Customize internal and external partnerships that can be more supply-demand driven around the availability of our agents, and real-time tracking to understand queue logic and ensuring that the right lead is going to the right agent on any given interaction. So there's always going to be a uniqueness around the skill set of an agent and the options available to a consumer, and you want to match those so you have the best outcome. And then the last two here of aligning with the health plans, like I said, first is being able to be the most significant for them is valuable.
But on top of that, being nimble to align our processes to their needs so that we're supporting the consumer, as well as being highly attractive to how CMS, the regulatory agency of the government who oversees this program, is seeking to protect consumers. And then finally, a resilient balance sheet. We are continually working on investing appropriately in the business to support our growth objectives as well as our shareholders and good returns on those investments. So let me stop there. We've got a few minutes to answer some questions. I know it went pretty quick, but happy to take them. And John, to the extent that you can help facilitate that, that would be great.
Yeah, Vijay, the first question from the audience is, there have been some industry exits and consolidation, including our acquisition of e-TeleQuote. What challenges and opportunities does that present for GoHealth?
It's actually very interesting. I mean, this AEP is a very unique one, where for the first time, those of you who may not follow the space, this is a highly disruptive market. Meaning the benefits were released publicly. The health plans have been talking about it all year, that they were going to make massive disruptions in degradation in product. And so there's going to be a high demand for consumers to have to shop for a new Medicare Advantage option. And to your point, John, there have been a lot of brokerages that have had not been able to figure out how to reduce their cost per acquisition, that direct cost per submission. They have been upwards of $1,000 in that bucket.
And so we have been really investing in technology, which enables us to be able to provide more capacity or our supply of agents and shopping experiences for the higher demand than we've ever seen, frankly, in the industry for years. And so as others have had those financial challenges, we have been preparing by investing in technology to give us scale capacity. Having e-TeleQuote join us at the beginning of AEP on our technology enables us to provide even more of that scale capacity to serve this population. And so we think it's an advantage for us. Our tech enables us to grow and achieve economies of scale with demand when it rises, as opposed to the traditional model, where much of the industry has been failing, which is that they were achieving diseconomies of scale.
As they were trying to grow, they had to increase their cost each time. And so in short, there is less supply of agents externally, so it's efficiency on marketing and drives more demand for our services. And we're really excited about the e-TeleQuote transaction, which enables us to, at this very important inflection in the industry, be able to support as many consumers as we can.
Vijay, the next question I have here is, regarding market dynamics. It was recently reported that two million consumers are going to lose their, Medicare plan during this annual enrollment period, and six million more are going to realize benefit degradation. Can you comment on how that, should impact AE, GoHealth during this AEP?
Yeah, as I was alluding to earlier, that disruption, if you took that. If you put that all together, call it six plus two, that's eight million out of about thirty-two million. So about a quarter of the overall Medicare Advantage population, one out of every four consumers, is going to have a disruptive event that needs attention for them to shop and confirm that either the plan they're still on, even though it's degraded, is the best one for them, or that there's a better option now available for them. That is going to lead to not only a high volume of shopping, but a high volume of switching, appropriate switching. So we believe that to be a tailwind for us, such that our marketing is going to be more effective.
More consumers who come in will have a justified reason to make a change, and even if they don't, as I alluded to earlier, we reconfirm them with this kind of test model with Plan Fit Check that we're rolling out, we'll also be compensated for that work, too, so I think the main thing to take away from that 6.6 million disruptions or degradations and 2 million plan exits is going to be that we have a lot of shoppers who need the help, and that should be an efficiency driver for us in total cost as well as in revenue opportunity.
Any further questions from the audience? Thank you, Vijay.
