Hello everyone, and thank you all for joining us during the Lytham Partners Fall 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Adam Lowensteiner. I am Vice President at Lytham Partners. Today, Mark Smith, Chairman and CEO of IBC Advanced Alloys, will be taking us through a brief slide presentation. IBC Advanced Alloys trades under the ticker symbol of IAALF on the OTCQB and IB on the TSX Venture Exchange. Let's get started. Mark, welcome.
Well, thank you very much, Adam, for that introduction, and good day everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here. I hope you pick up on the excitement that we are feeling in this business when I am done with this presentation today. What a great time to be in the business at IBC. As we move forward in the slide deck, we have our normal forward-looking statements as a publicly traded company. I will let you read those at your pleasure. Let's talk a little bit about IBC, and let me apologize a little bit upfront, because I will be reading a little bit, which I do not like to do with a slide presentation. There is a lot of precision within these four bullet points that I think is very important for us to make sure we get across.
First of all, we are really all about copper, but we are looking at ways to expand our business into new copper alloys and new other alloys, including one that you see here called aluminum scandium alloys, and we will cover that as we get into the slide deck in a little bit here. We are the only United States' company that both casts and forges copper and copper alloy products as its primary business. As you will see as we get into the presentation more and more, we are an extremely vertically integrated copper caster and forge product producer. We have a couple of people on our team that are just really top of the field in technical expertise for these products and these alloys.
In fact, they are often sought after for advice from our customers before they even start deciding what they want to use for the alloys and for the shapes of the parts and whatnot, because our people have so much hands-on experience that they can really give them immediate information and immediate valuable information on how to get the most efficient system going and get the right part out there. The last bullet point is the one I want to be pretty precise about, but we can do casting and we can do forging, and the forging would include hammer, press, and ring rolling. We have heat treatment capabilities, and we have machining operations. So we are truly a vertically integrated copper alloy producer and copper alloy parts producer. Moving to the next slide, just a little bit of information on the shares themselves.
You can see here, both the Venture Exchange and on the OTC. We've had some pretty good share performance here for, I don't know, probably almost a year now. I think our performance that we'll be showing in our annual report, which will be filed reasonably soon, and then the first quarter of our fiscal year, I think will really support what you see in the fourth quarter of our annual report. That is our earnings and our ability to generate revenue are growing quite dramatically, and we see continued growth in those areas. We can say that because our backlog of orders is growing quite rapidly right now. That's always a good sign. Of course, we want the backlog not to be too big because we want to make sure we get the parts to our customers when they want them.
Our backlog is growing quite nicely right now. As we get back into a little bit more information on the company, you can see that the diversity of the markets that we serve is really, really quite broad. The two that are always fighting each other for number one or number two spot each week right now and each month is the defense and the electronics industry. We saw defense really taking hold as the number one source of revenue for us for a period of time. The last few months, we've really seen electronics come back with a bang, and it's competing quite well with defense in terms of how we get the revenue generated in our company. Next slide shows some of the names of the companies that we deal with and the people that we're providing these copper alloys or copper alloy parts to.
These are certainly names that we're very proud of. These are really household names in the United States, and from a credit standpoint, really present a really nice credit risk position for the company when it comes to serving these customers. We're very proud of them, and we strive to serve them the best way that we can at all times. We go to the next section here, going to talk about copper a little bit more, and we're going to start by talking about the copper super cycle. Let's go to the next slide where we can show from 1999 to 2012, there was a super cycle for copper that occurred. The reason we call it a super cycle is that demand rose by almost 47%, and more importantly, prices increased for copper by 406%.
Needless to say, during this time, IBC's value-added copper products increased in value as well and allowed the company to become what it is today in terms of a vertically integrated forge and product producer. If we take a look at the next slide, we believe in all the people that spend their life forecasting what copper is going to do, and we certainly believe what they believe right now. We believe another super cycle is on its way, and we're suggesting that super cycle is going to occur from 2024. It's been happening for the last couple of years. We've certainly seen it and felt it, and we think it could go as long as 2035. The new demand, interestingly enough, is expected to be driven by U.S. consumption, and that's important since we're a U.S. company producing parts and alloys for a lot of U.S. customers.
But we are expecting the demand for copper to increase by about 63%. It's going to be going from 25 million tons in 2021 to a forecasted level of 49 metric tons by 2035. This is another huge increase, and you can see with the supply and demand figures and what the supply deficit is going to be, that there is certainly a very strong case to be made that prices for copper will continue to increase. As we go to the next slide, you can see that that is precisely what has been happening here. Very, very strong upward trend in copper pricing, and that's a very good thing in terms of IBC's revenue and ability to generate earnings and cash flow. It certainly supports our view that we are in the middle of a copper super cycle as we're speaking here today.
With that copper super cycle in mind, let's go to the next slide. You can see that what we're trying to do as a company is to position ourselves so that we have the best pricing and revenue and margin capability possible as a company. We're doing very well in that regard. Our margins are actually improving as we speak. That has a lot to do with some of the precision you can see in point number two, the precision copper products that we're producing, which do command higher prices and higher margins. We're trying to solve problems for our customers. What this ultimately kind of results in is bespoke alloys being produced for very specific purposes.
Every customer kind of has their recipe that they're looking for a copper product that allows us to utilize our technical expertise to help them, and it allows us to use our vertical integration to provide the alloys and the products that they need. Lastly, I'll point out, I know tariffs have been a pretty big issue in the country as of late. Because of the exemptions that there are for the imports of raw copper or raw copper billets, we have not really experienced any impact to date as a company as a result of any of the tariffs that are certainly quite public these days. With those three ideas in mind and that copper super cycle becoming real, we have a growth strategy within the company. Now we start out by saying we have an outstanding foundational business.
