Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have Newton Golf Company, Inc. It trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol NWTG. It is committed to innovation inspired by Sir Isaac Newton. Applies the principles of physics to the design and performance of premium golf equipment, creating precision engineered golf, Newton Motion Shafts, and Gravity Putters that deliver unmatched stability, control, and performance. Happy to welcome COO Jeff Clayborne. Nice to see you, Jeff. We are very much looking forward to hearing your presentation today.
Thanks, Anna. Appreciate everyone taking the time to learn a little bit about Newton Golf today.
Perfect. Go for it. Call me back when you are ready for questions.
All right. I am going to go through our slide deck, everyone. I am going to skip through some of the slides. The slide deck is available at newtongolf.com in the investor relations section. You can spend more time there. Some of the presentation will get into some of the technical elements of golf. If you got additional questions, feel free to email us. We are happy to set up separate conversations with anyone that wants to hear more about the story. With that, I will jump into a few things. Newton Golf, here is our key stats page. Won't spend much time here. We went public in 2023. We launched our first Motion shaft in 2023 at the back end of the year, which is why the revenue is a little bit lighter. We launched the fairway wood in 2024.
You saw great revenue growth, up to $3.4 million. We ended up at $8.1 million last year on the heels of launching the Fast Motion driver shaft. We have approximately 4.6 million shares outstanding. We're trading right around $1, puts us right around a $5 million market cap, and have half a million dollars of convertible debt that's priced above market. The conversion rate is fixed at $1.60. Subsequent to 3/31, we've added an additional $1.5 million of convertible notes, all with a fixed conversion price of $1.60. Who is Newton? I'm not going to spend much time here. As Anna said, we are technology forward-thinking as we created our shafts. I think what differentiates us the most is our dot system, which I will spend more time later in the presentation. We manufacture in the U.S.
We have new product lines coming out later this year, and we're expanding internationally. We operate in a relatively big market. Won't spend much time here. The global golf market is $9 billion, which provides opportunities for Newton Golf to expand beyond shaft once we prove ourselves and establish a sound market share within the shaft business. The shaft market itself is $600 million. Golf is growing. You guys can read about this. If you're active golfers, you know what's going on in the golf space. For us, this is where we start to differentiate ourselves, and you'll start seeing common themes as I go through.
It's a $600 million market. It's a relatively frustrating market. We are riding the tide of the changes in the OEM manufacturer, where they started at changing the tips, and now they have adapters at the bottom of all the driver shafts. They're now in the fairways. Many of the hybrids have them. What does that mean? Back in the day when, and it's sad, I actually just replaced my shaft, but I had bought a Speedster, with my Callaway back in 2005. For me to change that out, I would have to go to someone else that would have to tear it apart, put a new shaft in. With a simple screwdriver, you can unscrew the driver head from the shaft, and you can put in a replacement shaft in. That allows golfers to upgrade their shafts and improve their game on the fly.
That is the biggest change, which has really provided the opportunity for someone like Newton to come into the space. What makes us different? There is zero standardization into golf. Between Fujikura, Graphite Design, Mitsubishi, they all have different naming conventions. The way they go through the fitting process is cumbersome and fragmented flex labels. What is stiff with one isn't stiff for another. All the shafts perform quite a bit differently. One of the biggest frustration points is, if you go get a driver shaft and you find out your Ventus Blue, you go to a fitter and you have your driver. For their fairway and hybrids, no other company actually customizes the fairway and hybrid shafts. All they do is take the standard driver shaft and they cut it down and make it shorter.
That obviously creates quite a bit of an opportunity for someone like Newton, which I'll get into in a minute, because if you're cutting it down, your fairways, you need a heavier shaft because the head of a fairway is heavier than a driver. Also, you're hitting on the ground, which creates different torque. If you were Ventus Blue and you had a mid-flex point, mid-impact point, that does not mean that's what you're going to need for a fairway. Keep that in the back of your mind and I'll walk you through where we're changing things. If you were in the old system, the first thing you're going to do is look at your swing speed and understand the flex that you need. There's, like I said, six or seven different types of flexes, and they vary based on the company you're working with.
Once you identify your flex, you're going to find out your kick point. Most of the competition have three kick points. The three kick points are up in the close to the grip, that is usually reserved for people swinging the golf ball really fast. You got your mid-kick point, your average, enthusiast, moderately athletic. At the bottom, it still might be someone that used to be athletic, but maybe you're getting older and your swing speed's slowing down, so you need a lower kick point so you can drive the ball higher or further. With Newton, all you have to do is understand your swing speed. Once we understand your swing speed, we will put you in a dot. We have what is one through seven dots. One being, not to describe, an older person that doesn't swing really hard.
The shaft's going to be a lot more flexible, and we have an elongated profile, and at the bottom, it'll lead more to a lower kick point, even though we use more of the shaft. I'll get into that later. Now you've got your dot number. Once you have your dot, you can build your bag. What does that mean? Where I went back to our competition, I was a Ventus Blue. Now I want to upgrade all my shafts in my bag for my fairways and my hybrids. You've got to go back through the fitting system, which can be complex. The shafts start at $170 and go up to $300, so these are relatively decent-sized ticket items, especially when people could be buying five, six, seven upgrade shafts.