Thank you all. Appreciate your time.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was Vijay Kotte out in Chicago, the CEO of GoHealth. We also want to thank Mr. John Shave, VP of IR. Excellent job, Johnny. Vijay, if you're still there, enjoy the rest of your afternoon. Folks, that concludes the GoHealth presentation. Coming up next, it's US Antimony Corp. Do you think I'm saying that right, John? All right, US Antimony Corp. Gary Evans, the CEO, will be coming in in just a few minutes, but let's take a quick break, reset, get some more folks inside, and we'll kick off our seventh session of the day. Can you believe it? Lucky seven, coming up in a few.
All right. Once again, welcome, everybody. I see some familiar faces, some new faces. John Heffernan, one of the moderators today, one of the announcers over at Madison Square Garden, and it's a pleasure to be here. It's been a great day so far. Beautiful day here in New York City, especially, Sparks Steakhouse. A little shout-out to Lucosky Brookman, one of the title sponsors today, and of course, presented by the Money Channel. So an official welcome to the 2024 MicroCap Rodeo. So without further ado, I've got a couple of special guests. I'd like to introduce the Senior Vice President of IR, Mr. Jonathan Miller, from US Antimony Corp, and their Chairman and CEO. Ladies and gentlemen, let's put our hands together for Mr. Gary Evans. Gary, come on up.
What sports game am I at right now? Thank you for joining us. So let me tell you a little bit about this company. We are a micro-cap junior mining company with two hard rock minerals that we mine. What's so unusual about us is that we have revenues, cash flow, EBITDA, and earnings, and we have cash. We have about $14 million of cash on our balance sheet with virtually no debt. So that's very unusual, if you follow any kind of mining companies, to have a small cap miner. Now, what's really happened is what China has done as of September fifteenth, and I'll talk about that in the presentation. So this is our forward-looking statements, because I might say something I shouldn't say. We're an old company. It's been around since 1968.
It was founded by a guy by the name of John Lawrence, who passed away about four years ago. This company's been publicly traded now since 2012, and our story is one of a turnaround story. I've been on the board about 18 months. I was kind of brought in by a group of dissident shareholders that were not happy with prior management. I effectively took over the company from the standpoint of running it with my co-CEO, Joe Bardswich, who is a board member, another board member August of last year, so the turnaround began August a year ago. What makes us so unusual, other than being a junior mining company that's making money, is that we're the only producer of a smelter. We have a smelter located in Thompson Falls, Montana.
It's the only one in the United States. That has been around for a while and has the ability to be developed on a larger scale, and I'll talk about that here in a minute. Historically, China has controlled most of the antimony around the world. They've, for the last 15-20 years , have been going around and buying antimony mines, leasing properties, in a number of different countries. So today, they control the better part of 70%-80% of worldwide antimony. On September fifteenth, that was the announcement that China made, that they are no longer going to sell antimony or antimony products from their midstream and downstream operations to any country in the world, including the United States, for their own national interest. That, in turn, has gotten the attention of our U.S. government.
As you can imagine, we have been supplying Israel, as well as Ukraine, with lots of munitions, and antimony is a necessary ingredient for munitions. It's the hardening material for lead. It's also used in primers, which is the ignition system of a bullet. It's used in laser-guided missiles, it's used in night vision cameras, it's used in all kinds of things, military-wise. With that in mind, and us being the only smelter in the United States, we have been getting a lot of attention. Next. This is our corporate office, and our facility up in Thompson Falls, Montana. We currently smelt about 1,600 tons per month, or about 53 tons per day. We would like to expand this facility, and we'll talk about that here in a bit. Let's talk about the two products that we have, antimony and zeolite.
Zeolite is a product that we actually mine. We lease the mine up in Preston, Idaho. It's used for water filtration, environmental remediation, which also includes nuclear, and we'll talk about that. AstroTurf installation, odor control, 25% of our business goes to animal feed, sewage treatment and gas pipelines. Antimony, as I mentioned, is all in the munitions, but it's also used in solar panels, batteries and flame retardants. This is our zeolite mine up in Preston, Idaho. It's a surface mine. We blast the rock, take the rock by truck over to our facility, where we crush it. We have jaw crushers and stone crushers that make it into different size, mesh size of material that we sell to various customers. So what have we done at Bear River?
