Good day and welcome to Q2 Investors Summit Virtual. We appreciate your participation in today's virtual event. Up next, we are pleased to introduce United States Antimony Corporation. If you would like to ask a question during the webcast, you may drop them in the chat box button on the left side of your screen. Please type your question into the box and click send to submit it. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over the session to Jonathan Miller, VP of Investor Relations at United States Antimony Corporation, who will lead the presentation. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much for the introduction, and I appreciate everybody for tuning in. Today we'll be talking about our company, United States Antimony. Here is our forward-looking statements just in case I say anything that is a little in the near future. This is an older company. It's been around since 1968. The company went public in 2012. It was founded by a guy named John Lawrence. He was a miner, but didn't do much on the business side. We do give him credit for being able to keep the company alive for as long as he did when China was going around the past 15-20 years buying and selling all critical mineral assets, midstream, downstream, and mining operations, driving the price down. The company really began to turn around in 2023.
The founder passed away about four years ago, and a group of major shareholders who represented about 45% of the company brought in our now CEO, Gary Evans, who has a long track record on Wall Street. This is his fourth NYSE company. The other is in oil and gas, each reaching billion-dollar valuations, and he plans to replicate those successes here. Once Gary came on board, he started transitioning the management. It is an entire new board, entire new management team, and a new vision, new trajectory. When you start looking at the company, you really want to go back about two years. In 2024, it was part of those management changes. I came on board in July of last year. We also hired an SVP of Government Communications to help work closely with our lobbying group and government agencies.
Then we started staking claims in Alaska to become vertically integrated, which I'll touch on here shortly. We also started leasing some claims in Ontario, in Cobalt and Tungsten. We also leased a flotation mill in Philipsburg, Montana, which is a key component in the processing of Antimony. Earlier this year, we hired two new VPs for our mining division. We fired up our Madero smelter in Mexico, and we started receiving shipments internationally from Australia, which are currently being processed there. Mexico was shut down for a brief period during the management transition and is now back online processing material. I'll go ahead and go to the next slide here. What is Antimony? It's deemed a critical mineral by the Department of Interior and the Department of Defense.
It's actually the Department of Defense, which I'll get to here also shortly, has 17 critical minerals, Antimony being the most important of those critical minerals, and I'll go into why. Antimony is widely used in defense and other industrial applications. About 30% is used for various military components, probably the most important of which is bullets. Every single bullet fired in the world contains antimony. It's used to harden the lead, which is a soft semi-metal by itself. Antimony is able to withstand expansion and heat, so it allows the projectile to travel down the barrel of a gun. It's also used in the primer, which ignites the gunpowder, so you can't fire a bullet without Antimony.
It's also used in artillery shells, laser-guided missiles, night vision goggles, binoculars, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and probably the biggest use case is in flame retardants, which is growing exponentially due to the demand in different sectors. It's widely used in also lead-acid batteries. Every lead-acid battery, whether in a car or a boat, contains antimony. The roofing material for data storage centers contains antimony. You can imagine with Meta and Google and OpenAI building all these data storage centers, it's a vital component in flame retardation for the roofing material. It's also used in different semiconductors and circuitry used in quantum computing, AI, robotics, and it's also used in high-quality glass. All your cell phones likely contain antimony and then other various ceramics and plastics and chemicals. We're a small market for Antimony domestically. We're probably roughly around 4% - 8% right now.
The market has historically been controlled by China. As I mentioned, they've been going around the last 15, 20 years buying up all these assets, driving the price of Antimony down and controlling the market as they've done with other critical minerals. In September of last year, China announced that they were cutting off the global supply of Antimony to the United States and internationally. China's gone from being a net producer to a net importer. The reason is because they're the largest mine in the world. I think it's called the Twinkle Star Mine in Hunan Province in China, is mined out. It's been operational for about 50 years, and last year they depleted the resource there. As I mentioned, they've become a net importer of antimony material. When we're out in the global market sourcing material, we're competing with China. We ship domestically.
We have about 15 different customers, some who are large multi-billion dollar subcontractors for the military. We continue to source international shipments as well as are beginning to bring our own material from Alaska later this year. In addition to China, there were a few other countries that controlled the markets: Mexico, China, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bolivia, and Mexico dropped out due to historically low prices. As it stands today, United States Antimony owns the only two permitted smelters in North America, one being in Thompson Falls, Montana, the other being in Mexico, and also making us the only two permitted smelters in the Western Hemisphere. If you want Antimony, it has to come through us.
