Thank you for joining the H.C. Wainwright 26th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Trevor Liebing, and I'm on the investment banking team at H.C. Wainwright. I'm now honored to introduce our next presenter. Please welcome Gary Evans, Chairman and CEO at United States Antimony Corporation.
Thank you, Trevor. Thank you all for joining us today. We're the biggest little company you've never heard of, so I'm gonna try to educate you a little bit today. I'm based in Dallas, Texas. Jonathan's just north of Houston. Our company's headquarters is actually in Thompson Falls, Montana. We are likely to say something forward-looking, so this keeps me out of jail. Okay, our business. We were founded in 1968 . We've been trading on the New York Stock Exchange for 14 years now. We are truly a turnaround story. We have a new management and a new board. I took over as chairman in August, so really just about one year ago is when the turnaround began.
We've hired a number of new people, and made drastic changes to the business, and if you'll look at our Q1 and Q2 10-Qs, you'll see those dramatic changes in the financial numbers as well. So, we are unique in the standpoint that we are the only North American smelter for antimony around. Everybody else is out of business or closed shop, and this is very fortuitous in light of what happened on September. This was announced three weeks ago, but it actually occurs in September 15th , five days from now, when China has decided to cut off all global supply of antimony in the name of its own national security. Now, this just didn't happen. This wasn't something that all of a sudden they decided.
This has, in my opinion, been going on for 10 years, or more than 10 years. China has been going around the world buying up antimony supplies in every country you can imagine, and not only do they control over 50% of world supply, they control 70% of the processing, the midstream and the downstream portions of antimony. So as the only smelter in North America, we are, needless to say, getting a fair amount of attention today. Other places that were major players in antimony were Bolivia, Mexico, Russia, and Serbia. When China started taking control of these antimony supplies, they drove the price of antimony down to an unconscionable level, which drove everybody else out of the market. So this was very much contrived, in my opinion.
This is our, this used to be a mine, an antimony mine in Thompson Falls. It was shut down in 1983, but this is our smelting facility up in the mountains of Thompson Falls. We also are involved in another line of business called zeolite, and we'll. I'm gonna give you some details on that in a minute. We're really a two-prong approach, antimony and zeolite. Let's talk about antimony, though, here for a minute. It's primarily used for munitions, and that's why it's so important for our government. It's a lead-hardening material for. It is the hardening material for lead in bullets. It's also used in primer production. It's used to strengthen the side of tanks, flame retardant, semiconductor, solar panels, and batteries.
So it is a badly needed commodity and something that the U.S. doesn't have much of. Zeolite, on the other side of the spectrum, is used for water filtration, environmental remediation, AstroTurf installation, odor control, animal feed. 25% of our business goes to animal feed, gas pipeline, water absorption. And so I'll give you some details of that here in a bit. So this is our mine up in Preston, Idaho. Everything is surface mined. And these are the accomplishments we've made since new management's taken over. Our runtime in the second quarter of 2024 was 94%. That's up from 60%, 40%, and 70% in prior years. We completely changed the management. We have a new VP, a general manager up there, who's a mechanical engineer.
We have a new superintendent, a new office manager. Our tons sold were up 59% in the Q1 of 2024, and sales volumes were up 64%. CapEx spending was only $152,000, so we've tried to keep our CapEx low. We have no more sales backlog. We're building inventory now, and therefore, we've launched some new products in zeolite. One thing that's really important here is that this company had never really tested the reserves of zeolite at this mine, and we drilled 82 test holes earlier this year to determine the reserve potential. That reserve report is in process of being prepared, but what we can tell you is it is a huge supply, likely over 200 years of supply, based on current production.
It's the highest quality zeolite, we believe, of any mine in the world, and we can say that with confidence because one of our advisory directors is a zeolite expert, PhD, that's looked at these mines all over the world and professes to be this to be the best. So that gives us comfort that we can further expand this zeolite mine, which is our plans over the next couple of years. So these are a number of the things that we are involved in zeolite. As I said, a big portion of ours goes to animal feed. We have the Leslie's Pool account with one of our clients. It's used for cleaning up pool water. It's sewage treatment facilities, a lot of water treatment plants, soil remediation, fertilizer. AstroTurf is used.
We're laying down AstroTurf, and importantly, it was used in all three nuclear cleanup remediations. In fact, we're trying to convince the U.S. government that they ought to be stockpiling zeolite for our next nuclear disaster, because it was used to clean up all three of the major nuclear disasters throughout the world. We launched a new product just recently for cattle feed, and it's called Cattle Prime, and we'll be selling that directly to consumers and retailers. What it does for cattle, which is quite amazing, is it reduces the gases a cattle has, which has been a big problem in methane excretion, and in the first stomach, the second stomach, it adds protein.
Feedlots just absolutely love it, because it beefs up the cattle right before slaughter. It's also used for dairy cattle as well, and these are all the benefits it has for cattle. Revenues have begun to get back up to where they should be, and should be increasing further this year. This is comparing zeolite 30 June revenues to prior years. Let's go back to antimony now. These are all the different antimony products that we're involved in with our antimony smelter in Thompson Falls. Our present share of the market's, you know, maybe 4%. We are the only producer of antimony products, while China supplies 55% of the world's supply. It's obviously on the list of the country's critical minerals, along with, like, 10 others.
We're the only domestic U.S. producer. We can ship on short notice, and our facility in Thompson Falls today is actually only running at 50% of capacity, because we don't have enough supply. We're working on changing that, and I think that will happen here probably over the next 30 to 60 days, and those additional supplies will most likely come from foreign sources. We're probably talking to 12 different countries today and analyzing their samples to determine if they qualify for our facility. This was an announcement about 10 days ago. I look at antimony as a three-legged stool. You've gotta have the ore. You've gotta have the flotation, which basically brings the concentrate levels up high enough so you can take it to your smelter. We have the smelter.
