Good day, and welcome to the iAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Spring investment conference 2026. Our next presenting company is Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. If you would like to ask a question during the webcast, you may do so at any point during the presentation by clicking the Ask Question button on the left of your screen. Type your question into the box and click Send. I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Mr. Mark Gordon, Chairman and CEO of Odyssey Marine Exploration. Sir, please go ahead.
Well, thank you, Ali, and real pleasure to be here, presenting today at the iAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas conference. Happy that we were considered for this opportunity as one of the best investment ideas this spring. Hopefully I'll fulfill the expectations of our host here. Briefly, standard disclaimers, forward-looking information disclaimer apply to the information I'll be presenting here. Then just an additional cautionary note, we'll be talking about some re-estimated resource valuations. Just pay close attention that, you know, to the cautionary note here and then embedded in the slides where we're talking about value. I'm gonna start the opposite of at least how I've presented Odyssey as an investment opportunity in the past.
I wanna start with the macro environment, because the macro environment is really driving what makes investment in the seabed minerals space so attractive right now. If we start at the highest level, and I'm sure all of us have watched in the news, this current administration's focus on where are we gonna get the critical minerals that are necessary to power our economy and our defense systems. That's the high level of where we're starting. You know, here are some numbers to give you a sense of just how critical the situation is. Essentially, the U.S. lacks a secure end-to-end domestic supply for the critical minerals we need, and that's leaving us exposed, again, at the industrial level as well as the defense and agricultural levels.
You look at minerals like titanium and manganese, where we're 100% reliant on imported. When we look at rare earths, 70%-80% are coming from outside the U.S., with China having a real death grip, if you will. We've seen, you know, some of the threats that have been leveled lately in tariff back and forth with China. Net-net, this administration is really focused on finding the answers to how we're gonna solve this problem. I can tell you I spent 27 years of my adult life in D.C., and I have never seen more concentrated action on a particular strategic issue than I'm seeing right now in the past year under the current administration.
This slide has a lot of text on it. Let me just walk you through the key points here. As you look at the four bullet points, the lower left corner, the U.S. Critical Minerals Ministerial, what that was a meeting that was just conducted, in the past 30 days, first week of February in Washington, D.C., where we had 50 allied nations come meet with our government, hosted by, Secretary Rubio, Vice President Vance was involved. There was, a serious commitment from our government, and a serious commitment from 50 nations who traveled to talk specifically, about how we get an allied trading bloc, to make sure all of us have the critical minerals we're gonna need.
Most important to Odyssey's story, which I'll come to in a minute, is our major projects right now are in Mexico and in the Cook Islands. If you look at the upper left bullet point, Mexico entered into an agreement coming out of this ministerial conference with the U.S. to coordinate trade policy and regulatory alignments to serve both Mexico and the U.S. Also, the Cook Islands, the lower right bullet point here, also entered into an enhanced agreement. There was already an agreement where Trump's top White House advisor on minerals, David Copley, actually traveled to the Cook Islands earlier, well maybe about six months ago and signed an initial agreement. That agreement got enhanced coming out of this ministerial.
I mention those because again, Odyssey has projects in both of those jurisdictions that would benefit from good alignment between our government and those governments. Then finally, the upper right, the other important thing to demonstrate and underline how serious the U.S. government's commitment is something that was just also announced just in the past couple of weeks, Project Vault. You could get more information on that online, but it's over $12 billion of public-private funding to help supply stabilize the supply chain.
The good news for Odyssey and Odyssey investors is that many of the minerals we're working on in these different projects I've just described are on the U.S. government's critical mineral list, so they're gonna get special attention. If you look starting to zoom down now and look at Odyssey as an investment opportunity, couple of comments I'll make here. One, right now there's only two publicly traded in the U.S., anyway, companies, TMC and Odyssey Marine Exploration, that offer investors an opportunity to invest in this space that's accelerating in terms of its maturation. The difference between maybe the TMC and us, and by the way, we're big fans of TMC. We're building this industry together.
We're the only companies that I know of that have more than a decade of experience in seafloor mineral project management and execution. There are a bunch of new players coming online now. The difference between us is we have a multi-faceted program. What do I mean by that? We're targeting different commodities across different exclusive economic zones with different sovereign partners that have control of their waters. The other thing that makes Odyssey, I think, very unique is we bring three decades of ocean exploration experience.
