Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the H.C. Wainwright 26th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Vivian Chang, and I'm an analyst on the corporate access team. H.C. Wainwright is a full-service investment bank dedicated to providing corporate finance, strategic advisory, and related services to public and private companies across multiple sectors and regions. We have a total of 24 publishing senior analysts and over 650 companies covered across all sectors. If you would like more information, please visit hcwco.com. From a logistics standpoint, please make sure to reference your online conference portal that provides your individual links to your meetings and all presentations. With that being said, we wish you a productive and enjoyable day. Now I will hand it off to Rob and Michael over at McEwen Mining.
Hello, my name is Rob McEwen. I am the Chairman and CEO and largest shareholder of McEwen Mining. With me today is Michael Meding, our vice president and general manager of McEwen Copper, and we'll both be addressing the assets we have in McEwen Mining. We offer investors exposure to not only precious metals, gold and silver, but also one of the world's largest copper plays that will be built shortly, and Michael will speak to that in a moment. We have a safe harbor statement that you're all familiar with, and our assets are spread through the Americas.
Gold mines in Canada, in Nevada, in Mexico, in southern Argentina, and copper projects, the biggest being our Los Azules, which is located in Argentina, at the bottom of the screen, and Elder Creek, which is a grassroots exploration play in a gold and copper trend in Nevada. A couple of years ago, I made a mistake. I hired someone to head up our operations, who gave guidance to the market that was never met, and the cost of missing guidance, you can see there from late 2018- 2022. It was a road to hell. We are on a road of redemption since September of 2022, driven largely by our copper asset.
Management's estimates, we view McEwen Mining trading at a large discount, and by our estimates, we see a low value of $20-$50 a share, and these are by taking various metrics in the marketplace. The assumptions are down below. The biggest driver is the copper, and the low estimate is based on what, 50% of Josemaria—you'll hear more about that in a minute. The mid-price is our latest financing of the copper, which values the copper at just under $1 billion, and there's a recent deal in the same province, Filo and Lundin Mining, and BHP puts a high value in there at $30.
Portfolio of royalties, the largest of which is on the Los Azules copper project, you'll hear more about, and gold and silver, comparing it to a group of four peers, their economic value divided by their gold equivalent ounces. We're currently trading at $9.47, so we think there's quite a bit of upside there. Next slide. Next slide. Los Azules is located on the spine of the Andes, and the Andes are a very prolific copper area, with Chile and Peru providing 40% of the world's annual production of copper, and we are in the same geological district, with a number of copper deposits within the same province, in which we are in Argentina, and also other copper projects along the border with Chile. Next slide.
Los Azules is a large deposit, 5.7 billion tonnes and a contained metal of 37.6 billion pounds, based on a preliminary economic assessment resource estimate done and published in the summer of 2013. Next slide. We've had some metallurgical work done, further metallurgical work, that showed an improved recovery rate that lifted the NPV at an 8% discount to $2.9 billion, CapEx of $2.5 billion, and a payback of three years, 27-year life, and low cost at $1.07 a pound, cash and all in. That was previously, with the metallurgical study, $1.02 a pound, and all in, $1.58 a pound. Next slide.
I like to look at deposits that are not gold and convert them to a gold equivalent to get a sense of their size and economic importance. So I take the gold price, divide it by the copper price, and that provides a number of pounds equal to the value of one ounce of gold. And in this case, we have a gold equivalent resource of 62 million ounces, a production cost, cash production of just over $600 an ounce, and an all-in sustaining cost of under $1,000 an ounce, and an average annual production of 650,000 ounces a year for 27 years. That is a very large gold deposit with a strong internal rate of return. Next slide. This is a deposit. I said it was a large one.
According to Mining Intelligence, it is the eighth largest undeveloped copper deposit in the world, and if you were to take out those deposits owned by the majors, which you can see above, it is the fourth largest. Next slide. We have two large shareholders besides McEwen Mining, that being Stellantis, the fourth largest car manufacturer, owning 19%, and Rio Tinto, the second largest mining company in the world, owning 14.2%. I personally own 13%, and McEwen Mining owns 48%. Next slide. There's the ownership structure. Next slide. So we've done three financings of the copper project. We separated it out from McEwen Mining. You might recall that graph I showed you early on, that our share price dropped, so our revenue was down.
We weren't producing as much gold, and the treasury was weak, so I felt we should separate the copper from the precious metals and finance the copper separately. I led the financing with a $40 million investment. We raised $82 million and closed in late August of 2022, 2022 . That was at $10. We did a second at the following February at $19 a share. We did a third at $26 a share in October of last year, and so far, we've done another $19 million at $30, bringing our market value, implied market value, of just under $1 billion, and a value behind every share of McEwen Mining of $8.94. Next slide. This graph is showing how McEwen Mining has performed since we closed that financing in late August of 2022.
