Before we let Stephen have the floor, let me just cover a few housekeeping things. We really encourage questions, so please participate. Questions really make the event, both for the audience as well as for the presenter. If you'd like to ask a question, you will see a circle with three dots in it at the bottom of your screen. Click on that and you will see Q&A, and just type your questions in. I will be reading them out for the benefit of the speaker. With that, Stephen, can you take it away?
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today. As mentioned, my name is Stephen Soock, VP Investor Relations and Development for Heliostar Metals. I joined the company about a year and a half ago. Prior to that, I was a sell-side research analyst with Stifel based out of Toronto, covering the junior precious metal space. I did that for about eight years, and before that I was a mining engineer. Bounced around Canada for five years, getting my boots dirty and learning the business before moving into the corporate and banking side of the industry. Heliostar Metals, we intend to build the next mid-tier gold producer. We can show a clear pathway to go from 30,000 ounces of gold that we produced last year to 300,000 ounces of gold annually by the end of the decade.
We can do that entirely within our pipeline of development assets. Really what sets us apart is our ability to do that sort of growth trajectory without any additional equity dilution. By using a bootstrapping methodology, we can turn small-scale production and cash flow into successively larger production and more meaningful cash flow, and so on and so forth, to be able to fund our development projects and 10x our production by the end of the decade. I think of us as an organically funded developer, more so than a junior producer, being able to use that cash flow to fund growth. I will, of course, be making forward-looking statements. Please peruse this at your leisure. Why a mid-tier gold producer? I think in the 300,000 ounce-500,000 ounce per year range, you're both predator and prey.
You're prey insofar as that quantum of annual production puts you on the radar of groups like Kinross, OceanaGold, DPM Metals, et cetera, as a potential needle moving acquisition target. If the cycle remains robust, those sorts of larger players are paying up, paying elevated multiples for growth. That's a potential exit for us at the right time. Conversely, if the cycle rolls over, it's still a robust enough base that you can continue to acquire additional growth projects cheaply at the bottom of the cycle, and can still grow by building 100,000 ounce- 200,000 ounce a year mines. It's not such a large number that growth becomes impossible like it is for Barrick and Newmont these days. We think it creates a full-cycle company and one which allows us to create value for investors in both scenarios. This is our core pipeline of assets.
We acquired these in two, and now I guess recently, three transactions. Our first transaction was to buy the Ana Paula project in late 2022, early 2023. We bought this project and completely re-envisioned the way to approach it. It really is our flagship development project. It really showed there was a lot of value that was not being seen in this asset, and in how we approached it has been able to unlock a lot of that value. This has been our core focus and really is the core of the company, if you will. Opportunistically, as a company, we bought Ana Paula. Got itself into financial trouble through 2024. They sold off the rest of their Mexican portfolio and basically had to execute a fire sale.
They got into trouble building a large mine in northern Ontario in Canada, not associated with these assets, but were told to wind down the company and had to exit quickly. Their bad luck was our boon and, for $5 million, we picked up two producing mines, and then two other additional growth development projects. Everything on the page here in Mexico, we bought for $15 million in cash, we own 100% of, and we've since made more than $70 million now bringing cash flow from. Lastly, we just recently bought the Golds trike project in Utah. 1 million ounces of gold in resource in the Great Basin, with lots of upside potential, and an antimony kicker to boot. For $15 million in Mexico, what did we get? Two producing mines, both of which were on care and maintenance or shut down when we bought them.
La Colorada mine we put back into production within weeks of closing the acquisition, from producing from surface stockpiles and generated significant cash flow through 2025, catching the tailwind in the gold price there. San Agustin mine we just recently restarted. We got the first new open-pit mine permit in Mexico, in July of last year. We started the mine in December and poured first gold in January of this year. The idea is that these two assets will generate about $150 million in net free cash flow over the next two years. That will fund the equity portion of the Ana Paula build. That's how we were able to bootstrap our way towards additional growth. Ana Paula is really something special. We'll add 100,000 ounces a year there. Continued growth funded and following Ana Paula.