For us, once you know you are either a Fast Motion or a Motion, and I know I'm, let's say, a four dot, you're going to be a four dot in the Motion Series, or you will be a four dot in the Fast Motion series. Once you know you're a four dot, it's, "I've got my four dot driver," then I'd be a four dot fairway. I'd be four dot through all my hybrids, and it would just be a differentiation between the Fast and the Motion product line. I will quickly go through the product line. Motion was our first shaft. It's a little bit heavier than the Fast Motion. We use three types of fiber making our shafts. The Fast Motion is, on average, 10 g lighter. Obviously, if it's lighter, generally you can swing the ball faster, which would then give you higher swing speeds.
It is our number one selling. We use what's called high modulus fiber, which is just as stiff as our standard fibers, but it's much lighter. It performs better. With the higher swing speeds, part of the misnomer is it's not just that you swing faster. You also use your wrist. A lot of golfers use their wrist to put movement on the ball. If you have a lighter shaft, it puts less pressure on your wrist and allow you to control your ball and your flight a lot easier. We also sell putters. Putters will be part of the phase II of the company. It's interesting. We started as a putter business in 2018. The shafts are what took off. Putter is a completely feel business, and the putters start around $400 up to $550. They don't sell really well D2C.
We expand into wholesale, retail, and get floor space, and our customers can try the putters, we will then bring the putters to the forefront and focus a little bit more of our business. Right now, 99% of our business is focused on our shaft part of the business. Just a couple key stats here. We were the number two shaft on the PGA Tour Champions last year. We've had 60+ tour professionals across PGA, LPGA, Korn Ferry Tour, PGA Tour Champions put our drivers into play. We have some champions. On the right, I mentioned we're the number 1 shaft on Club Champion after only being in existence for a few years. We're also testing the limits of what carbon fiber can do. We have multiple players that are using it in world long drive.
Just earlier this year, one of the long drive guys set the world record holder for the fastest ball speed using a Newton shaft. Won't spend much time here other than this is our historical performance. You can see sales are going up. Our gross profit is going up. Obviously, percentage, that gross margin's down a little bit. The gross margins are down primarily last year was due to scalability over time. We couldn't maximize the facility, bring the margins down. However, we believe we can get to 70%+ margins in the future as we optimize our capacity and our manufacturing process. Where I want to spend a little more time was Q1, for those following the company. We had slowed down our capacity to upgrade our processes, procedures during Q1. Our revenue came in at $991,000.
That was down year-over-year, which we're aware that's not a tremendous growth story for a company like ours to have revenue going backwards. The demand didn't slow. It was the fact that we did not ship as many products as we were fine-tuning the manufacturing process, the quality control, and making slight improvements to our shafts themselves. We finished the quarter with a $1.2 million backlog. It's typically under $100,000. The mix of that was $900,000 between D2C, $300,000 for wholesale. If we had shipped all that product, we would've had another record quarter for Q1, quarter-over-quarter. The demand remained strong. It was a slowdown of our manufacturing facility, and those changes were critical to allow us to secure OEM partnerships. That's the primary highlights there. I'm sure I'll get more questions in the Q&A.
I want to leave as much time for the Q&A. I apologize, I talk really fast. Our business mix, mentioned it, we're currently 91% D2C, 9% wholesale, which is dominated by Club Champion. Our penetration for international is a rounding error. It's zero. The one thing I would point out there is we signed our partnership with Korea. They put in a 1,000-unit order in Q1, which already blew their minimum guarantee. We're seeing tremendous progress in Korea. The Japan market will start heating up. We launched our website last year. We also signed a few golfers in Japan that have local star power to increase our visibility in the Japan market. Japan and Korea, they bounce back and forth, guys. They're usually number two or three as far as the largest golf markets behind the United States. How do we plan on growing?
Obviously, we have our dot system. That dot system works by expanding our shaft platform. We have two primary product lines. We have our Fast Motion, which is lighter. You have the Motion that's a little bit heavier. We're eventually going to launch an X, which sits in between the two. Within each of the Fast, the Motion, and the future X, it is to have the driver, then the fairways, three, five, seven, hybrids, three, four, five, six, seven. That in and itself changes the game. We launched in 2023 with the ability for a customer to buy one shaft. We market it. Our customer acquisition costs can run around $100, but someone only has ability to buy one shaft. If you're a Motion lover, you can buy the fairway. Now you got an opportunity to buy two shafts.
Actually, three or four, because there's multiple fairways that you can purchase. This year, we are launching the Fast Motion fairway. We also have the Motion and Fast Motion hybrids coming. That changes the game for the company because it increases the lifetime value of our customer. Someone can come in and do their initial replacement. They can upgrade those shafts later down the road. As I mentioned, you spend the money, you go get your fitter, you know who you are, and you know your swing. Once you know your dot and you know your Fast Motion, you can go and upgrade your shafts without going back to a fitter. You can just go right to newtongolf.com and buy your four dot hybrid to upgrade your bag. OEM partnerships is the second big one for us.