It's changed over the past year. We have a new VP and general manager. We have a new superintendent. We have a new office manager, and our runtime went up dramatically in the second quarter of this year to 94%. Historically, we've been running 60%. It was very poorly run. It has had a lot of mechanical issues in the past. We fixed, we believe, all of those, and you can see our sales volume were up 64% from the first quarter of this year in our second quarter. We've now caught up on all of our orders and are building inventory, and we're out now soliciting new customers, which is something we couldn't do before because we couldn't even meet current customer demand.
We believe that this mine up in Preston, Idaho, based upon 82 test holes we drilled this year, is very good zeolite, some of the best in the world, and has over a 200-year supply, so we did launch a new product this year called CattleMax, and that's starting up to, again, sell our own product to cattle companies. Actually, these are nutritionists that use the feed to beef up the cattle, if you will, before slaughter. This is a map of our location up in Idaho. We're stuck up in the mountains. We have about 25 employees there, and, as I said, we've been modernizing our equipment, and we have the ability to double, even triple, production here, and I just want to have the business before we commit the capital dollars to do that.
These are some of the other uses for zeolite o dor control, that's also been a big area. The EPA has actually gotten interested in zeolite because it reduces greenhouse gases. You can imagine the cows excrete a lot of gas, and it reduces that significantly in their first stomach. Sewage treatment is also a big item. This could have been used up in Detroit to clean up their sewage issues. Water filtration, we have the Leslie's Pool account. Our zeolite is used in most pool cleanups. Let's talk about nuclear. All the nuclear issues, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, all had zeolite as a material to help clean up the radiation that occurred. So we're trying to convince the government they should be stockpiling zeolite for a future nuclear problem.
As I mentioned, this is our new cattle feed that we've just trademarked and/or begin marketing. In fact, Jonathan was just at a cattle show the last couple days in San Antonio. So what does this all do for cattle? You can see all the things that the toxin binding, enhanced feed efficiency, has all kinds of health benefits. We probably only have 2% of the cattle market, so this is an area we think that has substantial growth potential for this particular business. This is our revenues for the last couple quarters, comparing, you know, going back to 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and you can see we're back on a growth mode, and that should continue.
So now let's jump to antimony, which is the mine up in, actually, the smelter that's located up in Thompson Falls. We use the various products that we make, antimony oxide, metal, trioxide, trichloride, trisulfide, and nanocrystals. And we have a very small piece of the market, but again, being the only smelter, we're getting a lot of attention. We can ship on short notice. There's no antimony mines now in the United States, so everything we get is either from Canada or Mexico, or we're contracting with other countries that we're actually testing materials today up in Thompson Falls. We're doing this in conjunction with the Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce to be sure that the materials are coming from countries that our government is safe with and feel comfortable with.
So in 2024, antimony has increased in price from $3-$4 a pound to over $12-$13 a pound. It's the fastest increase of any hard rock commodity in 2024, and it now surpasses the price of copper. A few months ago, we decided that we were missing a key leg of our business. While we have the smelter in Thompson Falls, we did not have the ability to float or help the concentrate, increase the concentrate of subpar material. So we leased this facility in Philipsburg, Montana, which our vice president of our antimony division used to run and knows it quite well.
And so what this allows us is take antimony, let's just say, from Mexico, it's got 20%-30% concentrate, bring it up to 60%-70% concentrate, which is what's required for us to make munitions-grade material in our smelter. And so this was a real key piece of our three-legged stool. So we have the flotation now. This is one of the largest flotation facilities in the country. We have the smelter. We just don't. We're looking for ore, and so we'll talk about how we're trying to find that ore around the world. This is an example of the prices increase that I mentioned to you, going back to 2023, $5.50-$12.47 a pound.
