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0:10 Hello everyone. Good afternoon and thanks for attending. And thanks to the kindness team for having us here. My name is Taj Singh, President and CEO of First Nordic Metals, and we are focused in Scandinavia. We're the owner of 2 large greenstone belts, 1 in Sweden and 1 in Finland. The focus of this talk will be the Swedish Greenstone Belt. I'll be making cautionary statements. So just a high-level look right now. The first Nordic Metals was created through the merger of Barcelli minerals, which many of you may have heard of, and Gold Line resources. And that deal closed in mid-February of just this past year.
0:56 And what it has basically done, it's a very natural and obvious merger, we believe. Properties were contiguous to each other. Barsley owned the 2.5 million ounce Barsley project in JV with Agnico Eagle and Goldline owned at a hundred percent 80 kilometers of strike, 40 or so to the north, 40 or so to the south, the entire goal line belt, making them the largest development stage claim holder in Sweden. So it was a very obvious thing to put these things together, create a larger company, but obviously have synergies to move projects forward, share ideas and thoughts on exploration, methodologies, etc. So again, the Barsley Project high level, I'll dig into it a little bit more, but it is in a JV with Agnico Eagle, and it's currently a resource of 2.4 million ounces in all categories.
1:51 This belt, the Gold Line belt, is actually quite underexplored. It's probably the least explored greenstone belt in the world. It's covered by glacial till. And Sweden really only opened up to modern exploration in kind of in the 2000s. So it's probably 70, 80 years behind what we see in the Abitibi in northern Ontario and Quebec. So I think really that's the opportunity. This is a belt that's not been explored. And again, we are the largest claim holder here and basically take almost the whole belt. The other thing is that the belt is in a very nice place, in a geologically very fertile place, because you have a gold-lined precious metal belt and it intersects with a very well-known and prolific base metal belt, the VMS belt, where there's probably been over 150 discoveries and probably 20, 25, 30 active and historic mines, A lot of them owned by Boliden.
2:47 So it's in a very good setting geologically. Just a quick point about Sweden. Obviously, clearly, it is a developed nation. We strongly consider it to be a tier 1 country to operate in. Some of the lowest corporate taxes, 20%, which is fantastic. Access to low-cost power, some of the lowest-cost power. And even as now as an exploration and development company, it is just staggering the kind of costs you can get for drilling here. Almost $200 or so per meter all in. Probably ranks it as a top decile country in terms of keeping exploration costs down. When you move to production, production costs, mining costs, underground mining costs are also extremely low. And again, it's access to this low cost power, primarily hydro, and also mechanized.
3:36 They're very efficient at mining here, mechanized methods of mining and very efficient mining. Looking at the capital structure 183 million shares outstanding the average share price the share price currently sitting in the 24 to 25 cent range Canadian. And so the market cap is sitting in around 45, 46 million dollars Canadian. And In terms of shareholder distribution, very solid insider ownership, over 30% insider ownership. That's founders, board, and management. And then strategic and institutional is also very strong. There's about 2 or 3 funds that make up almost the entire Strategic and institutional kind of component here the large one being Ingalls and Snyder out of New York City Long-standing and very supportive shareholder and then retail make up the remaining 20% or so So looking at the Barsley project this again is the joint venture 55% owned by Agnico and 45% owned by us.
4:37 They are the operator and they carry all of our costs. So we are not spending anything as this project gets advanced and de-risked for now. The land package is about 35,000 hectares, very large. About $60 million or so has been spent on just this project. About 165,000 meters has already been drilled. And there is an existing resource, as I noted before, of close to 2.5 million ounces. So you can see the plan map here shows the main gold zone area shown in the red. That is where the current gold resource is sitting. That is honestly, I think we've only scratched the surface. You'll see when we look at some plan, some long sections that there's open at depth and along strike, you'll see about 3 and a half kilometers of strike has been tested and delineated into the resource, but there's a substantial portion of that strike that still needs to be tested. In addition, these orange stars show some pretty exciting new targets.
5:36 One is the Nora target, which is a... Already drilling has been done there, and it's a gold-rich base metal style of deposit, a VMS style deposit, which makes sense, as I noted. The prolific VMS belt intersects here. And then you have the Risbergay target, which is an open pit gold opportunity that has seen some drilling, but needs more work. So looking at the Barcelli project, the current resource, as I noted, covers about 3.5 km of strike, and there's close to 8 km of mineralized trend still there. You see the plan view here. It is primarily an underground deposit, the grade kind of ranging between 2 and a half to 3 gram per ton underground. There is a starter pit, which is good for economics as well, but the bulk of the economics and the real juice of the project is in the underground. And the thing that makes this project extremely favorable is the very wide zones that you get underground.
6:35 3, 4, or 5 meters is probably the minimum and you're talking about some zones that can be up to 20, 30, 40 meters wide. So it's a true bulk underground mining operation which again keeps those costs down and it's pretty typical of what you see in some of these Scandinavian mines and even in some mines in Ontario and Quebec on the Abitibi Greenstone Belt. There is a mine owned by Mandalay Resources, the Bjorkdal mine which has been operating since the 1990s, which is operating, I think, the head grade is at about 1 and a half grand per tonne underground, and you'll note from the resource table there we're almost double that. So, you know, that could, that should lead to pretty favourable economics moving forward because the mining methods, etc., and the costs are likely quite similar. This is open at depth for sure, we know that. It's not been tested. I mean the current resource goes to about 6,700 meters of resource, I mean of depth, but this is clearly a deposit that goes well past a kilometer depth. So there's very obvious potential to grow this at depth.
