Alright, thanks everyone for joining us today. We have an update with Sierra Madre, who just put out very strong Q2 numbers, the Second Quarter of Commercial Production, so very exciting. With me, I have CEO Alex Langer and CFO Ken Scott. I don't believe that we're going to be working off a presentation today, but there is an updated presentation on the website where you can find forward-looking statements. This session will contain forward-looking statements, so feel free to check those out. We will have a Q&A session, so feel free to enter any questions you have in the Q&A box. With that out of the way, hi gentlemen, thanks for joining me.
Good morning, Deb. Always a pleasure to chat.
Maybe you want to give us a little bit of an update on the quarter, and then we can jump into Q&A?
Yeah, sounds good. No, happy always to give everyone an update, and I'm happy that Ken gets to join us for the first time, which is great. Greg is away, well-deserved holiday. He's actually fishing, which is his absolute passion, so we're happy that he got away at least one week this year, which is good. Really happy with the Q2 numbers. You know, we showed progress in pretty much every category, which is great. We did have a little bit of an early onset of the rainy season, which did impact things a bit, but of course, with the capital raise that we just did, the $19.5 million, we'll be able to address that for next year, like get some power redundancy systems, some power generation backup. We're working through that right now. It got us a little bit early.
Our numbers were still good, so really happy with that. That progress is being made kind of every which way. What I think would be best is maybe I hand it over to Ken to maybe walk through some of the highlights of Q2, and then from there we can get into the questions and answers.
Thanks, Alex. Yeah, I'll just hit a few of the bigger highlights. Our net revenues, $5.36 million, up from $4.84 million in Q1. It's about a 10.7% increase. EBITDA, $1.46 million versus $1.07 million in Q1, so about a 36.5% increase, which we're obviously very happy with. Our MTM for the quarter was $400,000 versus only $120,000 in Q1, and that's because our sales are M+1 . During the period, silver and gold prices were increasing, which was a positive impact for us. Our working capital increased from around $2.2 million- $3.3 million in the quarter, a 48.8% increase. Those were all very, very exciting numbers for us. We're really happy with those. Our cash costs did creep up by about 2% from $23.08- $23.56. Our all-in costs from $28.98- $30.10, just under a 4% increase.
We would attribute most of the increase to power outages from rainy season, the startup of Coloso, and just equipment availability. It was all in all a very good quarter. Back to you, Alex.
Great, thanks Ken. Yeah, Deborah, I don't know if you have any questions or we can get going after that.
Q&A?
Yeah, let's do it.
Okay, so starting with the quarterly results, looking at Q2 performance, how did the Coloso ramp-up in the quarter proceed versus earlier expectations, and how should we expect this performance to impact Coloso output over the rest of the year?
Yeah, so Coloso, I think the big feature there is it's about 1.7x higher silver grade and about 1.2x higher on the gold grade side. When the mine shut down in 2017, 2018, about 100% of all material that First Majestic was mining came from Coloso. It's a new mine, really large entryways and really, really good shape. For us, we're still ramping it up quite a bit. Obviously, you're going to see increased costs, which we saw in the quarter. The plan is to get to about 150 tons per day by year end coming from Coloso. The higher grade material would be about just under 1/3 of total output would come from Coloso. Rainy season is pretty hard right now, so a lot of the work we need to do is dewatering.
We have a lot of the pumps pumping water, and we're moving slowly but surely all the way through. We've seen a ramp up absolutely of, you know, 10 tons per day, 20, 30, 40 tons per day, and we've had days of even more material coming from Coloso, and that is increasing kind of gradually as we get up towards the end of the year where it should be about 150 tons per day if we stick to the 500 tons per day mill scenario.
Awesome. Can you speak to the development that took place at Guitarra in Q2 and how it's expected to impact head grades over the rest of the year?
Yeah, that's a great question. We're still catching on the development. These things take a long time. You know, usually when a mine shuts down, it takes quite a while to get back up and running in terms of underground development. We went forward and started producing relatively quickly. We had some ratakes, which were pre-blasted old mining material that we were able to process, and we'd be mining fresh ore, even since the test mining phase late last year. We're increasing fresh ore that we're mining literally on a monthly basis. I think when we started this year, commercial production was only about 20%- 30% in quarter one of fresh ore.