To us, in some ways, maybe this is the holy grail. Partly because to get in business with the OEMs, you have to have consistent quality. Your product has to perform. We have the 60 pros using it. That's a certain amount of validation. To manage the scale and the volume of an OEM, I think it stamps another validation point for the company. It's more than just a validation point. There are roughly 10.5 million shafts sold, you'll see that in another slide, through these OEMs initially every year. When you get into the OEM, some of the OEMs have thousands of fitters that just fit Callaway, just fit Titleist. Some of the big fitting operations, Club Champion will fit on their own, so they carry Newton. We are the number one shaft.
However, other big fitting operations will only fit if you're in the catalog of the OEM because they'll do the custom fitting, but then they'll send the order for the various clubs to the OEM. They'll put the shaft together, and they'll send it back to the fitter, and then you get your club. If you're not in the catalog, you're missing some opportunities, but that catalog is the free marketing for us. Once we're in a Callaway catalog, the Titleist catalog, we increase our visibility. People may see us there. People may go to the fitter. If they don't like the price at the fitter, but then they can go to the D2C website and purchase online. The other component of the OEM is now you get into the tour van.
We've done incredibly well on the Tour of Champions, and that's partly because there's not a lot of endorsement money. These golfers are obviously still very competitive. Ernie Els, I think, still swings at 115 miles an hour. These are tremendous golfers, but because the money's smaller, we have the ability to sign them to small NIL deals. We call it tee-up money. We divvy up about $6,200 every tournament, and the top five golfers are using a Newton shaft. We divide up that money, and we pay them for putting the Newton shaft in play. That tee-up money isn't possible at the PGA level. It's way too expensive. To get Rory McIlroy to use our shaft would just be, we don't have the budget for it. However, once you're in a tour van, these are competitive golfers. They're all trying to improve their game.
You have certain golfers that will tinker with their clubs all season. You have other golfers that will work on the off-season, and they're not going to change. They're going to stick with it all season. However, once you're in a tour van, the caddy's working with you. You don't like the way the ball's coming off the club. We're in a tour van. He can go back to the tour van and now pick the Newton and put it in play, putting less focus on our sales team, and they're just organically doing it, and it'll allow us the opportunity to start getting to a younger demographic across the PGA or Korn Ferry specific tours. We obviously mentioned wholesale retail. Once we get into catalogs, it makes it easier for wholesale retail growth, and I touched on international expansion. We have four primary growth areas.
Product and OEM will lead the charge and be game changers for the company. As I went to the OEM, I'll give you some stats here. I mentioned the 10.5 million. Those are the sales of clubs that are sold annually across the drivers, hybrids, fairways. You see the little matrix of the market share. Callaway, TaylorMade, Titleist are the big guys with Ping right there. The other big opportunity is what we call the aftermarket. Yes, there's only 10.5 million clubs sold every year, but the average golfer, let's say they keep their clubs for five years. I kept my clubs for 15 years because I'm not a very good golfer. I don't need to be changing. The time that people are keeping their clubs is expanding because the PGA has changed the rules on the driver heads.
Back when I bought my club, everyone was still competing. They were making changes. You hit the ball longer, but the pros are getting bigger, stronger, and they're out-driving the courses. You don't see advertisement, "Oh, you hit the ball further with our new Callaway," because they've already stretched the limits. They'll help with you're hitting off the heel, it still goes straight, but you're not going to get more distance out of your drivers and your clubs. That technology now is going to be in the shaft because I think it's 2028, the PGA's also changing the rules of the golf ball, so the golf ball's going to go as far. In order to hit the ball further, the shaft technology's going to be in the forefront. We have a unique opportunity right now to capitalize on that opportunity.
When I mentioned on the aftermarket, if the average person doesn't replace their clubs over five years, that's $50 million potential upgradable shafts. I put in this little slide $40 million, and this is just a hypothetical, and we've used really conservative numbers. Assuming we achieve the 0.5% of the initial OEM sales, that could lead to $6.8 million in revenue. We achieve 2.5% of all the upgradable shaft sales, and keep in mind, we're the number one shaft sold at Club Champion. To get to 2.5%, we feel like that's defensible. That would add $13 million in revenue. However, what does that really mean to the company? Because if you remember earlier, we're 90% D2C. For us, the OEM kind of gets the flywheel going. We're visible. We're in all the catalogs. We're on the tour. You're a Callaway guy.
You go to a Callaway fitter. You get fit. You don't like the price, or you can't afford to upgrade all your shafts. Well, with our dot system, now you know who we are. You got your fitting. You picked up your driver, but now you can go expand the shafts through the bag, and we believe that's going to drive sales to D2C as well as OEM due to the price points, right? Our average price point factored in is $130 a shaft for our OEM and wholesale. D2C, the average price point is $230, so we sell less shafts, make more money, but it also will substantially decrease our customer acquisition cost, increase the lifetime value of the company, which is all the things our investors want to see and I certainly want to see as a CFO as well.
