All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to the U.S. Antimony Fireside Chat. Again, my name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lytham Partners, and today I have the pleasure of moderating a Q&A discussion with Jonathan Miller. Jonathan Head of Investor Relations here at U.S. Antimony. Quick reminder, company trades under the ticker symbol UAMY on the New York Stock Exchange. Jonathan, let's get started. Welcome.
Sounds good. Appreciate you having me on, Robert.
Very good. For those that may be totally new to U.S. Antimony, give us sort of the concise overview of the company today and maybe a little bit on your background as well and what attracted you to the company.
Sure. Yeah. It's important to note that this is the re-emergence of an older company that's been around for about 50 years, under new leadership, which took place around August 2023, after the founder had passed away. His son was managing the company, not to shareholders' expectations, and they brought Gary C. Evans on the board as the CEO. This is Gary C. Evans's fifth public company. His others were oil and gas companies that he grew to billion-dollar valuations, and they wanted him to turn that company around. During that time was an entire transition of the board and management team. Everybody's new, with the exception of our antimony metallurgist. He is sort of the key to how all this runs. We've just been on a fast track.
We knew that to turn the company around in 2024, we had to, you know, have access to more material, and this was us going up to Alaska, beginning to stake historic antimony claims that were mined during war times or discovered during the gold rush. This was without any foresight into what China was about to do in September 2024. Many of you may or may not know that they did embargo antimony to America, and antimony is deemed a critical mineral by the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Defense. It has hundreds, if not thousands, of different applications. The U.S. consumes around 26,000 tons a year, about 53 million pounds, 32% of which is defense. The other is industrial-based. In defense, it's used to harden lead and ammunition.
There's about 300 different types of ammunition where antimony is very prevalent, especially in armor-piercing, penetrating rounds. It's also used in the primer which ignites the gunpowder. It's used in artillery shells, laser-guided missiles, night vision goggles, binoculars. It's used in aircraft carriers, fighter jets, military tents, cots, uniforms. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. End of last year, we did secure a $245 million contract with the Defense Logistics Agency, a branch of the Pentagon, and we're responsible for stockpiling antimony for the government, which then divvies it off to the different branches of military. That contract was actually amended in December, $248 million. For the division of nuclear sciences, antimony is actually used in nuclear rods. They contain antimony and beryllium.
We expect this contract to go a lot higher. We've already received around $85 million in orders for 2026 for the DLA, which will make up a big chunk of our forecasted revenue for this year. The company has grown exponentially since we took over. In 2023, we were reporting around $7 million in revenues. 2024, we did about $15 million. 2025, we just reported last week $39 million and given guidance of $125 million for this year. Very well capitalized. We have close to $100 million in cash and marketable securities. We have a $400 million ATM that hasn't been touched. We have no debt.
We have many different irons in the fire related to other critical minerals that the government has pushed us towards, being tungsten and cobalt, as well as two others I can't disclose yet. We are seeking additional grants and funding. We were awarded a $27 million grant a few weeks ago, and that was to expand our throughput process. We own the only two permitted antimony smelters in North America, one being in Thompson Falls, Montana, the other being in Mexico. There's nobody else in the United States that can produce these antimony products at scale. We are the only ones. We make 5 distinct products for different industries, from battery manufacturers to solar panel manufacturers to defense contractors. Our process engineering is very proprietary and exclusive to us.
As I mentioned, our antimony metallurgist, he's been working with the material 50 years, 30 with the company, and he developed all the process engineering behind how we produce these different products at scale. While you may see promoters out there, you know, trying to leverage antimony to gain access to capital markets and federal funding, you really have to read between the lines. The only other real producer out there is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who's developed a mobile smelter capable of doing 7-10 tons annually. As I mentioned, the U.S. market is about 26,000 tons annually. We have a great and unique opportunity to capture a lot of that market share, given how far ahead we are of any competition.
You know, over the last 50 years, no one is really studying how to do this. We were importing cheap commodities from China. Absent having one of these guys on your team, you'd be very hard-pressed to replicate what we do. We just released a tungsten reserve report, a resource report a few weeks ago. That is being filed with the SEC either this week or next week. That's shown future revenues of $4.6 billion at today's tungsten prices, which I think is actually closer to around $6 billion now at today's tungsten prices. It's been on a vertical trajectory as well as a few other minerals that we're looking at to get involved with.