We're probably at about 50/50 for Q2, and by the end of the year, I expect it to be about 80/20, 80% fresh ore coming from La Guitarra as well as Coloso and 20% of this ratake material that we do have. It's good. What's nice about the fresh ore is it is higher grade than the ratake material, but as Ken will always tell me, the ratakes have a much lower cost since it's pre-blasted and we're able to process that right away. It's a little bit of give and take, but as we get into the higher grade Coloso ore, that's going to be really significant, especially to the bottom line and revenues. I think those are kind of the big features. We can only get so far on a daily basis as well in terms of development. We usually blast towards the end of the shift.
It takes a couple hours for that material to settle before you can go in and keep moving. We do anywhere from three to eight meters of development, I'd say, at Guitarra on a daily basis. Also, equipment availability has been an issue, especially at Coloso. We kind of had just enough equipment for Guitarra. We had to borrow a wee bit from Guitarra to get over to Coloso, but really happy to announce that we had two brand new, well, two new to us scoop trams that arrived last week and are already in operation. Our equipment is now being caught up, which was also a bit of an issue moving things around, but we're really happy with that. Development at both Guitarra and Coloso will continue pretty aggressively from now until we catch up right around the end of the year.
Nice. What's the split between in-resource and out-of-resource material being mined at Guitarra in Q2, and how do you foresee this split trending over the rest of the year?
It's pretty much the same, as we kind of discussed in terms of ratakes. Ratakes weren't part of the resource. Having said that, when we do do development, we do hit interesting visualized material that we're already able to process, especially at today's grade, or today's silver and gold prices, much higher than we had when we started. A lot of material was not part of the resource that we're able to process now and actually, you know, make money on it, which is great. It's kind of in line with that. I would say 50/50 about now and again 80/20, hopefully by the end of the year. As we do develop and find new areas, we can process that. Take off 10% of that or something along those lines.
Okay. What sort of fine-tuning is ongoing at the mines and mill, and how would it impact production in the second half of the year?
We're doing a lot of test work to look at some expansion possibilities. The capital we raised, I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit. We're figuring out the best use of proceeds and where we want to expand first. We're working right now. One thing we've recently done is switched over from regular ball mills to chrome ball mills, which is going to be impacting the grind size, which will allow for better recoveries. That's already kind of implemented. We're also looking at different mesh sizes for the gravity circuit and things like that. We're just doing a lot of the test work as we speak to hopefully put in some expansion material, whether that's a combination of a new ball mill, a new crushing circuit, significant air belts, a lot of different things. I would expect in quarter three to see us hopefully implement some of that.
There'll probably be a bit of downtime as we put in the new equipment and do some of the test work. Hopefully, end of quarter four, moving into quarter one of next year, we'll see an increase of throughput at the mine site. We should have proper news on that, I would say, just before Beaver Creek in about two weeks. We're still doing a lot of the test work. We have a preliminary idea in mind. We've had that in a while, but we just want to confirm equipment availability. We are scouring all the surveyors and suppliers of various materials. We'd love to have it in there today, but these things do take a little bit of time of sourcing the right equipment. It's ongoing, but we hope to have news on that in the next two weeks.
Awesome. Any plans to bring Nazareno online in the near term, similar to how you added Coloso? What needs to be done to add this mining center?
Yeah, Nazareno is another mining center. It's actually connected to Coloso. What's great about Nazareno is its width. They're really, really wide mains, up to 30 m, so they're really low-cost mining. In essence, you do long-haul blasting, and then from there you can muck it out and, you know, kennel like that, as it's really low cost. It is a little bit lower grade, but, you know, when we plan to go from 500- 1,000 tons per day, eventually we're going to need a lot more material. I think Nazareno is going to be a really good help for that. We're going to need that online before we even get into 1,000 tons per day. You're kind of looking ahead there. We hope to have news on Nazareno.
What we need to do there is get a little bit better grade control, so a little bit of underground drilling to understand exactly where we want to blast it from. You want to have minimal waste, especially when you're blasting such large amounts. We got to make sure we're up to speed on that. Access is there, so we're not too far away from Nazareno.