We just leased the flotation facility, which is the largest in the country, over in Philipsburg, Montana, and now we're working on the supply. So this allows us to take subpar antimony from anywhere in the world and bring it up to the levels it needs to be to make munitions-grade antimony. So this was a very important piece of our puzzle that we were missing. We also own our own flotation facility down in Mexico, but it is not anything close to what this facility's like. This is what's happened with antimony. Prices have gone up significantly. They're over $12 today and likely to go higher in light of China's decision, effective September 15th. So this is why is antimony supply so tight? Well, as I said, China they exports.
They use it for solar cells as well. I didn't mention that earlier. China is a net importer of antimony, and we've actually, our government's been getting our antimony from China. So if you think about what we're doing with the munitions in the United States, we're sending munitions to Ukraine, we're sending them to Israel, and our inventory has been drastically reduced, and then all of a sudden, China cuts everybody off. So needless to say, our government's scrambling. We're behind the eight ball, and we've been having lots of discussions with the Department of Defense about what we can do about it. This just gives you an example, though, of all metals. You know, it's not just antimony that has gone up in price.
If you look, going back to 2020, all critical metals and metal products have increased dramatically in price, and I think that's not gonna change. Because when you look at what's happening in the computer industry and telecommunications industry, they all need these metals, and so we've got a big demand coming with lower supply, and then you compound that with what the EPA has done by shutting down all antimony mines in the United States, and you can see the quandary we're in, so we decided not only would we source supplies from international contacts, but we also began leasing our own projects, so this is a new leased claims we have in Ontario, Canada.
These are a number of critical minerals in these claims, cobalt, nickel, copper, bismuth, and we're excited about this area. We've actually just leased some additional claims here recently. On the Alaska claims, we've also just made a decision to go to Alaska. We have 69 claims covering over 11,000 acres. This is high-grade copper with gold and silver, and some other things that we haven't disclosed at this point. We think that having some of our own in-house critical minerals is gonna be very important, because we could handle these critical minerals in our flotation facility at Philipsburg as well. There was also an executive order issued by the U.S. government. It's called 14017, and its strategic goal is to secure domestic supplies for critical minerals by 2027 from our own country.
thus reducing reliance. So you've got not only what China's done, but then you've got the U.S. government saying, "Hey, we only want to get it from the U.S." So this has created, you know, a lot of anguish for some American companies that are making products that are sold to the U.S. military, like roofing materials, fire retardants, 'cause they're supposed to now get that material from the U.S. government. We're obviously getting lots of calls from those companies and having discussions about how we can meet that demand. So this is just a summary of our accomplishments, just in 2023 and 2024. We have a lot more to do. We're only on the first base.
I think it's very unusual to find a junior mining company that's a micro-cap, 70 million market cap, that has cash, virtually no debt, growing revenues, cash flow, and EBITDA, generating some earnings now, and to be in this position, and then be sitting on this only antimony smelter in the US. So we think that we're at just the first base of a three-base inning that is gonna allow us to really add some significance to this little company that's been a sleeper for many, many years. This is just a summary of the balance sheet, showing you the six months of 2024 versus 2023. You can see revenues were up significantly. Operating expenses did go up with the addition of our people. But if you look at our bottom line, it definitely has made a drastic improvement.
The one thing we did do in March is shut down all our Mexican operations. We did a deep dive when I came on board with our new CFO. Went back 10 years, and Mexico has never made a dime. The company invested $52 million down there, so we shut everything down. We do have some assets there we may or may not keep, but most of that is for sale, and it could generate $10-$15 million of additional cash for the company. We've been fortunate enough that with the business turnaround, we've been actually adding cash every quarter to our cash stash, and that again, that's a bit unusual for a junior micro-cap mining company. So what's our looking-forward strategy?
Bring this company to the 21st century, continue to increase our throughput, increase our customer mix from foreign sources for antimony. As I said, we've already completed the thorough review of Mexico, and most of that is for sale. We are working very closely with the U.S. government, both on zeolite and on antimony. We actually have a lobbying firm on zeolite. We're talking to the EPA and other agencies about what zeolite can do. And then on the antimony side, we've got a formal request going to the Department of Defense at their insistence, about what we might need to expand our operations. We do have an existing universal shelf on file. We don't have a need to raise any capital, but it's good to know it's there.
Jonathan and I haven't been marketing at all with the company until about four weeks ago, and you can see the drastic improvement in share price and volume on the stock. We've never had really much institutional ownership. We started out with a conference at Sidoti and immediately started seeing institutional buying, million share days, and that's pretty much been our average volume since that, about three weeks ago. So we're out telling our story. We try to do one of these conferences at least once a month, meeting with investors. We have a luncheon tomorrow with, I don't know, 30 or 40 investors here in town, so people don't know our story, so we're trying to tell it, and I think we have a good one to tell, and this is not my first rodeo.
This is my fourth company on the New York Stock Exchange. They've all been multi-billion-dollar companies that have been sold, and we think this has the potential to be the same. So, you'll see insider buying, shares bought by me, by our CFO, by direct board of director members, our controller. We all believe in what we're doing here, and we think that this is a very unique opportunity and one that you should take a hard look at. Yes, sir?
I have three questions. Number one, I noticed that in your presentation, you didn't mention Australia as one of the sources, world sources of antimony, which it is.