We are applying for $20 million to the Department of War to stand that operation up, expedite bringing the tungsten to market. We're applying for a $75 million grant with the Department of War for our joint venture hydrometallurgy facility with Americas Gold and Silver that we intend to put at their facility in Galena, Idaho. It's already permitted with eight permits, so it's a turnkey operation. Our entire team, our engineering team, and their engineering team, and our management team are going down to Bolivia this Sunday to review the operation down there. We got involved with a small team of engineers and chemists from Canada who had gone down there about 18 months ago to start developing a hydromet process specific to antimony. They've done that.
We invested a little more with the company to see that they could prove that commercially. They've done that. We're now receiving over 150 tons of material. This is a game changer, this operation. Hydromet's been around for some time, but never specific for antimony or not at commercial scale for any material in the United States. This process, it gives us a high purity antimony flake, which is essentially a finished product. It's around 90% pure, and so there's not a lot of rock or other sediment or material that need to be reduced out of this in the iron ore reduction smelting. It essentially just goes. The metal flake goes right into the smelter and is converted right into ingots.
With the expanded facility in Montana, it's going to have a nameplate capacity of just over 300 tons. The caveat there is this input, this material could theoretically take our capacity from 300 to 700 or 1,000 tons per month because it is processed at almost four times the speed as, say like a rock slurry that we would get from a flotation mill. We're doing another $45 million award for the Department of Energy for putting another smaller hydromet facility in Montana where our flotation facility is. We expect to be opening up our mining operations in Montana, hopefully in the next 30 days, and then probably closer to 60 days for Alaska. The weather there has been horrible.
I think they have the most number of years on record at -40 degrees. It becomes very difficult to work in those conditions. We feel confident that by the end of the year, we could be supplying 20% of our own material through our smelters and hopefully closer to 50% by next year. I'll just go ahead and take a beat there and let you ask another question. This is a lot.
You probably hit on every single one of the questions that I had there. Let's see if we can try to unpack a couple of them.
Sure.
All right, let's just talk about sort of the global supply chain right now, right? Understand where it is globally. You talked about sort of China with the embargoes and how that's impacted and sort of the acceleration of sort of critical or strategic materials. Let's talk first on sort of the supply. Where are the big choke points at, and what is sort of expected to come online here over the next number of years?
Yeah. It's really interesting. You know, this entire industry really just sprung up over the last 18 months. Outside of China, nobody was mining and shipping antimony across the world. It wasn't economic at $4 or $5 a pound. It's often associated with deleterious elements like lead and arsenic and sulfur, making it extremely difficult to process. You know, unless you have the know-how to do that, you know, people just didn't want to mess with it. It was a waste product. Now we've seen all these collectives of miners all over the world. We have agreements in place with Chad, Bolivia, Australia, Mexico, and Peru to import material now.
While we've been approached with hundreds of offers to buy antimony, it's incumbent on us to look at not only the origin of that materials and making it off the black market from China. We have to get samples to test it. Oftentimes what they show us on paper is different from what we receive at our facilities to test. If it has higher than 0.2% of some of these deleterious elements, we can't accept it. If it's lower than 10% grade stibnite, we can't accept it. Hydromet's going to change all that. We'll be able to take subpar grade stibnite material, and concentrate that up to MIL-SPEC.
We'll also be able to take, material that has slightly higher concentrations of these deleterious elements and process those out in a safe way. We've been navigating this industry. Obviously, this, you know, entire industry or sector's been underinvested for 20 years. There's a huge influx of money coming from investors, and the government. You know, while we've seen China out in the global market now paying prices or premiums above Rotterdam, which is higher than their own exchange, for antimony pricing, it often seems it's more scarce than or more rare than rare earth elements out there for quality product.
We know we have an advantage, you know, being a first mover in the downstream processing, but we also want to consolidate as much third-party material as we can, so we can continue to meet the demand in the U.S. Internationally, it's still kind of vague what the demand is. We don't see numbers out of China or Russia and so it's a little bit of a gray area.