Our mines are primarily located in Mexico, with the exception of Golds trike and our Unga legacy asset. All told, it's just over 9 million ounces in M&I&I of the category breakdown shown here, and just about 125 million ounces of silver, predominantly at our Cerro del Gallo project. Our two producing mines are in Sonora and Durango, about an hour outside their respective state capitals. It's like saying you're in Nevada and Arizona in terms of mining states. Blue blood mining states, lots of mines in the region, and with a deep pool of skilled labor and available infrastructure. This is the one slide that really captures what we're trying to execute as a business. We produced 33,000 ounces of gold last year. We're on track to hit our guidance of 50,000-55,000 ounces of gold this year.
A bit of a step up next year by executing on some of the low-hanging fruit opportunities we see with really the step change coming in 2028. That's when we'll bring Ana Paula online at 100,000 ounces a year, which will really set us on long-term steady state production with significant cash flow. Adding Cerro del Gallo open pit heap leach project by the end of 2030 to get us to that 300,000 ounce per year run rate by the end of the decade. You can see this stepwise production growth over the next several years. We recently released our Q1 2026 results, producing just under 12,000 ounces of gold at an All-In Sustaining Cost or AISC of just under $2,000 per ounce.
Of the sub 100,000 ounce a year producers, we have one of the lowest cost profiles and have been able to keep costs quite steady, providing for the very strong margin in today's gold price environment. We produced some decent EPS here, $0.05 per share, while we're still investing in the business in both exploration and advancing our development projects and increasing the balance sheet along track with that as well. Our guidance this year is, as I mentioned, 50,000-55,000 ounces and about 300,000 ounces of silver at an All-In Sustaining Cost at just over $2,000 an ounce. Again, very, very strong margin cash flowing business we put together right now and we intend to grow. From a market cap perspective, we're sitting about CAD 625 million. All of the numbers I'll quote will be U.S. unless it's noted here.
We've got about 300 million shares fully diluted, outstanding, zero debt on the books, $38 million in cash, plus about $12 million in receivables that came in just past quarter end. We're sitting on about $50 million of cash as of the end of the first week of April. Our top shareholders are Eric Sprott, who owns about 15% of the company, half of which he bought in the open market, half of which he's written checks to financings for. Steve Land of Franklin Templeton is just under 10%, and Adrian Day's EuroPac Fund rounds out our top three. You can see there's a long list of long-only institutional shareholders beyond that to get to our 53%, alongside a good float. We trade about 1.2 million shares a day between the TSX Venture Exchange and the OTCQX in the U.S.
I won't go through everybody on the slide here for the sake of time. Our CEO, Charles Funk, has a background as an exploration geologist. He started his career with Newcrest in Australia, a company that was recently acquired by Newmont, I guess recently within the last couple of years. Charles is an Aussie fellow who spent the early part of his career kicking tires on projects all over the globe for Newcrest, moved to Canada about 10 years ago to be more entrepreneurial. His major success on this side of the ocean was he was the VP Ex that led the Panuco discovery for Vizsla Silver, turned that into a multi-billion dollar company. He's a rare combination of a very smart geologist, market presentable, entrepreneurial, and a young guy who's got lots of energy to continue to build the business.
Gregg Bush is a mining industry veteran, our COO, a proven mine builder. He was the COO of Capstone Mining, a major copper producer for 10 years in Mexico, worked for almost 10 years as SVP, Technical Services for Equinox Gold, also in Mexico. He's built mines, he's operated mines, he's operated mines that he's built. He's done it all twice and has great depth of experience. The last person I'll mention here is Ramon Dávila on our board, who has a background in all aspects of Mexican mining. He built First Majestic from the ground up alongside Keith Neumeyer. He's worked in the government, he's worked in permitting agency, he's worked in industry. He's one of these giants of the Mexican mining industry and is a great addition to our board about a year and a half ago.
