Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Thor Explorations Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged; they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send.
The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish our responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Segun Lawson. Segun, good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon, and welcome to everyone who's dialed in. Thank you. I'm pleased to be here to be presenting our full year 2024 results, which we released earlier this week, and also speak about the outlook for 2025, which we're very excited by after the milestones we achieved last year. We do have a disclaimer in here. There will be a number of forward-looking statements in the presentation, and this presentation will be made available on our website for anyone who wants to read this in more detail.
I'll start off by giving an overview of Thor Explorations, if there are any newcomers on the call. We're a West Africa focus group producer, developer, and explorer. We are advancing projects in three countries in West Africa. We're very well positioned for organic growth through exploration across all our portfolio in these three different jurisdictions.
Our shareholder value is underpinned by very high margin gold production from our flagship project in Nigeria, the Segilola Gold Project, which is based on a DFS open pit of just over 500,000 oz grading of 4.2g per ton. Our production guidance for 2025 is 85,000-95,000 oz and our All-In Sustaining Cost guidance is between $800 and $1,000 per oz. This is coming off a year where we have just completed production of 85,000 oz in Nigeria. Given where the gold price is and given our costs, we believe we are very well positioned for strong growth and our value to be underpinned by this cash flow.
Our second project is the Douta Project, which is now growing to be two contiguous licenses. The latest resource we have on that is a 1.78 million oz resource, which is pretty much 50/50 divided between an indicated resource and an inferred resource. We made a new discovery in the Douta Project earlier this year, which had implications on the timing of the preliminary feasibility study we have been advancing and are going to more detail later on in this presentation.
Also, one of the strategic moves we made last year was expanding into a new jurisdiction into Côte d'Ivoire, where we acquired some very prospective ground on some very, should I say, renowned Boromo Greenstone Belt terrain. That is the tenure we picked up. We picked up three licenses there: the Guitry Gold Project, which we acquired from Endeavour Mining; the Marahui Gold Project, which we acquired from a local partner and have been advancing since Q4 last year; and also the Boundiali Gold Exploration License.
We're very encouraged by what we have seen initially, and I will go into more detail of that in this presentation as well. We've set ourselves an internal milestone there to get that to a maiden resource through the course of this year. We have in Nigeria, as a first mover, also assembled a lithium exploration portfolio, which is over 600 sq km. We have slowed down exploration there. One of the things I will mention in this presentation is we have also purchased our own drilling rigs, which enables us to drill more flexibly and at a much lower cost.
We'll pick up the drilling here once these drill rigs have been commissioned and mobilized in the country. From a corporate snapshot and capital markets perspective, we have just over 664 million shares outstanding. We have no options and warrants outstanding, so our fully diluted number of shares is the same.
As of close of play yesterday, in Canada, we were trading at an all-time high of CAD 0.49, which we were pleased to see, and which was in, and we closed yesterday at CAD 0.25, having a market cap of CAD 325 million. One of the themes we have seen over the last 12 to 24 months is that our shares have been supported by both institutional and retail investors who have supported the share price on the way up. We feel, in addition to this, the fact that management have significant skin in the game, we are supported by what we could call strong hands in terms of the growth of the company.
We also have coverage on both sides of the Atlantic and the UK and also in North America. You can see by the target prices our brokers and bankers do believe we're undervalued, and we look forward to unlocking this value through the course of the next few months and years. The key highlights from last year, I would say, are first of all, we achieved our revised guidance of 85,000 oz. We sold just under 85,000 oz.
There's a significant milestone being the fact that we fully repaid our senior debt with the Africa Finance Corporation, and that has completely taken away the burden of every quarter servicing these large debt amounts and has put us in a much stronger position to fund larger budgets for exploration and also build up cash, particularly in this high gold price environment.
You can see that the highlights of the year last year in terms of financial performance, our revenue was $193 million, with an EBITDA of $133 million and a net profit of $91 million. It was a very strong year financially. We announced earlier this week, alongside with our results, that we are going to pay a maiden dividend in May. On 16th May is the payment date, with the record date being 2nd May . Alongside the maiden dividend payment, we have adopted a dividend policy, which has been approved by our board, which is a payment of CAD 0.0125 every three months on a quarterly basis.
