All right, as folks are getting to the room pretty quickly, I'll say good morning or good afternoon depending on where you're logging in from today. Really do appreciate all of you joining us for a corporate update and Q&A session from Contango ORE related to this morning's press release regarding their $24 million cash distribution. It feels good to say that number out loud. Don't get to very often. The completion of 2025's first campaign. I'm joined today, of course, by the company's President and CEO, Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, and the CFO, Mike Clark. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me.
Romeo, good to see you again. Mike, hello from across the pond.
Good morning.
Here's how today's going to work. I'm first going to throw it to Rick for a quick rundown of today's news. Then I'll pose questions to both the speakers on the line today. After that, we're eager to take some questions from the audience here live in the room. This will be a bit shorter event than we're typically used to. I'll be probably ending right at the half hour, so I'll try to get to as many questions as I can. Please feel free to ask anything, but if I don't get to you today, I'll make sure that the questions get to the Contango team so they can get back to you as soon as possible. Today's event's also being recorded and will be available very shortly today on both 6ix.com and also our YouTube channel. That's it for me.
I'm going to throw it to Rick for a quick intro before I jump in with some questions.
Yeah, so just thanks, Romeo, and just to everybody, thanks for joining us. I'm in Zürich, Switzerland, for the European Gold Forum here. We've got a three-day conference, and it'll be a busy three days. I think I've got about 38 meetings lined up, so looking forward to updating everyone. Yeah, we're in our press release this morning. As Romeo said, we've got a distribution from the Peak Gold Joint Venture of $24 million. Always good to get money into the bank. We've basically delivered more tons to the mill at Fort Knox than planned, and so produced about 19,500 oz of gold for our account for our 30% share of Manh Choh production. We haven't quite sold all of that. Mike can probably give you some more details on that.
Part of that distribution was from the, I'll tell you, the first half of the gold sales, but we've got more gold sales to come from this first campaign. It is the first campaign. Basically, they run for about a month. There will be four campaigns running this year. They are in the middle of each quarter. The February one obviously lasted a little longer because, again, we delivered more tons. Another campaign will be in May and then August and then November. We are on track to produce 60,000 oz of gold. We are actually ahead of schedule, if you will, for the year. We have guided to a $1,625 gold price. We do not have any costs related to this first campaign as of yet. Probably we will have those in early May.
Again, we're just kind of going with our 60,000 oz of production for our share of Manh Choh production and at an all-in sustaining cost of about $1,625. With that, I'll say we'll open this up. Romeo, the questions. I know there's probably a lot of questions out there. We've got a pretty full audience, so let's go ahead and get started.
Awesome. Yeah, so I've got some, a lot of them based on investor questions that came in an email in advance. If you don't mind, I'm just going to jump into a bunch of them right off the bat. The first campaign of 2025 exceeded original guidance with approximately 19,500 oz of gold for Contango's 30% share. Curious, and I assume other people are too, what operational improvements or new strategies contributed to this kind of outperformance?
Basically, it's tons and grades. The mine plan had us delivering 275,000 tons of gold at about 0.22 oz per ton. We ended up delivering about 50,000 tons more, just a bit shy of 50,000 tons more than the 275,000 tons plan. Grade was slightly lower than planned by like a third decimal, so not very much lower, but a little bit lower. Recoveries were a little better than planned, again, just a small percent better and better level of recovery. All in all, the plan was roughly to produce 15,000 oz 4x a year. The first batch out being larger produced more gold, and we got roughly the same grade and roughly slightly better recovery.
Basically, this time is mostly about tons, delivering more tons, which is a good thing to start out the year delivering more tons than planned, especially during the winter months when you can get snow conditions, storm conditions, what have you, that maybe reduce the amount of truckloads a day you can get up between the mill and the between the mine and the mill. I think that's the basic straightforward answer, more tons.
No, appreciate that. Makes sense to me. As I understand, though, there is still gold unsold. Is that correct as of right now?
Yeah, so I'll let Mike sell all our gold. He makes all our money, so I'll let him answer this one.
Yeah, no, as of the day, as of Friday, we'd sold about 13,000 oz out of the 19,000 oz. I have sold some more this morning on final shipping for the quarter, but there's still about another, I think it would be about 7,000 oz that weren't included as of the date of the release.
Okay, cool. Yeah, good to know. Just generally in the same vein, with cash distributions now expected to increase to $80 million, which I think I'm allowed to swear on this platform is a shit ton of money. How does that stronger cash position benefit shareholders? What'll change going forward?