We, of course, try to be good corporate citizens with a focus on water and education. We do work in the arid climates. We try and be good stewards of the water we use and promote access to clean water in the communities that we partner with. We think education is just the best way to leave a lasting positive impact in the communities and with the groups that we work with day to day. Quite frankly, employment and procurement in Mexico all but take care of themselves. Mexico has a great mining culture, a great deep pool of skilled labor, supplies, suppliers, all very readily available, and we're able to check those boxes quite easily from an ESG perspective. Moving into our assets now. La Colorada mine was a mine that we put back into production. It was in care and maintenance.
We put it back into production from stockpiles within a few weeks of closing the acquisition in late 2024. We put out a technical report that showed some very robust economics as we execute through the series of, I'll call it staged profitable projects at the mine to be able to generate cash flow in the near term and minimize CapEx to be able to support the Ana Paula build as part of the bigger strategy. Averaging about 50,000 ounces a year with a bit of a profile in there and very robust economics at what are now very conservative gold price assumptions. Last year we produced from stockpiles. If you can see my cursor, there was a big pile of rock here that sat just under the Gran Central pit on the page.
We generated about $25 million mining those stockpiles, which were originally waste in the 1990s, and then have now exhausted that material and moved on to an injection leaching phase where we're able to drill into the leach pad and give it another rinse, and we'll generate about 10,000 ounces-12,000 ounces of gold from using that technology this year. That bridges the gap while we do waste stripping and Veta M adre, moving the waste rock that sits on top of the ore. That'll start later this year, in the second half of this year, and unlock ore for 2027 at much higher grades, 0.7 g a ton.
Progressing on to the open pit cut back at Creston, which gives us another four years of mine life by unlocking this 300,000 ounces of reserves. That gives us six years of mine life, beyond that, we see resource opportunity upside in spades. Right now, we're working on the engineering for a larger open pit at Veta Madre that should include another 10,000-15,000 ounces. Our first drill campaign showed underground tenor grade thicknesses at all three open pits, below all three open pits. 9 m at 25 g a ton, 5 m at 18 g a ton. There is an underground future here, we just need the time to get to the drill campaign to see where that scope of that opportunity is and where it fits in our production profile.
Everything I just talked about is in the center of the page in these three open pits. Outside of that scene, 15, maybe 20 drill holes. We're going to start to execute on exploration to unlock the potential of the rest of the district. For example, Las Dundas is an area that was a past-producing open pit that we're going to start drilling off later this year. This soils target is a 1.5 mi long gold and soils anomaly that's never seen a drill hole. We're going to start to do the work to work up drill-ready targets there for later this year. We think we'll be mining here for more than 10 years by the time all is said and done, well beyond the six years currently on our books.
San Agustin Mine is the mine we put back into production after receiving the first new open pit mining permit from the Sheinbaum administration in July. Took the first blast in December and started pouring gold in January. It's an open pit heap leach project, an expansion of an open pit. Think of this as a near-term cash flow ATM for us, if you will. Over its 14 months of mine life, we will generate at spot gold prices about CAD 60 million of net free cash flow, net of closure liabilities, at a very strong All-In Sustaining Cost, a very robust economics. Being able to harvest that cash flow is an important springboard towards continuing to build the company.
Now that we've shown we're able to monetize this and are in the process of mining it very profitably, we did additional exploration to try and extend that mine life and have had some good success. Our first drill campaign, a set of results released, stepped out more than 200 m. It was at 750 ft from the edge of the open pit, this corner reserve area that gives us our 14 months of mine life, and hit the exact same style of mineralization that we're currently profitably mining. Broad intervals of 0.3 g per ton of material that starts basically at surface. We think we've got probably another nine to 12 months of mine life already defined here. The implication there is every week we can continue to push production beyond that 14 months is another $1 million in cash flow.