7:40 Metallurgical testing has been straightforward and pretty simple. Free milling sulfide ore, 91 to 95% recoveries across the board over various tests. And then I noted before there's some very interesting targets in Risbergier and Nora at the property. And the drilling has just started here. Agnico has started drilling. And the plans and the outlines around that will be coming out shortly from the First Nordic side on the details. These are some of the new targets I talked about. I won't spend as much time on it as I already noted them, but they are very interesting and I've really not seen much drilling. There's a few holes been put in these properties. The Risberger gold zone which likely could probably some kind of satellite pit to support the main gold resource and then the Nora VMS zone which is something Agnico was very excited about.
8:34 This again has high gold in it but has other base metals as well. It needs to be tested pretty thoroughly. I do want to point on this slide, I forgot to note a point, is when we did the due diligence to acquire this asset, because again Goldline and Barcelli merged when I was from the Gold Line side. We wanted to see like if there was no growth here, is this a mine right now? And I'll tell you it is. Assuming no growth even, you have a very meaningful sized resource of 2 and a half million ounces and with very favorable economics. There has been no PEA put out on this project, but some internal work we've done, building an internal mind plan has shown that this indeed will have a very impressive financial
9:16 profile and very impressive economics. Even at $1,800 gold or even lower, as we go up, it becomes obviously even more favorable. A couple of other key assets I want to talk about, because this story is now about an entire belt. You've got the Barsley project in the middle and then you've got the Paubecken project to the south about 40 kilometers and then the Storyukten project about 20 kilometers to the east. These projects, sorry to the south, sorry Storyukten's to the north, These projects both have the potential to be Barsley 2, Barsley 3. This is the main part of the story that I think is really interesting. These are 100% owned by us. At Paubacken, we've already done some drilling. We've already done quite a bit of geochemical work, lots of bot drilling, base of till drilling, which is the methodology used here in Scandinavia, and the footprint looks even larger than what you're seeing at Barsley in terms of the geochemical footprint.
10:12 Geophysics has also been done at Paubeck. So really this is what this whole story comes to is the fact that you may be able to find 2, 3 kind of Barsley style deposits on this belt and we are the 100% owner of the rest of the strike of this project. If you looked at this kind of belt in the Abitibi, you'd probably have 10 companies that cover this kind of ground. So that puts us in a really favorable position. The Storjukten project is a little bit earlier stage than Paabakken, but again some results will be coming out from recent exploration work we've done showing again very favorable and encouraging results. Footprint looks very very similar size to Barcelli if not even larger. We will need to do geophysics on Storjoktinen and bot drilling but in early days things are looking exciting.
11:01 I didn't talk about the Finland project much, guys, but we also own about 18,000 hectare greenstone belt in Finland, kind of north central Finland. That is called the Oyarvi project. This was acquired and drilled by Agnico. There's currently a small resource of about 300,000 ounces of about between 4 to 5 gram per ton gold. So good, very good grade. Starts at surface. It's only been tested at 200 meters depth and is clearly open at depth. And the strike, only a small portion of that strike has been tested. The strike, based on our interpretations, could be up to 3-4 kilometers in length and only really a small portion of above 3-400 meters or 500 meters has been tested. A couple of quick things here on the power backing project, guys. I've already explained it, but this image shows the work that's previously been done on it.
11:55 But you'll see that there's 2 main areas. One's called the Aida target. That footprint is over 4 kilometers long, and if you compare it to Barsley, Barsley is about 3 and a half kilometers. That's a very interesting target. It was the discovery hole that Goldline did, was at the Aida target and really it only about a little bit over a thousand meters has been drilled here. It needs follow-up and that will be the focus in 2024 for us to drill that project. The discovery hole was 22.5 meters of 2.5 gram per ton and when you look at the core and the early kind of grades and widths that you saw at Barsley, it's very similar to what you're seeing at Powhacken. So the Aida target is very interesting. If you look a little north of that, you'll see there there's the Harpsun target, another corridor that looks very interesting as well. You're almost about 3 to 4 kilometers there in kind of the footprint that you're testing. A lot of geochem has been done here, a lot of base of till drilling has been done.
12:49 That's also a very interesting target. I've talked about these, these are some of the initial holes that were done at Powhacken and I've talked about the discovery hole. And this is kind of our plan. Our plan is to basically drill this. This project now warrants about a 10,000 meter drill program. We will be working on it in late 2024. The Storjukten project again is in the north and again just north of Barsley, just at the bottom of that page is where the Barsley claims are, and just north of that you have the Storjukton project. Some results will be coming out on this in the next few weeks, which are going to look very compelling and encouraging for us to continue doing work here. Very quickly, I myself was previously founder, president, CEO of Discovery Silver, which we took it from IPO all the way to about $750-800 million market cap, raised $150 million. That's in Mexico, one of the world's largest silver deposits, and that is moving towards construction.
13:53 I was also one of the founding board members and lead independent director at GT Gold, which within 3 years of going public was sold to Newmont for $400 million. That's a copper gold project in British Columbia. Prior to that I was an analyst at Macquarie Capital Markets and before that I spent a decade at Inco and Valet. We also have Adam Segelsky, who was the founder of Goldline Resources. He's been involved in the mining industry pretty substantially over 2 decades. And of note, he was part of the Caden team that sold the project to Agnico Eagle for $200 million in Mexico. Benjamin Gelber is also here. He was also part of that same Caden team, as well as with Asanco Gold. His expertise is these greenstone belts, so it's great to have him on board. And then just wanted to point out in terms of a director here, we have Mark Legault just recently joining the board. Mark was a 35-year veteran from Agnico.
14:45 We're excited to have him on as we continue to work with Agnico on the Barsley project. So that pretty much wraps it up just in time and thank you for your attention.