Good morning, everyone. I would like to introduce our next presenter of the day. Please welcome Jonathan Miller, Vice President of United States Antimony Corp. Good morning.
Thank you and good morning. Go ahead and put my props down here. These are our forward-looking statements. We have a lot going on in different arenas of our operations, as well as our ongoing negotiations and conversations with the U.S. government. In the event that I say something that is in the works right now, let it be known that it is forward-looking. This is an older company. It has been around for 58 years.
The founder of the company passed away about six years ago, and his son took over briefly before a group of major shareholders who held around 45% of the company were unhappy with the way the son was managing the company and brought Gary Evans on Board as an Independent Director. He then quickly became Lead Director, Chairman, co-CEO, and then full-time CEO as of about August 2023.
This is his fifth public company. He has had four on the NYSE in the oil and gas, which he started and sold, and then he was on the Board of Novavax for 24 years. When they had the run-up during COVID, he transitioned the company from a women's Estrasorb company to a vaccine manufacturer and helped raise that company about $3 billion off ATM. During his time moving through the ranks at this company, he changed the entire Board and management team. Everybody in the company is new.
I joined in July 2024 when we had about a $30 million market cap, and initially it was just about getting out in the street and telling the story. Typically, people have never heard of antimony let alone who we were, not even the governors in the states that our operations are located. We also added a four-star General Jack Keane, on our Board last year. Some of you may recognize him as a correspondent who regularly appears on Fox News, on Fox Business. We continued to make dramatic changes very quickly.
We knew that just to turn this company around, we had to have more vertical integration, more surety of supply, and so we started moving into Alaska, where antimony was historically mined during war times, World War I, Vietnam War, Korean War, and so on, and beating some companies out from some of these historic claims by a matter of days. We have also diversified into tungsten. This came through our conversations with the government.
One of the biggest catalysts that gave this company a shot in the arm was in September 2024 when China announced that they were cutting off exports of antimony worldwide, especially to the United States. For decades, our own military and government and our entire industrial base had been getting antimony from China. They had the largest antimony-specific mine in the world called the Twinkling Star mine. It had been operational for 120 years. It had driven the price of the commodity down to around $5 and put any other antimony businesses in the U.S. out of business.
We do give credit to the founder that he was able to keep the company alive as long as he did, making us the only producer of antimony products in North America. What is antimony? Antimony is deemed a critical mineral by the Department of War and the Department of the Interior. It is a semi-metal. Some refer to it as a chameleon metalloid. It has many different applications. The U.S. consumes around 26,000 tons annually, with about 32% of that being defense related. In the defense space, it is used in everything from ammunition, so every bullet in the world contains antimony, either to harden the lead or in the primers, which ignites the gunpowder.
It is especially used in armor-piercing and penetrating rounds. It is used in artillery shells. It is used in laser-guided missiles, night vision goggles, binoculars. It is used on the surface of aircraft carriers. It is used in fighter jets. A pilot cannot eject from a seat without antimony. It is lined inside helicopters. There are many more defense applications, including military tents, cots, uniforms as a flame retardant, and others that we are learning about every day. The other biggest sector is going to be energy transition. Antimony is a key ingredient in solar panels.
Actually, the Chinese, the former CEO of the Twinkling Star mine, discovered that by increasing the amount of antimony in solar panels, you increase the efficiency and the lifespan and the clarity of that solar panel. It is also used in lead-acid batteries as a key ingredient. You cannot make a lead-acid battery without antimony. We have actually seen some demand destruction in the battery sector because of the cost of antimony was driven up so high last year. If you are getting newer batteries that have shorter life cycles, that is the reason why. It is also used in things like wind turbines, different cabling for different energy storage systems.
In the technology side, it is the third most used critical mineral in data storage centers. It is used in all the thick cabling that is lined throughout the building, and it is also heavily used in the roofing material as a flame retardant. We actually entered into a contract with a large industrial customer last year that is the largest manufacturer of flame retardant roofing material for data storage centers. It is also used in different applications within the building, semiconductors, data server towers, and so forth. As I mentioned, we are the only producer of antimony products in North America.
These are our locations in Thompson Falls, Montana is where our key smelter is. We actually just underwent an expansion there, which I will touch on here briefly. We received a $27 million grant from the Department of War earlier this year, which had been in negotiation throughout 2024 and 2025, and that has enabled us to build a one-off state-of-the-art facility in Thompson Falls that is now almost fully online. We have four more furnaces that we were waiting on what's called envelopes from manufacturer that was delaying us for a long time. We ended up having to sue them.