We've been for over 15 years focused on seafloor minerals, but 15 years prior to that, we've been working on exploration programs down to water depths of 6,000 m, which equips us well for the opportunity on seafloor minerals. This diverse portfolio I just referenced, our newest project in the U.S. We have a heavy mineral sands project that we just made application for with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, who regulates awarding leases in U.S. Outer Continental Shelf waters. The minerals here, titanium, zirconium, and rare earth elements are gonna be essential for defense systems. These are all top of that list we were talking about earlier, where we're reliant heavily on import from a foreign nation, some which aren't as friendly as others.
This is an exciting new project, but very early stage. In the Cook Islands, Odyssey has investments in two out of the three license holders there. Here, we're targeting polymetallic nodules. These are about the size of a golf ball, lying on the seafloor, but these rocks contain a variety of minerals, most notably cobalt, manganese, and nickel. The cobalt and nickel especially are gonna be important for battery and energy storage, a big focus for the world right now as electrification gains greater and greater foothold across all nations right now. These projects are both licensed for exploration. Exploration programs have been ongoing for a number of years right now. Odyssey actually has had a...
The licenses only date back three or four years, but Odyssey has been working with the Cook Islands government for well over a decade now as they were formulating their regulatory framework for these projects to proceed. We have a long-standing relationship with the regulators there. Mexico is a different mineral set. Again, I mentioned our diversification. This is phosphate, critical for fertilizer. It's one of the only ingredients of fertilizer that cannot be lab created, has to be found in nature. Right now, the U.S. is a significant producer of that, but Morocco, Russia, and China are the largest world producers. Another important project for the U.S. and for Mexico, who's having to import much of their raw phosphate right now, in addition to what they're producing domestically.
We've had some issues here. We've gone through some litigation challenges that are getting resolved now. Recently, our mining concessions were restored, and we are working with a fabulous Mexican business partner that's a very well-regarded businessman, multi-generation respected business family, very connected to the government in that they are large agri-food businesses that this company runs. As such, he finds himself as an advisor to government on ag and food issues. Again, exactly what this project is targeting. What you're seeing here is projects either in the U.S. or with U.S.-aligned partners. A portfolio that's targeting shortages of critical minerals.
The thing to look ahead, as for investors, is that it's an interesting story, because we'll have multiple catalysts as each of these projects advance up the value curve as we develop them. You can expect periodic news flow, and oftentimes those will serve as catalysts to have the market revalue our equity in a positive way. I would say the other thing is what we'll see in a minute. I'm gonna get into some numbers. There's an asymmetric upside here, where the success of any single asset in our portfolio is a multiple to Odyssey's current market capitalization. You'll probably hear me say that again because I think that's what is the opportunity right now for anyone new to the Odyssey story. Okay.
Again, drilling down on Odyssey, you know, what makes us fit for purpose and why I think we're well-positioned to take advantage of this wave of activity I described at the outset is we do take this government first approach. I mentioned having a relationship with the Cook Islands for more than a decade, which was many years before an exploration license was first granted. That this speaks to that approach. We've talked about our diversified portfolio in multiple jurisdictions. That gives us both commodity risk diversification and geopolitical risk diversification. The other really important thing from our, you know, three decades of working in the ocean exploration space and the past decade and a half working specifically on seafloor minerals, is we've developed some proprietary tools.
One is something that we call our Global Prospectivity System, which our science teams have evaluated now something like 150 exclusive economic zones around the world to determine where are the best mineral opportunities, and they're also using a 48-point scale to rate these opportunities. What it boils down to is are there gonna be rich mineral deposits, and is there a rule of law or regulatory framework that will allow us to develop these investments with peace of mind that we'll continue to own them once we prove they're valuable assets. The other thing we've developed with our science team is advanced modeling technology, where we can do a lot of desk-based research. The expensive part of our work is when we put ships on the water.
It's millions of dollars a month when we have big ships working out there. The more work we can do before we leave the dock to determine where the best mineral deposit is and you know where those concentrations will be help narrow our search and increase our efficiency in terms of our spend on the water. In fact, several of our geologists have been featured just in the past couple of months at major international conferences speaking about some of this technology that we've developed. We're really thought leaders, I think, in this aspect of our business. We have a great credentialed team, again, three decades of experience. I'm as excited about our global partner network. We have world-class partners. I'll give you a specific example. Our Mexico project will involve dredging.
