation, where we were able to utilize existing stockpiles and start to process that and put us into a producer position in early 2025. Stockpiles were actually mined as waste in the late 1990s in a very different gold price environment, but graded 0.2g a tonne, and we were able to make some very good money putting those through the crusher onto the leach pad and producing gold from them.
Stockpile, now we're moving into re-leaching and injection leaching on the large leach pad to continue to unlock ounces previously stacked there at a very low cost. Then we'll progress to stripping of the Veta Madre open pit. Again, a series of, call it, bootstrap projects where we find low levels of production generating good cash flow, leverage them into the next more meaningful size of production, generating more cash flow, and so on and so forth. That's a theme you'll see throughout our strategy. We did release an updated technical report for the La Colorada mine project. 6-year mine life, almost 300,000 ounces of gold that will be produced over that mine life.
Staged CapEx, providing a very low initial investment to unlock that and some very meaningful cash flow at what are still conservative gold prices despite today's pullback. This is what the asset looks like. As I mentioned, we've just finished mining the last of these stockpiles. In the H2 of this year, we'll start mining the Veta Madre open pit stripping. That'll unlock production for 2027, which will then fund the stripping required for the Creston open pit, and that gives us another 4 years of mine life, excuse me, at almost 0.8g a tonne and will really drive our increase in production over that timeline. Beyond just what's on the page here in reserves, we do have a number of other opportunities to expand our near mine resources.
1 we've been focused on is something called Veta Madre Plus. It's a pod of about 30,000 ounces that would allow us to further expand the planned Veta Madre open pit cutback and provide another, you know, 4-6 months of production there through 2027 into 2028. In addition, all of the pits remain open at depth. We did do some dedicated drilling below the Creston open pit, which was the biggest pit in the middle we intend to expand. That showed some underground tenor grades of mineralization, you know, almost 9 meters at 25g a tonne, 8.5 meters at 5.5 g a tonne. There's definitely an opportunity here to continue to chase mineralization and either further expand the pits or tackle this as an underground project.
This is an opportunity we intend to investigate in more detail throughout this year and start to put into a potential production plan through next year. Everything I just talked about was just in the middle of the page here. You can see the 2 open pit outlines and the cluster of samples. That's the third pit. That's seen 90%-95% of all exploration activity on this land package. It's 1 of the most immature brownfields environments we've ever come across when it comes to prospective exploration. A number of soil sampling campaigns have been done across the property, but very few of them have been drill tested.
We will come in the second part of this year, after doing some more boots on the ground work, with a dedicated drill program to start to scout out where the additional opportunities may lie. Very excited about this soils target, 2-kilometer-long golden soils anomaly that's never seen a drill hole with cutoff grades above that of the open pit. Excuse me, golden soils above the cutoff grade of the open pit, past producing open pits along trend. We think we'll be mining here for, you know, more than 10 years by the time all is said and done once we're able to flesh out these additional exploration opportunities, leveraging the existing infrastructure at the mine site. Our San Agustin mine is our second producing mine.
This was a mine that was in care and maintenance and residual leaching when we purchased it in November 2024. We got the first open pit mine expansion permit under the new administration in Mexico in July. We took the first blast and started producing in December and poured first gold in January. As you can see, we're able to move very quickly on opportunities that we can tackle. It's a short mine life, 14 months. But in that 14 months at spot prices, we should make about $50-$60 million of true net free cash flow. Think of this as a cash-generating engine, funding other growth projects and adding cash to our balance sheet to be able to again fund Ana Paula, which is the prize that we're getting to here.
Things have ramped up quickly and well, this will provide bulk of our production through 2026 from San Agustin mine. Again, some very attractive margins just around $2,200 an ounce all-in sustaining cost, and continue to drive cash flow. A portion of that cash flow, we will be reinvesting into San Agustin, now that we know we're able to monetize the asset. 15,000-18,000 meters looking to expand on the mine life here. This corner reserve area is what's our current 14 months of mine life.
We just released results that were very prospective to continue to expand that to the southwest, as well as our phase 3 southwest area is looking like it's got some good results coming back that will allow us to expand the mine life. Every extra week we can produce here is about $1 million of extra free cash flow we can add to our balance sheet. You know, even small opportunities can be very meaningful. The idea is that from these 2 mines over the next 2 years, we'll create about between $100 million and $200 million, depending on the price of gold in true bottom-line net cash flow added to the balance sheet. That'll fund the Ana Paula project.
Ana Paula is something special in the fact that it's a rare combination of a bulk tonnage, high-grade underground mine. This is a setup you don't see very often. Often, you see high-grade mines that are very narrow, require a lot of development or large ore bodies that are very low grade require kind of bulk tonnage. This allows us to take advantage of both at once just because of the geometry of the ore body. You get the economies of scale from the bulk mining. You get the high margin from the high grade that you're producing from almost 5.5 g a tonne.
