Hello everyone, and welcome. We appreciate you joining us today for this WTR Insights Conference session with Brazil Potash, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker GRO. I am Dmitry Silversteyn, Managing Director, Chemicals and Materials Technology at Water Tower Research, and it's great to be with you today. Today we're joined by Matt Simpson, Chief Executive Officer of Brazil Potash. Thank you for spending time with us today, Matt.
Appreciate you having me on.
My pleasure. A quick reminder before we start, Brazil Potash Safe Harbor Statements are available on the Investor tab of their company website, as well as in their latest presentations, which you can view and review by visiting www.brazilpotash.com. Additionally, this discussion may not be reproduced or transcribed without the written consent of Water Tower Research. We welcome your questions throughout today's conversation. Please submit them through the chat, and we'll do our best to address them in the follow-up email or in our Follow-Up Management Series Report. If you would like to request a meeting with Brazil Potash, you can do so through the conference portal, and we will attempt to meet your said request. With that, let's begin. Matt, can you please tell our audience a little bit about your background and give us a high-level overview of Brazil Potash and the resource you're developing in Brazil?
By education, I'm a chemical engineer with an MBA. I started my career with Hatch, which is a global engineering consulting construction firm. I used to design metallurgical refineries. I then built them in Australia for a number of years before joining Rio Tinto, which is one of the top three mining companies in the world. At Rio Tinto, I used to be the General Manager of the Iron Ore Company of Canada mine. It's a fairly sizable mine. We moved about 85 million tons a year of material. I had about 650 people that worked for me, was responsible for all the operations, maintenance, and engineers at site. Given that I've designed, constructed, and operated large mines, about 15 years ago, Dmitry, I decided to start building my own projects.
Regarding Brazil Potash, potash, if people aren't familiar, is a critical mineral, and it's one of the three essential nutrients to grow food on a commercial scale. The problem with the potash market is it's highly concentrated, where you have three countries, being Canada, Russia, and Belarus, that supply 80% of the world's potash. With the current war in the Middle East, we have just over 50% of the world's potash in countries that are sanctioned or at war. This has led to massive volatility in prices. Over the last five years, potash has been a low of $280 all the way up to $1,200. This is really important because it has a great impact on the cost and availability of all of our food. When we look at Brazil is the world's largest net importer of potash. They import about 22% of a $30 billion market.
They're 98% import dependent, when potentially the second biggest basin of potash in the world is sitting in their backyard being developed by Brazil Potash. Simply because we're in Brazil and everyone else is 12,000 mi away, our cost to extract, process, and deliver this essential nutrient with no substitute is less than just the transportation cost alone for everyone else.
Understood. That's a very good summary, Matt. Brazil Potash clearly is close to global food security and is really sort of in the bullseye when it comes to that. How critical is Brazil's dependence on imported potash to your investment thesis? You talked about the fact that the country imports most of its potash and other agricultural chemicals, but what does that dependence do, or how does that dependence play in your investment thesis?
Brazil today imports roughly $25 billion of the nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium fertilizer. Their goal, and they have a stated plan, is to reduce that to about 45% by 2050, including having at least 2.2 million tons of domestic potash production by 2030, another 6.6 million tons by 2050. Outside of one project that's operating that was acquired by a company called VL Holding earlier this year from Mosaic, which is a U.S. company, this is the only development potash project in Brazil. We're the only project that can meet that need. The reason why people should care is because Brazil is one of the world's largest exporters of agricultural goods. They can grow three crops a year. Again, their Achilles heel is their access to fertilizer.
This project is critical because not only does it ensure Brazil has this access to a key nutrient to grow food, but what it also means is that we have a fourth major basin in the world that, should we have unreliable supply coming out of, say, countries like the Middle East or even out of Russia, that there is another alternate to have this essential nutrient on scale.
That's very clear. Thank you, Matt. Let's focus on your competitive advantage, and you referred to it briefly in your introduction. What drives your positioning as the lowest cost producer of potash, particularly when it comes to Brazilian markets?
