Next lithium producer in Brazil. Currently, we're trading at approximately a $150 million market cap. We have two analysts covering us today. Both Jake and Heiko had visited the project and had a very great visit with the management team, each of them. They have reports with the buy recommendations and respective price targets of $20 and $12.50, which is much higher where we trade today, clearly.
In terms of the institutional ownership for Atlas Lithium, we are proud to say that we have seen an uptick in our institutional ownership just over the past quarter from approximately 10% to nearly 20% today, and we're very honored to see that interest. Part of it is the fact that lithium market has been improving over the past few quarters.
Part of it is the fact that we are planning to be transitioning from exploration to pre-production stage quite soon. I think this is getting noticed by the street. If you look at the list of institutional shareholders, you see that we have Mitsui & Co., which is a premier Japanese trading house name.
Mitsui had done over a year and a half of due diligence on us before proceeding with a $30 million investment, which made them the second largest shareholder in Atlas Lithium. We're honored to have Mitsui in our register, and they've been a great supporter of ours since their investment.
We have names such as Citadel that invested close to $10 million in just December last year, and many other quite respectable names picking us up, which is quite interesting and I believe it's quite telling the fact that the institutional ownership has been growing over the past quarter. Our investment thesis is essentially sixfold.
We will be one of the lowest cost producers in the world with the projected costs at the mine of $489 per the ton of lithium concentrate produced. We will be able to produce at such a low cost primarily because of the two reasons. We have a great asset that is close to the surface, amenable to open pit mining, which is cost effective. Brazil is an excellent jurisdiction in terms of cost.
The energy cost, the labor cost, they're a fraction of what they are in some of the other jurisdictions such as Australia or Canada. Our timeline to production has been greatly expedited at this stage. We have key permits already in place. Our DMS processing plant, which will be producing 150,000 tons of spodumene concentrate, has been fully paid for, fabricated in South Africa, and shipped in Brazil.
It's through customs. It is now in Brazil, fully ready for assembly. Of course, our roadmap to production, which is our definitive feasibility study, a robust nearly 500-page document, authored by SGS, is already fully published, and it is publicly available. We filed it with the SEC. All of those pieces are in place for us to be advancing towards production quite quickly.
We have the largest lithium exploration portfolio in Brazil, nearly 3x the size of Sigma Lithium's portfolio, which is next to us, a $2 billion producer next to us. A lot of it remains obviously to be explored, and we'll touch on our exploration potential at the end of this presentation.
The management team is incentivized to make this a success for all the common shareholders. Marc Fogassa, the founder and the CEO, owns approximately 23%, 24% or so of the common shares, and there's a few more percentage points for the rest of the management team. All of us are incentivized to make the common shareholders happy and to, you know, fully align for success.
In terms of the offtake partners, we are the only company in Brazil that has three committed Tier 1 offtake partners. We'll touch on that on the next slide. I think this is a big comment on the quality of the asset and the quality of the team. Of course, the last point here is the fact that Atlas Lithium owns approximately 21% of Atlas Critical Minerals, which also trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ATCX.
That company is currently developing projects in rare earths, titanium, graphite, and uranium. This is an added benefit, an added ownership benefit for any shareholder of ATLX. We have three offtake partners committed to us today. As I said, Mitsui have made a $30 million investment.
They are the second largest shareholder. They're also an offtaker with a small part of our phase one production of 150,000 tons. They will be getting 15,000 tons of product from that. There's two of the largest Chinese chemical producers, Chengxin and Yahua. Both of them had already committed $5 million into our equity.
They have committed $20 million as a non-dilutive prepayment for offtake each in exchange for 60,000 tons of our product for the duration of five years. Yahua is one of the major suppliers to Tesla. Chengxin is one of the major suppliers to BYD. We are very honored to have secured the interest of these companies.
Clearly, having three offtake partners, like this is a vote of confidence on the type of asset and management and the business plan that we have in place. These companies are now going through the final stages of technical due diligence, and we anticipate to be updating the market on the status of these prepayments soon.
