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23:31 With a lot of the large major companies, some of that diversification is built in. Because they always have projects that are at an exploration phase, often have projects at a development phase, a construction phase, and a foundation of producing assets. So that's to a certain extent with the larger mining companies that diversification is built in. If you're looking to create that diversification yourself as an investor, then I think what's reasonable is to invest in exploration-focused companies that have high-quality exploration assets, development companies who have projects that have solid economics and a solid plan towards moving to construction. And then in construction assets where there's a, you know, you can see a track record of, the project is progressing on time, it's progressing on budget, and we're getting very close to the, you know, to that free cash flow catalyst or milestone.
24:54 And then on the producing side, you know, there are companies out there that are smaller companies and the focus of their company is being a solid low-cost producer. And then on the producer side, You can look at mining companies that have diversified metal portfolios, or you can look at companies who are more commodity focused and commodity consolidated. So it's diversification, And that's another great thing about the mining sector is it offers, you know, enormous opportunities to Diversify Within the mining sector with companies that are at different stages Companies that are operating in different geopolitical environments companies that are operating in different commodities.
25:51 And the mining sector itself is a diversification from all the other asset classes that you can invest in. Sure, definitely. In terms of analyst coverage and reports, do either of you gentlemen put much weighting toward those? I'll I don't. And and I'll tell you why. Most Most analysts, you know, Bay street and Wall street and so forth are geologists. So I care what they think about exploration properties. If they're good geologists, not all geologists are good geologists. But when it comes to analyzing, you know, technical documents like, you know, pre feasibility documents, feasibility reports and stuff like that, They're not mining engineers generally.
26:47 And so, and then the other part of it is, is that in general, they don't even analyze anything that their firm is not doing financings for, they're supposed to. But, but generally, and there are exceptions, but, but, but, but generally they go where the business is. And so they're not completely unbiased. So, you know, for a geologist or a CFA or someone to go to, say, a feasibility report and go, okay, here's 2 projects. Let's compare them. Well, here's the internal rate of return. Here's the depreciated net present value of project A. Here's the internal rate of return. Here's the depreciated net present value of project B. This one's higher.
27:36 My due diligence is done. And you know, they don't generally, mostly, with some exceptions, have the capacity to look at how the sausage is made. Like what are your assumptions around CapEx? What are your assumptions around sustaining capital? What are your marketing assumptions? All of these levers that you can pull, you know, they matter. And so I think what matters more than analyst coverage is who's your partner. If you've got a partner, do you have a good partner? And because generally the people that are in the mining business, the big mining companies, the big trading houses have expertise, they do know how to rip apart an engineering report and analyze the details of it. They can look at how the sausage is made.
28:34 And I think that's more important. And another element of this is that the analysts generally cater to the institutional market. And so if you've got a market cap in excess of $200 million, okay, they can look at you because, you know, and even better is a billion-dollar market cap, because the institutions look at, do I have enough liquidity to get in and out with meaningful positions? And if you've got a market cap of 20 million or 10 million or 30 or 40 million, you're not gonna get coverage because the institutions aren't interested because there's just not enough liquidity.
29:25 So it's kind of a catch-22. Anyways, the short answer is I don't pay much attention to the analysts. I think what I would say is, you know, I agree with a lot of what you said, Mark, and I think that it's another data point, right? It can't be the only data point. And I tend to think that, as you said, Mark, the larger the mining company gets in terms of market cap, the more useful analyst reports and analyst coverage, you know, If you're talking about a multinational, top 5, top 10, maybe even top 20 mining company, I think that The analyst coverage on companies like that is broad, well-represented, and because of the nature of those businesses, it's probably a more valid data point that you can put a little bit more weight in. I think the junior mining space is underserved by analysts.