The combined mix, we have a path to over $50 million in revenue, and that'd be 300,000 shafts. If anyone has listened to our presentations before, you know I've mentioned that we have capacity in our St. Joe facility up to 200,000 shafts. We are already looking at adding second lines on key equipment in the near future for two purposes. One, something breaks down, you can shift. You have your equipment there. Two, we want to be able to expand beyond 200,000 shafts and allow for the opportunity to meet the demands that are going to be coming from the OEMs. We're at 21 minutes, I'm going to quickly go through this so I leave time for Q&A. We have an elongated profile. What that means, our competition have kick points. I mentioned grip, middle, low.
We use an elongated kick point, which stretches over two-thirds of the shaft. If you think about a longbow, and you pull it all up, all that energy stored in the bow, since we have an elongated kick point, we can store more energy. When the shaft releases, hits the ball, you hit the ball further, and with our technology, you hit the ball straighter, where if you have a smaller kick point, you don't store up as much energy. That's kind of the differentiation for us. There's a comparison to L.A.B. Golf and their exit. You can see that online. The key takeaways, record sales last year. We're high gross margin. Number one shaft at Club Champion. Have 60-plus tour professionals putting our shaft in play. We have a proprietary dot system, which allows for expansion and revenue growth.
We're launching new shaft lines later this year. We have begun penetration with OEMs. We are in multiple discussions and currently shipping to one of the OEMs. We have international expansion, and we do believe we will still have a record year as our demand hasn't slowed down. It has simply been us optimizing our facility in St. Joe's. With that, I will turn it back over to Anna for Q&A.
Awesome. Great job, Jeff. Really interesting stuff here. Starting with the question, how do the improvements in the manufacturing facility better position you for potential OEM partners? When you think the facility will be ready for the potential OEM partners, when might that be?
I'll take the last one first. The OEM facility, our facility's ready for OEMs now. We virtually got through most of that in Q1 and the later part, the very beginning of Q2. The biggest impact was consistency and quality control. Part of it was we started in 2023. I brought in somebody with 30 years of experience of growing manufacturing facilities. The gentleman has over 19 years of Vice President or above experience. He is now leading the charge, which that is across multiple avenues for a company like us in getting on someone's radar. One, it's the HR part, managing that, safety in the warehouse, OSHA requirements. You've got to meet all that and create a professional work environment with someone that understands how to lead that as we went from doing 1,000 shafts a year.
Last year, we did roughly 48,000 shafts. As we're growing, we need to become more professional. On top of that, it was changing out some of the people. Once you establish standard operating procedures and everything and consistency, you find that some of the people that were there may not be the right people for the future. All of our shafts are handmade. They are cut, they are stacked, we roll them. We run them through the media, which is the cellophane that goes around them. You bake them, you take them out of the oven, you sand them, you paint them. In the old process with the quality control for D2C was fine. You're buying one shaft at a time. The difference is if you're shipping to an OEM, you may be sending them 300 shafts.
Those 300 shafts have to test they have to roll the same, they have to weigh the same. Our guys, the hand part of the process of rolling it on and getting it in the oven was slightly different. They may sand, it was within spec, but it sanded a little bit different. We needed to tighten all of that from a quality control standpoint. That was critical for us again, as I mentioned, the OEM is a really important part of our business, and their standards are much higher than if I just get one shaft, "Oh, I got it. I hit it straighter, I hit it farther. I'm happy." The OEM standards for managing and putting us through the gauntlet is a little bit different, and we're ready for that now.
Perfect. Thank you for that. Have you had any order cancellations from the 1.2 million backlog?
We have, not material. Overall, we had, it's not out of the 1.2 million, the 1.2 million is net. We've had very few cancellations of that backlog we stated in March we are now shipping product. We've cut our backlog in half over the last 30 days. That's in process, which is great. We did have about $300,000 of retail value, wholesale value cancellations from inception. If you're following us online, that is probably the biggest sore point we have is through the shutdown. That Q1 is our slowest part of the year. We have the OEM circling. We could have put this off and waited till next year, and done it throughout the year. We chose to take it on the chin and get ready for the OEMs too many of them are circling, and we didn't want to lose the opportunity.
However, with that is the frustration from our customers. It's real. If you go on Reddit, you go on Facebook, people talk positive about the shaft, but there's comments out there, "Oh, are they a scam? Are they a real customer?" Because we had customers waiting two months, three months for their shaft. That's now all getting worked out. The new shafts are actually better than the shafts we had before. The reviews that the customers are getting are glowing. However, we're still managing the backlog. I think to me, it's less about the cancellation as it is reputational damage, that we don't want people to think we're not real. It just, the crossover and making the changes in the warehouse took a little longer than we anticipated.
Thank you for that. With that said, what percentage of customers purchase additional Newton products after their first purchase?