I'll answer first and let Mike again answer more like a CFO. Basically, our first, and we've said this many times before, our first order of business is pay down the debt, deliver into the hedges. That's definitely what we're guiding to do. We've said we're going to deliver about 70% of the gold produced this year into the hedges and 30% would then be exposed to spot price. We make about $400/oz on our gold delivered into the hedge price, which is at $2,025. Our all-in sustaining guidance right now is $1,625. That hasn't changed. The delta there is $400. We don't lose money selling gold into the hedges. I know I've said that many, many times, but I'll say it again. We make money.
Obviously, at $3,000 gold or as many as $3,025 gold, we make about a $1,400 margin on 30% of the ounces. $80 million is a lot of money. The objective is to, obviously, $80 million is going to allow us to pay down the debt significantly this year. I'll let Mike get to give you the numbers of what we're projecting. Delivering the gold to make the $80 million of money means we're going to reduce our hedge book roughly in half. Right now, we've got 86,000 oz of gold hedged. By the end of the year, with our planned production, we'll deliver about half of that. We'll reduce that outstanding hedge. Mike, you want to?
Yeah, I guess the only thing I'd add to that is the $80 million is kind of pre-hedge. We get that cash flow from the Peak Gold JV, and then we have to sell our hedges and deliver into them and also sell at spot. The way I would look at it is you've got $80 million of free cash flow coming from the JV, and then you're going to have about a $33 million realized hedge loss on deliveries. Everything after that is kind of free cash flow from operations for the year. The only other item, kind of as Rick said, the $9 million as part of this $24 million came in early March. That really related to 2024's excess cash, which is kind of added to what we weren't projecting necessarily in our budget.
That's kind of given us the ability to kind of focus on cash management and timing of paying down principal repayments in advance to save on interest and just give us a little more flexibility in what we want to do and make sure there's plenty of cushion accounts for the year.
Yep, makes sense to me. One thing I noticed in the press release is it mentioned ongoing incremental improvements in both ore haul and processing at Fort Knox. I'm curious if you can just share some sort of specific examples about these improvements and what they mean for campaign results going forward.
Yeah, so one of the, there were three main areas where we reduced the effectiveness of the truck haul in terms of tons of ore being delivered to the Fort Knox mill per truckload. They were the bridge weight restriction. That's still in place. I think rough numbers, that was about two tons, two and a half tons of further restriction in terms of tons of ore in the truck. The other one, or one of the other ones, was moisture content of the rock. Being in the wintertime, whatever water was in the stockpile at that time is still in the stockpile because it's still frozen. That's counted as moisture content, if you will.
That was another couple of tons of extra weight that was not included in the feasibility study because everything we are always comparing to at that time is always back to the feasibility study plan because that feasibility study was the plan. The third thing was ice and snow buildup on the trailers. That was not anticipated in the feasibility study. That was another two to two and a half tons of ice and snow. I think all of us were a bit surprised that trailers picked up that much ice and snow, but the fact is that they do. That is probably the area that we have had the most success at incremental improvement right now, just knocking the ice and snow off the truck before it gets on the highway.
Most of the accumulation takes place on the road between the mine site and the highway. The highways are generally kept very clear. Obviously, if it's a snowstorm, if it's a bad snowstorm, they don't drive the trucks. They just take a break for a few hours or half a day or whatever it is until the snowstorm passes and the roads are plowed. I'd say that's one of the incremental improvements that has been realized. As I said, the moisture content for the ore that's already been stockpiled over the winter, it's frozen. The moisture's in there. You're not getting it out until springtime. The bridge weight restriction is still in place.
The good news on the bridge weight restriction is that the federal DOT and the state Department of Transportation, the federal government did approve the state transportation plan, which included money now to fix the bridges. That money has been allocated, and the plan is to start fixing the bridges this year. As I understand from the press release that the DOT gave a month or so ago, the bridges will not be completely repaired until next year. We will see an increase in the amount of in the bridge weight restriction. The good news is it eventually gets repaired and we will get that weight back.
Oh, that's great. I also wanted to ask, we touched on it, but I want to talk about gold recovery rates. You averaged 93.5% during the first campaign year, slightly above plan. Curious what contributes to that rate increase so people get it.
Yeah, basically, it's getting the recipe right. The main part of the recipe is oxide versus sulfide ore. The sweet spot in terms of recovery is to have a two-to-one ratio, two oxide, one sulfide. With the current setup of the mill, that's what they aim towards. They've obviously dialed it in pretty well. At the stockpiles at Manh Choh, you have high-grade oxide, low-grade oxide, high-grade sulfide, low-grade oxide. You want to do a blend to target a grade, and the grade is around 0.2. If you dial it in right, you kind of optimize the recovery factor. Now, as we get deeper and deeper into the ore body, we'll see more and more sulfide. There are plans to add oxygen into the mixture, which is part of the recipe, if you will, to help improve gold recoveries.