We believe we are well positioned to build up cash and build up sufficient cash to fund all our organic ambitions and also provide a buffer provision in case any inorganic compelling opportunities do come our way. In addition to that, return our cash to shareholders. I mean, the timing of when we announced this dividend, it was a yield north of 11.5%, which is extremely competitive compared to our peer group. We are pleased to do that.
We know that as well as our capital growth, which we believe there are the fundamentals to continue going very strongly, we are well positioned to transition into a dividend-paying yield-performing company. We are pleased to have announced that. I will add that this dividend is for a minimum initial two years, and the CAD 0.0125 is a minimum amount we will pay each quarter.
With the ability to increase this, should there be stronger cash flows in any particular quarter, based on the spike in the gold price and better balance sheet positions at the end of each quarter. Looking at the production summary last year, you can see that we had a very strong Q4 . We mined just over 380,000 tons of ore, grading at 2.3 g per ton.
Through the course of the year in general, in Q1, Q2, and particularly Q3, where we had operational challenges, we knew we had to finish strongly in the year. I think I will take this opportunity to thank the team for all the hard work that went through the course of last year. We were very pleased with not only just the mining, the performance of the process plant as well.
If you compare last year to the year before, yes, we were down in terms of recovery rate %, but we are looking to pick that up through the course of this year. What we did see last year was that we were getting into higher grade, as we were going deeper, higher grade areas of the ore body compared to 2023.
One thing to note here is we are growing a very sizable stockpile at just under 1g per ton. 40,000 oz here is very high value, and it's worth noting at the end of the documented mine life, all this will be processed at an operating cost, which does not involve mining, and those costs are being sunk at the moment. That is also a material amount of gold that does have to pass through the mill at some point in time.
I spoke at a high level on the financial summary, and you can see in Q4, this was really where there was a bumper quarter, a record quarter in terms of revenue, profit, and EBITDA translating across the bringing the average for the whole year up. Our cash operating costs and all-in sustaining costs in 2024 was significantly lower than the previous year.
There are three key reasons for this. I would say the first one is the fact that we are using more compressed natural gas versus diesel to power our process plant. We do still use diesel for our total mining fleet. However, the oil price in Nigeria, the diesel prices have reduced significantly, which has translated to a lower cost there. Lastly, there has been good recoveries from gravity as opposed to the CIL, which has required less power.
We have seen a stabilization in costs for some of our key inputs like ammonium nitrate globally, which we locked in at a point last year. That has managed to keep our costs down. We believe our cost control practices that we put in place last year are carrying through to 2025. We expect and anticipate that 2025, we should be on top of our costs as well.
I have previously highlighted the fact that we have the social license to operate. Without going into every single detail here, I would say we pride ourselves on international best practice, social responsibility, and our commitment to the communities around us. You can see that being reflected in who we hire, the projects we do. We have completed over 40 projects.
We have a community development agreement, which we've rolled out benefits from right from the exploration phase through construction and currently during production. I will take this opportunity to quickly mention the Osun State issue we had in September, October 2024, where there were a number of allegations made against us.
We were pleased to press release earlier this year and publish the outcome of the fact-finding committee, which showed all the allegations to be unsubstantiated. Our operations haven't been affected. We continue our dialogue with the state. We are physically located in that state, and we want a good, amicable relationship to continue there. We have an open dialogue there, but we think it's very important to stress to investors that we have been exonerated at the federal level, the regulator in the mining sector in Nigeria, and we continue our operations there uninterrupted.
Key for us, and easily the highest priority for us as a company, is to extend the Segilola mine life. We had last year completed an initial 12-hole drilling program and have continued that drilling through the course of this year, 2025. The initial program was a proof of concept drill program. We are now expanding the scope of that drilling program to test both the shallow dipping plunges and the steeper chutes, which we have interpreted here.
I think I will go back to the point where I mentioned earlier in the presentation that we have now, having paid off our senior debt, have a lot more budget to throw at drilling here in Nigeria. We are looking to hopefully extend the mine life and do that in a material fashion. One of the ways we are looking to do that is doing our own drilling.
We have purchased our own drill rigs, which should be in country in the middle of this quarter. That would add to the current third-party drill contractors we are using to increase the rate at which we drill here. We are anticipating we drill for quite an extended period of time. When I say that, I mean over the course of the next two quarters, Q2 and Q3, whilst updating the market with the drill results as they come in to start the Q4 with all the data we have acquired from the drilling and push that into an updated mine life.