I have an audience question for you. Can you project a timeframe when all three mines will be at full production?
Yeah, we're still working through that. I think we've kind of guided to the market 2027. We'd like to be at a 1000 tons per day. I don't know exactly what that timeframe looks like. I expect all three mines to be actively producing by next year and then full capacity. It's going to be up to the mill and making sure that we have the mill equipment in place and that we also have the availability of tailing space, whether that's backfill going back in, making sure we're staying on top of the filter press for our current tailing deposit, or even moving into phase four, which is a fully permitted 5.8 million ton tailings facility. It's a combination of all those things. My best guess would be 2027.
Everything's up and running and doing really, really well, but a combination of all three of those things being done now and through 2026 should be on the table.
Have you received approval for using cyanide to increase recovery?
We haven't, and we haven't applied for it either. Cyanide, it's interesting. It has a bad connotation in the market for sure, just because of the word cyanide, but I really think that's it. If we were to apply for it, it would be something where we'd have to build a cyanide facility, and it would be encapsulated. It would be quite safe. It would theoretically, and I know First Majestic actually did quite a bit of work on this, increase especially the gold recoveries substantially. If you were to do that, you would also need higher security because you're going to be producing a dory product, and rather than trucking material, you're going to be helicoptering it in and out, so your costs do go up quite a bit.
I don't think at 500 tons per day it would make much sense, but when, and I think it's a when, we get up to 1,000 tons per day, it's definitely something to look at. It would have to take quite a bit of community consultation. I think the local regulators and environmental groups, the permitting groups have been really positive. We have conversations with them all the time. It's amazing. We're up close to 250 people now at site and employment, so it's a huge, huge boom for the local economy. If we were to have those conversations with them, I think it would be received quite well. It's something that's always been in the back of our minds, and it's a great thing. I know Ken Scott's numbers would definitely improve the second cyanide came in. It's definitely on our minds, and it's something we'll look into in the future.
Cool. Given that there's an audience question here. I'm going to skip ahead to the exploration section, and we'll start with his question or her question. Are you able to speak more towards the potential drill plans?
Yeah, no, it's really exciting. You know, it's one of the reasons why, it's the main reason we purchased La Guitarra from First Majestic was for the exploration potential. We truly feel it is one of the largest undeveloped silver districts in Mexico. There's been a bit of exploration on the west side, and on the east side, it's been very, very, very minimal. I think we've identified now about 60 km of main material at surface. There's a bunch of historic, really large past-producing mines, especially in the east district. One is Mina de Água, which had over 10,000 employees during its peak. That one shut down in 1910 just because it got a little bit too deep and it flooded. There was no real way of dewatering mines back then as we have now. The other one is El Rincón.
El Rincón shut down in 1937, but had an incredibly high head grade, about 6.5 g gold and 860 g silver. Really, really amazing grades that are there and the potential. With the capital we just raised at $19.5 million, we've already earmarked about over $5 million of that for drilling in the east district. That should give us 20,000- 25,000 m of drilling. It is lower cost drilling in Mexico. It's road access for us all over the property, which is great. We actually have a large piece of land there that we have leased for about 800 hectares that we can drill from at any time. We've also drilled from underground. It gives us a lot of flexibility there. For us, what we need to do to be able to drill properly is we are staffing up right now for exploration geologists.
We're going to get them in the field more so. We're going to clean up some of the underground workings and map, map, map, map, map, also trench, and getting ready for a proper drill program in the first half of 2026. Greg's big thing is, you know, he needs to hit 80% of his drill holes. Otherwise, you know, he'll fire himself and we do need him. We're not going to let that happen. We just got to build up some more drill targets. We do also have to apply for drill permits. We'll do that relatively soon. I'm sure there'll be an announcement when that time comes that we're applying for permits or that we receive them. You have to be pretty exact now as well when you apply for permits.