So not only when China made its announcement, effective September 15th, about them stopping antimony sales to U.S. or any other country, they also controlled the midstream, which is the station I just mentioned and the smelting. So that's about 80% of worldwide production. So this has created quite a quagmire for lots of different countries. We immediately got some calls from the Department of Defense. We're working with them. We're actually believe that there's some ways that we can help the government quite a bit, and so we're having continuous dialogue with actually not only Department of Defense, but three other departments of the U.S. government. What do we think? You know, why did China do this? I mean, I think this was something that was planned for maybe 15-20 years.
It wasn't something just happened overnight. So it was very smart, in my opinion, and very contrived, and we were left behind the eight ball, not watching what we're doing. So our government needs antimony, and I think we'll do everything it can to get antimony to be able to make these munitions. This is just an idea of other critical minerals. So there's a lot of critical minerals. I'll show you here in a minute. We're involved in quite a few, but look at the price increase of critical minerals really going back to year 2020, and it had a significant improvement, I think is only gonna get higher. So we made a decision internally, because we have some very talented people on our board and in our management team, to lease some of our own minerals.
So we did this up in Ontario, Canada. It's 97 claims, three leases covering about 4,300 acres. This is an area, it's got all kinds of activity. The critical minerals here are high-grade cobalt, nickel, copper, and bismuth. And we have a development plan here. We're actually continuing to add our acreage position in this area. And we also went to Alaska, and we've acquired 69 claims covering 11,000 acres. High-grade copper with gold and antimony is here as well. And we've made sure that all these claims are in areas where it has road access, has existing infrastructure to help us get the material. We can bring the material to either our flotation facility in Philipsburg or to our smelter in Thompson Falls, Montana, all by truck. So that was very important, and we're continuing to build upon this.
We've shown this to the Department of Defense, and we're hopeful that we might be getting some exploration dollars to help us continue to explore these areas, so the U.S. government did issue an executive order called Executive Order 14017. The strategic goal is by 2027 to be getting all these critical minerals from foreign sources, from sources other than Russia and China, and so you can see all the names of the different critical minerals, of which we're involved in quite a few. This was also part of the DPA, Defense Production Act, and zeolite's role in this can also obviously be involved with regard to nuclear cleanup, so we believe we're really trying to help the national security interest in both of our minerals.
You can see on this chart the 17 critical minerals identified by the DoD, and we're involved in 7 of those today. We're hopeful that we can even expand that further. Accomplishments since this new management team kind of got in place, you can see all the new management changes, board changes. As I mentioned, BRZ has had a completely different management team, which is our zeolite mine production is doubled in 2024. We shut down our Mexican operations. This was run by our prior team. We did a deep dive and determined the company spent about $52 million in Mexico over the last 27 years and didn't have much to show for it. We shut that down in March and are selling off those assets.
As I mentioned, we still have a large cash balance right around $13 million, and we're returning the company back to profitability like it should be. This is just a snapshot of our revenues, our income statement for six months ended 2024 compared to 2023. You can see all the changes that have occurred in revenues, gross margins, and income. And so what are we doing going forward? We're trying to bring this company to 21st century. It's been an old, sleepy company with great assets that needed to be fine-tuned, and that's what we're doing. We're significantly broadening our touch in the international community. I think we're talking to maybe 12 different countries about receiving material. Having the only antimony mine gives us a very, very unique position.
We know we need to increase the size of that, when I say mine, I mean smelter. We need to increase the size of that smelter significantly, and we're talking to the Department of Defense about that as well. We wish to expand our customer base. A lot of our material today comes from one customer in Canada, and we want to explore that with many other countries and other material. So as I said, having two legs of our three-legged stool complete, we're now trying to finish the third leg, which is the ore. The company had not really done any marketing to institutional investors. About 60, close to 90 days ago, Jonathan and I started hitting the road. We've gone to a number of conferences. We've begun telling the story.
