All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to the New Found Gold fireside chat. My name is Robert Blum. Again, managing partner here at Lytham Partners, and today have the honor of moderating a Q&A discussion here with Keith Boyle, Chief Executive Officer at New Found Gold. Quick reminder, the company trades under the ticker symbol NFGC on the NYSE here in the United States. Keith, thanks so much for your participation. Welcome.
Thank you, Robert. Good to be here.
Fantastic. For those newer to the story or brand new to the story, how would you describe the company's sort of transformation here over the last year?
What I would say is that, New Found Gold has gone from a purely exploration company to now a producing company. We started that, December of 2024 with, you know, a change at the board level. Paul Huet was brought in as the Chair and, he, you know, with the mandate, let's get to cash flow, we've got such a great deposit here, that, brought me in in January, but also went through the changing out of the board. Everybody on the board right now is new as of December 2024. I started in January of 2025 and changed out the whole management team except one individual, Melissa Render, who's the President and, was promoted from VP of Exploration. She found the gold, and, we wanna keep finding gold.
The rest of the team is really an experienced, seasoned team of mine builders. I'm a 40-year mine builder and operator, yeah, I came in to have some fun. We're advancing the Queensway deposit, which last year we put out an initial MRE. We put out a PEA. It showed a really robust project. We went about raising some money. We hired WSP as our EPCM contractor in order to do all the detailed engineering required to advance Queensway. We bought Maritime Resources, a small company that has a mill or had a mill, it's ours now, that we wanted in order to then fast-track Queensway into production.
We're gonna double the size of that mill over the next 18 months so that Queensway can get into production by the end of 2027. Really, you know, in summary, we've come from early stage exploration to now producing company because Hammerdown mine that we bought is ramping up production in these gold prices, record gold price environment.
You know, I wanna come back to sort of the company more specifically, but with you being here, I really wanna get your insights given your experience in the markets. Obviously, gold's had really a remarkable run here in 2025. Strong investment flow is still elevated and sort of official sector demand. From your perspective, what is actually driving the gold markets today, and which driver remains sort of maybe misunderstood, most misunderstood by investors?
Well, if I was really, you know, that well-versed in the gold market, I probably wouldn't be doing this for a living. But having said that, look, my view is gold is money, has always been money, for, you know, centuries. You can really see the change in the gold price when the U.S. dollar and gold decoupled. It's really the debasement of the fiat currency that it's maintaining purchase power with the ounce of gold. That adage, that old saying, you know, you buy a fine handmade suit on Bond Street with an ounce of gold, you know, it's pretty good. Like it still holds true. I think that's really the driver.
Central bank buying has definitely been one of the more maybe defining features of this cycle here. Do you view that as maybe short to medium term reaction to some of these recent shocks, or is this something more structural in the global reserve behavior?
Well, I mean, to answer the question I just answered really is it's a reflection that they recognize that they have to support their fiat currencies. I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
All right. Very good. You know, in a world of fiscal strain and sort of these geopolitical fragmentation, persistent uncertainty around real assets, you know, what is the role that you think gold now plays in portfolios as a whole, and what macro change would be most likely to diminish that role?
If you look at the last few years, there was the cryptocurrencies, where a lot of money found its way into cryptocurrencies. You're starting to see a lot of money coming out of cryptocurrencies and looking for another high risk, you know, the risk investment, which gold mining you know is. Gold itself, I think, is becoming more and more seen as that hedge to keeping your purchasing value and, you know, the 10%-15% of your portfolio should be in gold is just becoming more and more mainstream.
You know, even at these elevated prices, gold mine supply still responds rather slowly, right? What are the sort of structural reasons for that, and which bottlenecks do you think matter most over maybe the next few years here?
Well, to get a mine going, you need permitting. Permitting depends on the willingness of the government and, you know, any indigenous groups that are there. Again, the willingness to advance the project. Luckily, we're in Newfoundland, Labrador. Great jurisdiction, probably the best. Well, it is the best that I've operated in. They're in the top ten, you know, when it comes to the Fraser Institute looking for that policy perception. For us, there's that, and then there's access to capital. It's being able to raise the money to advance your project. Ours being a phased project is a huge advantage 'cause it's not a large capital requirement relative to the size of our company in order to get into production.