This is not a refractory ore, so I do not want anybody to misunderstand what I am saying. The oxygen or air sparging and oxygen just help float the bubbles and get the mixture and get the cyanide attracted to the gold. When you think about how gold is actually recovered using cyanide, it is a bit of alchemy to make this stuff work. Therefore, it is a bit of a recipe.
Sure. Now, you need a bit of wizardry in your life, for sure. I appreciate it. I got one question from an investor that I'm just going to ask really verbatim, if you don't mind. Somebody wrote in to ask if you can address the hedge position loss and how that gets cleared up. He says he understands the hedge and why it was needed, but he's wondering if the loss is offset by a gain as we get closer to full delivery.
Yeah, so I'll answer that. I'll ask Mike to, again, answer more like a CFO. There is no loss when we deliver into a hedge. Our all-in sustaining costs, as we just talked about, are $1,650 or sorry, $1,625. That's our guidance for this year. Last year, our all-in sustaining costs were just over $1,200. The Kinross guidance to us for the current year mine plan is $1,625. If it costs us $1,625 and we deliver into the hedge and we receive $2,025, $2,025, that's a $400 gain. We've not lost anything. The unrealized loss that's talked about from an accounting perspective is on the rest of the gold that you haven't delivered yet. You have a commitment to deliver that gold into the hedge. If you don't, you've got to go buy it.
Obviously, if you've got to buy it at $3,000 or $3,100 gold, it's going to cost you a lot of money. A shit ton, I think is the expression you use.
That sounds safe.
Again, we do not lose money delivering gold into the hedges. We make less money. We make $400 as opposed to the spot price that Mike just sold gold at the other day, which is, or I guess this morning, is closer to $3,100, which is more than a $1,400 margin. Again, we do not lose money delivering gold into the hedges. Mike, you want to?
Yeah, I guess I agree with what you said, Rick. I think just looking at it from the financial statement perspective and looking at the 2024 results, we ended up with, I think, about a $55 million hedge liability on the books. What that's comprised of is you do a kind of a mark-to-market on those undelivered ounces that are outstanding at the end of the year. If you look at the income statement, you have two components to that loss. You have a realized loss, and you have an unrealized loss. As you deliver oz into the hedges, you're effectively moving things from an unrealized loss to a realized loss. At the end of the year, we had $20 million go- to realized losses, which relates to the hedge deliveries that we went into.
There was $35 million related to all the outstanding hedges that have not been delivered into. As we continue to deliver this year, you are going to see a higher realized loss versus unrealized loss. Does that kind of make sense, or did I say realized too many times?
That was the word you said.
I just want to add in there that the only way we lose money on the hedges is if we do not deliver the gold. As long as we are delivering gold on plan, and right now we are delivering more gold than planned, so that is good. As long as we deliver the gold to the plan and deliver into the hedges, which Mike, they total what, about 40,000 oz-45,000 oz?
There's about 45,000 oz we'll be delivering into this year. We're already kind of, we've already chewed through our April hedge book, and starting today, we sold everything at spot. Starting on next week's shipments and the following ones, we'll be kind of going back to delivering into the next July hedges. We're getting ahead of those. It's just part of the plan to bring these down as quickly as possible.
Awesome. Being ahead is always good. Another one, just pretty much straight from an investor. At current pace, when roughly do you expect current cash assets will exceed debt and hedge liabilities, just roughly?
That is definitely a Mike question.
Look at the numbers, man.
Thinking about just, I don't actually have that kind of forecast in front of me, but I guess I would say, based on our plan to pay down the debt by $37.5 million this year, followed by 45,000 oz of hedges, which is effectively half of our hedge position, I would expect you would be in that position by the end of this year. I would have to do more work on that and get back to that person who asked that question.
All good. Yeah, like I said to the folks in the room, I'll send the transcript. I'm curious, can you explain the or reference the $9 million in additional profits from 2024? Why were those paid so late?
I mean, again, I'll start and Mike can follow up. Basically, when we sold all the gold from the last campaign of 2024, which was in November, it takes about, if you run the mill for four weeks, it takes almost another four weeks to get all the gold out of the mill because it goes into the carbon circuit and that just, it circulates around. It just takes time. Part of it is that the gold didn't actually get sold until 2025. Also, I'd say that going into the winter months, I think the Peak Gold management said, "Okay, we better, we've got the money in the bank. Let's keep it here until we know we don't need it." Again, operating in the wintertime, stuff happens and you might get delays.