Previously, you could say, you know, this area is where we're going to put the drill pad, and you could be relatively, you know, you can move it around a bit. Now you can't. You literally, where your drill pad goes is where you're going to be drilling. We want to be exact. We still have to target perfectly where we're going to put in the aspiration drill holes. You apply for the permits of the drill pad, and then we'll be off and running. To give everyone an example, I think it was about six to eight weeks last time we received drill permits from when we applied for them. That's kind of the timeframe. We do have about 54 drill holes permitted in the west district as well, so we can do a little bit of both. We're excited and working through it right now.
First half of next year, we expect the drills to be turning.
Awesome. How quickly can drilling success translate into plant feed, and would additional permits be needed to mine at the east district?
That's a good question. We went into production again without a feasibility study, without a PEA, just because we understood the deposit really well. We understood the mining. We had all the historic information from First Majestic and from the previous operators. That was great. Now the east district is actually permitted. It did have a MIA on it. Some areas we could actually start taking that material out right now. If we were to find a bit more material, maybe at that El Rincón grade of 6.5 g gold and 8.60 g silver, 100 tons per day would be pretty helpful, right, Ken, adding to some of the grades. To answer your question, we could start pulling material relatively quickly.
Right, then moving on to financing. I guess you've already answered this with the closing of the $19.5 million financing earlier in July. How would you split that between expansion and exploration? You said $5 million is marked for exploration. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the expansion plans.
Yeah, absolutely. The goal is to get up to 1,000 tons per day by 2027. I think eventually we could probably do more than that. Maybe 1,200, 1,500 tons per day would probably be the max. 1,200- 1,500 tons per day eventually. Of that capital we raised, we actually went out to raise $10 million. That was just for planned expansion. We had a lot of interest. I think the order book ended up being close to $30 million, if not more than $30 million. We kind of stopped on $16.5 million, which allowed us to do the full, full, full drill program, the 20,000- 25,000 m. We had an investor who we were quite keen on, Eric Sprott, who decided to come in, and we thought it would be really helpful to have him as a shareholder and on the registry. We opened it up again to bring in an extra $3 million.
Rough estimates is about $10 million for planned expansion. That's tailings, that's underground development, that's equipment. Actually, a couple million of that is for equipment itself. That's for a new ball mill, conveyor belts, paste backfill facility, everything that is somewhat CapEx related outside the equipment, as Ken will remind me. The rest of that is for exploration. We do have a bit of a slush fund, thanks to Eric coming in, which gives us a bit more for exploration. If things go well, and we expect they will, and hope they do, it gives us an extra few million there to do further drilling, even further because we are in cash flows as well.
Awesome. You mentioned Eric Sprott. Can you talk about any of the other participants from the financing?
I think we can now, yeah. When we went out to launch the financing, we were really fortunate to get a big lead order. It was just filed, I think last week on Bloomberg, and it was Franklin Templeton. They're an incredibly large institutional fund, mining-based fund. They've done it really, really well. It's a group we had identified early on that if they were able to, you know, come in as an investor, you know, we would definitely like that and allow us to, in essence, double production and also do a bit of drilling. They were the lead investor. They filed 10 million shares, so we work backwards. It's a $7 million Canadian lead order. That's a fairly small order for them as well. They usually like to do quite a bit more, which is good. That's kind of where the awards came in.
Management and founders, I think we, management, you know, just ourselves, we did well over half a million. Commodity Capital, who's been, you know, one of the funds that supported us from the very, very, very beginning, they maintained their 8%. They put in another $2 million. Then a bunch of institutional money that came in as well. Relatively small amounts, some really good names out of Toronto and Europe, the U.K., which was good. A majority was institutional money. A lot of it, I think our institutional holdings went from like 12% up to 24%. Management, we maintained a good amount from 24% down to 22%. Then quite a bit of retail as well. I know the book, pretty much everyone has cut back down to 20%- 40% of their allocation just because the order book was, I guess, oversold or oversubscribed quite a bit.
I think, you know, if you look in the market right now, trading around $0.84- $0.85 and a financing at $0.70, which is fully free trading now, there was a lot of demand, which I think is a good sign.
Yeah, definitely have seen buying in the market since the financing. It's good to see. Also, just talking about where you're trading currently, you've got some warrants that are close to in the money. Can you talk a little bit about those and the potential proceeds and what you might use that money for?