After we receive these prepayments, we anticipate to be fully funded to production. Brazil's Lithium Valley, imaged here on the right. Atlas Lithium is in blue. As you can see, our portfolio sort of envelopes the entirety of the Lithium Valley. The project that we'll be producing first is the Neves project here in the south, if you can see my cursor. This is where our plant will be assembled, and this is where we will be producing first.
However, we also have excellent projects all the way in the north of the valley. There is a Salinas Project, for example, which is located next to what used to be Latin Resources. Pilbara Minerals bought the Latin Resources for $370 million equivalent in August of 2024, and we have an excellent project located immediately to their flagship there.
We've already placed some initial drill holes there with the lithium discovery close to the surface, and we'll touch on that at the end. That will be most likely our second expansion frontier. Of course, we also have excellent areas with lithium identified by the surface markers in the Clear Project, closely located to Sigma Lithium's flagship mine.
There's many more areas in the center and north of the valley that remain to be explored. That's where in terms of the regional potential, we have 557 kilometers squared of lithium exploration rights, and that's almost 3x larger than Sigma Lithium's holdings. As you may know, Sigma Lithium trades today at approximately $2.5 billion .
They are a producer. In terms of the DFS, this is a high quality, nearly 500 pages document, which was authored by SGS, a premier name in mineral evaluation. The DFS outlines what is an exceptionally attractive from the economic standpoint project, Neves project. Our NPV after tax is $539 million, and this is at presumed prices that are actually below the prices that we're seeing in the lithium market today.
We plan to be producing at a very attractive cost of $489 per the ton of lithium produced at the mine. Just for the reference, lithium concentrate such as ours has been trading greater than $2,000 per ton recently. And of course, our CapEx is another point worth highlighting here.
It is very attractive at only $57.6 million direct CapEx to get to production. If you take a look at some of the comparisons in the area, we're talking about other projects needing a CapEx of $200+ million compared to only $57.6 million for us, which is what makes us a much easier to get to production in terms of that.
Here's the breakdown of the costs for the CapEx and the breakdown for the OpEx as well for those people who want to get into more detail on this. In terms of the lithium demand, if you talked about lithium in early 2025, it was all about electric vehicles.
Essentially, it was all about EVs. What has happened in mid 2025, mid last year, is that the conversation has quickly shifted to energy storage systems as well. The reason for this has been the growth of AI and the requirements for multiple new large data centers.
All of these data centers will be requiring an uninterrupted power supply, because it doesn't matter whether the lithium or whether the data center is getting its power from the grid connection or from, you know, the small modular reactors that are being developed. The power has to be stored somewhere to allow for uninterrupted 24/7 supply.
This is where lithium-based power sources, energy storage systems come in, and the demand has been blowing everything out of the water. I mean, we've seen market leaders such as the chairman of Ganfeng, one of the largest lithium companies in China, come on a conference call a few months back and say that the energy storage systems is absolutely blowing everything out of the water in terms of demand they had never anticipated.
Now, of course, electric vehicles continue to be still the major driver percentage-wise of the demand, but the energy storage systems have really sparked what has become a significant rebound in pricing of lithium over the past three quarters, and it appears to be continuing here in the near future. In terms of the team, Marc Fogassa is the Chairman and CEO. I'll let him introduce himself. Marc, please.
Thank you, Igor. I was born and raised in Brazil. I grew up in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. Valedictorian of my high school of 600 students, a Portuguese-speaking high school. I was the first person from my family to come to the U.S. I'm only child. My parents were middle class, and wanted to study in U.S., and I ended up at MIT, where I did really well, double majored, then proceeded to going to Harvard for a couple degrees, including an MBA.
During my time at Harvard Business School, I was elected co-president of the Private Equity Venture Capital Club. In that capacity, I was able to get a job in venture capital as a student and close my first deal as a student and joined that board.
One of my early deals in VC in the U.S., which had nothing to do with Brazil or mining, was a company that came to me from Yale as a PowerPoint. We invested, I joined the board, that company grew from a PowerPoint, essentially, to a billion-dollar Nasdaq valuation over time.