I will stress that whilst we have not had an official mine life update, we have drilled beneath the pit. We have drilled mineralized minable intersections underneath the pit. We are carrying out this program because we are encouraged by the initial drill results that we have had.
There is a 7,500m drilling program which has commenced and which we are well positioned to increase based on the success of the drilling. Still on exploration, there are several areas we have now identified and drilled historically, and they have been earmarked for follow-up drilling, particularly to the south of Segilola, where we have drilled very high-grade intersections. Again, the use of iron rigs is extremely important in terms of our strategy here in Nigeria.
One thing we had embarked on last year was looking at a regional scale exploration, and we found an area which has had a consistent gold anomalism over a 10km by 5 km sq area, about 52 km to the south of Segilola. That is what you see in yellow in this presentation.
We have actually been working on this over the last three, four months, where the work we're carrying out is soil geochemistry, stream sediment sampling. We're doing some magnetic surveys and also some rock chip sampling. We're very keen to get this data so we can update the market sometime in the next few months. This is something, should all this data stack up, we're very excited to drill. It is a very large area of gold anomalism, and we're actually looking forward to seeing if we can delineate some drill targets over the next few months. That is something where we've put on our priority list to update the market with as well.
I will move on to the Douta Project, which I mentioned we've now expanded into two separate licenses in a very strategic position on this huge shear zone in the Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier in southeast Senegal. We are surrounded by gold deposits and gold discoveries. We have been putting a lot of work into advance a preliminary feasibility study here on what was the Makosa East deposit we had found.
This project, as you can see on the image on the right-hand side, has a strike length of about 7 km, with the Makosa East being running slightly parallel with a shorter strike length to the main Makosa body. We then discovered a couple of hundred thousand ounces in the Makosa Tail and had been advancing all this through the preliminary feasibility study stage. We are working out the process flow sheet. We have submitted our environmental impact assessment.
We have completed all our geotech work. However, fairly late in the game, when we were carrying out some exploration on our new Douta West permit, we did identify a lot of anomalism to the south, which we named the Baraka 3 Target. This was characterized by a structure that extended and we mapped for over 3 km. It had a soil anomaly on this footprint. Not just in the soils, there were some fantastic rock chip geochemical results from 9.5 g per ton, 6 g per ton, 3.67 g per ton, and just under 3 g per ton, extending the entire strike length of this. We planned a few drill lines from the south, extending all the way to the north of the structure.
As we press released earlier, the first two lines confirmed what we thought: a wide, shallow, pretty high-grade for this area discovery in Baraka West, which gave us a bit of a problem internally in terms of sequencing the preliminary feasibility study. The reason being, this mineralization was all in the oxide, where our met test has previously shown recoveries of 90%-96%, shallow from surface, so very little blasting required.
If this mineralization, which we had in the first two lines, continued for the entire 3 km strike length, then this is a significant material amount of gold vis-à-vis the size of the project. Given the fact that it's in the oxide, it would probably, in terms of the mine planning, be right at the front of the mining and processing.
We had to take that decision to complete this drilling first and see how we could incorporate this into the preliminary feasibility study because this could be the early ounces at this grade with high recoveries, easy to mine. This could have potentially material economic effects on the Douta Project as a whole. We are drilling here. The plan is to have three drill rigs here and try and have this all completed as quickly as possible.
We are accelerating an 8,000m drill program across the entire strike length of this structure, which has been shown to be gold-bearing in soils and the rock chips and the first couple of hundred meters. Once that is done, we are going to incorporate that into our total global resource and then update the market on the timing of the completion of the preliminary feasibility study.
Then Côte d'Ivoire. Last year, we had been in Côte d'Ivoire for the course of a year doing a lot of reconnaissance work. That ended up in us picking up three licenses, one northeast, northwest, and in the south. Côte d'Ivoire, needless to say, has been a success story in terms of gold discoveries, construction of gold mines, support from the government.
It is underlain by a lot of the West African perspective, Boromo Greenstone Belt that probably hosts over 90% of all the gold discoveries in West Africa. We like the jurisdiction. We like the mining code. Exploration work commenced here in Q4 last year, early-stage exploration work. We were very encouraged by the results of the exploration work. The first project I'll quickly touch on is the Guitry Gold Project, which we acquired from Endeavour. That already had 11,000m of drilling already carried out in it.