Also in February 2021, there was an Executive Order 14017 passed under the Defense Production Act that states by 2027, all critical minerals need to be sourced domestically, especially if you're supplying material for the government and the military. Here's a little bit more information about that executive order. Obviously, I'm sure you're aware that the current administration has been very friendly to building up critical minerals domestically and replenishing our stockpiles. When China made that announcement in September of last year, we started getting calls from the Department of Defense. In December, we hosted three different divisions of DOD at our operation in Montana. That's around the time we retained our lobbying group in D.C., who's gotten us in front of congressional leadership, DOD, and other agencies, just putting us on the map. The company did a really great job of flying under the radar for decades.
Now we're out there telling the story for the first time and have been submitting white papers and scope papers at the DOD's request for grant funding, which took place in December of last year. It's only been about five months, but we're making great strides in our conversations with them and hope that we'll be well capitalized to meet the demand. This is just a picture of our operations in Montana. It's a relatively small footprint, but right now, earlier this year, we announced an expansion of this facility. We'll be adding seven more furnaces there. We're moving around some of the office buildings on site to have the capacity for those additional furnaces. Currently, that plan has been running at about 100 tons per month, give or take, and we hope to three to four times the output at this facility.
The completion date is set for December of this year for that expansion. When we start bringing material from Alaska, we'll have the ability to start processing that rapidly at this facility. This is some more information about the flotation mill that we've leased in Philipsburg. It's about 100 mi - 150 mi away from our refinery. The key component that this plays is that it's able to take the raw material, process it in what they call floating, which separates the different hard rocks and minerals. We'll have byproducts such as gold, silver, copper, and some waste products. This will help bring up the concentrate because we need about 70% to run through our furnaces there in Thompson Falls. This is a photo of our operations down in Madero, Mexico. This has an engineered capacity of 200 tons per month.
It's currently running at about 70 - 100 as those international shipments from Australia have begun to arrive. This just went back online earlier this year in March, April. Everything being processed here will be reflected in our second quarter numbers. This is just a little bit about the geography. We're centrally located between two different ports on the East Coast and West Coast. We have 15 employees there. We refurbished everything since it was shut down in the summer of last year. We've sent teams down there about three different times to make sure everything's running smoothly and that the material coming out of there is of the quality we expect. These are just some pictures of those shipments arriving from Australia. We've had two containers arrive. We have two more en route. Those will be being processed pretty soon here.
As I mentioned, the antimony supply is so tight because China's been going around the last 15 years - 20 years. Between them and Russia, they controlled about 80% of the market. When China announced that they were cutting off the global supply last year, it caught a lot of people with their pants around their ankles. Our own Department of Defense was getting their Antimony from China. All these major manufacturers in the U.S., whether they be for lead-acid batteries or semiconductors or bullets and other military equipment, were all getting their Antimony from China. Wrongly, antimony's been lumped in with these rare earth element negotiations or conversations that have been taking place between Trump and China. China has what's called a 100-year marathon to become the number one market in the world, the global superpower.
We do not expect China to ever be providing us with Antimony ever again. Why would they supply us with a material to rebuild our defense infrastructure? As I mentioned, when we are out in the global market, we are competing with China and sourcing that material from all these countries that may have offtakes. The price of Antimony has surged almost 700% since this announcement. What was not economically viable at $5 a pound to mine and ship internationally, now at almost $30 a pound, we are now fielding calls from different countries and companies all over the world who want to supply us with antimony. We are in the midst of negotiating other definitive agreements to have a stable and steady supply coming into that facility in Mexico. Most international shipments will be going to Mexico for processing.
I think it's also important to note in 2023, prior to the management change, the company was approved for military spec material with a $500,000 grant from the DOD. That facility in Mexico is able to create what the military uses. Their ingots almost look like a gold bar, but it's Antimony that they use for different weapon systems. Here's a little graph highlighting how the price of Antimony has surged over the last few years. You can see that it steadily grew up until 2023. When China made that announcement, it just started to skyrocket. The price today is a little bit higher than what's shown here. It's about $28 and some change. Some global experts predict that the price could go to $50 a pound. We were making money at $5 a pound. We have even better margins now at 30.
We hope the price remains stable. We do not want to see demand destruction. This is just a list of the different Antimony products that we create: oxide, Antimony metal, trioxide, trichloride, trisulfide, and nanocrystals. These are all used in various applications. Depending on what they are, we can manufacture that product. This is a little bit more information about our claims in Alaska. In the summer of last year, when China cut us off, we went up to Alaska. We met with the Geological Society. One of our VPs, who we hired in the mining division, was on the board of the Geological Society for 15 years, so had a close relationship. They pulled up a big map and showed us where all the historic Antimony claims were going back 100 years.
