Aura Minerals is introducing a 360-degree view on mining with a holistic thinking, and Aura Minerals is a diversified gold and copper producer with assets in the Americas. Holistic thinking, that sounds very intriguing. Natasha, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here introducing Aura to you. I'm Natasha. I'm the head of IR and Treasury, so I probably will focus much more on finance than on technical stuff, but please be open to any questions. Aura, we are a gold and copper producer, mainly based in the Americas. We have now four operating mines, one project under construction and one project in development, and two exploration projects. What we think is our main focus is to deliver projects, production with high returns to investors, and we are having a huge success doing that, what makes us able to deliver not only a huge EBITDA, 60% of cash conversion, and also paying dividends during a growth project, so we paid 6% in dividend yields in 2022 and 2023, and we are paying 8.8% in the last 12 months of 2024.
So we believe that we can keep this track. I don't think 8.8% is a stable number, but probably this 6% is. Another point is that we are having a huge success on unlocking value in our exploration job internally. We are not an exploration company. We are a producer, but we are increasing the life of mine of our plants during exploration in the lands that we have. So we are achieving good results on that, and we feel confident that even having the highest life of mine, we are being able to increase capacity and to increase the life of mine in our operations. Here is our footprint. As I said, we are mainly focused on the Americas. We are not dealing in other jurisdictions. For coincidence, we are much more in Brazil, but it's just a coincidence.
We could have operations in the Americas, but focus on the Americas. Why that? Our team is mainly Brazilians. I'm Brazilian from São Paulo. We believe that knowing the jurisdiction, knowing the language, the culture of the people, we are going to be able to implement our projects better, to be easier to get the license and to deal with the government and the community. This is happening. Now we are being able to do that in Brazil. We have two mines that we are building there, Borborema that we are building and Matupá that we are announcing the construction next year. If you check the footprint, we have one copper mine underground, one in Mexico, is Aranzazu. 42% of my results come from this mine. It's a copper mine, so 30% of my results now are copper.
We have one operating mine in Honduras, two operating mines in Brazil, two projects, one under construction and one that we are going to announce, and one exploration project in Brazil, Serra da Estrela. I don't have a lot of data of this project yet, but it's a very important project to produce copper. It's in Carajás region. It's a region that we have Vale. We have Ero Copper. So we have a lot of copper producers. So it can be a huge potential for the company to increase its position in copper. We want to keep this 30%-70% copper and gold, but of course, we know that we have two gold projects in the pipeline. So it's going to reduce the copper exposure. So we are increasing the research into new copper projects and in sites of gold.
Here, I will give just a short overview about Aura. We are not a brand new company. We have been listed in TSX since 2020, but the company was acquired by a local investor, a Brazilian investor, in 2016, Paulo Brito. He's the previous owner of Yamana Gold. After he bought Aura, we passed through a huge transformation, which changed the management. We changed the culture. We moved ourselves from Canada to Miami. Now we try to have small mines that we can grow, increase the profitability, and make the company bigger. We want to reach our main goal is to reach 450,000 ounces in the next three years. Then our main goal is to reach 1 million ounces in the next 10 years. Of course, we're delivering a good return and now we are delivering dividends and paybacks. Here is a little bit about our results.
We have been able to improve our production in the last years. We passed through a problem with a contractor in Honduras. That's the reason you see a short reduction in 2023, but we ramp up the new one, and now we are operating full. The idea is that we keep growing in terms of production as soon as we are implementing the Borborema project. Here is just a short overview of how this movement since Paulo Brito started in the company impacted in results. We grew capacity, we grew revenues, EBITDA, and the most important one, we grew the free cash flow generation and free cash flow conversion. Now we operate with an average 6% of free cash flow conversion, giving the possibility to keep growing the company, investing in exploration, and paying dividends. What is our main goal when we think about financials?
Of course, we are pretty happy we are a producer, so $2,600 is like being amazing. We cannot complain, but when we look to our structure, our main goal is cost, so we are always focused on cost reduction. We are now second quartile. Of course, we have the goal to move to the first one, and we think we can do that through these new projects that we are announcing. If you check Borborema, our sustaining cost is below $1,000, and Matupá is even lower, so we think that our main point now is to control costs and keep reducing, adding new projects with lower cost basis, and then improving the profitability. Of course, we are pretty confident that the gold price will keep this level, but we never know. It is a commodity. We cannot focus on that.