And you can see on this graph that we're up 219%, far surpassing the performance of gold at 48%, the Dow at 30%, Nasdaq at 52%, copper at 23%, and the gold indices, the GDX and the GDXJ, at both 71% and 69%, and ahead of silver. And we think this is just beginning, as our precious metal operations have turned the corner in improving both what they're producing and lowering the cost of what they produce. Next slide. A big, big impact on the asset in Argentina. Argentina was often considered a place to avoid in investments. I always liked it because we had a large deposit, and I thought one day there'd be a government that would turn this place around, and President Javier Milei is doing magic down there.
He introduced a large bill to encourage foreign investment, and it's proving to be a real winner in that, just at the end of July of this year, BHP and Lundin Mining announced a $4.4 billion copper deal, consolidating the deposits of Filo del Sol and Josemaria. And you'll hear about that shortly from Michael, how we compare against those two. Next slide. And here we go.
So as Rob said, we have two reference points. Why do we choose Josemaria, and why do we choose Filo? They're in the same province as the Los Azules project. And here I would like to compare them. When it comes to altitude, Los Azules is somewhere between 3,100 and 3,600 meters altitude. Josemaria, 4,900 meters altitude, and Filo del Sol, 4,900- 5,400 meters altitude. Why is this important? And Rob likes to compare the Filo del Sol numbers with Base Camp Everest. Machines and people, they don't perform the same way in altitude as they do at lower elevations. So we clearly out benefit from our geographic location as compared to Josemaria and Filo del Sol.
Then, when we compare copper resources and grades, and we take together what is publicly published as of today, Josemaria and Filo, we're about 2.5x Josemaria and Filo together. And we are on a measured and indicated basis on a higher grade. The same with inferred. We are closer to infrastructure. On the lower left-hand side, you see the comparisons. We're about 70 kilometers straight line to a provincial road and a 500 kV line. Josemaria is about 244 kilometers from connectivity, both in terms of provincial road as well as energy. And Filo del Sol is 77 kilometers to Chile, which would be allowed through the mining integration treaty between Chile and Argentina.
Then from a cost perspective, Los Azules is on the lowest cost quartile. Josemaria is on the highest. In terms of development stage, we are at an earlier stage. We are at PEA level, Josemaria is at feasibility, and Filo del Sol is at PFS level. So what Rob said before, we have done three financings. We are in the fourth financing round. Based on the pricing of the fourth financing round, we would be valuing ourselves at $947 million. Josemaria was sold. 50% of it was sold to BHP for a deal value of $1.38 billion. And Filo del Sol was taken private or is in the process of being taken private for $3.12 billion.
We believe that we have a very good profile as when we compare ourselves to those two. Now, what Rob already mentioned before is the large investment incentive regime that recently came through and was just regulated in Argentina. It has significant tax benefits. It lowers the corporate tax rate by 10 percentage points. It has a couple of other benefits, such as accelerated depreciation, unlimited loss carry forward, unlimited interest deduction, lower tax on dividends from 7%- 3.5% after seven years, no withholding tax on foreign technical services, and so forth.
It also is very clear on foreign exchange benefits, which is one of the stumbling blocks for Argentina, and export proceeds are freely available abroad for big projects, 100% three years after startup of the project. We think this is a major point for foreign investment coming to Argentina, making Argentina more competitive from an overall tax burden point of view, giving clear foreign exchange stability, and giving that on a 30 to 40 year basis. There are other things, such as the free exportation of goods, free importations of everything required to build the mine, and then also the abolition of the export duties after three years, which is currently at 4.5%.
What helps in terms of financing of such a large construction project is the immediate recovery of the VAT, which currently takes significant time. Now, when we look at the relative positioning of Los Azules, and we benchmark against a couple of selected base metal developers, then we see that Los Azules has one of the highest life of mines. It has one of the highest LOM average production. It has the highest total resource. It is ranked on the bigger size in terms of CapEx, but on the lower size when we compare to concentrators. If you compare concentrator, concentrator is usually between $4 billion and $6 billion. Here, Los Azules that will be producing industrializable copper via heap leaching is at a relatively low $2.5 billion.
We have a relatively low overall capital intensity in U.S. dollars per ton of copper produced, and we have a relatively low cash cost of $1.07 per pound of copper produced. Now, as you can see, the sensitivities, the PEA assumption, we published our last PEA in June last year, with an NPV of 2.7 and a price of $3.75. If you would look at current long-term consensus, which is $4.08, then our NPV would grow to about slightly below $ 3.3 billion .