We saw a 47% uptick. That is just starting, and the reason is it's a metric we're going to continue to start. What we do see is an expansion amongst friends and groups. Someone goes out in their foursome, we're seeing the rest of their buddies come in and buy a shaft. We hear the testimonies. "Why'd you buy the shaft?" "Yeah, because the guy that hit the ball the shortest is now leading us on Sunday, and I can't have that. I'm going to give your Newton shaft a try." As we expand, because right now, if you love Fast Motion, Fast Motion represents 67% of our sales. Well, we don't offer any other Fast Motion shafts. There is no fairway yet and there's no hybrid. Those are coming later this year.
After that point, we're going to start seeing an uptick, where right now with Motion, you can buy the Motion shaft and you can buy the Motion fairways. It's limited, and we just launched the Fast Motion last year, and that's kind of become the crown jewel.
Wonderful. I want to give you about a minute to close. We've got so many questions for you, we are out of time, so we'll send them to you. You can answer on your own. What do you have to say for a takeaway for our viewers today?
We are in a very unique position in a sport that's growing, not just for the casual golfer. You get outside in the fresh air, the technology, and the at-home golf that you can do with the simulators, Topgolf, Canada. We're seeing upticks in golf around the world from places that never golfed before. You can only golf in Canada and parts of Canada for a few months a year. Now you can golf all year round in simulators. That has a big impact. With the changes and the tips and how easy it is to upgrade a shaft, I think we are as an $8 million revenue, $5 million market cap, we have tremendous total returns to investors to look forward to in the future as we grow this company and execute on our dots.
Perfect. Great presentation today, Jeff. We appreciate your time and really enjoyed learning more about Newton Golf Company, we'd love to see you again real soon.
Thank you, Anna. Thanks, Emerging Growth. Bye-bye.
All right, everyone, we'll be right back with our next presenter. Welcome back everyone. Next we have Nova Minerals Limited, trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol NVA and on the ASX under the symbol NVA. It's a gold and critical minerals exploration and development company focused on advancing the Estelle Gold Project. Happy to welcome CEO and Executive Director, Christopher Tyson. Chris, welcome to the conference. We're looking forward to hearing your presentation.
Thanks so much, Anna. We'll get straight into it. Nova Minerals, we're developing North America's next major gold and critical minerals district, and the big critical mineral that we've been focused on is antimony. We're bringing domestic supply of antimony back to the U.S. here. Few disclaimers. It's really about antimony and gold for us. On the antimony side, we've been the recent recipient of a $43.4 million Department of Defense award funding to bring that domestic production back, and we are on track, and we're targeting initial production by the end of 2026 or early 2027. Ahead of schedule actually on that. With the gold, to date, very large project, on the Australian JORC system, the global resource, 9.9 million ounces, but in the S-K 1300 here in the United States, those in-pit economic resources, our previous study was 5.2 million ounces of in-pit resources.
We're working on a feasibility study now to come out with a new estimate on that on the gold side. Very exciting for both, but we're really on the right commodities at the right team and the right location here in Alaska, USA. The corporate overview, what's been happening. Recently, we've been working on a U.S. re-domicile. We are now a U.S. company, and the timeline there, we released the scheme booklet at a shareholder vote on the scheme that was approved, and the courts have now approved that as well. We are currently in trading halt this week, and we will be coming out of trading halt next week, next Monday, to be a fully U.S. domiciled company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange starting next Monday to commence trading as a fully U.S. re-domiciled company.
We're ramping up field programs in the meantime, and we're fully funded for our exploration and development programs on both the gold and antimony side, as we move forward now into the high season where we have drilling programs and technical studies. We're coming into a big season for news flow to follow here for the rest of the year. Alaska, such a safe mining jurisdiction, preferred jurisdiction on some of these ranking schemes like the Fraser Institute. Our project's all on state land, there's no federal and native title land to contend with. That means a much more streamlined permitting process, and we're fully permitted for exploration, and we're just seeing a lot of just expedited permitting. We're already experiencing that.
I recall that on day one, this current administration released an executive order, which was literally titled Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Mineral Resource Potential, this is what it looks like, projects like Estelle, we're already seeing the benefits of that. The project itself, quite a large project, over 200 sq mi claim block here in Alaska, where we have over 20 prospects at various stages of advancement.
We've been really focused on Korbel and RPM for the gold, then Stibium and Styx prospects for the antimony. On the antimony side, Stibium and Styx, we see massive stibnite veining on the surface there with surface sampling results up to 60% antimony, this is what we're focused on for the $43 million Department of Defense award to bring that domestic production back to start extracting material from these prospects, as well as drill to establish a resource for longer-term sustained production and longer-term planning. That's for phase I, phase II, we'd be looking beyond 2026 and 2027. We'll be looking to scale things up by expanding the mining operations and building a much larger refinery. The key prospects there, Styx and Stibium, really the thing to focus on on this slide is the photos.
You can see that on the left-hand side with Styx, you can see us just already extracting ore. We see that the guys there working on a massive stibnite vein, just sticking out of the surface. We've already collected about 50 tons of material, just hand manually collecting that last year. Now, of course, with the Department of Defense funding, we've now bought mining equipment, we're going to mechanize that and really scale things up this year as part of the Department of Defense program to commence antimony production. There's a photo of myself and Senator Murkowski sitting in front of our antimony stockpile down at our base camp. On the right-hand side, you can see some of those pictures of the big veins there at Stibium, also now in a drill rig there.