30:40 And because of the reasons that you articulated, Mark, just the nature of the smaller market caps, smaller companies, the fact that analysts are tied toward to financial institutions. So the junior mining sector is somewhat underserved by the analysts, and therefore you have to go and dig a little bit deeper. And I do like your comment, you know, when you said, looking at who the strategic partners are, and that they're associated with companies, because you're absolutely right. If you're looking at a junior company who has solid strategic partners, You can rest assured that they have those strategic partners because those strategic partners like what they see and they have the technical expertise to do a deep dive.
31:45 And so there's certainly something to be said for that. And that's a strong indicator in my view as well. Yeah, it's interesting. And what you said about the junior market being underserved, you know, another way to look at it is that creates opportunity. I mean, if you've got a big story and your market cap is $20 million, the analysts aren't going to look at you and the institutions aren't going to look at you. If you've got the same story at a $200 million market cap, and you can show some upside beyond that, that's when they get involved. So they do the opposite of buying cheap. And that's what leaves the opportunity for individual investors to go, okay, well, you know, I'm going to get in cheap and wait. We'll see what happens. Maybe the commodity market takes off, maybe there's some event, maybe somebody comes in and, you know, if it gets to 10 times the market cap, well, the institutions are going to start buying it then it's it's it's it's a very odd ecosystem I Like that statement that makes a lot of sense I have a question I wrote down here regarding financing options and tax incentives in Canada for exploration expenditures. I'm just wondering, is any of this, can any of this be applied to financial studies, economic assessments, development and construction costs?
33:14 Well, in Canada, yeah, there's flow through funding available and particularly for critical minerals, but it's really for exploration. It's not for development. The government is very interested in developing sort of battery supply chains and critical minerals. And so they are coming out with, there's a $1.5 billion fund in support of developing infrastructure around critical minerals development. That could be quite useful. We're in the process of applying for some of that right now because we've got a power line to build, we've got road improvements to make, and all of that is currently carried in our financial model as our expenditure is 100% equity.
34:06 But if the government would take some of those significant infrastructure costs off our hands, that would make it much easier to go forward. It would also send a message to the international investment community that Canada is, you know, it's not just talk. We are open for business. So Sam Bunker Hill's dual listed operated in the States. Anything to add there? Well, as a USSF, we're not able to use it, flow through financing, and we're not able to utilize that mechanism. But There are mechanisms in the United States and certainly with the more recent increase in focus on strategic supply chains and strategic material sourcing, you're seeing some movement from the US government. I mean, in the last 6 to 8 months, you've seen some fairly sizable investments actually through different governmental departments.
35:14 The Department of Defense comes to mind, the Department of Energy comes to mind, where the US government is looking to make very targeted and important, from a scale perspective, investments in specific and targeted critical metals that are related to a secure supply chain. So we're seeing movement, we're seeing increase in that, and we hope to see more of that. I'm just going to go on a tangent here, Sam, but I know Bunker Hill has silver as well. Do you ever do you see silver ever being considered a critical metal in the States? That's interesting. I think that I don't know if the US will ever list silver as a critical metal.
36:09 I personally think that it should. When you look at the supply-demand dynamics around silver, I think it's clear that its importance as a low carbon energy transition metal is increasing and continues to increase. But it's hard to say whether it'll ever reach a critical metals designation. I think it may be a while. Thank you. I have a couple of company specific questions here I just wrote down. So I'll start with you, Mark, for this one. I wrote, the later half of this year, your team announced a very thorough PFS study.
36:57 How did the market react to the study and is it justified? Oh, the market barely reacted. You know, I'm talking about, I mean, frankly, you know, it's very hard to make headway in this market. But the other market, the market that you don't see, is reacting quite favorably. And what I'm talking about is potential strategic investors. We were 6 weeks ago, we just after the PFS came out, We visited Tokyo and our partner Mitsubishi Corp. You know, and again, their modus operandi is they want to end up with a minority interest in a mine.