These are tailings and deposits and veins that have been mined by other junior miners in the area, whether they be in gold or silver or copper. This is in close proximity to the Alaskan Highway. It has infrastructure, and it has the ability to start bringing material out very rapidly. A lot of this material is on the surface or it is subsurface with maybe one to five feet of overburden. The traditional mining project takes anywhere from 7 - 10, maybe even longer, years to begin operation. We are doing that in a year. In September of this year, we expect to be bringing our own material from Alaska down to our smelters in Thompson Falls via trucks. It is historic as far as production is concerned. This is also very important to our margins.
For international shipments that we're bringing in, we're paying anywhere from 45% - 50% of Rotterdam price, so about $15, $16 a pound. When we begin bringing material from Alaska, we'll only be paying around $6 a pound. Our margins will go from 40% to 80% with our own material. We will also be the only vertically integrated antimony company in the Western Hemisphere. This is a map showing where those claims are in the Stibnite Creek Tok area of Alaska. It is around Fairbanks. These are the other minerals that are associated with those claims, Antimony, of course, being the most important. You have a few others there as well, which can be processed at our flotation mill and included in additional revenue streams.
This is just a map showing the truck route on the Alaskan Highway from our claims in Alaska down to Thompson Falls, Montana. It is about a 2,100 mi drive. We expect to be stockpiling, building inventory during the summer months so we can continue trucking material down throughout the winter. This is just some more information about our claims in Ontario, Canada. As I mentioned, there is a significant cobalt deposit there. We will be looking at maybe doing some JV or other partnerships probably in 2026 to help exploit those claims. We also have another critical mineral that we will be making an announcement about, which the DOD pointed us to also in this Ontario, Canada region. This is just a map highlighting where those claims are in Canada and some of the other minerals that are associated with those deposits. This is the list.
On the right side, you have the 17 critical minerals listed by the Department of Defense. On the left side, you have the different critical minerals and noncritical gold and silver that United States Antimony is now involved in. We have the ability to meet the demand of several of these DOD-listed critical minerals with the existing claims that we have today. This is just a graph showing how Antimony is used in lead-acid batteries. There is a synthetic antimony. It is made in India. It is about three times the price of Rotterdam, so about $90 a pound. From our conversations with the Department of Defense, it is not adequate to meet their needs, but also the needs of various industrial manufacturers and commercial manufacturers, whether they be lead-acid batteries or solar panels or other applications.
Now we're going to switch gears and talk about another part of our business, Zeolite. It's not a critical mineral, but it is very strategic. It's a natural crystalline material. It's very porous. It's able to act like a molecular sieve, so it's able to bind to other molecules. It has a high cation exchange capacity. We'll talk about who uses Zeolite. Zeolite, like Antimony, has dozens of different applications. It's widely used in water filtration and water treatment. Mining operations use it to clean up their wastewater. It's also used in reverse osmosis systems and pool and aquarium filtration. It's also used in agriculture as a feed amendment for cattle and other livestock. About 25% of our Zeolite sales go to cattle feed. Cattle has numerous benefits.
It helps reduce methane gas in the first stomach of the cow and increases protein in the second stomach. You are getting better feed efficiency, better nutrient uptake. You get about 11.5% increase in cattle size, which beef ranchers love. It is also used in the fields to sprinkle over the urine in the patties to mask the ammonia smell, which is a big issue. It is also used in horticulture as a soil conditioner. It helps with water retention and nutrient uptake for crops. It is also used in petroleum refining, catalytic cracking, various synthetic fibers, detergents, plastics. Another big use case we came across last year is concrete. Concrete uses fly ash, which comes from coal in their cement hardening mixture. Obviously, there has been a lot of backlash on coal and its use. Concrete production is responsible for 10% of global CO2 emissions.
A lot of these big manufacturers have initiatives by 2030 and 2050 to be net zero and carbon neutral. They are all exploring alternatives for fly ash. We got involved last year with a research team at Texas A&M who received some federal funding to develop a low-carbon concrete. They received some of our material. The preliminary research has shown that Zeolite is a viable alternative to fly ash in the cement hardening mixture. That has led us to having conversations with some of the biggest producers: CEMEX, Heidelberg Materials, Holcim, CRH, and others. On the right side here, you will see a photo of our operations there. It is in Preston, Idaho. We have one of the highest quality deposits anywhere in the world. It comes from volcanic ash.