We need to focus on the things that are under our hands, and the main thing is the cost structure. Here I will jump. It's just a little overview about the CapEx and about our debt profile. Just to give you an idea, because we just announced today a local bond in Brazil that we are issuing of $100 million for six years, which probably will come with a cost of 6.5%. So we are refinancing our debt to have amortization schedule of above five years, reducing this amortization that we have. We are repaying all those debts, and then we are going to have a better free cash flow to be able to invest in any M&As that can appear or even in our operations. So the idea is to refinance our debt. We are very low on leverage. We are 0.8x today.
We are going to keep this level. You need to remember that we are building a project in a moment that I will talk about now. The main point of that is grow, but with stability and giving the possibility to don't face any troubles in the future. Here is a short overview of how we unlock the value in the future. As I said, we are pretty focused on return. Our last three projects, if you check here, we have returns above 30%. We are always looking for this kind of projects. They are small, but they are profitable. We don't want to be the biggest gold producer. We want to be the highest profitable one. This is a short example on how we are doing this and the kind of projects that we are looking for.
Almas, that is our brand new project. We just started up Almas in August 2023. We are already full capacity. We reached commercial capacity in only four months. It was pretty fast. Now we are full, and we are increasing the capacity in 10%. In this project, we build on budget, on time, and now increasing capacity. It's a huge success to us, and it's the model that we are going to implement now in the construction of Borborema that I will talk a little bit later and in the construction of Matupá. We also understand that the life of mine of our plants is something that we need to worry. We are always investing in exploration. As I said, we have a new management. This management is focused on increasing the life of mine, but not to increase to 20 years.
The point that we want to keep is between seven and 10, because then we can think that we can keep investing and keeping this level, increasing the returns of the company, and of course, I am the IR, so we need to talk about multiples. Nowadays, Aura is trading as a junior company, and we are a producer, so we believe that we have a huge potential to increase the multiples of the company without a huge effort, only delivering what we are promising to the market. We keep at least five years without marketing the company. [The company] was passing through this movement in terms of the management, so now we are back, and the idea is to show the company introduced to more people, then try to convert the scenario into a better one. Here is a short overview to you about Almas.
As I said, it's our brand new project. Already operating well, so we are full capacity on that. The budget of this project was $77 million. We issued a local bond in Brazil to finance that. The cost was 5.8%. We built it in 14 months. It was COVID, so it's a very good achievement when we could build a project during COVID on time, close to budget, and we ramp up to reach commercial production in only four months. This is the model that we are using to implement Borborema. Borborema is the biggest project of Aura. We are building Borborema now. We are 45% complete. Sorry for the 40%. It's just because it's the last public information that I have. In the feasibility study, we have a project of 83,000 ounces per year. It might be online in the beginning of 2025.
We did a feasibility study considering a gold price of $1,700. So with this gold price, the returns on leverage are 22%. Of course, with the actual gold price is much higher. The payback will be in three years. And this project runs with an 11-year life of mine. So it's a very good one. I'm going to one slide, and then here is just a short picture of the project we are building. I will just go to one slide in the end of my presentation because I want to show you the huge potential of this project that I think is important to you to know. If you check here, it's a Google Earth picture of the project. You can see my mine there. Do I have the thing? No. You can see my mine there. So it's where the Aura is.
The ore body comes across the mine, something like that. And because of this space that is already open, we have a reserve of 800,000 ounces in this plant. But if you check, I have much more resources. Oh, why that? Because our ore body comes almost into this line, this gray line that I have here. And what it is, is a federal road. It's five km of a federal road. We are in a kind of desert in Brazil. There is nothing around us. So the only thing that is blocking all of this M&I is this federal road. So what we are planning now, we are already discussing with the government. We are getting all the licenses to move the road. We believe that in the next two, three years, we are having it done, and then we are doubling the size of this project.