Our long-term partner for that project is Royal Boskalis, one of the largest dredging companies in the world, who's operated a wholly owned subsidiary in Mexico for over 25 years. That's an example of one of our partners. Finally, look, this alignment with U.S. critical mineral priorities, we're just in the right place at the right time at this moment with what we've built here. Let's talk a little bit about the projects in terms of value and how that might ultimately result in enhanced valuation for Odyssey Marine Exploration at a market level. First project is the Mexico project. That's PHOSAGMEX, it's phosphate. Our internal NPV value here, again, please read the disclaimers at the bottom of the screen, is we believe conservative.
That's the center column, the NPV values for these projects. What we've done is just discounted at 50% in the first column to set up a range of values. The third column indicates Odyssey's ownership. We own 35% of that project right now. Odyssey's value would range from about $200 million-$440 million, based on that level of ownership and the net present value range we've established here. The next two projects are the Cook Islands projects, OML. Actually, the $4.7 billion NPV came from OML. They've published this. It's based on a JORC compliant report.
Any of you that are new to mining, there are two mining standards, JORC, which is the Australian mining standard for valuing a resource, and the 43-101, which is the Canadian standard. One or the other are the two world standards for valuing a mining project, what the resource value will be. Theirs has delivered a $4.7 billion NPV. Odyssey owns 7% of that. You see a range of values of $165 million-$329 million for that investment. Now, with CIC, has not provided the number. We've used OML's number. Let me explain why. CIC's mining area is directly adjacent to OML, so the mineralogy is identical.
CIC has an area that's about 6-8 times the size, the license area is 6-8 times the size of OML. In the case of CIC, we currently own 14%, just over 14% of CIC, setting up a range of Odyssey's investment value being between $330 million and $670 million. You run it out, and just across these three projects, $700 million-$1.4 billion. Now, I mentioned earlier our Global Prospectivity, our proprietary tool. We have many more projects in early stage of development, which I haven't even spoken about today. The BOEM project is so early stage that we're not valuing it.
We tend to be very conservative in our valuation of projects. So you're not seeing we're not reporting any value, even projecting a value at this point for that project. We've got a pipeline of projects we can sort of just rinse, wash, and repeat, if you will, and bring projects out of the pipeline as we have the resources to do so. Expect to hear more about that. With that said, that is my final slide. I think we are gonna have some time for Q&A. Let's see. Let me go to the Q&A section. Sorry, I'm new to the platform here. Okay. I'll just sort of go in order here.
Some investors may still view ocean minerals as a longer-term opportunity. However, in the U.S., the government appears to be moving from policy intent toward tangible action by prioritizing offshore mineral leasing and critical mineral security. Can you discuss how this acceleration is creating real nearer-term opportunities for companies like Odyssey? That's a great question, some of which I've touched on, but let me see if I can do a job of neatly answering this. There's so many different dimensions. I totally agree. The shift from policy to execution is happening at an amazing pace. Good. An amazingly good pace.
I mentioned earlier, I spent 27 years of my adult life in D.C., prior to coming down to Tampa, Florida, to join the Odyssey team, and I've never seen this level of activity coordinated across multiple government agencies, from Department of War to Department of the Interior to Department of State to Department of Commerce, and there seems to be really good alignment. Yeah, there's no question that U.S. policy discussions are increasingly focused on implementation and readiness, and particularly around offshore minerals, not just critical minerals from any source. Obviously, terrestrial is gonna remain an important source, but the idea that the current administration sees offshore minerals as a viable addition to the supply chain is really good for our business.
The other thing I think in this shift from policy to execution, you know, exploration and development timelines are long. The near-term policy acceleration benefits companies like Odyssey that have already done the foundational work and are positioned now to take advantage of the partnerships that our government is signing, through the ministerial as well as Project Vault, where there will be significant funding, available to advance these projects. Another component here is the policy and permitting focus. Again, the government seems to be really focused on streamlining these processes, and that just reflects the urgency of securing, future supply.
To my earlier comment, going faster is important because this is a long process to get a project from identifying a resource to where it's in production, delivering the minerals to the beach. Big fan of that. The other thing I think that's the most important that's making me max bullish right now is that there's no longer a discussion about whether offshore minerals will matter. It's how and when and how can they be responsibly developed. That's the shift I see in the dialogue with government. We're very actively engaged in Washington. I and other members of the Odyssey team are in Washington now every few weeks in meetings across all of these different agencies I've mentioned, including at the White House.
What we wanna make sure is that the government understands how we align with their priorities, so that we get the appropriate level of focus and attention. I could just tell you those meetings have all gone tremendously well. Look, I think the billions of dollars now that are proposed in federal funding underscores how serious our government is in terms of building this domestic critical mineral supply chain. Again, something really good for companies like Odyssey that have spent 15 years preparing for this moment. You know, Odyssey does have an early, I guess, a follow-on related comment is we do have the early mover positioning. To date, it hasn't been rewarded, but my sense is it's about to be.