Today, we call that a unicorn. That made an impression on me. When I'm, when I was in my early 40s, I decided that I wanted to do that again, but now as a founder. Here we are today. We're extremely, intensely, committed to building a multi-billion dollar enterprise. We have the largest portfolio for lithium areas, as Igor mentioned.
We also have a separate company called Atlas Critical Minerals that I had the pleasure to also bring to Nasdaq this past January, which Atlas Lithium owns 21% of. And more than that, I mean, recently, as we provided a press release on this, the U.S. government and Japanese government have jointly selected only two lithium companies to focus on, and those are Albemarle and Atlas Lithium.
In addition to that, we value our relationship with entities such as Mitsui that spent a year and a half on due diligence on us, they could have any other company in Brazil to invest in. For lithium, they chose Atlas. They actually, I tell people that they know me better than my daughters.
The other one is Citadel that has been great to know, great to work with, and committed to us in December, as Igor mentioned before. I assembled what I believe is an A-plus team, we work extremely hard on behalf of our shareholders. I'll pass it back to you, Igor.
Thanks, Marc. As you said, we've assembled a fantastic team in Brazil. Eduardo Queiroz is our Vice President of Engineering and our PMO. He brings over 24 years of experience managing mining projects in Brazil specifically, and he comes to us from essentially managing multi-billion dollar projects. We're very honored to have secured his interest in the Atlas Group.
Tiago Miranda is our CFO, 18 years of experience in finance with large Brazilian mining companies. Joel Monteiro is our liaison to government and communities as a VP of Admin and Head of ESG. We have great relationship with the government at all levels, federal, state, and local, and we obviously have a great relationship with the communities. We'll touch on that in a few slides.
Areli Nogueira is our Vice President of Mineral Exploration, very experienced in lithium and hard rock lithium in Brazil. We have a presence in China as well. Lili Wu is our Head of Business Development based in Beijing. Given how much role China is playing in lithium today, this is a great connection to have to that part of the world. In terms of the board, Marc is the Chairman and the CEO.
We have Admiral Flavio Rocha, who is a former minister-level cabinet member in Brazil's government and also a four-star admiral in Brazil's navy. Ambassador Roger F. Noriega is one of our independent directors as well. He was nominated by President Bush as a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State. Cassi Olson is an independent director based in California, and she's a practicing lawyer.
Stephen R. Petersen used to be the second longest portfolio manager at Fidelity. He is one of our independent directors, but also a Chairman of our independent audit committee. Brazil is a fantastic jurisdiction in terms of next up-and-comer for hard rock lithium specifically. First of all, Brazil is economically, politically stable. It is a mining-friendly jurisdiction.
For example, the state where our project is based, Minas Gerais state, literally translates from Portuguese as general mines. The state has over 300 functioning mines, efficient permitting. There is a strategic minerals focus by Brazilian government, and the development of critical minerals projects and lithium projects is being supported. We're also in a community that is economically disadvantaged, in a part of Brazil that is economically disadvantaged, which allows us to have a favorable tax structure.
In terms of the permitting situation, for example, our key initial permitting, we're able to obtain in 13 months, which is quite attractive if you start comparing that to other Tier 1 jurisdictions. Atlas Lithium has also earned a fast-track permitting designation from the state of Minas Gerais, which was a competitive process where we were sort of put side to side with other companies.
Environmental and ESG component is important to us. Obviously, this is a question that gets asked a lot today. We will be recirculating most of the water within the plant circuit up to 98%. It will be dry stacking process for the tailings. There will be no tailing dams required. Of course, we plan to be using the hydroelectric power for the project.
It's an ESG, full ESG compliant endeavor. In terms of the permitting, we have already received our key licenses for the mining of our first ore body, which is in Anitta 2. We received the mining concession status for the entirety of the Neves Project, which is a mining right that sort of goes in perpetuity for the entirety of the project.
We already are permitted for the plant site area for the plant to operate, produce, and sell the product. We have done a lot of positive things for the community as a company should. We've obviously engaged the communities to the maximal positive extent.