This specific deposit settled at the bottom of a lake bed millions of years ago, keeping it ultra pure and preserved. We literally just blast it out of the ground, bring it to this crushing facility here, which runs it through various mesh sizes so you can get larger granules all the way to a fine powder, depending on what the application is. This is an example of how we do it. We just blast it, pick it up, put it in trucks, and bring it next door to that crushing facility. When the new management transition happened, we spent a little money there to bring everything up to spec, make sure it was running smoothly, caught up on back orders. We hired a new VP and plant manager who's a mechanical engineer. He has that operation running like a fine-tuned engine.
We also did our first reserve test, and we drilled 82 test holes and determined that we have up to 100-year supply just on this location here. The rest of the material is located on BLM land surrounding the property. At current capacity right now, we have enough to last us for a very long time. The company historically never had any salespeople. We changed that. We hired some salespeople to start spearheading water filtration and cattle feed and help grow these different industrial aspects to Zeolite. Another thing I did not mention for Zeolite and its use cases is nuclear remediation. It has been famously used at Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island because it is able to bind to the radioactive isotopes and store those.
Part of our conversations with our lobbying firm has been getting us in front of the EPA and other regulatory agencies and emphasizing the importance of having stockpiles of Zeolite that could be readily deployed. The U.S. obviously has a lot of aging nuclear reactors around the country. It could be used to store the uranium rods, both in the concrete made from Zeolite, but also to treat the surrounding environment with. We believe there is a big market out there for using Zeolite in these different applications. Also for wastewater treatment, it could have been used at Flint, Michigan. It still could. Our Asheville, North Carolina, after the hurricane came through last year and contaminated all the waterways, we think it is a very strategic mineral that we should have an abundance of ready to go.
As I mentioned, we had a new VP mechanical engineer who brought everything up to spec up there. It's now running at 98.4% efficiency. We've increased the amount of tons sold every quarter coming out of that facility and continue to look at different industries and products that we can manufacture on site or sell to by the metric ton. This is a cattle prime. It's a cattle feed amendment that we can bring directly to consumers. Instead of selling large pallets of metric tons, we can create direct-to-consumer products. It could also be used for chicken coops to deal with the ammonia smell in chickens. It's also used in consumer products. It works similar to the way activated charcoal works in the human body.
You can take it in pill or powder form, and it binds to toxins and metals in the body and safely flushes them out. You can imagine, if you go direct-to-consumer, the margins expand greatly. We're exploring all different avenues that we can take this business and grow it. These are just some of the different benefits that it has for cattle, as I mentioned: improved digestion, nutrient uptake, better feed efficiency, reduction of methane gas, which is a big deal in large agriculture. These are some of the notable recent accomplishments of the company. As I mentioned, the President resigned from the company after the founder passed away. His son stepped in temporarily before that group of shareholders brought Gary in.
He began to immediately change the management and the board, new SVP of Corporate Development, Government Communications, working with various government agencies and our lobbying firm, General Manager of Bear River, the mechanical engineer who's turned that plant around, new VP of Antimony Division, our guy that's up there in Montana. He's been doing this for about 40 years. He's one of the foremost experts in Antimony refining. It's important to note that refining Antimony is more of an art than a process. We have a lot of protections in place around our process engineering. You can't just go to a fabricator and ask them to build you an Antimony furnace. We have a lot of IP involved.
Our new VP is helping bridge the gap with the guy that's been there for 40 years and help us secure more material and make that side of the business more streamlined. In 2024, we had the highest revenues. In 2023, we reported about $7 million in revenues. In 2024, we reported about $15 million, so almost doubled that. In the first quarter of this year, we had a record quarter, reported $7 million, and we've given guidance of $40 million- $50 million for the year, which will come about from our production in Mexico but also our expansion in Thompson Falls, Montana. This is just a snapshot of our balance sheet. We continue to add revenues to the balance sheet. We have about $18 million in cash. We have very little debt, around $250,000. We have a $100 million universal shelf.
We have a $25 million ATM, and we have a $5 million line of credit that's unutilized with a bank out of Dallas. We like to maintain a high cash balance. We expect that with the expansion in Montana and the exploitation of our claims in Alaska, with the way our conversations are going with the government, we hope that that will be fully funded through grants that we've applied for. We continue to expand our Antimony processing footprint to supply material to the U.S. government, but also their subcontractors. We continue to secure international shipments. As I mentioned, we're getting material from Australia. We're also receiving material from Mexico and in different stages of negotiation with Chad, Turkey, Bolivia, Peru, Morocco, and a few other countries.