Our cost to extract and process at about $80 a ton is very similar to the Canadians and the Russians. Imported potash is about $200 of transportation. You spend almost 2.5 times on transportation compared to what's typically spent on mining and processing. In our case, not only are we in Brazil, but we're only 5 mi away from a major inland river called the Madeira. The Madeira River is absolutely massive, Dmitry. This is a river that's about 0.6 mi wide. It's almost 50 ft deep. It takes Panamax vessels in the river. More fundamentally, what happens is that this river also connects into Mato Grosso, which is the largest farming region in Brazil. We currently have offtake agreements with companies like AMAGGI. AMAGGI is one of the biggest soybean producers in the world.
They sell about $10 billion a year of grains and soybean. What happens is that they grow their soybean, their grains, they then truck them to river barge ports, and then load river barges that are then offloaded at a transshipment terminal only 40 mi away from us. They export around 8.5 million tons through that route, but they only import about 700,000 tons of grain, seed, and fertilizer. Instead of those barges and trucks going back empty, we make use of that backhaul by loading it with our potash. The reason that this would be the lowest-cost producer on the cost curve is simply location.
In our case, our fully loaded cost is $80 to mine and process, but another $53 for transportation, so about $130 a ton compares to the next closest to us, which would be the Russians or the Belarusians at about $280 a ton. It's not possible for anyone to get even close to our cost simply, again, because of the transportation advantage that we have.
It's all about location, like in real estate, right?
Location, location, location.
Understood. All right. Well, let's turn to execution. What remains permitting-wise for stakeholders to understand where the risks are, and where are you in terms of managing community and Indigenous engagement?
We are fully permitted to start construction of the mine, the processing plant, and the port. We've already done all of our community consultations. We've also done consultations following United Nations protocols with indigenous people. To be clear, we are not located on indigenous land. However, we are within 6 mi of two reserves, and those two reserves decided to include 36 reserves in a consultation process that took seven years. At the end of that consultation process, we had 94% participation against a minimum threshold set by the indigenous of 60%. We're well over their threshold, and we had over 90% support for this project to be permitted. After that happened, that's when our 21 installation licenses for construction were granted. The only permit outstanding from a construction standpoint is for our 102-mi-long power line.
We don't expect that to at all be contentious because the power line will take over 200,000 people off of diesel generators and connect them to Brazil's national grid, which is over 80% renewable energy, mostly hydroelectric. It's very clean, lower cost, more sustainable. Should there be any issues, we can also co-generate our own electricity using natural gas. We're at the point where we're now actually even started some of the early construction. We've cleared the land. We're now about to get into what's called front-end engineering design, and once the project is built, we will then get our operating license and mining concessions.
Understood. It sounds like you're going above and beyond when it comes to Indigenous engagement, and that's good to see. Just the building out of your infrastructure or your plant's infrastructure will also, as you mentioned, take 200,000 people off of diesel generators, far from a reliable source of energy, and put them on a modern grid, which I'm sure your local community is pretty excited about. That's a good place to be. Let's talk about your financial and capital and return requirements. What is the capital requirement to bring this product or this resource into production?
The initial capital, and this comes from our S-K 1300, and we also have a National Instrument 43-101 report, is estimated at $2.5 billion, but peak funding is really $2.8 billion. The reason it's a little bit higher is we do need to pay for some working capital during the construction and also pay fees to our friendly bankers to raise the money. Out of that $2.8 billion that's needed is about $1.8 billion of debt, and we expect the bulk of that debt to come from multilateral agencies, government-backed entities, and export credit agencies. We have a binding commitment or contract, I should say, with Franco-Nevada, which is a $50 billion market cap royalty and streaming company, where in exchange for a 4% royalty, they will fund roughly around $150 million of our construction.
We also announced just before the holidays last year that the Brazilian government has confirmed that we will qualify for tax exemptions. We need to now lock those in, but that would remove about another $100 million of import duty. There's then about $350 million of what's called a build, own, operate, transfer contract, Dmitry, where with our 102-mi-long power line, our river barge port, our steam plant, there's third parties that are interested to build those assets. They will fund the construction on their own balance sheet. They will own them, they will operate them, but then transfer them to us over an extended period, and extended means somewhere probably north of 20 years, during which they amortize their initial cost. That only leaves about $400 million of equity that needs to be raised to build the project.