As of our management call yesterday, we expect to have the remaining four furnaces online by Thanksgiving. This is taking the Thompson Falls location from a capacity of 75 tons per month at the legacy facility to now over 300 tons per month at that facility. We have the Madero smelter in Mexico. That is another legacy furnace that's capable of doing 200 tons per month. For the first half of this year, this was mostly online. We reopened it in late 2024, early 2025, and began repairing some of the issues there. We received some feedstock from Australia that had a high level of deleterious elements in there.
There was a high degree of iron that we had to work to figure out what was causing the pollution in the product that we were making. We have that figured out, and we're now doing two to three truckloads a week out of Madero, which goes up to Mexico. Madero will turn it into an oxide, which is like a powder, and then up in Thompson Falls, it gets converted into a metal like you see here. This is an example of a 5 lb metal ingot. What we sell to the government is actually a 50 lb metal bar.
We have a flotation facility in Radersburg, Montana, which we acquired earlier this year. Sorry, I'm just going to close this little AI assistant there. There we go. Thank you. The flotation facility was an important acquisition for us because antimony out of the ground, there's all different grades that we can get from all over the world, and typically, to go into our smelters, we need at least a 60% concentrate. When we get a lower quality or a lower grade material, that has to go through a flotation circuit, which crushes it and increases that concentrate.
It floats to the surface and gets scraped off, and then that 60% concentrate goes into the smelter, where we can create metals and oxides. In Preston, Idaho, we have a subsidiary called Bear River Zeolite. Zeolite is not a critical mineral, but it is very strategic, and it has, like antimony, a wider range of different applications and uses, which I'll touch on. What is the current process for antimony, and why are we the only ones in North America that are doing it? Stage I is mining. With the mining operations, we need at least a 10% grade stibnite, which is the name for antimony in the rock.
It has to have less than 0.2% of deleterious elements like lead and arsenic and sulfur that will typically get burned off in the iron ore reduction smelting process. Stage II, as I mentioned, is the flotation circuit, where we can take that material and crush it and float it and bring that concentrate to 60%. That then goes into the smelter. Earlier this year, we announced a joint venture with another NYSE-listed company called Americas Gold and Silver that operates in Idaho. They are involved in mainly silver and copper, and antimony is a byproduct of their mining process.
Historically, that material has been going to another company called Teck in Canada, where it is processed, and then the sodium antimonate is the byproduct that we had been purchasing, which is full of impurities. We then have to clean it up and purify it before we can make finished products. The joint venture is to build what is called a hydrometallurgy facility or hydromet for short. Hydromet has existed for some decades now, but not specific for antimony. In China, they have this process engineering already, but in the United States, we are obviously decades behind on a lot of processing for critical minerals and rare earth minerals.
Hydromet is important because it allows us to take a much wider range of antimony-bearing material. If you remember, I stated that in the mining process, we need at least a 10% grade coming out of the ground and less than 0.2% of those deleterious elements. Hydromet allows us to take any grade of material or any concentration of these deleterious elements and process these out in a safe way to create a more pure product. This is the antimony flake that comes off of this hydromet process. This is the same purity as this metal bar. It is 99.7% pure, so essentially a finished product.
This allows us not only to take a wider range of feedstock, but it is cleaner, and it has a much faster throughput in our furnaces. If you can imagine, the furnace has a gross capacity. You could either fill it with a 60% concentrate or 99% concentrate. This is much faster, much cleaner, and much more efficient. We were approached by a group of Canadian chemists and engineers last year that had developed this process when the price of antimony went from $5/lb to $30/lb . It then became economic for not only other countries to start mining antimony, but for different technologies and process engineering to evolve around the product.
We invested a little bit of money with this company to prove that they could do this commercially, which they have done. We have now started receiving shipments from Bolivia. With that investment, we have exclusive licensing rights for North America and Australia for this technology. The joint venture, we are 49%, Americas Gold and Silver is 51%. They have donated the land in Idaho where we plan to build 120,000 sq ft facility. It will be modular. There will be three different phases, one being antimony, and the others being copper and silver. Initially, we were just going to move forward with the antimony construction first, but we have since gone back to the table and decided to do all three at once.
It is increasing the time engineering is taking to put together their schematics, but also increasing our CapEx going from $75 million- $150 million. Hydromet will be a game changer for us. This facility capable of doing 1,000 tons per month, combined with our ramping up to 500 tons per month, will put us at over 1,500 tons per month. As I mentioned, the domestic demand is 26,000 tons per year. By 2028, when this comes online, we will be roughly 60% of the domestic demand.
These are the five different antimony products that we make. This is not easy to replicate. We have a metallurgist that has been working with antimony for 50 years, 30 years with our company, and he developed a lot of the proprietary process engineering behind these five different products that we make. Oxides are heavily used in flame retardants. As I mentioned, it is included in cinema curtains and babies' clothes. The metals are used in wiring, probably in your air fryer, your microwave, and the cables have antimony in them. There is a lot of antimony in products that people do not even really know that it is there.