The stock has reacted very favorably, from $0.22 to $0.71. And if you look at our volume, it's gone from 100,000 shares to 1 million to 2 million shares a day. We know we have new institutional sponsorship. We're continuing to do conferences like this one here. We're back here in a couple of weeks to do ThinkEquity. So we know we have research analysts now that are looking to write research on us because I'm getting questions every day from them about their reports. So we think that telling our story is not a hard story to tell. It's again very unique being a junior mining company and profitable. And we think that with what we have we see on the horizon, that that will just expand significantly.
We need to increase our revenues. Instead of $10million-$12 million a year, it needs to be $25 million-$50 million a year, and that's our goal. This is my fourth public company. All my companies have been multi-billion-dollar companies that I've sold. This will be a billion-dollar company if we continue doing what we're doing. So, we are looking at acquisitions. I worked on one for 10 months that I killed about a month ago. Just didn't have the reserves that we thought we needed, but I have one that will be hopefully done before the end of the year. So we are trying to grow our base. We want to get, we want to get bigger.
But we also do not want to be diluted because we think that the potential for the stock is very significant, especially in light of things we're talking with the U.S. government about. So our last slide here talks about kind of our stock price range, market cap, and we've got about, you know, as I say, we're averaging about close to a million shares a day. And we think that we'll have lots of news between now and the first quarter that will hopefully get investors even more excited about what we're doing. Your top management is not taking salaries. We're being paid in stock. We believe that the stock has lots of potential, and you'll see we've also been big buyers of the stock as well.
So with that, I'd like to open up the floor to specific questions you may have. I tried to go through fast so we could talk.
Talk a little bit more about that, maybe sort of the process, and the timeline then for developing your own source of ore. And is the vertical integration absolutely critical then to the performance over the next couple of years? Because it seems to me t hat's going to take a while to, you know, from just having bought the rights there.
Actually being able to pull stuff out of the ground. So is there like a two-step process here where you're going to improve the revenues and profitability over the next two, three years, and beyond that, then that might be the opportunity for vertical integration upstream?
Yes, a good question. First of all, our primary goal today is trying to find antimony from foreign sources. We have, you know, daily, weekly meetings on that, and receiving samples and doing testing and trying to find product. And I feel more confident about finding that today, five times more confident than I did a week ago. We're making really good progress and should be able to, you know, have that material, because our facility in Thompson Falls is only running at 50% of capacity because we don't have enough material. There was a mine there, so they put the smelter by the mine, but the mines have been shut down twenty years.
So that's why it's located at that. No, it was not necessarily depleted, but when China went out and bought all these mines, they cut the price of antimony to such a level, nobody could make money. Antimony has always been deemed a byproduct of, with gold or silver, copper. It's not typically been a source material for mining companies until recently. It's always been another mineral they could sell. So back to your question, though, why are we looking at our own claims? We believe that the future of antimony is gonna be significant, and obviously, if we can fully integrate by mining, flotation and smelting, then our profit margins go up significantly. So that's the reason for that. And it's not just antimony.
I mean, one of the properties that we have, we're really excited about the cobalt, so there's other critical minerals. So I would look at us as a critical mineral company that's being very stealth and very careful in our mineral leasing opportunities. If the government is not our partner, there will be industry partners. So I wouldn't see us going out and spending a bunch of exploration money. It's really not our business. It would be a partner or the U.S. government helping fund that exploration. So it's being done in order to position ourselves for down the road. Because you're right, that's not going to happen in 2025 , and may happen in 2026 , but not in 2025 . Yes, sir.
Now, the antimony you're getting now, is that near the smelter at the old mine? You're just mining it?
No, it's coming from Canada. There's no, there's no mining of antimony in the United States today. What we're getting is from Canada.
So that, that's in Canada?
Correct.
So you're just getting this from other companies?
On our property, no, but yes, like, the antimony we're getting right now from Canada is coming out of the tailings of an existing mine. So they have to get rid of it. It's, they need to get, you know... Right.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
But you're leasing-
It's areas that we've identified that have significant antimony or other critical mineral opportunities that we believe, based on executive orders from the government, that we will have assistance in funding. Our real goal is to get prime areas, do some exploration so we can have some reserve reports done, and then to be able to announce, "Okay, we've got X million tons of this mineral, X million tons of that mineral," which then takes you to a different level.