We've helped restore some of the buildings, helped house some construct some housing, and done a lot of events for the community. The communities like us, they want us to, you know, to have the successful project. In terms of the project outlay, this is what the general outlay will look like.
Our first open pit will be here between Anitta 2 and 2.5 . Second open pit will be the Anitta 3. The processing plant will be located here. All of this has been optimized working with the mining experts for the mine sequencing optimization. These pits are basically strategically positioned quite close to each other.
The material, the lithium material that we'll be mining has been proven over and over again to be of excellent quality, easy to separate, and easy to process and concentrate. We've had multiple independent third-party analysis from industry leaders such as SGS and POSCO. All of this is delineated in detail in the DFS study by SGS.
This is the mining operation dashboard, basically the mining pit by year, et cetera. I'm not gonna spend too much time on these technical details. What the first two open pits will look like in terms of the mining sequence here. This is the processing flow sheet. Brazil has been blessed with a lithium that is of excellent quality with large crystal size.
What that means is that there's not a lot of fine particles, the flotation is not necessary to achieve decent economical recoveries. Our recoveries are in a good range without the flotation, which allows us to have a pure DMS processing operation. We're gonna have dense media separation processing plant without flotation, this is the processing circuit.
In terms of the plant itself, this is what the modular modules of the plant will look like. The plant had been designed by the engineers that have experience building these plants throughout the world. It was built and fabricated in South Africa and shipped to Brazil for cost reasons. The entirety of the plant with the shipment and taxes and all the fees it was approximately $25 million-$26 million.
It is now in Brazil ready for assembly, which is a big de-risking factor for any mining company. What you see here is the trial assembly of the plant in South Africa before it was shipped. These are just the modules. What's not pictured is about 1,000 meters of conveyor belts, large slurry tanks, all of those are already in Brazil as well.
Our timeline will be, we are, as we had just announced recently, advancing with some of the pre-construction, pre-project implementation things such as signing the contracts for the main project partners, project execution partners. We're doing as much of this timeline as we can before the formal FID. The formal FID will happen at the receipt of the off-take prepayment from our partners.
Following the FID, today we expect about 14 months or so to start commissioning the plant, which is quite an attractive timeline. This is what the Neves projects look like. We have always adopted a production first approach, so we've drilled out enough of the Neves project to know that we have a good runway and to be able to secure the off-take prepayments for the project.
We have clearly not explored the entirety of the project. The Neves project itself represents only about two out of the 85 mineral rights that you see that we have in our portfolio. Here in the image. Well, it's really three mineral rights here in the image, so three mineral rights out of the 85 that we have. Within those, we have drilled these five distinct ore bodies.
We named them in sequence, Anitta 1, 2, 2.5, 3, and 4. Our first open pit will be here between Anitta 2 and 2.5. Second open pit will be at Anitta 3. These ore bodies were discovered based on the exploration campaign that was built on a lot of data, a lot of soil geochemistry, a lot of magnetic studies, geophysics studies, and that produced these hotspots where we have then gone and drilled and found the ore bodies.
We're continuing with this exploration campaign at Neves, and now that we're getting closer to production, we're starting to look back at resumption of the drilling campaign to begin growing the rest of the Neves. This is how we grow locally.
We drill out the rest of the Neves, potentially connect some of these ore bodies, explore some of these hotspots in the south of the project, and once we've drilled out the Neves, then we have a huge regional portfolio as we discussed, the Salinas project, the Clear Project. This is the growth potential that we have regionally on top of the local growth.
The upside of ATLX is in several factors. First of all, the near term transition as we advance from exploration to pre-production and then from pre-production to revenue generation, especially at the lithium prices today, this is going to be a major inflection point for the stock and a major catalyst. Also we have a lot of exploration potential that is still remaining.
As you will see on the next slide, for example, our 100% owned Salinas Project has already yielded some of the great results right close to the surface in terms of lithium, and then we still have a lot of potential remaining at Neves itself.