If you have a lot of winter storms, you might get a few delays here and there. I think that's the sort of the prudent management of Peak Gold Joint Venture's money to do to operate that way. I'd say by the time March rolled around, they said, "We don't need the $9 million anymore or your $9 million anymore.
There you go. I got a political question, so hold on.
Mike, you want to explain that like a CFO would explain it?
No, the only thing I would say is from their perspective, it's easier to hold back the money than come up short and have to go back to us and ask us to write them a check. I think we prefer that too. That's kind of just how we ended up there.
No, appreciate it very much. Like I said, I'm jumping into a politics question next, so beware before we jump into it. I was cruising the Executive Orders list recently, and I saw that there was one prioritizing permitting for critical metals related mining projects. Just curious, any of Contango's current projects suite potentially qualify for that Executive Order?
Yeah, actually, Johnson Tract fits really nicely into that. In fact, all gold is now included in the critical metals list, which is interesting. Aside from that, Johnson Tract has a significant amount of zinc and copper and silver, all of which have traditionally been critical metals. As you know, we are in the process of permitting Johnson Tract. Having an administration that very demonstrably and very vocally is saying, "Hey, we support mining and we need to speed up the permitting process for critical mines that can produce critical metals," it certainly is a breath of fresh air compared to what we had under the Biden administration, where they would say we need critical metals, but then anytime there was a project that was producing critical metals, they'd find some excuse to put it on the sidelines.
Yeah, and look, I mean, we're not bypassing any standards or doing any sort of end runs here. Most of the permitting we're doing with respect to Johnson Tract is state permitting, but we do have a number of federal permitting agencies that will interact with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They control and permit everything that has to do with the wetlands. In Alaska, we have a fair bit of wetlands. And then a few other agencies, as well as from the federal government, as well as the state government. Again, having a federal administration that is supportive of mining, I think will just help smooth the process and actually get to the end game, actually getting your permits in an expeditious manner.
Awesome. One thing I wanted to ask about while we're on actually Johnson Tract, what's up next for that project? Are we still anticipating a PA in the next several weeks? Generally, what can investors expect from that?
Yeah, a good follow-on question. Yeah, the PA has taken a little longer than we would have liked. We wanted to do a thorough job, and so we've been spending a lot of time with our contractor to make sure we put the things in there that make a lot of sense. There's a few things that engineering companies always say, "Oh, you should try looking at this and you should try looking at that." We're like, "Well, let's get more data before we start going down that path." Short answer is by the end of this month, it will be done. I think it's going to be a good, strong, robust PA. It's a good grade deposit. I've always said this. It's one of the nicest underground mines I think you'll see with 40-meter-wide stopes. I mean, these are, it's a very healthy ore body.
I mean, it's just a thick, massive ore body and good grade. Where we're putting in the tunnel is right in the heart of the higher grade, the 20 g. There's kind of a core zone here that runs about 20 g/t . That's gold equivalent. Again, it's a gold, silver, copper, zinc mine, or will be a gold, silver, copper, zinc mine. Yeah, I'm really excited to see this thing, the PA come out. I think, again, we'll see a project that I think is going to be similar in terms of its economic than we've seen at Manh Choh. It's an underground mine and Manh Choh is open pit, but they're similar size, they're similar grade, and I think we're going to see some good economics on this thing.
Great. I got one question that I haven't asked you in a while, so I thought I'd look for an update on it. Any update on the pending lawsuits against the company?
Short answer is not technically. I think we'll expect to see some movement here. The case is scheduled in court in August. That is fast approaching. I think we're just, we feel very confident that this is a bit of a nuisance lawsuit, to use my non-legal terminology. I mean, the outstanding legal question before the judge is that we're a truck transfer program as a public nuisance. I don't know how driving legal trucks with legal loads with legal drivers is any more of a public nuisance than any other driver out there. That is my opinion. We'll let this play out in the courts, but I'm confident we'll be in a good place here.
Sure, sounds good. I got one, just generally your thoughts, because every morning you wake up and you see gold at a new all-time high. What really is your thoughts on why the gold price just keeps going up and where do you think it might settle?
I mean, look, central banks continue to buy. I think the other dynamic, and that's been happening for the last several years, they've really kind of increased the amount of gold that they've purchased. It's not all central banks. I mean, look, it's China, Russia, India, Turkey, and Iran. That's definitely been a big push. I think more recently we've seen the ETF, the gold-related ETFs, also purchasing gold. For the last several years, they've been net sellers of gold. That's sort of an added momentum, if you will, to gold purchases. I'm speaking specifically of the ones that actually buy physical gold. I forget that takes that gold off the market, not the ones that just play with paper gold. That's like a trillion-dollar business of trading paper.