Like for Canada, is it possible for some of the U.S. somewhere?
Alaska and Canada. We are looking at some older antimony mines in the U.S. that were shut down to see if there was any opportunities. The ones we looked at so far, we've said no.
Why?
Cost and permitting. If you are on federal land, you can forget it. You're not going to get a permit. But state land or private land, yes. Yes, sir.
Two questions. Number one, I'm sure you're aware that one of your neighbors in Idaho has been through the wringer in getting permits and getting projects off the ground.
Perpetua.
Yeah. So what leads you to believe that you're going to have an easier time, if you need it, to get the permits and to get your projects up and going? And my second question is, I'm looking at your long-term debt as $262.
Thousand.
Is the goal to keep a fairly high leverage and use stock to, for potential acquisitions, or are you looking to maximize cash flow and pay down debt?
Again, we have $14 million of cash. That's $262,000. It's just a truck. So the debt is minuscule. So we want to continue to keep a high cash level. I think that separates us.
I just read it.
Yeah, I thought you did. So yes, $262,000, $262,000, which is not $14 million. Big difference. So no, we don't use leverage hardly at all. Only reason we financed that is our interest rate was 2%, we were getting 4% on our money, so it was an arbitrage.
Yeah.
Remind me back to the first question. Tell me again the-
My question was-
Oh, about Perpetua. Okay, I remember.
Yeah.
Yes, that's a very good question. So Perpetua is on federal land, tribal land, and opening up a gold mine in a fairly sensitive area. They've been through the wringer for four-plus years. Our smelter is on private land we own. We have no federal land, we have no tribal land, and we don't have any issues. We're running that smelter every day. The new projects we have in Canada and Alaska, none are on federal land, none are on tribal land. They're either on provincial or state land. And we're working very closely with, like, the geologists for the state of Alaska that have helped us. And so, staying away from federal is the biggest issue. That's your permitting problem. Now, Perpetua's going to get their permits, I have no doubt. In fact, I think they'll have them before the end of the year.
Oh. Well, Paulson has, you know, more money than whatever.
Yeah. So I'm assuming that he has a way of pitching the government, this is in the-
The government needs, needs that antimony. That antimony is pretty critical, and they would all come to us because no other place to go.
If he gets his permits.
The better it is for us. We're working hand in hand.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, we got time for maybe one or two more.
Okay. Yes, sir.
Last chapter, get the driver shipped down, and the antimony down to your smelter.
Truck it. We can truck it. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Everything's on roadway. Nothing in Timbuktu. It's all by railroad or roadway or waterway. About 5-6%. Can you wait? We got one more, one more if you got it. Another one too far away. But you will see us. We're continuing leasing, but in those areas that we've already identified. I spent a week in Alaska, two or three weeks ago, with one of our engineers and a geologist, and I was very impressed on what we could have up there. Again, nobody paid attention to antimony when it was $3, $4, $5 a pound. It's $13, $14 a pound. You know, the commodity price in itself, and then you tap on top of that, no supply, and you got a new opportunity.
I'm sure you noticed that Mandalay just reported their earnings, and while the gold was up, the antimony production was way down.
I have spoken to Mandalay executives extensively, and they don't think they have much life left.
Yeah. I mean, you'll see the gold going down, too. The gold is with the antimony, and they’re telling me two years. Another problem, and this is one of the largest antimony producers in the world. Free world, exactly. Good point. Thank you for your time.
Ladies and gentlemen, one more time for Mr. Gary Evans. Great job, Gary, Chairman and CEO of US Antimony Corp. And, of course, our thanks to Jonathan Miller, the SVP of IR. Folks, we'll take a brief reset. Coming up, it's Intellinetics, and that's going to start in just a couple of minutes. So, get yourselves comfortable, and we'll check back in shortly.