With permitted mill and tailings and, you know, quick timeline to permit the project and a small bullet to raise, you know, we're well-positioned to advance our project.
You know, the market often talks about ounces, but the real scarcity may be investable ounces, right? In this cycle, what makes a gold project genuinely strategic? You know, is it grade? You know, we just talked about jurisdiction, infrastructure, visibility and permitting, or is there something else there?
Well, I mean, grade is king. You got high grade in the deposit. I mean, that's margin. Once you've established it, and you can't change that's mother nature. Jurisdiction, you can get it to market quickly. Infrastructure, you don't have that timeline to build all that infrastructure and get to site. We're right off the Trans-Canada Highway, you know, less than 20 km from a major airport in Gander. We have the people, skilled workforce that in and around, like, around the project that are looking for jobs at home. Lastly, like I said, the permitting is fast-tracked in particular in Newfoundland.
What they do there is they work with the companies and work through all, you know, all the issues that they may have with respect to your application before you formally apply. Firefly did that last year, and they got their environmental assessment permit in 45 days, which everyone I tell that to, their eyebrows raise, and their eyes get big, and for a reason. That's unheard of. What we're doing, we're doing exactly the same thing, and we expect that same treatment.
You know, just expand on that a little bit more against sort of this background that we're talking about here. You know, why do you think New Found Gold's model is sort of especially relevant now, right? I mean, it's a high-grade flagship at Queensway. It's existing infrastructure through Pine Cove and Nugget Pond, right? Then sort of the ability to pair development with ongoing discovery.
Well, we've got a high-grade core that starts right at surface. We've seen it at surface. We've sampled it at surface, and more recently, we drilled the top part of it equivalent to about a year's worth of production. We know the grade is right there. We have a permitted mill that we're now going to double its capacity to accept that, so that's a straightforward exercise. In terms of resource growth potential, you know, we've got a property package that's 110 km long. The resource is only on a 4.5 km stretch of that property. We've discovered something 11 km to the north that's not in the current initial resource or PEA.
Underground, you know, there's a small contribution in the mine plan for an underground resource, but over 90% of the drilling's been done above 250 meters. It's wide open at depth. You know, we've got at depth a long strike, and then we've got this camp potential along this 110 km property. It's fantastic. With the newly acquired Hammerdown and Pine Cove properties, even more targets that need looking at, all to be able to fill our mills.
You know, with Queensway now sort of sitting, as you said, right at this intersection of exploration and development, how do you sort of look to preserve the upside of district scale discovery while sort of imposing the discipline needed to engineer, permit, and finance phase one here?
Well, we approach it that, you know, call it 60%-75% of the drilling will get put into project-related drilling, including expansion of resource, infilling of resource, and whatever else we need for the project itself. That'll keep the resource expanding, and call it added to the tail of the mine life. What we're really trying to do then is add to the production over and above that, and that's through exploration, and that's the other 25%-40% of the drilling budget that we're looking at in order to then find new deposits, given the size of our project.
Yeah, we've sort of chatted about this a little bit, but the recent work at the AFZ, right, sort of grade control and infill drilling, resource conversion, you know, really seems less about almost excitement, but more about confidence. What has that work told you guys about continuity and the quality of the early mine areas?
As an operator, I always want to see, you know, I want to know what the mill is supposed to receive once you start mining, and that's what it was about. It's about, you know, the last step of de-risking before you actually mine and send it to the mill. Having done it on a 5-by-5 meter centers pattern, basically that first year of production, that's a really high confidence for us to know there's good grade that's gonna come out of the mill.
How are you sort of deciding where the highest value dollar of exploration capital goes today?