Let's then flip this side, the demand drivers for Antimony going forward. You've talked about defense, you've talked about a number of other applications. Sort of help us understand what the biggest drivers are and where demand goes and the growth rates over the next number of years here on the demand side.
Yeah. The entire market's expected to grow around 6% year-over-year. The largest sectors for antimony demand are gonna be flame retardants and semiconductors and photovoltaic glass. Antimony actually in data storage centers, antimony is the number three most used metal or critical mineral. You know, a lot of people are aware of all the data centers that are going up across the country, multi-billion-dollar infrastructures that all require antimony, many of which will have to source that domestically. We know during this energy transition phase, not just antimony is used, not just lead-acid batteries, but lithium-ion batteries and liquid metal batteries. We know there's big demand in the lead-acid battery market for companies that are looking to diversify into domestic sources.
I've just recently begun soliciting sales for Antimony now that our expansion is coming online gradually and we're increasing our volumes. Just in the first three weeks of going out there, you know, we've identified close to 40 companies that have a mandate to diversify into a domestic source. There's just, we can't meet the demand. I mean, it's probably around 15 million pounds just in these companies alone annually that we've identified, which, you know, is close to around $200 million in revenue a year. The faster we can scale our operations to meet that demand, you know, the better off our entire industry will be.
Let's talk about pricing here. Obviously, in a market that can reprice rather quickly, what are sort of the indicators that antimony tightness is, you know, more structural versus short-term spikes in inventory or substitution behaviors, et cetera?
Yeah. You know, as I mentioned, I think, you know, quality antimony is even more rare than rare earth elements. Last year was the fastest appreciating critical mineral, went up 500%, from its, you know, $4-$5 range. It went nearly to $30. The price has rebalanced back some. I speculate that's because now we've seen all these different countries and companies and brokers now coming online to export antimony or ship antimony. Again, you have to read between the lines and look at the material, understand the grade of the material, the elements involved with it. I think all these different small pockets and collective of miners that have come online have had some effect on the price rebalancing back to where it was.
Understanding the quality of the material, I think should also drive the price. You know, prices we see reflected in Argus or the Rotterdam are not really reflected on what the material should be priced at. Again, we're the only producer in North America. They have not asked us what we sell our material for or what we should sell it for. You know, I think it's incumbent on them to approach us and ask us, what are we selling these five different products for? We should be the definitive authority on what the pricing is. We've heard rumors of government implementing an AI model. I think the acronym is OPENS, O-P-E-N-S, to sort of set floor pricing for commodities like this, and I think that'd be beneficial to the industry.
Obviously, give investors more surety of what to expect when you don't have a commodity price jumping the way that this one has. You know, like I said, we've seen China out in the open market paying premiums above Western pricing. There is speculation of them manipulating the market as well.
You guys obviously have talked about sort of this first mover advantage here in North America. If the West is serious about sort of building out this ex-China supply chain, what does a realistic timeline look like and what parts of the supply chain are sort of actually feasible to reshore here in the near term?
Yeah, I think, you know, timelines are gonna be moving, but obviously a lot faster than they had been. The mining industry is very antiquated. This entire industry has been underinvested for 20, 30 years. Now there's this window of opportunity where we're re-industrializing and investing. We've never seen the government take equity positions in companies before, let alone mining companies. It's imperative for us to take this first mover advantage and move as quickly as we can. As I mentioned, I've identified a whole market that we can capture. We just have to be able to scale our operations and input of raw material as quickly as we can, which we're all doing. That's sort of the trajectory of where we see it moving.
Is that the biggest constraint is raw material right now as you see it?
Quality raw material. There's a lot of promoters with antimony out there. Obviously, they can gain access to capital markets and federal funding, similar to how AI was using that in your pitch deck over the last few years. Most of that material we can't do anything with currently. That changes when we have a hydromet facility online. Where this is going in Idaho, we're right in the backyard of Perpetua and Sunshine Silver, and these companies have antimony but nowhere to process it. Hydromet will allow us to take subpar material, less than 10% grade Stibnite, and also process out these deleterious elements in a safe way that traditionally we've had to reject because there's no way to deal with it.