37:43 They want to end up with their pro rata share of the offtake and they hope to end up with more than their pro rata share of the offtake, but they do not want to operate mines. So, you know, and again, they've done this successfully many times, helped to develop a project, helped to finance it. Kyle, you know, I can pick up more generally, not speaking to a specific bunker hill pre-feasibility as a catalyst, but what Mark said there, he made a pretty important point, is that the markets that you don't see are very active. So, for example, strategic partners, whether that be Mitsubishi, a tech metals, very active in supporting projects. And also you're seeing royalty and streaming companies becoming, are very active. And they're actually, you know, from my perspective, they're filling a void that the capital markets, particularly the capital markets and the equity markets in Canada used to fill and is at least at the current time and over the last couple of years have been somewhat on the sidelines.
39:07 You know, we've got, we've actually got another strategic market that hasn't been around before, but that is not active, well, somewhat active, but certainly very interested. And that is automobile manufacturers who are trying to transition to the electric vehicle business and, you know, And they're worried about long-term supplies of both nickel and lithium, primarily. And both nickel and lithium are down right now. But if you look 5 years out, 10 years out, it's going to be hard to get your hands on any. So they are seriously looking at getting involved upstream and upstream diversification.
39:54 We are having conversations with some OEMs that have brought in-house the capacity to analyze mining projects. We're talking to some car companies that know they need to invest upstream, but they haven't brought in that capacity yet. Their thought process is evolving. But that's an interesting new source of strategic money that has not really gotten active yet other than Ford. Ford got active with a Latter-Rite project in Indonesia. They're partnering with the Chinese on it. That's the only... Well, no, there's other moves as well. There's other sort of investments, more passive investments and lithium projects that I've seen and so forth.
40:47 So that's, you know, that whole market is extremely interested in what we're doing. And if we can close a deal with one of them, maybe that will provide some excitement for the, you know, retail and institutional market in our stock. So we'll see. Thanks, Mark. Sam, I had a question regarding Bunker Hill here for you. Your team started construction post COVID. Are there any issues with supply chains that you undergone in this high interest rate environment? Did that affect your capital expenditure at all? You know, interesting question, you know, so, so certainly, you know, in the depths of the COVID epidemic, there were, there were supply chain challenges. Now, where we were at as a project in the depths of COVID, we were fortunate that we were at a stage where we were doing resource definition drilling, we were doing technical studies.
41:51 So that was not too much of an impact. The other thing that was fortunate is that While we were in the COVID pandemic and supply chain, we were disrupted, we were able to work with it and gain a strategic partner and acquire the full processing facility. So the processing facility in the Bunker Hill restart is, you know, the largest single area of capital expenditure that, you know, that we have by a long shot, over 50%. And the acquisition of a process plant that met our needs and was in good condition and relatively close, only 140 miles away, allowed us to mitigate some of the inflationary pressures coming out of COVID.
42:52 So, as we moved out of COVID and the supply chains were correcting and you began to see the impact of inflation, the largest capital expenditure that we have at Bunker Hill had already been acquired and the prices already essentially known and locked in. Now, it's not to say that we don't have inflationary pressures. We do, but to a large extent we've been able to mitigate those. Another area that we have in our favor regarding inflation is just where we're located geographically, And we're quite fortunate. We're in the Pacific Northwest. The mine sits less than a mile from a major East-West interstate highway, interstate 90.
43:43 We're about an hour from the Spokane Valley, which has all of the light industrial service providers and talent that we would need. We're located in the Silver Valley, which is a historic mining district, which is still active with the Heckler operates the Lucky Friday Mine, America's Gold and Silver operates the Corbelina Complex. So we're in an area that has mining support services that are close at hand. And then we're also in an area where, because of historic government investments and infrastructure back in the 1930s and 40s, we're primarily hydro-based electricity. So we have very favorable energy price that is stable and low over a long period of time. So we're fortunate from that perspective that inflation hasn't been too much of an issue. And because of how our project development fell in relation to the COVID pandemic, it was a much more muted impact than it otherwise could have been.