We're also, as I mentioned, looking at announcing another play in another critical mineral that should be coming here in the next few weeks. As I mentioned, continuing our conversations with EPA and other government agencies about Zeolite. We're always looking to make an acquisition if it makes sense. Obviously, Antimony is a very hot topic now, given the export ban and its vital uses. You'll hear of other companies that are involved or trying to get involved with Antimony, but they are still three to four years away from being in production and being able to bring material out of the ground. Meanwhile, we're doing this today. Come September, we will be the only vertically integrated antimony company around. Again, I'll highlight that we are looking at different acquisitions. Obviously, a lot of people are trying to come into the space.
We are always having ongoing conversations if it makes sense, if they have had the material tested, if it is ready to bring out of the ground. We are exploring all different avenues for potential acquisitions. This is highlighting again our consolidated revenues. We gave guidance after our Q1 earnings of $40 million - $50 million for this year. We think we will comfortably be in that range given the expansion and reactivation of the facility in Mexico. These are just some of the recent publications since I have come on board in the last 10 months. Outside of the capital markets, not knowing who we were, the governors and senators in the states that we operate did not even know we existed. Last year, we really focused on retail, early institutional conferences, just getting out there and telling the story to the street, participating in events like this.
The company also never had any equity research coverage. We now have four firms covering us: B. Riley, D. Boral, AGP, and H.C. Wainwright, with two to three more looking to initiate coverage here soon. They're in various stages. Gary's also been featured on Fox Business Mornings with Maria twice since December, one being last week and the other being in the middle of December 2024. We have been in Reuters, Fast Markets, S&P Global, and a ton of other publications that you can see here in our presentation. We continue to garner lots of attention. We have mainstream cable news outlets that want to do stories on us because of how big the critical mineral story is overall.
We're also looking at bringing on some marketing firms and public relations firms to help spread this message to the different environmental groups, but also other miners in Alaska that may have antimony that they can supply us with. We'll be spearheading a lot of different marketing efforts here in the coming weeks and months. This is our corporate profile. As of May 8, the share price was $3.52. As of last year, it was around $0.20. The market cap's gone from $20 million to over $300 million. We have significant cash. This has gone up a little from the $18.7 million. Average daily volume has increased from a few thousand shares a day to around 3.4 million a day. I think last week was the highest of record with around 10 million shares transacted on Friday or Thursday.
The company has about 117 million shares outstanding. That's gone up a little bit. Under the previous management, they did a deal with Roth that included about 10 million in warrants. We've seen about 40% of those come in. They expire in November of this year and in February of next year. We'll receive a little bit of cash from those. As I mentioned, long-term debt, this has decreased a little bit. If you look at our first quarter numbers, it's down to around $250,000 now. Then the unutilized credit line with the bank here in Dallas and the $100 million universal shelf and $25 million ATM with Alliance Global Partners. That's everything in summary about the company. This really, as I mentioned, started taking place around two years ago with this new trajectory.
We feel confident that we align with the government and military and that we'll be very well capitalized going forward with our expansion efforts to help supply this critical mineral to all these industrial and military companies that desperately need it. We've been told that our reserves are the lowest that they've been since after World War II. Everybody's moving very rapidly to get something going and get a domestic supply. On the management side, everybody's firing on all cylinders to make sure that this company scales as quickly as humanly possible and bring everything to fruition. With that, I'll go ahead and open it up to some Q&A. Let's see. What do you consider fair market value of your shares today? I think we're still greatly underrepresented. As I mentioned, we're the only producer in the Western Hemisphere. We have great assets.
We have great fundamentals, great management. In the guidance that has been given through these different equity research reports, they all have price targets of $5 plus. We see that with some of the announcements we have coming in the next couple of months that we will reach those price targets and probably handsomely beat them. Fully diluted book value is about 126 million shares. I think that is everything for the Q&A.
I think there is a follow-up question by Seth. Excuse me, sir. There is a follow-up question by Seth Denison here too. A question about the price per share basis or fully diluted book value per share.
Sorry, I did not see that. With a market cap of $300 million, a fully diluted share is of around 120 million. The fully diluted price per share would be around $2.50. All right. Thank you, everybody.
If there's no further questions, I'll go ahead and turn it over to the next.