Another year is about another $50 million beyond our baseline projections that we'd be able to harvest as we continue to execute on this growth opportunity. This is a picture of the mines, a month or two dated now. We're a few benches down. You can see it's easy mining. This expansion zone is a nice flat ranch land that would allow us to continue to expand the open pit in that direction. That's really the cash generation exercise to get to be able to build Ana Paula. Ana Paula is truly something special. The project that had over $100 million invested into it by previous operators that we completely re-scoped. We focused just on the highest grade portion of what was previously looked at as an open pit project to really focus on the highest margin material and redid the geologic model to look at that.
Our VP, Projects, Sam Anderson, looked at these series of high-grade drill hits that had never been tied together. Said, "Let's focus on those." Turned the drills 90 degrees and with 3,000 m of drilling, added 300,000 ounces at more than 10 g a ton to the resource base. Absolutely nailed how to approach this deposit. We put out a PEA at the end of last year, a preliminary economic assessment study, that showed a nine-year mine life with 100,000 ounces per year production profile at a $1,000 per ounce All-In Sustaining Cost because of this rare combination of high grade over wide widths. You get economies of scale from the bulk mining that the geometry permits. You get incredibly high margin from mining the high-grade material over those widths. You don't have to build a big mine to get a meaningful amount of production.
An 1,800 ton per day mine mill operation will produce this 100,000 ounces a year. It's really this unicorn in terms of the geometry and economic setup to produce very, very robust cash flow. That was shown in that economic study that we put out. Some quick math. Let's call it a $4,000 gold price and a $1,000 All-In Sustaining Cost to make the math easy. $3,000 margin, 100,000 ounces a year gives you $300 million in pre-tax cash flow. After tax and exploration spending, this should throw off about $200 million of annual cash flow, U.S. annual cash flow. We're trading at just over 2 times annual cash flow corporately of just Ana Paula. Again, we think as we de-risk this asset, advance the studies, advance towards production, we should see that be reflected in our share price.
In order to advance this quickly, we've been executing on drilling. We've just wrapped up a 25,000-meter drill campaign focused on upgrading this half million ounces of inferred material. The idea is that that'll make it into the feasibility study that we'll put out at the end of Q2 next year, to be able to show a 10-year mine life at 100,000 ounces a year as a target, and really supported by these broad widths of high grade. You can see here on the page, 88 meters at 16 grams a ton, 16 meters at 16 grams a ton, 161 meters at 4.26 grams a ton. This is a true bulk tonnage ore body that really affords us some spectacular cash generation potential. We're advancing this on three tracks.
The first one is technical, where we've incorporating the infield drilling. We're continuing to drill now, we'll go into that. Incorporating that drilling to support all that technical work that goes into supporting a mine build, advanced metallurgical testing, detailed engineering, optimized mine design, all the things that go on that'll culminate in that feasibility study that'll be out late Q2 next year. We're modifying the existing permit. This was fully permitted for an old open pit project the way it was previously envisioned. We've since re-scoped that to underground. Nevertheless, we're submitting to the government what our actual plan forward is, asking for about one-third of the disturbance that has already been permitted. Then, have budgeted 10 months for that to turn around once it's submitted in August this year. Then we're advancing financing as well.
We expect to generate about $150 million of internal cash flows for the project, and we'll pair that with $150 million of project finance or corporate debt to be able to support the $300 million CapEx bill to bring in the Panuco online. We want to have all three of those pieces lined up and ready to go by the end of Q2 next year. Make the construction decision 15-18 month construction timeline and ramping up to 100,000 ounces a year by the end of 2028. That would put us corporately at 200,000 ounces a year at a $1,500 per ounce All-In Sustaining Cost. If you look at any other companies that have that sort of profile, they're trading with about a $3.5 billion enterprise value versus our, round numbers, half billion dollar enterprise value right now.