Obviously, what they call it, the Trump, what's being referred to as the Trump trade or the Trump tariff trades. I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty out there about how all that's playing out. That may be sort of another added scoop of uncertainty. It's interesting that Bank of America, which is a big conservative American bank, came out with their guidance for next year's gold price of $3,500/oz . Goldman Sachs was a little more conservative and came out with $3,300. Again, this is an average gold price for, I think by the end of the year was what they said. At the same time, I'm starting to see articles that are like, "Oh geez, gold price has gone up and up and up and up and up," and up doesn't go on forever.
They are predicting not a crash, but a reset. Things go up and then they reset to 30% down or whatever. You are definitely starting to see both. It is interesting today on a high gold price, a bunch of the stocks are red.
Oh, that's all.
Yeah. There are definitely shorts making bets against gold and against gold mining companies. I'll bring back the hedge word. I hate talking about it sometimes, but the whole purpose of a hedge is to bring you down. Some of these guys who are talking about the 30% correction in the gold price, that would put you down somewhere south of $2,000, $1,800 gold or something like that. We are protected. We have protected that downside. Again, we are not losing money selling gold in 2025. We are just not making as much money. If the shorts are right on that or the analysts are right that the gold price is going to correct by 30%-35%, then we are covered.
Yeah, there you go. In the same vein of making money, I did see on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, from a series of robots to track insider buys that you made another big purchase of Contango shares yourself. I got two questions for you there. Did the robots lie to me? They sometimes do. It's hard to tell with these AI bots that run through the sites. If not, can you give us some details on your personal buying?
No, I actually, I did buy, I think it was 10,000 shares. I am actually planning to buy some more when Mike lifts the blackout here. We usually put a blackout around any press release we have out. I think we are incredibly undervalued at $10 a share. Yeah, I bought shares and I plan to buy some more shares.
Great. I got one question from the audience. I know there's a bunch. Like I said, I will get this whole transcript to the team, so you will be getting back to from them near future. Somebody asked, "Do you think the market's attaching negative value to Johnson Tract? Considering cash flows are robust, stock is cheap compared to those cash flows." They ended with, "What gives, Rick? What do you think is going on?
I mean, look, a company has to build for the future. I think with Manh Choh, we've demonstrated that the DSO model works. So long as you have the three main criteria, which is that you've got good grade, you can get things permitted. Things that are on private land are a lot easier to permit than things that are on federal land, as an example. All of our projects are on private land. We tick all three projects, tick that box. From a standpoint of permitting, permitting just the mine. Again, we're not building mills and tailings facilities and things like that. Permitting just the mine, if you're above the water table, it's a heck of a lot easier to permit a mine. You're just not interacting with groundwater. At Lucky Shot, the mine is above the water table.
The only time we have water in the mine is when it's raining or when all the snow is melting, which is springtime. Once that is out of the system, the water, and it's very good water quality. I mean, that's the other part of water. There's the amount of water and then the water quality. Lucky Shot is in a grano diorite. It's literally Tombstone. It's really good quality water. You put it into some settling ponds and any turbidity settles out, and then you can release it because it's good quality. Johnson Tract, kind of the same scenario. It's above the water table. Your body's above you. And we're purposely putting the tunnel in a post-mineral intrusive rock. It's a dacite. It's a little different geologically than the grano diorite. But chemically and from a water quality standpoint, it's the same.
It just doesn't have any bad stuff in it. We can just build an infiltration system and let the water run out of the mine. You settle it out so you're not putting any turbidity even into the groundwater. Those are the things that make things simple for a mine to be permitted and also make it simple to operate. Those are the ingredients. I think we've got three great projects. We're making more money than planned. We're going to plan to do something with that. Not sure exactly what that's going to be. We want to see what our all-in sustaining costs are going to be for the first campaign. Mike will have those out to you in our Q1 release in early May. I'll see if we're on track.
All the numbers that we've been talking about are good numbers and backed up by good accounting methodology. That means we'll be making about $80 million of free cash flow if the gold price stays around about $3,000/oz . We'll have some extra money to do other things besides pay bankers up. We'll end the year in a good spot. Okay. Did I add anything to that?
No, no. I think that's good.
Awesome. We are now already five minutes late. I apologize, fellows, for keeping you longer than I expected. I know there are some questions. A lot of them are just straight math questions that I will send directly to Mike afterwards so he can tackle them. Thank you both so much for this update and everybody for joining us in the room today. Hope you guys have a wonderful evening for you, Rick, and the rest of your day for you, Mike.
Thanks.
Thank you very much.
Talk soon. Have a great day.
You too.