44:58 Thank you, Sam. And that's all the questions I had. So for any individual that came in a little late, we did put some time aside for Q&A and I do see some questions in the chat, so I'll address those, but please feel free to submit more questions if you have any. Mark, we do have 1 specific to Giga Meadows. If Mishabishi got 15% for $8 million of Hard Creek Metals, what percentage would a $50 million fetch to advance your project? Well, what we're looking for is we're looking for 50 million US dollars for 20% of the joint venture company. That's our ask. And that's what we're out there shopping right now. And I don't think anyone's really blanching at the price. It's all about due diligence at this point.
45:52 Bear in mind Mitsubishi got involved at an earlier stage. We'd done a PEA and we used their money to do the data acquisition on site, including drilling, metallurgical work, et cetera. We've done a lot of work to, to come up with a PFS. We have de-risked the project significantly. And so it's a different project. It's a much more advanced project than when Mitsubishi bought in. And, you know, I have to say they're very pleased with our project, with our progress. Thank you. And Sam, I'll let you address this question from the audience first.
46:37 Seems to me the best bang for your buck or for the 10 bagger potential is an exploration stage versus production stage, correct? Not necessarily. And I think that both Bunker Hill and Giga Metals are an example of that. So if you think about this, with Bunker Hill, we're sitting around a $30 million market cap. But you're looking at an asset that we believe, and the reason that we're here doing this is because it's going to be the cornerstone asset that is going to be the cash flow engine to create a multi-asset North American focused mining company over the near term, 3 to 5 years.
47:28 Now, when you look at that value creation potential there, there's absolutely 10 bag, potentially more. So if you look at companies, and there's examples out here of companies that who have been able to go on a similar trajectory, SSR metals, SSR mining, who eventually merged with Alliser. You're looking at companies that are going from sub-100 million dollar market caps to billion dollar market caps over a very short amount of time. You know, maybe from a mining perspective, right, over a 5 to 7 year period, maybe an 8 year period where there's tremendous growth potential.
48:18 Now, I would say on the exploration side, you can find opportunities where you have that tin bagger, but sometimes the scale is a little bit different. So it's a little bit more risk, it's potentially a lot more risk, there's more uncertainty, but you can see spectacular value creation over a much shorter amount of time. But I think I would argue actually that the larger value creation potential actually exists in companies who have de-risked that growth potential through the careful, diligent work on the geology side, with drilling, de-risking from a geological and a technical aspect, their operations. So you have a much clearer idea of what the actual value potential can be.
49:22 It's quite hard to determine what's the value potential sometimes of an exploration company, because you have so much uncertainty around what is the geology actually going to be. I totally agree with that. At the exploration stage, people say it's 1 in 1,000. I don't think that's quite true. But the odds are very long against making a significant discovery of the exploration stage. Once in a while it happens, and those are the ones we all remember. And it's very exciting. But, you know, I mean, before this chat, I looked up bunker hill mining. I hadn't really dug in at all. And I looked at sort of the price performance over the last little while. And I tell you, that's exactly what I look for.
50:14 Here's a stock that's been beat up that shouldn't be beat up. There's no real reason for it to be beat up. And that's where you get, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, you have, you don't have geological risk anymore. With a company like Bunker Hill, you don't have development risk. We have development risk, but no geological risk. We know what we've done here. And Bunker Hill has execution risk, basically, is the way I would put it. Is that fair, Sam? So, you know, and so, you know, an execution risk can bite you. It's a real risk. But it, so it all depends on the management and their ability to manage execution risk.
51:05 But I tell you, I just looking around right now, I'm seeing examples where, my God, it's quite a developed asset and there is at least 10 beggar potential because of market conditions right now. So, you know, and another question I get asked, no, no, no, just by the way, if you're, if you're in the audience and you're, and you're new to this sector. I don't promote my company to my friends who are generally not in the mining business. But sometimes they'll come and ask me and they'll say, well, that looks really interesting, Mark, and it's nickel it's big, it's, you know, EVs.