We have commenced drilling at Stibium Prospect as we move forward here to eventually establish a resource. We'll be producing antimony well before we even establish a resource for that longer-term planning, just because it's right there on the surface and we can extract it now. A key part of the project is the Port McKenzie site, where we'll be doing all our downstream processing. This is where we'll be extracting the ore on our site then sending it to Port McKenzie to further crush it and concentrate it, then refine it into the initial product of military-grade antimony trisulfide. That's what phase I is all about. Here at Port McKenzie deepwater port, we're situated between a rail bed and the road.
We got the power line running right next to our property, where we've secured 42 acres, which will easily facilitate this phase I project refinery, and then it's large enough to expand then into a phase II. It's a really key location, centrally located, and the larger vision there is to establish an antimony refining hub in U.S. hands that not only our project feeds into but across the region, across the state, and indeed across the world that can feed into here. Really, it's not just antimony. As we move forward, really a critical minerals refining hub, and Port McKenzie is such a key part of that with logistical redundancy and a central location. On the flow sheet, we've been developing that with a lot of metallurgical test work.
What we're looking at is mining, of course, at the site, and then early concentration on the site using ore sorting, XRT density ore sorting to be exact, to produce a coarse concentrate. The material will still be between three to five inches in size, and we'll be separating that into two products, a high-grade gold, low-grade stockpile, or a high-grade gold, low-grade antimony stockpile, which we'll just store on-site that has value to us, and then a high-grade antimony, low-grade gold stockpile, which we will then ship to Port McKenzie for the downstream processing. There we will mill and potentially gravity separate, but certainly flotation to produce a concentrate running between 40%-60%.
Then we are leaning towards, and really have decided to move towards a hydrometallurgical process, where we'll be leaching this material, getting it into solution, and then once it's in solution, the first priority, of course, is to produce the military-grade antimony trisulfide. Because we're using the hydrometallurgical process, it's not too far of a stretch shortly thereafter to then put on a circuit for antimony trioxide and antimony metal for some of these other refined antimony products off the same plant. 80% of that plant is the same, that early processing and then the refining. We can put on different circuits. Of course, with phase I, with the Department of Defense funding, the project priority is to produce military-grade antimony trisulfide. That's the first cab off the rank. The project is well on schedule, actually ahead of schedule.
We're just about to complete our design and engineering of our processing plants. Most of that is complete. We're just looking at the refining process now, that hydrometallurgical step to produce the military-grade antimony trisulfide. We'll establish some type of a mineral resource, by the end of the year, hopefully, because we have a drilling program happening this year, and so we will establish that. That does not stop us from actually starting to extract material. With the Department of Defense funding, we've now purchased over 90% of the actual mining and processing equipment, which has been delivered or is on the way now to be delivered this summer.
This summer will be very active for us in terms of commencing the mining here shortly in the coming weeks, then the construction period starts over the next few months, by later this year, we will be looking to commission parts of that plant to be targeting eventual production of military-grade antimony trisulfide by late 2026 or early next year. We want to be successful at that because then we have the potential to move to phase II, where we scale things up and apply for much larger DOE funding for phase II. The grand vision here is really, when I speak about phase II, is to have a critical mineral antimony and critical minerals refining hub, and this lays it out. We will be mining on the site or doing that early ore sorting concentration at the site.
We can mine it at 5% out of the deposits using machines, excavators, and these type of machines that are ore sorting. Our test work has shown a three to five times upgrade, so we will be producing a 15%-20% product at the site, then take it to Port McKenzie for all the downstream processing there. Being at Port McKenzie, this is really the gateway for Alaska Minerals to reach market, and it is being developed as a commodity port. Projects from across the state and around the region can feed into this central refinery that we can then export to the U.S. and our allies and to the markets. Being at the port location there and lots of different logistics options, that is very feasible.
That is the grand vision that we are working on with the Department of Defense to establish, with our project at the center of it, of course, the wider region resources to feed into that. The gold side, we are, of course, a gold company as well. To point out, the antimony project is running on a standalone parallel path. Separate to that are our gold projects. Here, currently we are working on a feasibility study, doing all the studies and the drilling that is involved, the metallurgical test work, the environmental studies, to come out with some type of feasibility very soon. It is an iterative process. The more drilling, the more studies you do. You follow those leads and make it as robust as possible.
We are attempting now with our drilling programs to infill and get as many resources as we can into reserves, into the reserves for this upcoming feasibility study. That involves RPM project here. Of course, at RPM, we have a number of zones we have been working on, RPM North, Valley, and South. If we zoom into those, here is some typical drill intercepts. You can see, one I always like to point out is RPM-005, 400 meters at three and a half grams per ton, including 132 meters at 10 grams per ton. It goes on and on. I could go on and on here, but that is very typical, particularly of that RPM North zone. That will be where we start. That will be the phase I pit there at RPM North, where that yellow outline shaded area is, then we will expand into the wider deposit.