Our Alaska operations. As I mentioned, in about August 2024, we knew that just to grow the company, we had to have more surety of supply, be more vertically integrated. We went up to Alaska and met with the Geological Society, who showed us where all these historic claims were going back 100 years in some cases. We are now up to over 35,000 acres in Alaska. Most of these are open pit which we have begun drilling operations of. We are at the whim of the weather up there. We have a small window during the spring and the summer which we can operate. Once it drops below zero, it becomes difficult to operate in the ground.
Our most recent acquisition is Nolan Creek, which is about 75 mi north of Fairbanks. This is an underground mine, so this enables us to work year-round. We purchased it in a trustee sale for, I believe, $1.5 million. There is an old resource report on this property. It was privately owned. It is a high-bearing gold antimony mine. We are working on getting that resource report updated. We should have it hopefully before we report our earnings in the next three weeks, but definitely before the end of the year.
That should show an inferred value in the ground for gold and antimony of around $0.5 b illion- $1 billion. We have got our permits. We paved a road up there. We built a man camp. We reinforced all the underground infrastructure. We will begin bulk sampling there in the next 60 days. Right now, we are mostly dependent on third-party material. We resumed mining operations in Montana. We were the first company to actually start mining antimony domestically in 40 years. The EPA had shut most of the mines down 40 years ago.
Where our smelter is in Montana is just adjacent to an antimony mine called Stibnite Hill, which we reopened in October of last year. In 45 days, we trucked down 800 tons of material. We resumed operations after the winter and the spring of this year and are nearing around 1,000 tons so far for this year. It is a 10% grade, so if you think 1,000 tons at 10% grade equals about 100 tons of finished material. Our Canadian material is what our legacy feedstock has been, as I mentioned, from Teck Resources. Bolivia is where the hydromet facility is located.
The country of Chad has a very high-grade antimony ore. It is around 50%. That actually just gets trucked or shipped to Mexico where it gets put into our furnaces there as a rock. It gets crushed and put into the furnaces, creates an oxide. As I mentioned, we're doing two to three truckloads a week bringing that up to Montana. We have been approached by nearly every artisanal miner that has sprung up over the last year.
This was a market that did not exist before China's export ban. We've seen South America, Southeast Asia, Africa now, because it's economic, beginning to mine and ship antimony. The issue for us is that because we make mil-spec products, as I mentioned, the grade of the material and the deleterious elements is vital. The majority of the feedstock that's come online internationally we've had to reject. Historical antimony prices, as I mentioned, it's been hovering about $5/lb , $6/lb for many years. When China made that announcement in September 2024, it shot up 500%.
It was almost $30/lb at some point. Now, because of this influx of material from artisanal miners that's come online over the last year, the prices have dropped down to about $8.64/lb now. I think it's closer to $9 this week. It updates weekly. It's usually behind a paywall. Argus Metals is who tracks that pricing. It's tracked on the Rotterdam Exchange. We do experience a premium above spot pricing because we have a Made in America product. There is a mandate or an executive order that goes into effect next year in January.
It was actually passed under the Biden administration, that states that if you're a contractor of the military or the government and using these materials, your supply chain needs to be domestic. Part of us winning that $106 million contract was a large company that wanted to get ahead of that mandate and have a steady supply from us coming. We've seen a large influx of other military contractors that are now looking to make that same transition. We're working closely with our partners at the Department of War to identify who those manufacturers are and streamline a transition over to a domestic supply for them.
Through our conversations with the government, we've also diversified into tungsten. It was another critical mineral that was cut off from China. It's very important in military applications and technology applications, especially kinetic weapons. We bought a property in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada last year, last May, for $5 million. This was an existing open-pit tungsten mine until about 12 years ago, when it just became uneconomic to mine in North America anymore.
We did a lot of groundwork there last year, and in March of this year, we filed a 43-101 S-K technical report with the SEC that showed an inferred resource in the ground of $4.5 billion. That was in March, and the price has continued to appreciate. The inferred value now is closer to over $9 billion. We've begun taking drill core samples there, sending them to our Radersburg laboratory. I didn't mention that we did build $1 million laboratory there. Most of the critical mineral and rare earth labs around the country had been delayed by months because of this domestic drive going on right now. We will begin bulk sampling at that property this year.
We're expecting to get 20,000 tons before the end of the year. I expect by next year you'll see tungsten as a line item on our revenue. This is our diversified critical mineral and precious metal portfolio. As you see, we are involved in antimony, silver, tungsten, precious metals, gold and copper. Other exploration upside nickel, zinc, bismuth, magnesium and molybdenum, which is also called moly. Our Bear River Zeolite subsidiary, as I mentioned, it's not a critical mineral, it's very strategic. It comes from volcanic ash.