We look at the IRR sensitivity, again, long-term consensus, from the 375 that we had in the PEA assumption, it would be just shy of 24%, and all those numbers are without the impact of the regime. Our high-level estimate foresee that the regime will add slightly below $1 billion to the NPV of the project. Then we have another very important differentiating factor, and Rob likes to call this, that we really would like to build something beautiful. We would like to build a jewel on the mountain. This is a mock-up of how we envision our workers for the mine of the future, will work in the future.
It treats its own water, generates its own electricity, and grows its own food, at least for a certain part of the food supply that is required. And it's beautifully embedded, similar to how the Incas built several hundred years back within the mountain range, and it's something where people of Calingasta, where our project is located, should be proud of. Then, when we look at Los Azules' design versus comparable-sized conventional copper mines, we see that we are in the lowest cost quartile on the upper left-hand side, and we are also in the lowest 10% in terms of carbon emissions. How is this possible?
We just today published another press release working expanding our work with YPF, the local power company, that will supply 100% renewable energy to Los Azules. We have about one-fourth of water consumption of comparable copper mine. We are processing via heap leach. We aim to produce green copper cathodes. There's no transport to a smelter. We have no tailings or tailings dam, and we have a public pledge to be carbon neutral by 2038. Now, coming to the team that has been driving forward Los Azules. Los Azules' management team has a deep experience, plus a track record of success in San Juan Province, where our project is located, and getting things done in Argentina depends heavily on the type and kind of people that one employs.
Each of our team members here in Argentina, you see that by the flag, has at least 15 years of leadership experience in the San Juan Province in Tier One and Tier Two mining operations. We have a wide mix of different partners with whom we built this project together, from international companies such as Samuel Engineering and Knight Piésold , to local drilling companies such as Drilla that support us in maintaining and expanding our social license to operate in the province. We have interesting recent exploration results. We have seen, and you see in dark gray, the mineable pit shell from our PEA from last year, and in light gray, the unconstrained resource shell. We have seen in the exploration hole on the left side, left is to the north, that we see copper far below our pit shell.
We have drilled 1,128 meters, and we have seen 0.42% copper at the end of the drill hole for about 480 meters. Then we have done another hole that unfortunately we had to stop short, where we have seen 0.2% copper over 202 meters at the end of the hole. Then to the south, 600 meters to the south of the deposit, we also see copper mineralization. That means that we can expand going forward our already vast deposit to the north, to the south, east, west, and the south. Then we have some other exciting news that we showed in our annual general meeting.
We have a possible discovery of a new porphyry copper system called Tango, east of Los Azules. It's about three km east of Los Azules. Los Azules you see, on the left side with the, black outline. What we have seen is five key elements of a large porphyry system: multiple intrusives, porphyry copper alteration, porphyry copper veining, porphyry copper, porphyry geochemical signatures, geophysical signatures, and, we have been able to drill one hole, that's the, blue box that you can see there, that was completed the last drilling season, and it intercepted 106 meters of 0.11% copper. Unfortunately, we couldn't go, more to the east, where we would have liked to drill due to weather conditions, but we have shown here that we found a mineralized system.
Okay.
I hand over back to you, Rob.
Thank you, Mike. Just in terms of alignment with shareholders, my personal investment in the company and McEwen Mining, McEwen Copper, is $225 million, 16%, making $1 a year. We have 51 million shares outstanding. You can see the ownership structure, and on the right, the funds that own is institutional. Next slide. Our financial position has been improving. At the end of Q2 this year, just under $41 million. During the year, we reduced our debt to $40 million. We've been doing some flow-through financing, which are tax-driven investments that you can do at a premium. The most recent financing was done at an average cost of $14.36, so well above the market.
Net income last year was $1.15 a share, as opposed to a loss of $0.81 a share the preceding year. Production pretty much a little below last year, but we have a growth curve where we can see our production over the next five years stepping up from 130,000-140,000 to up to 200,000 ounces. Next slide. You can see our resources, good resource and spread amongst three mine properties. You can see on the next slide, 32, it's just... The next slide, please. Where we had a drop in production, and we're picking up, and five years out, we'll be about where we were in 2019.
So if you want exposure to precious metals in a levered situation, and you want exposure to one of the largest copper deposits in the world, that we will be doing an IPO in the first half of next year for copper, so an opportunity to get in early, and McEwen Mining, in management's opinion, is significantly undervalued. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, Rob and Michael, and to the entire team at McEwen Mining for leading a very productive and informative presentation. The H.C. Wainwright team is grateful for your presence at the Annual Global Investment Conference and for your efforts in preparing for your session.