Sure, and Ken, you're welcome to hop on here. We do have a $5 million loan outstanding still to First Majestic . You know, we were very well aware of that. We did get a year extension, which was really kind of them. It's at 15%. It's, you know, we're very, very comfortable with it. It's not a huge amount. It's $62,500 a month, so really not a huge amount. If the warrant money does start to come in, if we achieve our goals and things trade well, I think a good chunk of that would be earmarked for that. Again, drilling success would breed more drilling need. That's kind of what we're counting on. If we're able to have success thanks to the drill bit, that capital would already provide us with phase two in the east district.
Another audience question here. Will you be able to complete development and continue exploration using operating cash flow and cash reserves without additional capital?
Ken?
Can you give a quick answer to that? Yes. Alex, you can expand.
No, I think you nailed it on the head there again. Yeah, no, we should be absolutely fine here, especially with the capital coming in. Obviously, CapEx money is going to be going into building out the mill a little bit. I think one of the big things that we've been really harping on is equipment. We've been renting a lot of equipment, and it's very expensive, especially haul trucks and underground scoops and everything like that. Now that we have the capital, we're able to buy that equipment, and it's going to drop down our costs substantially. Ken, do you have a rough estimate of what that might look like on a per-ounce basis? Oh, you're on mute now.
I'm sorry. It's by several dollars per ounce that it will drop.
With that equipment coming in?
Exactly, exactly. As we increase our grades at the mine, that's going to then also translate into lower cash costs per ounce because we'll be producing way more ounces. It's a two-edged sword. The mine always wants to expand production, and the CFO wants to see better grades. As we get into the better grades, that pretty much flows right to the bottom line. We expect to see late Q4, Q1 of next year, substantially better results.
Great. A couple more questions from me. I know you talked about use of proceeds and what you'd like to do with the cash. Would you also consider looking at acquisitions? Is that part of the plan?
It's always part of the plan. Yeah, we're in a number of data rooms. We're always looking at projects. Things have gotten more expensive, as you would expect, just with the price of silver and gold going up. We'd only make an acquisition if it was very accretive for us. We're looking at Mexico. We're looking at silver predominantly, some interesting gold projects as well. There's nothing in the near term that we're jumping at right away, but it's a lot of due diligence. We've been looking at a number of projects. We've been traveling to projects, but La Guitarra is a special beast. We have more than enough on our plate right now in terms of the expansion plan and in terms of the upcoming drill program that we really want to be focused on that.
If there's an opportunity that came to us, we're definitely spending the time looking at that. If it's accretive, it's something that we're prepared to move on.
One last question for me. What news flow should investors look for for the rest of the year? What are your catalysts?
Yeah, it's going to be quite a few. I think the one I'm most looking forward to personally is going to be the expansion plans. The plan there is to have something down that we're going to put up on the board and work through a Gantt chart and have deliverables for everybody in terms of this equipment is coming then and what that looks like and make sure the underground development is caught up for that. That should be right around Beaver Creek. That'll be whether we go to 640 tons per day or 750, 800, 1,000 tons per day, kind of giving us a timeline of when I expect or when we expect mill expansion to happen and corresponding material being moved to the mine. That's going to be the next really big piece. That should be right around Beaver Creek.
From there, you will have some news on equipment that we hopefully eventually switched over to a full fleet of our own, not using rental equipment anymore. We'll have our, and then from there, there'll be a lot of news when the equipment arrives. If we add a new ball mill, once it's installed, we'll talk about that. We'll have news on tailings, which is good. The quarter three results and really just expansion and making sure everything is moving forward and really looking forward. I think quarter four is progressed to be quite a great quarter, especially right around then. Hopefully, some equipment or some plant upgrades will be in place by then as well. Lots of news coming.
Sounds like it. Congratulations on a successful quarter and a successful financing. Sounds like this year's been really a formative year for the company. Congratulations to you both. We're looking forward to the second half of the year. Thanks to the audience for your questions and participation. If anyone has any follow-up questions or would like a one-on-one call, please feel free to reach out. Enjoy the rest of the summer. See you at Beaver Creek.
Sounds great. Thanks so much, everybody, for the time. Thank you a lot, Deborah.
Thank you, everyone.