Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
26:04 And the original Angus Fane discovery was on this one here. So yeah, so that's looking pretty significant. The other thing that was, I think, really exciting in this particular last batch of drill results was that we hit a pretty important mineralized structure that's the new style of mineralization for us. So there are these black kind of carbonaceous shales that are found as part of the stratigraphy in here and do host mineralization sometimes. Some of the historical mines, they did mine this black shale material with you know rich and silver and I mean in in our case we had 11.4 percent 11.6 percent copper as well as silver so very very high grades you know if you go to the historical mining, there was copper and nickel sometimes reported as in the sales figures with the cobalt and of course the silver. So very, very interesting to get that that that intercept.
27:20 And it's again, potentially a brand new style of mineralization, like I would call it a third style for us, so the first one would be the regular, you know, high grade veins that we know and love from the cobalt camp and they tend to be cobalt and silver but sort of a bit of a zoning between the 2 more some are more cobalt rich some are more silver rich then you get the stringers into the wall rock which are you know usually perpendicular to the veins those are usually only silver And then this third style of mineralization, which is the hosted in the shell, you get this more massive kind of silver rich base metal mineralization. So Very, very interesting. We're super excited about this. Again, you're getting it for free as a shareholder.
28:08 So to wrap up, we've got 2 projects, both increasing value on the Lassonde curve, Bethania going into production, still ramping up, still in the startup phase, Silver King still in the discovery phase. So these are the times when most of the values created the quickest in the mining industry. And so we're very fortunate to be able to be in that position. After the last financing, here's sort of where our capitalization sits at about 30-ish million market cap, 120 million shares outstanding, still very, very high management ownership. We're very proud of that. Certainly, we've been diluted a little bit, but I bought more shares this year, as has some of the rest, some of the management team, and we're still over 10%.
28:59 And That is the end of the presentation. I'll just leave this slide on, and then, Romeo, you can ask me questions. And if they need visual aid, I'll go to a slide, and otherwise, I'll just answer them. Works perfectly. I know we got a whole bunch of questions in the chat. I believe we should be able to get to all of them, but I do have a couple of questions on my own first, if you don't mind. What I want to jump into is, I want to talk about the district scale potential of Bethania. Because, I mean, from what you've indicated, it's only 0.3% of the pretty large 4,300 hectare land package that contains the current resource. So overall, I'd love if you could explain to the folks in the room, what exploration strategy in the future are you employing to really evaluate that 99.7% of the package? Well, the strategy is we need to drill and we could keep finding more veins, which there's value to do that. But at some point, we just we need to drill. Drilling is expensive. So we've kind of again, pushed that off to focus on getting the mine into production. We felt like that was, you know, for us, a more important thing to do it in the near term, because it differentiates us from the oodles and oodles of other Explorer co's out there which you know are I'm sure some of them are great. But frankly we just don't want to be in that morass. We want to be different and we want we want to attract a different investor base. And I think we've been able to do that and we're we're still doing that. So
30:30 we've got a great production growth story with the exploration upside. And getting back to your question, we need to drill. So then the question is really, how do you prioritize that drilling? And to that, I would answer, all of the targets that I showed you, or I would consider low-hanging fruit, because again, compared to what we do in Ontario and, you know, elsewhere, even in the Saudi Arabia project, this is relatively easy. We know where the veins are, we can see, we can map them, sample them at surface, and then you just need to kind of drill them and start blocking them out, see how big they are, and you know, confirm the structures are continuing at depth. So what do we do first? Well, the lowest of the low-hanging fruit is the depth potential at the mine itself.
31:20 This is where we have the most data. Again, we've got very high degree of certainty, not 100%, but always high degree certainty that it continues at depth. And the comparable intermediate sulfidation vein mines like this can go hundreds and hundreds of meters deep and and so for us to you know drill another 200 meters deeper here that would be immediately you know part of our mine plan and you we could essentially double the resource or more just by essentially doubling the the depth And then the next priority would be the strike length potential. So essentially extending it to the east here, we know we've got these veins on the other side of the hill.