51:53 You know, I'm thinking I might buy some, how much should I buy? And I go, Oh God, well, you know, you know, it's risky and I'll say all that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, and again, this is not constitute financial advice. This is just a word to the wise, you know, if you're new to the sector and you're willing to take on the risk, cause you're looking for that 10 bagger, how much should you invest? Well, my question to you is how much would you spend on a really nice vacation for your family? For some people that's $2,000. For some people that's $30,000. It depends how rich you are. It depends how much free cash flow you've got. But that's probably an appropriate amount for someone to invest in the mining business that isn't sophisticated about the mining business.
52:41 Because if you lose 90% of your money, it means you're not going to go on vacation 1 year, and that's your downside. But if you get a 10-bagger or a 20-bagger, that can be a real nice addition to your finances. I haven't heard that phrase before. I like that. The last question from the audience is from Louis or Lewis here. What financial and economic elements pose the greatest challenge to quantify when projecting bottom line results? And whoever wants to kick it off first. I'm not sure I can you sorry Colin, I'm not sure I understood the question. I'll read it again here.
53:26 What financial and economic elements pose the greatest challenge to quantify when projecting bottom line results? I'm going to pass that to Sam because I'm not sure I understand the question. That's interesting. So if you're thinking about which ones are the highest, hardest to quantify, I think the way I might answer this is that in pretty much any technical report that you read, There'll be a section that talks about the sensitivities. So, and that might be an appropriate way to think about that. So when I'm talking about sensitivities, you'll go to the economics chapter in any PEA pre-feasibility or feasibility study. And there'll be a discussion and an analysis of the economic sensitivities.
54:27 The sensitivity to metal price, the sensitivity to operating costs, the sensitivity to CAPEX expenditure on the project. And everyone is slightly different. And I think that every project is slightly different. And I think that's a good place to start to understand maybe not which ones are the hardest to quantify but which ones are the you know the most critical. So if you come for instance if you come across a project where the sensitivity to metal price is highly sensitive and a 5% move or a 10% move in the metal price drives either significant upside value or significant downside value.
55:19 You're looking at an asset where, or a company where if you want to make an investment in there, then you would want to be of the view that the metal price is either stable or likely to increase. But understand that if your view is that, you know, there's downside metal sensitivity risk in your view, then that may not be what you're looking for. You know, and with that risk comes opportunity. That's right. I mean, if, if, if you've got a project and our project is very sensitive to the price of the underlying commodities, extremely sensitive. If you've got a project that is very large and sensitive, you know, again, it depends on your view of the underlying commodity.
56:10 And you know, if you believe that nickel, for example, is essential to the development of the EV business, which I think it is and it's fair, then over time, I mean, the growth rate and the use of that commodity is up. But bottom line is, if you think it has to go higher, then you're looking for those highly leveraged projects. That's right. That's right. And, you know, and another useful one is, you know, the CapEx and the OpEx and, and every asset has a, you know, has different sensitivities to CapEx, has different sensitivities to metal prices. Some are highly sensitive, some are less sensitive. Typically, 1 will stand out as, this is the aspect or the area of this, this mine that provides the most leverage.
57:09 And that, and there's 2 sides to that leverage story. You're absolutely right. You know, there's the, there's the upside leverage, you know, and the downside risk. And, And for me, when I look at it, I also couple that with the mine life, understanding that when a mine is in operation, particularly when you're talking about commodity price, you're going to see, I almost like that leverage because I know, looking at history, if you have a long mine life, there's going to be 345 periods of time where the returns on that asset are truly remarkable. So, I think that's a good place to start is in the economic analysis and commentary of technical reports and looking at and understanding the sensitivities.