On top of all that, there is the benefit of ownership of another completely separate Nasdaq company that is focused on the very timely sector of critical minerals, and that is just an upside for any shareholder of ATLX. These are the drill holes that we've done. First few test drill holes at Salinas. As just as a matter of reminder, that is the project that is located all the way on top of the Lithium Valley.
It's located next to Latin Resources, which was recently bought out for $370 million. We've just a few test drill holes that we have performed there. We are confident that there is mineralized lithium, and it is close to the surface.
As you can see, when you take a spodumene core and you light it, you put a UV light to it, the spodumene, the lithium-bearing mineral, the crystals will highlight salmon pink as you see on this imaging. These are very large crystals, and we are confident this is going to be a good project. We will be focused on continuing the exploration campaign there as the next expansion frontier for us.
Finally, I will touch on just a few things, a few points on the ATCX. Atlas Lithium owns 21% of the separate Nasdaq company, Atlas Critical Minerals. For those investors who are interested to learn more about Atlas Critical Minerals, we will be doing a similar type of presentation this Thursday as well.
The main parallels that are being developed under this company are the rare earths project of two types, the conglomerate as well as ionic clays. We've had some very encouraging initial results with high grades, also an excellent graphite project with some of the initial grades on the surface reaching as high as 19.4% pure carbon. As you may know, graphite is very timely.
There is more graphite in electric vehicle battery by weight than there is lithium. You know, U.S., for example, today has no real functioning natural graphite mines. There's one that is about to open, but really nothing today. Graphite is very timely and is another parallel being developed. Of course, uranium, which is something that's quite undeveloped in Brazil.
In fact, Brazil is one of the few remaining countries with undeveloped uranium deposits because Brazil has not really allowed private capital to come in and begin developing it. What we're focusing on is positioning ourselves here as potentially one of the first movers in uranium subject to a legislation change, which we believe is coming in the near term. This really concludes the presentation for Atlas Lithium.
Marc, do you wanna, we still have a few minutes here? Really just three minutes. Any question you wanna try to address here while we're on live?
Yeah, we got, yes, Igor. Thank you for the audience. We appreciate your time and interest. We have a lot of questions here, let me answer some of them, and then we'll follow up with the answers to the other ones later.
Question is, since including Neves in the Critical Minerals Cooperation, I think you're referring to the U.S.-Japan cooperation that has just been announced recently. Have any additional offtake discussions emerged with Western automakers or battery makers who want diversified supply outside of China?
Yes, absolutely. But, some of these conversations even predated that announcement because of the strength of the project. Yes, we have had interest in our product from companies both in China as well as in the Western world.
Let's put it that way. I think that people are asking about progress in terms of what is, what is left to be done. As we indicated in a press release, we're getting very close to finalizing all the technical work that needs to get done prior to a project of this magnitude being implemented.
We announced the contracting of four major Brazilian companies, engineering and engineering management companies in a press release dated April 27th. You can expect a further announcement in the next several weeks as we finalize all the things that need to get done. To give you more granularity, we have 161 jobs that we call jobs, items that need to get done by contractors as we get the project implemented.
The majority of the cost is in the top 10 of those 161 items, and those are the ones that we are really focusing on and presenting those in press releases or other filings. Rest assured the process has been tremendously effective. We have our supply people and engineering teams have done a requisition for proposals.
Some of these areas have gotten up to upwards of 19 companies bidding for our project, for that particular job in the project. In rounds of negotiation culminating in what we do, which is bring them to the office and put them in separate rooms, like the three finalists, put them in separate rooms and hold them there until we finalize the negotiation.
In one negotiation that I've was involved with less than till 1 A.M. and then we had a winner with the best technical proposal plus price. It's one of the companies that we announced in the press release on April 27th. We're doing everything very, very carefully and precisely, and we are already below budget on the DFS because of that approach. It bodes well for the future. Again, we're running out of time here. Igor, any other parting words from you?
No, thank you, everybody, for their time. We have some questions that we'll try to maybe answer in writing, offline, but we're coming up on 30 minutes, so we have to hop off here. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you so much. Stay well.