You guys, you just mentioned Hydromet and sort of JVs and such. Talk about sort of as you expand your footprint here, including acquiring processing assets and stuff, how do you decide which parts of the value chain you must own outright versus partner with?
Sure. The traditional way to process antimony is you mine it. The ore, as I mentioned, has to be at least 10% stibnite. That goes to a flotation mill, which is sort of the middle leg that separates out some of the rock and other minerals and increases the concentrate of the antimony. We need about 60% to run through our furnaces. It's a time-intensive process, and at 60% in the furnaces you're still taking time to, you know, molten rock and other materials to get that ultra-pure, 99% pure finished product that we manufacture that's MIL-SPEC. Hydromet's able to do all that in a much more efficient way using electrification and give us a finished product that can theoretically be put through our furnaces at quadruple the speed.
With this expansion that's going online in Montana, the new facility will have a nameplate capacity of I think it's around 340 tons. With this material, we could theoretically at the same facility without changing anything mechanically do 700 or 1,000 tons per month. We entered into this joint venture with Americas Gold and Silver. We had historically been getting their material, but not from them. They have gold, silver, copper and antimony at their mines. That material was going to Teck Resources in Canada to be processed, and then we would buy the sodium antimonate from Teck Resources. Americas Gold and Silver was leaving around $40 million a year on the table by not realizing anything for that antimony.
From Teck Resources, you know, this was a by-product, so it's full of impurities. We buy that from them, refine it and purify it. Now we're taking Teck out of the equation. We're working directly. We're putting this Hydromet facility at their property in Idaho, which is turnkey for us. We don't need to spend millions of dollars and years getting permitted. Our team, their engineering team, our engineering team, and our management team, we're going down to Bolivia this Sunday to meet with the team we've been working with down there. This is a group of Canadian engineers and chemists that devised a way to make Hydromet specific for antimony, which hasn't been done. Hydromet technology's existed for a while, just not at a commercial scale in the U.S.
This is the first of its kind, specific antimony Hydromet. They came to us last year wanting to do something together. We asked them if they could do this at a commercial scale. They didn't have the money. We invested around $2.5 million with them to prove that they could do this at scale, which they've done. We're now receiving 150 tons a month of this antimony flake. As I mentioned, with this investment, we've gotten exclusive licensing rights for this technology for the United States and Australia. In Idaho, we expect, I think the numbers engineering's putting out right now are somewhere between 800-1,000 tons per month of finished antimony product being able to come out of that facility. It'll be a game changer.
There is a potential that we could license this technology out. We've been approached by embassies that want us to do this for zinc, germanium, and gallium, which are very difficult to process currently at traditional methods. We want to also put one of these in Australia where we've identified some valuable resources.
How do you balance sort of the mission-critical antimony with the broader portfolio, right? The tungstens and other minerals. What sort of strategic logic for being multi-product, and how does it reduce risk or increase the opportunity here?
Sure, yeah. You know, while antimony is our bread and butter, we're not steering away from that. There were other minerals that China embargoed in 2024. During our conversations with the government, you know, they made us aware that there was no domestic production of tungsten or cobalt and a few other minerals that they're looking at. You know, in certain ways told us that if we could find it, they could help us prop it up. It would be similar business model to what we did with antimony, where antimony went backwards. We got the $245 million DLA contract before we got the grant to expand the facility. That came from our own CapEx.
We did receive that $27 million dollar award from the government this last month, and that's essentially just reimbursement for the cost of the expansion and claims we've built in Alaska. We're doing the same thing with tungsten and cobalt and others, whereas one of the prerequisites was having a resource report which we just announced we've done for tungsten, our claim in Canada, the Fostung Tungsten property . That'll be available and published with the SEC probably if not today, then next week, hopefully. That shows future potential revenue of $4.6 billion, which I think since we've released that, tungsten's continued to appreciate. I think it's closer to around $6 billion or $7 billion now. It's an existing property.