32:09 So connecting all this up together and drilling this is kind of a no brainer as well. And again, this upper part's never been mined. So, well, tiny little bit, a little small added here, but for the most part, it's not mined. So there could be millions of ounces up here, and of course the depth potential as well. The next priorities would be Tito and Carmelitas and again you know depending on what additional work we do etc. As I said right now you know we like Tito but we like Carmelitas as well we really like them both And I think either or both of those would be sort of our tier, you know, tier 3 priority, I guess, if the depth potential of the mine is tier 1, the strike length would be tier 2.
32:58 And then the regional satellite deposits would be our tier 3 targets. And they all need and deserve drilling. And realistically, we're talking about tens of thousands of meters of drilling over the next several years. But it's something we wanna be able to do from cashflow. No, no, makes sense. There's a couple of questions in the chat that are right on topics. I'm going to jump into those before I get into my next one. Todd asks, do you think the Bethania property has been covered with sufficient geophysical surveys so far to identify new targets, prioritize exploration, et cetera? No, because the veins, you know, come right to surface and we've had these essentially artisanal mines to follow up on, which we either knew about them from from activity in the you know there's no activity today on any artisanal mines important to know so we don't have any like legal mining or anything going on our property but we do but you know there was some mining up until 2020.
34:04 So obviously we know where they were mining, we know where to go there. And if not, there's government reports that show where there was some artisanal mining in the past. So essentially, we've been able to go to all those or some of those places to date and lo and behold yeah there's veins there they're exposed to surface they're usually bigger than anyone expected you know in the in the case of Tito it essentially was a point geo geographical coordinates There's a point here where somebody took a sample and we went there and lo and behold there's you know more than a kilometer of mineralized veins at surface, you know, kind of east to west and 1 very, you know, big vein. So that it's been relatively so easy. We didn't need to do the geophysics.
34:56 With that being said, to cover the rest of the property at some point, it may be something we're doing. We're doing some remote satellite remote sensing right now. We're very excited about that. It's something we tried first in Saudi Arabia with our partners there. We're trying it now in Bithania, where you can actually pick up individual alteration minerals from space. And then where there's, I guess, where there's sort of a mass of them or a cluster of them, you have a strong likelihood that there's something anomalous there that's worth checking out. So that's something we're using right now, as an example. Yeah, no, no, appreciate that. And Sean, the question asks, would growing the Bethania resource affect the mining and operations at all? I mean, I guess it will, it will allow us the, it will allow us to start looking at some kind of scale of expansion of the mine.
35:53 That's really important. We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with looking at a thousand or 1200 ton per day mine rate, although again, internally, we do feel like that's the ultimate potential of this area, but we need the resources to kind of catch up to our dreams of mining at a bigger scale. So it is it is very important to to do that exploration first and that's what we're we're gonna be doing now in the coming years. But you know other than that it it won't affect the mining unless we find something that is, let's say, thicker, significantly thicker, like a bigger, thicker vein, then we could potentially change the mining method in that area.
36:44 But if it's the same as Bethania, then it's really not going to affect us. It's just going to be more. We're just going to do more of it. Okay, helpful. One thing I really want to talk about is, I saw there was a recent doubling of production in those last 10 days of April. So I got 2 questions about that. What operational changes allowed that acceleration and kind of more importantly is that new rate sustainable. So look as a you know as I kind of alluded to in the presentation the real sea change that happened in April was we had access to more money. So we were kind of getting stuck in the first quarter just with mining at a low rate but with lack of working capital to continue development. And of course, you know, in order to ramp up production, you need to have more working faces and you need to have all the infrastructure to move the material out of the mine.
37:43 And so in the earlier stages of a ramp up, there's disproportionately more development happening than there is going to be mining, actual mining of mineralized material or payable material. So we we're sort of in that in that zone right now and you know really we've been able to develop more working areas and that will just continue. So I hope that the rate that we were doing at the end of April was more like 15 tons per day. I hope that is not sustainable because we should be much, much higher than that very soon. And and so, you know, leave that with us and we will we will report, you know, the milestones as we go here.