This is really the jewel in the crown for any mining scenario that will be coming forward in our upcoming feasibility study. There's lots of upside around RPM, of course, and we've done a lot of surface sampling, and you can see here along this ridge line, there's a number of anomalies that are drill-ready targets here along there. The idea and the model there is to intersect additional RPM North bonanza zones. They're genetically linked and very similar geology and geophysical signatures we're seeing there. We're hoping to drill some of those this year. Also out in the valley, you can see that grid spacing. What we have is a valley fill, so it's all eroded off of the RPM North zone filling in this valley, this material.
We have a one gram per ton, 1.6 km-long anomaly there, which is about 50 meters- 70 meters thick of fill in the material, all crushed up, ready to dig. We just need to get in there and drill. We know it's on the surface, and some really nice two-gram per ton targets there as well. We just need to drill it to depth and get some volume to that, and that's a big resource upside there in that valley fill material. We continue to advance that as well. Further is the Korbel deposit bulk tonnage system. That's that yellow outline there. That's the Korbel main deposit. Here is a bulk tonnage lower grade system, two and a half kilometer strike length. This is a massive deposit, lower grade type system.
There is a higher grade feeder core through there, and you can see from some of these numbers, 101 meters at 1.3 grams per ton, 94 meters at a gram. Very typical of that high grade feeder core there in the center of Korbel, and just decades and decades of mine life when we include Korbel into the project execution plan. Further afield, speaking of upside, it is the kind of project where you'll be out here for decades and decades with multiple mining centers producing multiple commodities. Currently we are focused on gold and antimony, but we have additional prospects with not just gold, but multi-element potential, porphyry copper potential with gold, copper, silver, other critical elements. There's a list of about 15 elements there.
We've really taken a holistic approach to this project from the very beginning, and we do multi-element analysis, and we're seeing about 15 other elements. We don't know exactly what it all means yet, but it's not as readily available as antimony, which is just on the surface and very visible. We're talking about things like gallium, scandium, yttrium, some of these other critical elements that we're looking to take out of our waste streams in some of these other prospects, and at the gold in Korbel, at the RPM in Korbel prospects as well. RPM's very rich in bismuth, for example, very key strategic mineral. Here's our proven flow sheet. Nothing too fancy going on here on the gold side. Conventional off-the-shelf technology. We utilize ore sorting early for some of the lower grade materials. The higher grade, of course, straight to the mill.
We'll be looking to ore sort there, then we can separate into a high grade fraction that goes off to the mill, then the lower grade reject material out of the ore sorters go off to the heap leach pad. We do have that option. Heap leach, CIL, and ore sorting, lots of options there to really optimize this project. When it comes to the milling, in milling, we'll use some flotation. Then we'll regrind down to about 20 microns, get good gold liberation there, very good liberation of the gold, then we'll be leaching that material. Typical CIL, and we're already getting over 96% recovery in our early test work. Now we're honing in with our feasibility studies to really improve those numbers.
A typical gold extraction plant where we'll be producing doré bars. That should be quite clean, those doré bars. Gold mostly with a little bit of silver, but not much else. That's really nice. Here's what I'm talking about with some of these other critical elements. We're working with the Department of Defense for additional funding to accomplish this by putting in critical minerals extraction plants on the back end to take out some of these elements from our tailings. Not just sending it off simply to a tailings facility, but sending them through critical minerals extraction plants, and there's a lot of funding out there that we're going for. Not only is it positive for the bottom line for the project, but for national security, and bringing domestic production back.
We're all in on that with our Department of Defense partners. A timeline. We just continue our exploration and advancing these projects nonstop over the years to come. On the gold side, on the antimony side, we're looking at phase I production of antimony trisulfide by the end of this year or early next year. On the gold side, working on that feasibility study throughout the rest of the year, trying to come out with that by next year. We are well advanced with our environmental studies, we would be in a position once that feasibility study is out to start submitting for permitting. Being on state land, much more streamlined permitting. We expect that process to take about 12- 18 months. We're looking to have everything we're in control of on the technical side.
We're looking to have a construction-ready project by 2028. Just to wrap things up, we have strong dual commodity exposure with gold and antimony. Like I said, right commodities in the right place at the right time. It's really a world-class district scale project. We don't have many of these left in the world. We've been a first mover in the critical minerals space, which is why we've been the successful recipient of a Department of Defense funding. That really shows confidence in our project, and we will be successful at phase I and look to move to phase II with additional Department of Defense funding. Have the potential for that. Being in Alaska, with all the geopolitical risk and sovereign risk in the world today, being here in Alaska in a tier 1 jurisdiction is really a big bonus for the project.
We're talking about a long scale, long mine life, large-scale project here. Like I said, decades and decades of mine life. Really, again, that strategic alignment and partnership now with the U.S. government. Antimony, phase I to start, but much bigger things in the works in our discussions with our U.S. government partners bodes well for the company and indeed will create value for the investor. I'll leave it at that and open it up to any questions that people might have if we've got some time left.
Great job, Chris. All right, we do still have some questions for you. Let's talk about how sensitive are projected economics to the fluctuating gold prices.