That foundational business has been growing 4%-6% per year for a very long time, and it's growing at that foundational business with those household name companies that we showed you earlier on. This is an outstanding base business that we have. What we're looking to do now is to expand our business and look at new areas for growth. The way that we plan to do that is to expand into what we call near net shape copper alloy cast products. I'll cover that in more detail in just a minute. We want to get into more copper nickel and aluminum bronze alloys. That has a lot to do with point number four, which is expanding sales to the Navy. Those are the types of alloys and cast products that they need, and they are expanding unbelievably right now.
Finally, expanding production of our cast and forged parts made with aluminum scandium alloy, I will cover that in more detail as well. Let's go to the next slide and talk about the first part of our growth projects. The first part is this casting of individual components. It is near net shape parts, and we do that from a variety of copper alloys. You can see in the picture to the right, that is an example of one of the parts that we have cast as part of this new growing effort. We have got quite a few orders coming in for this type of product already. We can cast parts that would be upwards of 500 pounds each, and it has been really kind of fun to see this part of the business grow.
In order to make that business even better, we are looking at adding a Vacuum Cap Furnace to our foundry. We have the spot in our foundry for that. We had planned ahead for it. We do have the spot ready to go. By putting a Vacuum Cap Furnace into our foundry, we will then have the capabilities to do copper nickel alloys, which really allows us to expand the products going into the Navy in particular. Very excited about that. A follow-on to that Vacuum Cap Furnace is also discussed here, and it gets that copper nickel alloy production capabilities in country and in-house. This is pretty important because today, the United States imports over 90% of the copper nickel alloys that it needs, particularly in the Navy. We can bring that production capability onshore the United States.
We would have the capability of producing the alloys that you can see here, all starting with a C, and they are very gas-sensitive alloys. That is why you have to have a Vacuum Cap Furnace that will allow us to continue to produce those near net shape castings of up to 500 pounds, but with multiple different types of copper alloys and not the limited types. We can really expand into these gas sensitive alloys, which are particularly in demand with the Navy right now.
This is about a $5 million investment that we will need to make in order to have this Vacuum Cap Furnace. We have already invested about $500,000 into the support infrastructure for that, and we are looking for different ways to fund the remainder of the money that we will need in order to get this Vacuum Cap Furnace into place. Next slide talks about our stage 3.
This really gets into the aluminum scandium alloy production. Aluminum scandium alloys are getting traction across the world right now, but I think in particular in the United States, and even more specifically into the Department of Defense. Aluminum scandium alloys can be used in a number of different places. You get better performance as opposed to just using aluminum by itself. You end up with a lighter weight alloy. You end up with a stronger alloy, which is very important. You end up with a less corrosive material. The aluminum scandium alloy is highly resistant to almost all types of corrosion. Matter of fact, it can replace titanium and tungsten in some cases.
And then with the ongoing growth of what we now call additive manufacturing, I used to call 3D manufacturing, aluminum scandium is a perfect alloy to be used in additive manufacturing, and we are seeing a lot of activity in that area as we speak. There are three different additive manufacturers in Colorado that we are working with, and we hope to gain some very good offtake agreements for our aluminum scandium product as we develop these markets. You can see the picture off to the right here. This was the actual pouring of aluminum scandium alloy that happened in our foundry. It was the first pour that we had made of this alloy, and I am happy to report that every single sample we took during this pour ended up hitting the spec for this aluminum scandium alloy perfectly.
We are going to continue to do test pours to make sure that we can be a reliable supplier of this aluminum scandium alloy on spec at all times. And we are looking forward to this being a fairly near-term growth area for the company and a brand-new product for the company. Finally, stage 4, and then we will be close to done at that point. This is where we want to really go downstream further in our business, and this would include putting in a radial forge into our operations there in Indiana. And that would be about a $25 million capital investment that we would make.
But this really allows us to take the alloys that we are otherwise producing in the Vacuum Cap Furnace, once we have that in place, and start to produce the more close to finished products in terms of the wrought rounds, the bars, and the hollows in at least 1-6 inch diameter shapes that we are looking to make here. These start to get the final products that the Navy actually wants to purchase, as opposed to purchasing the alloy from us and then having someone else do that final finish work for them. So this would put us into the full supply chain from start to finish for the Navy in particular. And with this type of machinery, you can give yourself, as a supplier, very quick turnaround times for customers. You can have inventory that they can pick and choose from and get immediate delivery on.
That really is a thing of importance to the Navy in particular. So, that is kind of a short summary of who we are and where we are going as a company. We are pretty excited about the progress that we have been making just here in the last couple of quarters, and we see nothing but extremely strong traction for that to continue to grow. And we are seeing revenues today that are in some cases 50%-60% higher than they were in the first and second quarter of this calendar year.
So that is very real growth, and it has really good traction behind it. Here is our information in terms of how to contact us. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact us. Adam, thank you again for the opportunity to talk about IBC Advanced Alloys today. We will send it back to you.
Thank you, Mark, and thank you everyone for watching. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with IBC Advanced Alloys, please send me an email at lowensteiner@lythampartners.com. If you'd like to learn more about Lytham Partners, you can visit our website at lythampartners.com or follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected about future events. We hope you all enjoy the rest of your conference and have a great day.
Thank you.