You also are able to, you know, have a small mine, so, to be able to get a meaningful number of ounces, so it doesn't require a lot of maintenance and upkeep and development to keep going. Like I said, it's a rare combination and 1 we're lucky to have in the portfolio, having re-envisioned this project to focus on just this high-grade core of the project. We released a PEA in Q4, showing the economics of the underground for the first time. Over $1 billion NPV at our upside price of $3,800 an ounce at a very robust IRR. We'll produce 100,000 ounces a year after ramp-up at a $1,000 all-in sustaining cost over a 9-year mine life.
Incredible margins over what I refer to as a full cycle asset that really will be the cash flow driver of Heliostar to fund all future growth ambitions within the company. It was at a PEA level, so we were able to include this 500,000 ounces of inferred material. We've just wrapped up a 20,000-meter drill campaign focused on infill drilling that inferred those inferred ounces to be able to add them to a feasibility study, which is planned to come out in the H1 of 2027, with the goal of showing a ten-year mine life at 100,000 ounces a year in that feasibility study, with additional upside apparent from additional drilling. You know, a few metrics here, 1,800 tonnes a day, so a very small mine.
This ore body is 60 meters wide, grading almost 5.5g a tonne. So that's really what allows us to drive that exceptionally low AISC, nand low life of mine sustaining CapEx because it is a rather small compact mine to access a lot of ore, over 5,000 ounces per vertical meter in the high-grade core of it. We have also just expanded to do an additional 10,000 meters of drilling looking at other nearby expansion targets, as well as chasing this ore body down dip as we see a great prospectivity to continue to expand this deposit. I'll go into that in a little more detail in a minute. We want to put this into production as fast as is feasibly and technically possible, for obvious reasons.
This is the timeline we intend to execute on. Just having wrapped up that infill drill campaign, we'll submit the modified permit to go underground in the next couple of months. This was actually fully permitted previously for a much larger, very different open pit project. We're modifying that to go underground. Again, everything going in the right direction, smaller surface footprint, less water use, et cetera. Nevertheless, you've got to go through that amendment process. We're doing another round of metallurgical testing, all the advanced engineering that you would expect to go in a feasibility study that will be our construction document. Something we're going to do that's a little different is we'll start financing discussions in later this year.
What we want to do is bring a few financing groups inside the tent, you know, call it $150 million odd we'll need in project level financing, so that we're able to have everything ready to go in late Q2 2027. We'll have the feasibility study construction document ready. We'll have the permit in hand, and we'll have all the money lined up to be able to pull the trigger, 18-month construction timeline, and ramping up to that 100,000 ounces a year, in the H2 of 2028. While we're doing all that technical work to bring the mine into production, like I mentioned, we are continuing to drill, based on the step-out success we'd had, on these exploration target gets near planned underground infrastructures, make it into the feasibility study.
Nevertheless, we think they'll eventually make it into a subsequent mine plan. The other thing we've done is do some step-down drilling. This is in a deposit that's open at depth, and we want to continue to chase that. Drilling done, you can see the results here about, you know, 15 years ago did show some high grade continuing. As you can see, the topography goes up and the ore body goes down. You know, we've only recently had the security of cash flow to do some of that deeper drilling, but was very successful. We hit 25 meters at 8g a tonne. We know the high grade continues at depth, and we want to continue to chase that.
The other thing we'll do this year from certainty of cash flow is continue to develop this decline. There is a 400-meter-long production-scale decline that was started by a previous operator. We're going to continue to advance that in Q3 this year and push it into the ore body. That'll let us do 2 things. 1 is de-risk the early parts of the mine plan, have the geologists get in there and map it, see how the rock stands up, you know, maybe take a test stope, things like that. The other part is to be able to provide a drill platform to drill deeper. This is a different view in the bottom picture. That elbow kickout will give us a great angle to continue to drill that, those deeper prospective ounces.
The reason we're so excited about chasing this deeper is because of who our neighbors are. Torex and Los Filos are 12- and 15-million-ounce deposits. Ana Paula's, you know, just over 1 million ounces. That's because Ana Paula geologically sits much higher up. We know this is where fluids have escaped. As we're able to chase that down, we expect to hit a contact skarn, an intrusion that was driving the mineralization at depth. That contact skarn is what Torex and Los Filos are mining, and then those are monster deposits. This is truly, you know, the exploration upside. We know we have a very good, very profitable 10-year, 100,000-ounce-a-year mine.
We could have a true T1 deposit lurking at depth, and we want to get the drill results to figure that out. That'll bring us to 200,000 ounces a year by the end of 2028 on a corporate level. You know, from there we will continue to develop with our Cerro de Gallo project. This is 1 that is, again, an open pit heap leach project in the prolific state of Guanajuato. We just released a PFS study on this and intend to continue to work this project to optimize it. This is actually a subset of almost a 5 million ounce larger deposit.