38:32 But we're very confident that with, again, the additional investments that we're making, not just in April, but here in May and June, we're gonna be able to continue to ramp up pretty aggressively, at least for the next few months and get the mind to a level where it can start to grow on its own. I appreciate that. So with the kind of promise and growth across a couple of metrics, we're gazing into a crystal ball here. What production level do you expect to reach by year end? And are there any catalysts that could kind of accelerate that timeline? Yeah, good question. So look, we deliberately didn't give specific guidance to work on sort of beyond the next 2 quarters, but I think we should be by the end of the year, you know, over 200 tons per day, closing in on 350 at some point, you know, exactly what month and when, you know, remains to be seen.
39:36 And I mean, at that level, we'll be, you know, the mine will be, we think, you know, based on our internal numbers, we think it'll be pretty profitable. And, and that, you know, we'd be very, very happy with that, frankly. With that being said, if we do get, you know, positive things happening in the market, we could accelerate that even faster, certainly. And you know, something like, for example, the warrants, which is more towards the end of the year, those, those, those, we've got a big chunk of our warrants, almost half of the warrants that we have outstanding come due at the end of this year.
40:23 And if we get those exercised, that would inject another roughly 6 million Canadian into the company and that would allow us to potentially ramp up even faster. So it's stuff like that. Again, it's really about money at this stage. And we are very, very much of the camp that We try to be very good stewards of the, you know, of the shares outstanding and the dilution. Obviously, sometimes you, you know, you have to issue shares. And but we we we've really tried to limit limit it only when it when it's absolutely necessary and when it's the right time. And so that's something we take very carefully. And again, we're not planning to do anything more this year, but it is always possible with the warrants and stuff like that, that we could have more money coming at us And that would be great. We have great uses of proceeds for any money that we are able to raise from warrants or anything else.
41:24 We have, you know, we've got exploration, we've got the ramp up. So I think no matter what happens, we can we can show our shareholders and our investors that we generate a really, really high return. Great, thank you. I know you're not a technical guy, so just best of your ability. I know that it says here that silver recovery has improved to 94% by the end of April. Curious, just any insight you can give on how that happened. Yeah, I look at the, we have people, KUYA people at the mill whenever we are processing a batch. And they are constantly kind of playing with the various sort of metrics that you can control in a flotation plant. So things like, you know, the time that each process takes, you can make it longer and recover more oxygen levels, stuff like that.
42:27 And so we, you know, we continue to play around with that and optimize that. And so we had very, very good results in the last batch in early April with especially the silver recovery. So, yeah, it's just, I think, having a little bit of control, it's not our own mill. That would be the optimal thing, would be to have our own mill, designed especially for our ore. But the second best thing is what we've got, which is, you know, a very cooperative partner with our tool mill, Camilla, and the ability for our, you know, our Kuya metallurgical team and professionals to modify and play around with things as the process is happening in order to get better and better recoveries.
43:22 Cool. That's very helpful. Appreciate it. I got 2 questions on Silver Kings now, 1 on broad strategy and then 1 into the specifics of the project. So with those impressive draw results there, the 15,000 grand per tonne silver, how do you balance resource allocation generally between Bethania and the potential at Silver Kings? You know, it's, you know, you phrased the question in the past tense. It has been really you know a situation where we've reacted to the market. Of course almost every dollar we put into Silver King since we acquired it has been through the flow through financing system here in Canada. And you know I think as we go forward I think this year we're compared to previous years, we're much more focused on Bethania.
44:20 We really wanna get that right. We really wanna have the corporate resources going into Bethania because, I think if we can get the production up to, not even necessarily 350 tons per day by the end of the year, but anything even close to that, even approaching that where we're profitable, the upside in the stock is huge. And it's much greater than doing another drill program at Silver Kings. So we really like the project but you know I think Bethany is the focus right now. Appreciate it. Last question on Silver Kings and I'm gonna get to the questions we haven't touched yet from the audience and a couple came in on our email. But I know the Campbell Crawford discovery shows that widening mineralized zones in recent drilling results. How does that new structural understanding of the deposit affect the exploration model? And what implications does it have for the research potential generally?