We've started doing our own work here and divided it into three clusters of gold anomalism around a couple of different structures on two main prospects. These targets remain open along strike and down plunge. We have our team there and getting this drill ready in terms of following our own interpretation. We are very excited about this. There has been gold drilled here with some very encouraging intersections already, and we look forward to advancing this.
Our second project, which I'm particularly excited about, is the Marahui Project. It is a 250sq km permit in the northeast of the country. You can see the work we did here. We did a permit-wide soil geochem survey just to see what the signatures are saying. We have picked up a number of structures, which you can see have been outlined in red across the entire anomaly.
The most interesting of which is down in the southeast of the permit itself, where we identified two structures, the larger one being 4 km long and in the widest areas about 200 m wide. This is sitting on top of some Boromo Greenstone, the best rocks you can find for gold in West Africa. We are very excited about this. You can see not just the soils define this anomaly.
This was coincident on the magnetic structure and the Boromo Greenstone and the rock chips, which we have sampled from here. The gold has not been transferred to the rock chips have shown this gold values for the entire 4 km strike length. More work is being done here. We are carrying out some magnetic surveys. There is some trenching, and we will be looking forward to drilling this.
This is something we're very excited about and also following up on the additional targets within this license. I'll finish off by saying what our outlook and catalysts are this year. I've mentioned we do have a target of 85,000-95,000 oz this year at a cost between $800 and $1,000 per oz. We've increased our exploration expenditure in the group. In Nigeria, we're looking to spend between $7.5 million and $10 million. That will get the drilling done underneath the Segilola pit, the targets around it as well. In Senegal and in Côte d'Ivoire, we're looking to spend between $5 million and $7.5 million.
That will get us the drilling done on Baraka 3, the remaining any outstanding items on the PFS drilling program in Côte d'Ivoire, two drilling programs in Côte d'Ivoire where we're looking to have our major resource done this year. Obviously, be advancing our exploration across all our portfolio. The program in Nigeria is ongoing.
The program in Senegal is ongoing as well. In Côte d'Ivoire, we have probably a couple more months to have these targets fully drill ready, and then we will start the drilling there as well. We're extremely excited about where we are in terms of unlocking value through the exploration. We've now put ourselves financially in a position where we're building up cash on a weekly basis. We've paid off our senior debt.
If you look on the slide, if you have the opportunity to follow up and look on the slide on our financial performance last year, we've significantly reduced our accounts payable by the year-end last year. In Q1 as well, that's been reduced even further. Through the course of this quarter now, that accounts payable will be current in terms of a 90 day payment basis. We're confident, and that's why we've been confident enough and comfortable enough to adopt our dividend policy. That's a snapshot and overview of my presentation, and I'm happy to go through the questions now. Thank you.
Perfect, Segun. That's great. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen.
While Segun takes a few moments just to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your Investor Dashboard. Segun, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions that were both pre-submitted ahead of today's event, as well as those that have come through throughout your presentation this afternoon as well.
Firstly, thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. Segun, at this point, sir, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks. Just one second. Okay. Yep. I'm happy to answer all the questions I've got here. I will just read them out, and then I will answer.
The first question is, have you entered into new forward hedging contracts, or are you confident that the gold price remaining elevated for a long while to come? I think I'll start off answering that question by saying the hedges we were in last year have been completely unwound, which was also partly the reason we had a lower average gold sales price in Q4.
We completely unwound the balance in Q1 ahead of what we had initially planned to do. Now we're completely unhedged. We have full exposure to the gold price, which is obviously trading at near all-time highs. We haven't hedged any as of yet. It's a discussion that's going on internally.
We do believe in the immediate future, over the next couple of months, there is a lot of volatility, particularly what's happening in the White House, should I say, that is keeping the gold price at these levels. We have not had any hedges. It's not something we're ruling out.
Last year, around about this time last year, we hedged about a quarter of our production for the year, thinking we were at all-time highs. Obviously, the gold price kept rising. The reason we did that was because we knew we had debt service obligations at that time. We do not have that anymore this year. If the gold price starts to come off a bit, we will look at that and try and lock in some of these high margins.
The next question. I know we must wait a bit longer, but are you confident we will see a couple of additional years of mine life added to Segilola at a minimum? Look, that's a tricky question because I've got to be careful in terms of making forward-looking statements like that.
What I can say is the proof of concept drill program was a success, intersecting gold in such a high percentage of our drill holes. We haven't closed this deposit out yet. The drilling is ongoing, where we wouldn't be stepping up this drilling and spending so much money on this drilling if we didn't feel relatively confident of it being a success. That's all I can really say now. We will be updating the market with our drill results as they come in batches.