Again, significant re-rate potential as we execute on our growth and de-risk the Ana Paula cash flows. As I mentioned, we've continued to drill, chasing the deposit down dip, and really had some good success there at showing the high-grade nature of this deposit continues. 100 meters at 5.3 grams a ton. This top 30 meters of that was true in a inferred stope. The next 70 meters was all incremental to the mine plan. 25 meters at 8.26 grams a ton, that was located 80 meters below the deepest drill hole that supports the current mine plan. We know this high-grade system continues down at depth, and the reason we're so excited about that is because of who our neighbors are in the district. This picture's taken standing on top of the Ana Paula deposit. You can see Torex's mine, the Morelos Complex.
That's a 12 million-ounce deposit, produced 420,000 ounces of gold last year. The single asset production gave them a $6 billion valuation. Los Filos, the next valley over, you can just see the mine peeking through the gap in the mountains there, is a 15 million-ounce deposit. We're in a part of the world that creates elephant-sized deposits. Ana Paula sits geologically much higher up, compared to what Torex and Los Filos are mining. We think as we're able to chase the deposit deeper, we should hit the sort of multimillion-ounce potential that supports these other two mines. Stay tuned as we continue to search to define that. Beyond that, we've got our Cerro del Gallo project that we'll build following Ana Paula, as I mentioned. We put out a pre-feasibility level study on this in Q4 last year.
We'll likely re-scope this as 100,000 ounces a year for more than 10 years. That study also showed us how we'd be able to expand the scope of the project. That mine plan sits as a small subset of this 5 million-ounce total resource. We're now working on some of the levers we need to pull to include more of that resource in a subsequent mine plan to really show the true scale of what this project can become following Ana Paula. That PEA showed very robust economics, almost a $1 billion NPV at a $3,900 gold. Very low AISC given its high grade and low operating strip ratio. We recently acquired the Golds trike project, from an outfit called Liberty Gold. It was their secondary project, their single asset developer, which didn't have the bandwidth to advance both projects.
We have a series of staged payments over five years to them that matches well with our cash flow profile from the rest of our development pipeline. We bought 1 million ounces in the Great Basin geology in Utah, for about $75 an ounce over five years. We see a lot of geologic upside potential, at depth, with 95% of the drilling less than 200 m deep and not into the Paleozoics that typically support some of the mineralization in these systems. It was a path-producing open pit. You can see the picture there on the top that's been since shut down. We think there's a lot of upside to be able to show more scale from the resource and lots more gold in the system.
The icing on the cake was a target called Antimony Ridge, a path-producing mine in the 1970s on the east end of the property that produced 10 tons of antimony and some recent high-grade grab samples. While we're doing our technical review of the gold project, we're going to advance the systematic exploration on the antimony side and be able to show that to the market later in the year. Again, stay tuned for that on the exploration, and critical minerals element. In terms of news flow, we'll be drill bit heavy over the next little bit. We've got mine life extension drilling at San Agustin, down-dip expansion zone drilling at Ana Paula, Veta Madre Plus and regional exploration at La Colorada.
We'll also, in the second half of the year, transition more into an execution phase, showing feasibility study progress update at Ana Paula and the waste stripping at Veta Madre at La Colorada to unlock ore for 2027. Really, the blocking and tackling, that is just the quarterly results showing that the approach is working. We're generating cash flow, we're reinvesting in the business, we're building our treasury, all culminating in that Ana Paula construction decision in mid 2027. If we're able to execute on that, we should be a much larger, much more profitable business over the next few years. Hopefully, be able to create a lot of value for shareholders along the way. Thank you very much. I've got a few minutes left here for questions, so I'll turn it back over to you to facilitate that.
Terrific, Stephen. Very impressive, particularly the fact that you were able to advance so far without diluted financing. Not many miners can show us that. Congratulations. A couple of questions came in. The first one, you kind of alluded to it with your calendar slide, could you just talk about the near-term catalysts that investors should look for that would show you're making progress on this ambitious plan?