We see opportunity to expand the scope of the mine plan presented here, and this will get us up to that 300,000 ounces a year here, by the end of 2030 following Ana Paula, funded by Ana Paula project in our pipeline, again, potential to follow on beyond Cerro de Gallo, and 1 that we continue to work quietly in the background, but given the timelines is not a core focus for us right now. This is what you can expect from our news flow over the next little while. You know, we've continued to execute on what we've set out.
We'll continue to drill aggressively across the portfolio, on all 3 major projects, continue to put out very strong quarterly results to continue to support our growth ambitions and showing that cash flow and where the money comes from that we're reinvesting to grow the business, and executing on our timelines to bring Ana Paula into construction as well as our various other smaller growth projects that lead up to that. If we're able to do that, we should be a much more valuable company as we continue to execute, as we've proven we can over the last several years, and you know, believe that there's a lot more value in our shares to be unlocked through this growth trajectory funded by cash flow. Thank you very much.
I will now go to the Q&A for some questions. Please, if you have any, put them in the chat here, and I will try to address all that I'm able to in the next 5 or 6 minutes that I have available. What are the de-risking steps for Ana Paula between now and the construction decision? That's a good question. We are doing a lot of background feasibility work. You know, we just wrapped up that drill campaign, so we will be doing metallurgy work. We now have the samples to do that more advanced metallurgy. We will also be doing very advanced front-end engineering and design as the long lead time items are actually the critical step towards getting into production.
If we're able to put down deposits funded from cash flow and get that engineering work, detailed engineering work done, that's something we can definitely de-risk. Another major de-risking step is the development into the ore body. As I mentioned, you know, that'll really let us know exactly what we're dealing with before we reach full commercial production. That's something that we'll be able to talk more about near the end of this year, early 2027, as that work actually reaches the deposit. Any potential capital needs in the foreseeable future? Good question. Again, the answer is not from an equity standpoint. We believe all our growth prospects and bootstrapping projects here are able to be funded from existing cash on hand and operating cash flow.
What we will need, as I mentioned, is about $150 million in project-level finance facility for Ana Paula. Given the exceptionally strong economics and quick payback period, we expect that to be a very competitive process with a quite low cost of capital. We'll be starting that process more formally in Q2 this year to try and nail down the other half of the funding we'll need. No dilutive capital needs required in the next little while. Across your portfolio, which mine has the potential to change the equity story the most over the next 3 years? Definitely Ana Paula. I think, you know, we're still valued as a developer.
I think as we bring Ana Paula online, we will get more of that producer multiple in our valuation. I think that'll really be the step change. Ana Paula allows us to show a steady state long mine life and a very strong economics with, as I mentioned, kind of a series of staged projects at La Colorada and San Agustin to get to that point that are harder for the market to give us full value as a company for until Ana Paula comes online. With $41 million in cash, how far into the future can you fund before needing to raise additional capital? I kind of addressed this. You know, we really don't have a burn rate.
It's a negative burn rate because we are adding cash to the balance sheet, especially every day that, you know, recently we've been able to sell gold over $5,000 an ounce. You know, we are able to have that full runway in terms of our whole growth trajectory and business plan here, that we are able to execute without requiring any equity. I will share that our budgets were done at $3,800 an ounce. Obviously, the recent downtick in gold price isn't pleasant, but it quite frankly doesn't have a material impact on our go-forward plan.
You know, down to anything about, you know, $4,000 an ounce gold price, we're able to continue to execute exactly as I've laid out here, with the only shift being, you know, how much project finance facility we'll need for Ana Paula. Whether that's, you know, $100 million or $200 million, whether or not we'll have $100 million or $200 million cash in the bank to pair that with. As you ramp up production, what is your target AISC as you move towards 300,000 ounces per year production? Lower. I think this is another thing that's great to see about our story is our production profile going up and our cost profile coming down, both going in the right direction.
You know, once Ana Paula comes online at that, you'll call it $1,000 all-in sustaining cost. Corporately, we should be kind of around that $1,500-$1,800 all-in sustaining cost at a corporate consolidated level, which would put us as 1 of the lowest cost, you know, mid-tier producers out there. So, you know, that I think that's a reasonable range. What I think over the long term, we'll be able to say very sub $2,000 per ounce AISC. Now we'll see what inflationary pressures do to that over the next 10 years, but I think that's a realistic goal if you look at the quality of the cash flow coming from Ana Paula. Excuse me. Just going through the rest of them here.
That's everything we've got going on. Thank you. I think I was able to get to most of the questions here. If you have more, please get in contact with us at info@heliostarmetals.com or visit our website, heliostarmetals.com. Someone will get back to you and please stay in touch. Thank you very much for tuning in today and all the best for the rest of your day. Thanks.