45:19 Yeah. So I think, I think it's this, you know, this is the best way to kind of show that. So we discovered the, the Angus vein first, which, you know, we, we think is sort of running, Northeast, Southwest, and then the parallel map McNamara vein. And then in the, the January results, what we were able to show was that if we sort of drill through the middle of that, there's actually these veins that connect between the 2, which we call the ladder veins. And they're close enough together that even though you might get some waste rock or low grade in between, the high grades kind of carry a much wider zone there and You know, so you a couple of instances of that just to you know demonstrate You know 11 point that our best intercept was 11.5 meters at You know 379 now within that, you know, we we had, you know, 236 of Over over a thousand grams, you know similar a little wider but lower grade on this whole 24.
46:30 So we're kind of showing that there's a potentially a bigger zone of course much like gold mining and you know in the Abitibi you can get you know if you have veins that are maybe narrow but if they're close enough together you can kind of mine them all as 1 block. And you know the high grade carries the low grade and you end up with a kind of a bulk average of the whole thing. And if that average is high enough, it's economic to mine. So obviously, 380 is really good. I mean, we'd take that at Bethania, even if it was only 2 or 3 meters, we'd be very happy. So to have that over 12, almost 12 meters, 11 and a half meters is outstanding So well obviously a lot more drilling required here but you know this is good in terms of building up tonnage because it is very you got to do a lot of drilling to build up tonnage if you're only hitting a meter 50 centimeters 2 meters at a time so this this is certainly something where there's a lot more tonnage potential here than perhaps some of the other zones that are just maybe just a single narrow vein or something.
47:44 Great. Thank you. Jake from the chat asks, what reason do investors have to have confidence in the timeline to 100 and 350 tons per day? I mean, I think the fact that we're now funded for it is, is really the the, the issue or that's been the issue. And so, you know, other than that, I think we just need to execute and prove it. But, you know, as I said before, the it's, there's really been at least, you know, since the beginning of this year, there's been no real operational issues with the mine. You know other than just you know lack of capital. I mean if we were a big company and this was our you know our third or fourth mine.
48:32 You know It would be a different story. We'd be at 350 already. We could have put millions and millions of dollars into development. And then in that case you can ramp this up very very quickly. But you know we're not in that position. We're a small company. We didn't want to go to 3 or 400 million shares outstanding just to raise all the money we needed. So I guess time will tell if that was the right strategy or not. But I think it leaves a lot more upside for the for the investors the way that we've done it. Appreciate that insight. There are a number of questions came in over email and in the chat. So I'll just summarize them into one because you did reference it already in your presentation. And that's you indicated a $15 per ounce all-in costs. Really, is this gonna be consistent throughout?
49:22 What can people expect that number to do? Well, let me just go back and explain where that number comes from. So when we did our PEA, which was a few years ago now, the life of mine average was around $12 all in sustaining. Lower sometimes when the grade is higher, and, but it averaged out to about $12. Now, we, again, we've given some guidance, although this is all internal numbers. We think that the whole milling will cost us about another $3 an ounce once we're in kind of full phase 1 production of 350. So it's more right now, obviously, because we're doing less scale. But as we scale up, it'll go down to about $3 an ounce. So that's where that number comes from.
50:19 You know we so far we we're pretty happy with our our mining costs. You know They're already reasonable and coming down as we continue to expand. And then at the end of the day, there's sort of some fixed costs to running a mine. And once we get enough tonnage going, it essentially dilutes it over more ounces and more tons and you get to where you want to be. I appreciate that. Summarizing a bunch of questions that are in the chat and a couple that came in on email, To the best of your ability, what are the odds of another raise required or finance required this year?