58:07 And there will always be a discussion of that in every well-prepared technical report. Thank you. We have one more question we can get to from the audience here. And since we're talking the sensitivity of commodity prices, Josh is wondering about if a move in copper, and this is more directed toward you, Mark, if a move in copper would affect the prices of both nickel and cobalt. Well, you know, I think, I don't think moving copper has a direct effect on nickel and cobalt. I think all base metals have a tendency to move together somewhat with regards to worldwide GDP growth.
58:53 So nickel's part of the, or has traditionally been part of the steel complex. It's largest use is in making stainless steel. So like copper, if you've got robust economic growth, then demand for both commodities goes up at the same time due to the steel conference, due to the steel part of the business. What's changed though is nickel is very levered to the growth of the electric vehicle business. And so is copper to a lesser extent. You know, copper is very much needed for electric vehicles, charging stations, et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole growth component there, but, it's not levered to the same extent as nickel.
59:44 So, you know, I don't think the one affects the other, but I think they're both subject to similar external effects. Great, excellent. And thanks everyone that asked questions in the audience today. We have a couple of minutes here. So I'm just gonna let you 2 finish off the conversation by just doing a little pitch here. Why don't both of you, 30 seconds, a highlight of 2023, 30 seconds, what to look forward to in 2024. And Sam, why don't you start? Absolutely, so 2023, very exciting year for Bunker Hill. We achieved the milestone of full project financing, moved into the execution phase of building the Bunker Hill mine, and we'll be in into production by the end of 2024.
1:00:33 And really what we're seeing is the is the first step towards what we're what we're building as a company, which is a multi asset base metal focused company with a precious component focused in North America and delivering metals to the low carbon energy transition that the world's going through. And I think I would say just generally about commodity prices, If you believe in the low carbon energy transition, and that we will do that on a global scale, then there is literally no other way for metals prices to move than up. In a scenario where we go through a low carbon energy transition, there's an enormous gap between the supply and the demand side, which is going to require significant investment and significant growth in the metals industry.
1:01:39 And it will be a phenomenal once in a lifetime opportunity for value creation through investment. That is so true, Sam. I, you know, this whole energy transition theme is really just getting started. And I recall like 3, 4 years ago, people that would project, you know, how much EV growth there would be, how, you know, how many cars would be sold. The ones that were considered crazy bullish 3 or 4 years ago were wrong because they were projecting, their projections were too low. You know, it's happening, it's happening more quickly than anyone foresaw and it's continuing to steam ahead.
1:02:29 So, I just agree that this is a once in a generation opportunity to get involved in the metals markets. If you're new to these markets, I almost sort of envy you because you haven't been through all the pain of the last few years. And I think you're looking at an incredible entry point. Thank you. And Mark, I want to give you the opportunity for you to highlight Gigametals 2023 and 2024? Well, you know, the big event in 2023 was getting the Prefeasibility Study done. That was a lot of work and it was a significant de-risking, particularly in geometallurgy.
1:03:15 I don't want to get too much in the weeds here, but our geometallurgical program is extremely successful. We've got very narrow error bars between when we predict how much we will recover from a particular part of the deposit, and then we do the test and we see how much we actually recover, the error bars are very narrow. We did this over all sorts of parts of the deposit, different grades from high-grade to what we know as waste rock. Our recovery algorithm is remarkably accurate for a deposit of this type. 2024, it's all about finding that next partner. Mitsubishi doesn't want to build the mine, they don't want to operate the mine, but they're very, very helpful. So when we travel around with them to meet large companies that are looking at investing in nickel, we're starting our discussion at quite a high level of management and that matters when you're dealing with extremely large companies as we are.
1:04:22 The other part of it is dealing with extremely large companies, nothing happens in a heartbeat. There is a very deliberate pace to the due diligence, and we know that. But we are making good progress with that. We're having some very interesting discussions, and we'll just have to see. Stay tuned. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. My apologies if you're running late for another meeting here, but thank you everyone that attended. If you