This deposit in Preston, Idaho, is one of the purest deposits in North America, if not the world. It settled at the bottom of a lakebed millions of years ago, which kept it ultra-pure and preserved throughout that time. We did a resource report in 2024, which indicated that we have upwards of 100-year supply at current capacity. We're working on building a sales organization here. Zeolite's used in everything from cattle feed, where it removes methane gas in the first stomach of the cow, increases protein in the second, and then increases their feed efficiency. That's one of our biggest sectors right now, continuing to grow.
Also water filtration. It's used in RO systems, wastewater cleanup at mining operations. It's also used in nuclear remediation. It's been used at Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. Because of its high cation exchange capacity, it's able to bind to those radioactive isotopes in soil and groundwater. Also in concrete and construction. Concrete's responsible for 10% of global CO2 emissions. There's a big drive right now for these manufacturers to be net zero by 2030. Fly ash, which comes from coal, is the leading contributor to that CO2 emission.
We got involved with a research team at Texas A&M last year that used our zeolite to develop the eco-friendly low-carbon concrete, and the preliminary research looks very strong, to replace fly ash with zeolite. These are all our assets in North America. As you can see, all our mining operations in Canada. We are headquartered in Dallas, where our CEO resides. I'm just outside of Houston, along with our CFO, and then all of our operations down in Mexico. We also have a key person in D.C. that handles all of our government contracts and negotiations. Some of our notable milestones, our revenues continue to grow.
Under new management in 2023, the company did about $8 million. In 2024, that ramped up to $15 million. Last year, we did $39 million. This was all from our industrial base. Last year, we gave guidance for this year of $125 million, which we had to cut in half because of that price of antimony coming down by half. Our guidance for this year has been revised to $60 million-$75 million based on that new antimony pricing. We continue to grow the zeolite mine and the business there. We've essentially doubled production and are on our way to doubling revenues for this year. We maintain a strong cash balance.
We uplisted from the NYSE American Board to the Classic Board in March of this year, and also were added to the NYSE Texas Exchange last year and did the opening ceremony earlier this year. We've also delivered the first nine deliveries under our DLA contract, which I haven't touched on yet. We won a $245 million contract with the Defense Logistics Agency, or DLA, to supply antimony metal ingots for the national stockpile. We have begun delivering that as of May, and we are nine months ahead of schedule.
We should've had revenues on that reported in the second quarter, but there were significant delays and defaults on the government side that pushed that into the third quarter, so Q3 and Q4 will be heavily back-loaded. I just went over our revenues, continue to grow. I expect that by next year, we'll probably be doing over $100 million in revenue. Market cap growth, as I mentioned, when I joined the company, we had a $30 million market cap. Matter of just telling the story and getting out there, and now our institutional ownership has grown from nearly zero just a few years ago to over 62%.
Our long-term contracts, which I mentioned, with the DLA and the deliveries that have been conducted on those since May, as well as our $106 million contract with the industrial customer. These are some of the government grant applications we have out. We'd like the government to fund our joint venture. They've indicated to us, our CEO's actually in D.C. this week and met with the DLA, who said they want to take that $245 million contract to $1 billion in the next year. This is our value creation roadmap, everything that we have going on. 2026 will be anticipated gold and antimony production from Nolan Creek, first deliveries to Radersburg from Nolan Creek, and continuing to expand on the tungsten property.
Our first half operating results were a little lackluster, as I mentioned, because of those delays with the government and the pricing of antimony dropping. A lot of customers were waiting to place orders to see where the floor was on that antimony pricing. This is just our financial snapshot. Stocks had a little bit of a rebound since then. We think there was a lot of sector-based institutional tax loss selling going on over the last few weeks.
We think that's finally subsided ahead of the October 31st deadline. If you look at our antimony sales and zeolite volumes, this has doubled quarter-over-quarter since the first quarter. We've been in a lot of publications and press. Our CEO's been featured in Bloomberg, Fox Business with Maria, who's no longer there, and many other podcasts and publications. We've picked up research coverage from five firms, the most recent being Texas Capital, who we're now banking with.
We have an ATM with Alliance Global Partners, B. Riley, and Texas Capital, which we've drawn down on a few times at the end of last year and beginning of this year. We raised about $50 million off that ATM, with the last round being $11.50. We don't do any down rounds. We don't have any needs for capital this year. Next year could be the joint venture that we need to raise some capital for, but we're expecting, as I mentioned, the government to fund that, especially if they expect to take that purchase order to $1 billion in the next year. Thank you.