Yeah, definitely. Like I said, it kind of falls into the three pieces here. Really, the key part is showing mine life extension in the near term at San Agustin. We've got an 18,000-m drill program that'll have batches of drill results out through the rest of the year, showing where those mine life extensions and, really more meaningfully, that cash generation potential over the next two years comes from that asset beyond what we're showing in reserves. The Ana Paula feasibility progress update we'll probably have out at some point through this summer. We'll give a bit of a peek into all that work going on behind the scenes to make Ana Paula come online within the timeline we show here. Beyond that, like I said, our quarterly results. We always put out our quarters in a timely manner, followed by a webcast.
You're welcome to please tune in to those to get a little bit more color on the business and the financials and that quarterly execution along the way.
Ana Paula will be the next asset that you'll be bringing into production. When you showed some of the slides about that deposit, I noticed one line there that spoke about a financing discussion in the second half of 2026, leading into 2027. There it is. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? You've got so much cash flow coming from San Agustin. What other financing are you looking for?
What we're looking for is more of a project-level financing or debt financing. We're just evaluating these options now, everything ranging from traditional bank financing, that does their deep dive and takes their time but comes in typically at a lower cost of capital. Things like a Nordic bond structure. Given that we've got cash-flowing assets to support debt repayments, we're starting to investigate and see if that's a good fit for us, some sort of corporate facility. A few kind of off-the-wall options, let's call it nontraditional capital providers paying in against a gold prepaid sort of structure, all the way through to your more typical, call it, private equity packages. We're just starting to have these discussions now and evaluate our options really from two angles, what's the lowest cost of capital and what allows us the most flexibility as a business as we continue to grow.
Throughout the presentation, I mentioned both 300,000 and 500,000 ounces of annual production by the end of the decade. The delta there is really explained by M&A. At some point, we would like to tack on additional production to grow quicker, and that is the one thing that we do reserve the right to issue additional equity for. The business plan, as I've laid it out here, doesn't require any external equity to be issued. If we can grow faster, we think that would be well-rewarded by the market and is something we would pursue, obviously for the right asset and the right price at the right time.
You mentioned that you'll be submitting permits for Ana Paula, I believe it was midsummer of this year. How long does the permitting process typically take?
By the letter of the law, it's supposed to take six months. We've allocated 10 months, knowing that sometimes the bureaucracies don't always function on the timeline that you'd like them to. We've seen these permits get turned around with increasing expediency since the new administration has come in in Mexico. The permitting agency, called SEMARNAT, has got a mandate to clear a backlog that was generated, a backlog of permits that was generated under the previous administration. We've seen them make significant progress on doing exactly that. Like I said, six months on paper. We've allocated 10 as a reasonable buffer and to give ourselves a little bit of slack time in there.
Looks like we have time for one more question. You mentioned that the bulk of your employees are Mexican, based in Mexico. Can you just talk a little bit about what it's like for you guys from Canada doing business in Mexico?
Yeah, Mexico's been a great place for us to build this business. Like I said, deep mining culture, great technical skill set. Everybody right from our mine general managers right down to the truck drivers and janitors, geologists and everybody in between are Mexican nationals at our mine sites. It's a very stable democracy, I'd say. The courts are always a bastion of stability. Nothing has ever gone sideways from that perspective. It's tied into North America through NAFTA and USMCA agreements, so there's never anything that goes off the rails from that perspective. You see in the occasional headline, more recently, about some of the conflicts that are happening with some of the cartel activity. That's not in the parts of the country that we operate. That's mostly almost exclusively confined to Sinaloa, and our mines are not located there.
We see it as it's been a very good place to build a business, and we have every success kind of operating day to day there with no disruption.
Well, great. A very impressive presentation. We wish you a lot of success with these mines, developing these deposits. Thank you again for your presentation.
Great. Thank you very much.