Right now, we have a very tight cap table, only about 54 million shares out basic, 80 million on a fully diluted basis. Even just the exercise of the warrants alone will bring in about another $42 million.
Understood. What does the long-term cash flow profile of this operation would look like across cycles? You mentioned that the pricing right now is pretty volatile given what's going on with sanctions against Russia and Brazil, and now you have the shipping constraints out of the Middle East. As you kind of look out longer term in terms of cash generation for this project, what does that look like?
In the worst case scenario, it's not possible for potash to sell below about $280 a ton CFR Brazil, and all CFR Brazil means is it's loaded on a boat at the coast of Brazil. On top of that number, our inland freight, as I mentioned before, is about $50, whereas imported material is more like $100. Part of the offtake contracts, we have 91% of our product pre-sold for contracts ranging from 10 years -17 years, is that we add the inland freight capture. That adds about $50 to that number. In the worst case scenario, Dmitry, we're selling this product for $280 plus $50 for inland freight, so $330 against a cost of production of $80. That would be a net of about $250 on 2.4 million tons. Worst case, we're making about $650 million a year.
As an upside case, even though potash hit $1,200, let's use 2/3 of that number. If we use $800 as an upside case and then add that $50 back on top, that's $850 at our mine gate against a cost of $80, $770 of net profit on 2.4 million tons, it's about $1.85 billion. We're going to be somewhere between $650 million and $1.85 billion. Right now, the price is $385 a ton, so using today's price, we'd generate about $850 million. Long term, we do expect the prices to go a little bit higher, not just because of the conflict in the Middle East, but also because of, again, the very tight concentration of where that product comes from.
The expectation is that over the next five to eight years, we will see an imbalance where the amount of supply will not keep up with demand, despite some major projects like BHP's Jansen coming online, and it's simply because the view is that none of the new production that was expected to be built in Belarus gets realized because it's largely owned by the sanctioned Belarusian government, which is a landlocked country. Maybe half of the new production that was expected to be built in Russia, which is largely owned by sanctioned oligarchs, sees the light of day. If that happens, we should central case generate roughly around $1 billion of free cash. Again, the numbers are somewhere between $ 650 million and about $ 1.8 billion for a very, very long project life.
Understood. It does sound like you got the asset in the right place at the right time as the market needed, and the supply certainly seems to be under question mark, if not outright constraint at this point. Before we close, can you talk about from an investor's perspective, what are the key milestones that investors should track over the next 12 months-18 months to make sure the project is developing on time and is going as you expected?
We expect a ton of news this year, Dmitry. This year, 2026, is all about putting the key building blocks to fund the construction together. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, we are looking at putting in build, own, operate, transfer contracts. We'll have roughly five of those for, again, the power line, the steam plant, the port, the 20 MW of power that's needed for construction that becomes our backup power, and for the trucking, the roughly 6 mi from the plant to the port. Every time we announce one of those contracts, there'll be an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, followed by a binding contract. Just there alone, there's 10 potential press releases. We're also going to announce locking in those government tax savings, that $ 100 million that we mentioned a little bit earlier on.
There'll be a potential anchor equity investor that may or may not happen. When we get the bulk of the equity together, the brunt of the construction can actually start in terms of placing orders for long lead equipment, starting to freeze the ground where the shafts will be sunk, and then rolling into 2027 is when we expect the debt to come into place.
Understood, Matt. Well, thank you, Matt Simpson. We appreciate you joining us for this session of WTR Insights Conference.
Thanks for having me on.
My pleasure. Thanks to everyone for participating as well. Please look for additional content on Brazil Potash at watertowerresearch.com. For those with further questions or for investors wishing to meet with management after this event, please reflect that interest through the conference portal. Our next conference session will start shortly, and we invite you to stay with us. Thank you.