More than a decade now, we've been deliberately building this pipeline of projects that align with this current, what was future policy momentum, and is now current policy momentum. We're well-positioned to take advantage of that. I think the final thing I'll say on this is the U.S. adds a really interesting element. I mentioned earlier that our tool, Global Prospectivity, has evaluated over 150 different exclusive economic zones. By the way, I shouldn't assume everyone knows what that means. Exclusive economic zone is the 200 mi from the shoreline out into the ocean where governments, single governments, sovereign nations control what happens as it relates to mineral rights. That's where we've been focused. U.S., of course, was on the list.
We didn't see this kind of commitment from our own government before, so we started projects elsewhere. That's why we're particularly excited now about the activity we're seeing at Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, BOEM, which is part of Department of the Interior. They're actively looking in alignment with these multiple agencies to provide mineral harvesting from our own U.S. waters on the Outer Continental Shelf. Odyssey had the foresight back in 2021, even before we had this visible commitment from our government to become a qualified contractor, which gives us the opportunity to apply for these applications, is what I should say. There's that. That was a good question and a long answer, but I thought it deserved a lot of color.
Okay, there's another question. You mentioned that there are only a limited number of ways for investors to access this space. The Metals Company is often cited as a front-runner. Can you explain how Odyssey's approach differs and what sets it apart as an investment opportunity? I think my quick answer is you should own both. I do. I own a lot more Odyssey than I do TMC. Look, we're big fans of TMC. They're a strong company and we need them to succeed. I hope they feel the same about us because we're the two companies that for more than a decade have been leading this charge and have projects at the most advanced stage.
For this industry to develop, we need responsible operators, more than just one. We do have, I would say this, we have different business models. We're not direct competitors. There's a lot of resource out there. There's a lot of ways we've cooperated in programs in the past and intend to continue to do so with them. I think the biggest difference is TMC has been primarily focused on the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which is a very rich polymetallic nodule rich area of the ocean, between Hawaii. If you drew a diagonal line between Hawaii and Mexico, there's a geological feature there that has created an amazing abundance of nodules. The nodules are slightly different. Theirs in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone will have higher nickel content.
Ours in the Cook Islands have higher cobalt, but they're both gonna be needed to fill the demand needs. That area of the ocean has been regulated by the United Nations, although the U.S. has just announced accelerated licensing through NOAA. By contrast, Odyssey, as I've mentioned now a couple different times, has stayed away from that environment. We found, you know, it's difficult enough with an emerging business to deal with a single government to get 168 or however many are part of the International Seabed Authority of the United Nations now to agree, we just saw as challenging. And then portfolio diversification.
You know, again, we have multiple minerals, and TMC is focused on polymetallic nodules, and of course, that's the heaviest weighting in our portfolio as well, but we also have phosphate and now heavy mineral sands if the BOEM project progresses. looks like I'm running out of time here. well, let me see if if I can answer one more quick one before the clock runs me out. how should investors think about the timeline from exploration and permitting to commercial production across the Cook Islands and Mexico phosphate projects? good question. I mentioned earlier these are long timelines. The good news is we've been working in Mexico, for actually over a decade. 2012 is when we got our, first exploration license there.
There are some issues that have to be worked out. Anyone that's done any work on Odyssey will see that we had a dispute with the prior administration in Mexico that resulted in an action under NAFTA that Odyssey brought and successfully won late in 2024. We're now working with our Mexican partner, who I mentioned earlier, very well-respected Mexican business leader that's also an advisor on agri-food issues to government, to try to come up with a win-win solution there. Once that solution is achieved, that project, because it's using standard dredge technology that already exists, could be in production in 12-18 months.
The Cook Islands, you know, again, exploration program is pretty far advanced, but it'll probably be several years before those projects could go to production, from exploration to harvesting, just because in that case, you're working in much deeper water with specialized equipment that's being developed. With that, I think I've run out of my 30 minutes of allotted time, but it's been a real pleasure to be here presenting to you today. Any questions we didn't get to, we'll try to follow up directly. I think there are some one-on-one slots. If any of this piqued your interest, take a look at my schedule on the platform here and feel free to book an appointment tomorrow. I'd be happy to talk at greater length.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes Odyssey Marine Exploration Incorporated's presentation. You may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company.