Well, if you look at our previous scoping study, which is a bit dated now, it's over two years ago, but we were looking at the project, at that stage, at an $1,800 gold price, and it was a positive project. Now we're talking about a $4,000 gold price. We're definitely in the safe zone here, right? Easily the project is more than our previous scoping study at $1,800 gold, and the numbers there were quite positive. You can imagine now at $4,000 gold. I guess the answer would be at these levels currently, unless it drops below $2,000 or $1,800, we're in the safe zone, and it's sensitive to the gold price always. All these projects are, but we're still well within the green, in the black.
Great. How much of the Estelle Land package remains effectively unexplored?
Great question. We've only scratched the surface out there. About 2%-3% has actually been explored, and we continue every year, and that's part of our programs this year. We have old school geologists, boots on the ground every year. I think we got three teams mobilized this year, and that includes a mapper and a sampler. Every year, if you watch our news flow and you follow our company, we come out with new discoveries or go to some of these discoveries from the previous year and continue to advance those projects. Already 20 known prospects that we've discovered, and every year we come out with another one or two that it's like a kid in a candy store out there. We've only scratched the surface.
Two questions. What discovery within Estelle has surprised management the most? What do you believe the market most misunderstands about the scale potential?
The antimony. The antimony for sure. We were a gold company, and we still are a gold company. Let's not forget that. We never want to dilute that story. When we've discovered these massive stibnite veins on the surface, we recognized we were onto something special, and that was years ago, right? That was years ago. We recognized the race is on for critical minerals, we approached and started discussing that with our government partners and got the Department of Defense to do their due diligence to look at our project early on. Here we are as a first mover, at the center of the effort to bring antimony production back to the United States. Now we're looking at not only mining antimony, but also doing a fully vertically integrated supply chain.
Mining it and processing it to produce that military-grade antimony trisulfide initially, also metal and antimony trioxide. We're not only a miner now, we're also a processor, a critical minerals processor, that's been the biggest development over the last few years. Certainly, moving from the gold space into a much larger critical minerals-type company.
What about the challenges? What are the biggest remaining engineering challenges?
Yeah. We're 100 miles from Anchorage in Alaska. A lot of great projects, some of these are quite remote. We're not that remote. We're 100 miles from Anchorage, the infrastructure is always a challenge in Alaska. We have a number of options here, a lot of our project is we have a large airstrip on the project. We support the project year-round. We also utilize a winter road, very common in this part of the world. Now we have the West Susitna Access Road project. That project is already in the Department of Transportation, STIP, as they call it. It's been budgeted and planned, and they're breaking ground on that this year. Ultimately, to develop the gold project, we're going to need that West Susitna Access Road. That's all on state land as well.
You can see with the permitting expediting, we're already seeing that up north. The Ambler roads permitting has been approved. There's access and then power, we have a number of power options on the table. The gas pipeline is back gaining momentum, the AK LNG project in Alaska. Certainly, with everything that's happening in Hormuz and down in the Gulf States, there's an extra push, we just had the Alaska Energy Conference, the governor's annual conference last month, where a lot of the Asian countries showed up ready to buy, ready to support, and that development of the AK LNG that we can then build a spur line off of is an option. The coal project that is only 20 miles from us, they just recently received their own Department of Energy of $90 million to complete their feasibility study.
We need that kind of base load power. Everything for the regional development and energy sources have gained support and everything's gaining momentum. It's an exciting time to be in Alaska. I think we can overcome those challenges.
I bet it is. With all of that said, what development milestone do you believe will create the most shareholder value over the next 12 months?
Becoming an antimony producer. Once we're producing the military-grade antimony trisulfide later this year, early next year, that takes us to the next level. That'll take us from being an explorer developer currently to an actual revenue-generating producer. That's a huge catalyst, and then we will continue to grow that antimony project on that side. Then, of course, this year, in the shorter term, the drilling results coming out this year, where we continue to focus mainly on RPM to prove that resource is up and some exciting extensions there. Then a mineral resource update to follow that hopefully before the end of the year if we get all the assays in. Big catalyst on that and then that'll then, of course, culminate into our feasibility study, which we're hoping to get out at some point next year.
Perfect. Well, Chris, what do you want investors to leave with today? What's the takeaway?
Yeah, markets are tough right now. It can be a bloodbath out there. But I think if you take a closer look at Nova Minerals and all the things that we've discussed today, it really has been a first mover and we're on the path to production. We got cash flow in our sights, revenue here in the near term, that really takes us from just being another exploration company to being a producer on the antimony and some of these other exciting things happening on the critical mineral space. Then there's the district scale of what we're doing with the gold. We're not just a one-hit wonder. It's a district-scale play. Major companies were built on projects like this, like the Carlin Trend in Nevada where Newmont and Barrick were built. This is the type of project we're talking about.
Go to our website, everything we discussed today, and check it out, dig a bit deeper, and I think you'll find we're onto something quite special here.
Perfect. Great job, Chris. Thank you for informing us about Nova Minerals. We look forward to seeing you again real soon.
Absolutely. Thanks for having us.
All right, everyone, we'll be right back