It was shut down about 15 years ago when it wasn't economic to mine tungsten anymore in the U.S. or domestically in North America. You know, now it very much is. We're surrounded by a lot of other large miners. There's roadways, infrastructure. There's underutilized equipment and processing facilities we can use to expedite the processing and bringing the material to market. Ultimately the goal is to get that, again, that stockpiling award that they're putting out for these different critical minerals. That's the business models go through the government. We have $75 million in an award ask right now for the joint venture in Idaho. That's through the Department of War. We have a $45 million award we're applying for through the Department of Energy for new critical mineral processing technologies, which the Hydromet is.
We'll have a smaller Hydromet in Radersburg where our flotation facility is, and then we're applying for $20 million to help stand up that tungsten property. We also expect that we could fulfill our contract much quicker than the five-year term limit. We believe that it could go from $2.45 to much higher given how depleted our reserves are, knowing that NATO, U.K., other European nations, Australia, all want to build their own critical mineral repositories. We think this could be an opportunity to work with multiple governments internationally.
All right. Very good. A couple minutes here to wrap things up. What are the milestones you want investors to be looking out for over the next, you know, year or so that demonstrate you're executing, you know, commercially with contracts and offtakes, operational throughput, and maybe strategically through new facilities and partnerships?
I mean, this is a very rare company. You don't often see a small mining company that has cash flow, revenues, earnings, EBITDA. You know, the company's grown significantly since our management team took over in 2023. We did $7 million in revenue. In 2024 we did $15 million. In 2025, which we reported last week, we did $39 million, and we've given guidance of $125 million for this year. $85 million of that we anticipate coming from our military contract. We do have all these other irons in the fire, awards coming. You know, as first mover, I think it's incumbent upon us to move as quickly as possible to capture a lot of that market.
You know, as we've expanded our volumes and our growth with the facility in Montana soon coming online, I've been able to go out in the market and start soliciting sales for Antimony, which just in the first few weeks I've identified over four companies that have mandates to diversify into domestic sources. They have a combined demand of over 15 million pounds per year, which could be, you know, over $200 million a year in revenue. You know, I anticipate that you'll see more industrial contracts coming online both for Antimony oxide and metal, such as is used in batteries. I think you'll see more joint ventures coming online. As I mentioned, our strategic positioning in Idaho with other Antimony producers in the area.
You know, as more of these companies begin to bring material out of the ground and don't have a way to process it, I think you'll see more relationships coming online to be able to process that material and bring it to market. You know, the Hydromet, we can take any type of material now, so all these, you know, different offtakes that we've been rejecting, either because they're too far out on a timeline for production or the materials don't meet our specs, we can now the door's open to take in all this material. I think come 2027, we'll have a good opportunity to capture, you know, 40% of the domestic market share and then also start developing these other critical mineral assets.
We also have a claim in the southeast United States that we've been working on with two other critical minerals following a similar price appreciation of tungsten near vertical. We've been leasing up land quietly. We'll hopefully have something to announce on that, maybe at the end of the second quarter. I think the ultimate vision is being a diversified defense critical mineral company. Obviously we have a four-star general on our board, a retired general that we've been working closely with in helping us make inroads into the government. We have a new government affairs person who's helping us on the contractual side. He's worked with Teledyne, Northrop Grumman. He's worked for the government, so he's seen the contracts from both sides.
He's helping us, you know, make headway in all the legal arenas and government arenas, both in Alaska and in D.C. With everything we have going on right now, you know, I anticipate a really heavy news cycle this year and well into next year. You know, when we started marketing this company 18 months ago, we had a $30 million market cap, $0.33 a share. We were saying this was gonna be a billion-dollar company. We didn't anticipate it to happen so quickly, but this is still really only the beginning. We're still at first base here. With everything coming, this could easily be a multi-billion dollar company in the next few years.
All right. Fantastic. Jonathan, well, thank you so much for your participation in the Lytham Partners Summit here today. Greatly appreciate it. Thank you to everybody watching. Any additional follow-up questions that I can help facilitate some answers to or schedule a meeting here with Jonathan, please shoot me an email. Again, that's Blum, B-L-U-M, @lythampartners.com. Again, additional presentations, fireside chats coming up, so everyone please stick around for more. Jonathan, again, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you, Robert. Take care.