Exploration and, you know, a lot of this discussion doesn't get seen, but it's all about advancing the initial targets. You know, that first little bit of rock you find on surface, you know, it's like one in 9,000, 10,000 ever make it to production. You need lots of these indicators at start. Well, we have a lot of them, and so it's parsing through them and always raising the quality of those initial targets. Melissa and her team, Melissa Render, have done a great job of that up until now, where, you know, Dropkick being one of the first ones. Now, we're following up at Paul's Pond, which is 65 km to the south. There's other structural features that she'll be following up on that match some of this, these high-grade grab samples they got at surface.
You touched a little bit on this earlier, you know, really Hammerdown changes the conversation because it adds production and the team, right, to develop in-house operating experience to the story here, beyond the obvious cash flow. What does Hammerdown also allow New Found Gold to do differently as an organization?
Well, we're building a team. They're building knowledge. Hammerdown is a 700-ton-a-day open pit, small vein-type open pit mine. All the procedures, all the startup that they're going through right now, building a brand-new team within the company, everything they've got to do for grade control and, I'll call it, dilution control. All that's getting learned now, and guess what? That's where they're going to be able to apply it next year when we start up Queensway.
Yeah. That same idea of sort of leveraging sort of experience, you know, with Pine Cove and Nugget Pond, you know, important because they do bring that permitted processing infrastructure into the platform. How much do those assets change maybe the timeline, the capital intensity, and the execution risk for Queensway?
Well, I mean, it reduces the execution risks tremendously. It saves us two to three years on our timeline to get Queensway into production. Had we built a mill on site, it would have taken two to three years longer.
All right. Back to Hammerdown here for just a moment. You know, the updated plan introduces more of a regional platform logic, you know. Now with Hammerdown, Orion, you know, feeding into Pine Cove here, how should investors think about that strategically as an asset, a hub, or is it sort of a bridge to a larger company?
Well, I mean, you've got it all of the above. You've got to look at this as the Pine Cove mill being the strategic asset, and now it's up to us to find the deposits to keep it full. We're gonna double its capacity to 1,400 tons a day. It'll be processing Hammerdown at 700 and then Queensway Phase One at 700. But once Queensway Phase One is done, we'll have an extra 700 tons a day to fill that mill. That's where, you know, adding in Orion, Stog'er Tight, and more discoveries, more resources to then double the capacity of that, I'll call it Hammerdown, Pine Cove property set. Well, now you're looking at a multi-asset company.
Well, in the final couple of minutes that we have left here, what is it investors, you know, should think about over the next 12 to 18 months? What are the milestones that really matter, you know, not just for news flow, but for proving the broader thesis here for the company that it can evolve into sort of this differentiated Canadian producer?
Well, I mean, we're right now ramping up Hammerdown, so we'll see commercial production in the second half of this year. We're doubling the size of Pine Cove mill. So you'll see milestones of, you know, first, the construction to start, then as construction progresses to next year, where the first part of the Pine Cove switchover of the circuit happens, and then we're able to send the Queensway material over to Pine Cove in the, you know, in the fourth quarter of next year. So that's operationally what we're going to see, the start of construction at Queensway itself. But on the exploration front, we still will be continuing our exploration. We have four drills turning on site, and we'll continue to look to expand the resource, infill the resource.
We infilled last year phase one. Now we're infilling phase two, and now we're also looking at infill drill and expanding phase three, which is the underground portion, as well as looking at targets within the resource envelope, because you know, these are structurally controlled. There's still some blank spaces that we want to test. We've got a structural model that we continue to test and want to find more of these high-grade shoots. That's within the resource, and then on the exploration front, we want to continue looking along strike on the Appleton, but also looking in parallel to the Appleton to see where the better targets are for future deposit generation.
All right. Very good. Well, Keith, greatly appreciate your participation in the summit here today. Thank you to everybody for watching here. If there are any questions for the company, I'm sure you can reach out to investor relations folks there. Or if I can help in any ways facilitate anything, please reach out to me as well. That's Blum, B-L-U-M, @lythampartners.com. Again, have a number of presentations, fireside chats coming up here throughout the day, so please stick around for more. Again, Keith, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Robert.