Given the recent gold highs, are you planning to enter another forward contract at these $3,000 levels? Okay. We just answered that. Have you got an ETA on providing initial mine life extension figure for Segilola when the additional drilling of Douta will be finished, when the Douta PFS will be released following the new drill results? The first one, providing an initial mine life extension. We do plan on drilling, going hard at it over the next two quarters, and then being positioned in Q4 to come up with an initial number. That is what we are working towards.
The second question was the Douta PFS. The Douta PFS, we will update as soon as we can have all the results in from this drilling. We expect this 8,000m of drilling to be completed in the middle of May, in about four or five weeks. I would say there is a time constraint, which we do not have control over, which is the turnaround time from the labs. Obviously, we keep as much pressure on them to get it turned around as quickly as possible. We will be able to give a timeline then. Once we have all the assay results back, we will. The drilling program is going to be completed over the next four weeks.
Next question. Regarding lithium, do you plan to find a JV partner, similar to other lithium explorers, to develop potential projects within the area? Progress on this on the side so you will potentially explore and sell on to fund funds to accelerate gold projects.
The lithium portfolio is something that's come from us being a first mover in Nigeria. We are a gold company. That is our priority. We think that's what our shareholders want to see. We believe that's going to unlock significant value. With the lithium, we do want to get to a critical point before making any major strategic decisions. That critical point will involve us drilling with our own drill rigs rather than pay the higher cost of using third-party contractors.
Next question. Accounts payable were $46 million end of year. In 2024, OpEx was $50 million. How was it possible to have such a long period of payment? How do you expect accounts payable to go down further in 2025?
Look, like I mentioned in the presentation, the accounts payable has been even further reduced over Q1 and should be completely removed during the course of the next few months. Yeah, I believe I already mentioned that in the presentation. Given how cheap the company trades on a PE multiple while buybacks not be commenced, we did consider share buybacks. The price has rallied. We were in a close period with our year-end results, so we could not initiate a buyback during the close period within 45 days of announcing our results. We have been keen on returning money to shareholders, whether it was a buyback or a dividend. We evaluated both.
The fact that we're listed on AIM and the TSX-V, the number of the regulations regarding a buyback based on our average volume of shares would have meant it would have taken about six or seven months to buy back $1 million worth of shares, which we just thought a more effective way of returning money to our shareholders was through a dividend rather than such a slow buyback over six months.
With the high-grade hits north and south of Segilola, how much open pit life remains? Are you considering a move to underground? Yes, we are considering a move to underground. There will be a natural inflection point based on the gold price and based on the drilling we do.
We're still basing ourselves on the DFS mine life, so another three years, and then hopefully, before the end of this year, announcing what an updated mine life would look like.
You have announced dividends. Can you explain why you prefer dividends to buybacks? Especially as you consider the company undervalued. I think I just answered that based on a previous question. The next three questions I've already answered regarding mine life. Mine life again. Buybacks again.
Previously, you've mentioned $175 million as a rough estimate of CapEx for Douta. Is this still the case if majority of the ore is refractory? The $175 million number was back of the envelope. Based on all the work we've been doing with our contractors, our EPC contractor, that number hasn't changed.
Will Douta be fully debt financed? No, I don't think it would be complete leverage. I think there will be a component to that. We pay from our own balance sheet as well. There will be a large debt facility to finance this as well. I think I've answered everything.
Perfect. Segun, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we will make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. Segun, perhaps before now, just really looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great.
Yeah. Look, I think I'll close by saying I'm pleased with where we are now as a company. We're at the start of the next phase in our evolution. No debt, strong cash flow, growing portfolio, a lot of upside to unlock through exploration, some significant milestones to achieve this year in three different countries, and significant exploration potential in all three countries. We are very excited. The fact that we've transitioned into a dividend-paying company shows our commitment to returning money to shareholders in a sustainable way.
Look, I'm personally very excited about 2025. I think there's a lot more to come. As I speak now, the drill rigs turning on two of our projects. In a couple of months, it'll be on all three of our projects. Yeah, look, we're doing all of this with no debt and in an all-time high gold price environment. It is an exciting time for us as a company. We are very much looking forward to 2025.
Perfect, Segun. That's great. Thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? It will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Thor Explorations, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.