It's the biggest potential of Aura at the moment, and it's something that you need to pay attention because I don't think the market is looking to that. And we can have a much bigger project with higher returns with almost non-investment. It would be almost something close to $10 million-$15 million to move the road. So it's not something that is going to impact the result, but it's going to impact the company valuation and the company size in the short term. Let me go back. Sorry about that. So here is just a short overview about all of our projects we have. As I said, Aranzazu, here is an overview. Copper underground mine is my only underground mine. So even being underground, the cash structure is pretty good. We have been operating with eight years' life of mine in the last seven years.
So it's not something that scares us. We are investing in exploration in the region. So we are increasing it every year. So we are having a huge success in this area. We have MINOSA. That is our Honduras plant. The life of mine of Honduras is a little bit lower than what we want. And the main point of that is that we did not make a lot of investments in exploration in this area in the last years. We have some instability with the community. So we stopped investing there. And now we are coming back. So we know that there is a lot of gold. We are having a lot of signs, but we'll take at least two years to increase it again. But we are planning to keep this operation. So we are investing. We have Apoena. It's our Brazilian mine in Mato Grosso.
Apoena, it's a mine that in terms of geology, it's quite unstable. The ore body is not so regular there. So we have quarters that we have high grades, like four grams per ton, but we have quarters that we have one, like the average grade of last year. And also we see this impact in the strip ratio. So sometimes we can have higher costs, sometimes it's lower costs. On average, it's supposed to be across $1,300. So the idea is to reduce this level, but it's an unstable orebody. So we cannot promise that it's going to be always that, but the average of the region should be like this. And now our brand new project ramping up. We have not so higher grades on this one, but at the same time, the strip ratio is low. So the cost structure is low.
Once we are in the first year of full operation of this project, our plan is to reduce the cost of it. We are planning to run this project between maybe 1,000 and 1,100 per ounce. The sustaining cost might decrease. What I like to always to repeat, Borborema, it's our brand new project. We are building it. If you check, the cost structure is much lower. The region that we are is good. The grades are not that bad, 1.5. The strip ratio is lower. We have the huge potential to reduce the cost of Aura with this project. We have Matupá. Matupá is a project that I already have the feasibility study done. It's a seven years' life of mine project. The investment to build it might be across $100 million.
We could announce this project already, but the main point is that we bought two more projects across this one, pretty close, and the potential of reserves there is very high. What we decide, we are postponing the announcement of Matupá that was planned to this quarter to the next year, and then we can rebuild all the studies that we have in the area and decide that we should build one project like Almas, that is a 50,000 ounces project, or if you should be a project like Borborema, considering the results of this new research that we are doing in the area. This project, we expect to have more, I believe, eight, nine months of research on the area, and then we are going to announce this to you.
Here is a short overview of the success that we are having into our exploration job. As I said, we are not an exploration company. We are a producer, but we have a huge amount of topic into exploration to keep increasing our life of mine and to keep increasing the capacity of our actual projects. So in the last five years, we more than double our reserves and increase more than three times our resources. So we are having a huge success on that. The effort is decreasing because we just convert into M&A this year. So probably this number is increasing in 2025. Here is a short overview about our multiple. As I said, we have been traded as a junior company. So we have a huge space to grow in multiples. So this is something that we are investing a lot on.
And a short overview about dividends. My time is getting over. So it's just a comparison that we are one of the leaders in the sector in dividends. And here is a short overview. We are almost a $1 billion company. Our main shareholder, he owns 55% of the shares. He's not selling. So he's saying that the share price is too cheap to sell. So maybe he doesn't want me to work. Maybe this is something like that. I think it is, but I'm trying my best to improve these multiples and convince him to reduce the participation in the company.
Thank you for that, Natasha. And I will steal a little bit more of the time here because I need to ask you. You are paying dividend and you have a paying dividend structure here. And yet you show us a chart where you wanted to grow.
So how do you square that circle? Once our projects, all of them have a payback very fast and high returns, when we are being able to finance them very well, what we are doing is I'm building this project with the security that I can use part of my cash flow for dividends. Everybody says, are you with the cake or you cook the cake? You need to decide. We are being able to do both. Together with that, we have a strong strategy in the balance sheet, generating cash in all the operations and the project finance itself. And with a strong shareholder who has 55%, then the dividend policy will not change. We will not change. It's 20% of my EBITDA minus sustaining CapEx. So we are keeping it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you.