51:08 Well, we, you know, I'll go to a slide that I have. So this is something I've presented on online before. In fact, we might call this the Stein curve because I invented it. I'm very proud of that. But Look, I think as you get towards, you know, being in this could be for any mining company, but as you go from being, you know, kind of a junior where you're really just drilling and you're sort of just supporting overheads and your exploration and Feasibility costs, you know you do that for some period of time and then once you get into production and you get you know Into free cash flow, you know, the dilution doesn't go to 0, but it goes pretty close to 0 because there's always going to be some dilution because of warrants options and stuff like that.
52:10 And Kuya is no different. So I think where the important thing on that is to say that we're on, you know, we're on the starting to get on the on the low slope of this asymptotic curve here, where it starts off very high. And there's a lot of dilution early on. And, and then, you know, now we're getting into this area where there's not going to be very much dilution percentage wise going forward is what we expect. And so we're not at this point planning on doing any other equity issues this year. We obviously want to push the get the operations going with what we have. We want to get credit for that in the market. That means we need to execute. And it also means we need to tell the story. If we do that, I think we'll be way over the warrant strike price and we'll have quite a bit of cash coming in at the end of the year, which we can then do whatever we want with, including put that into expanding the mine quicker.
53:20 We could also potentially do more exploration with that, more drilling, which again, either of which is going to add a lot of value to the project. Perfect. I appreciate that. I know we got only 7 minutes left for the end of the hour, so I'm gonna shoot some rapid fire questions at you from the chat. Thomas asked, might Bethania and Chido connect into one system or are they separate? I would say they're, oops. I would say they're likely separate but related and the reason is just they're parallel the veins seem to be parallel to each other you know Bethania is is going running in more or less the same orientation the Bethania vein swarm as Tito. So I think more than they might you know if they connected a depth it would be way too deep.
54:12 So right so it's more likely that we'll just treat them as 2 separate areas. And great. Sean asks, is Bethania implementing mechanical mining yet? Right now, no, where we're at, but obviously, that's something we are investing in right now and we'll start to incorporate that into the into the operations in the coming months. Great. Walter asked has the explosives issue been resolved. Yes. Awesome. Do a rapid fire right at the end. Peter asks I think you likely heard about the Saudi Arabia project the first time on this call. He's curious what the company's doing there and what stake Glia has in it. So I'd ask people to stay tuned on that. We're going to make an announcement on that very soon.
55:02 You know, there is activity going on there and we're pretty excited about it. So, so yeah, just we'll, we'll have an announcement on that very, very shortly. And that should answer most of the questions on Saudi Arabia. And obviously after that comes out, I'm happy to answer other questions by email or whatever, if you're interested. Perfect. Shana says 350 tons per day the upper limit of the mill? So, no. 350 is what we're permitted to do right now, both mining and the mill construction. And the idea would be, get there first as a phase 1, and then look at sort of amending the permits to expand from there.
55:57 And you know, I've been looking at development mining projects for 25 years now, and it's always, almost always easier to expand an existing mine or mill than it is to build it in the first place and permit it in the first place. So we feel that's a really that's a much better strategy than, you know, trying to start from square 1 and go, you know, 0 to 1000 tons per day. If we get to 350, that's a nice line. That's a nice size mine. It's worth way more than the company is valued today. And then we, but with that being said, we do think we can expand from there and we'll do the amended permits and all that.
56:43 And if they take a year, 2 years to get those, the good thing about being in operation is you're making money the whole time. And so you're sort of getting paid to wait. Whereas again, if you're a pre-construction or pre-production company, then any delay on permits costs you millions and millions of dollars. So we'll be in a much better position. Understood. I got time for 2 more questions and both people started with any chance. So these are 2 any chance questions. Todd asks, any chance for Silver King spin out? There is a chance. There you go. And Todd, but nothing, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not, it's not nothing imminent, but you know, again, anything, you know, remember I'm, I'm a big shareholder of this company.
57:31 Anything we can do that, you know, that creates value for shareholders, including myself, I'm open to it. Great. And Todd asks any chance the Carmelitas are the same veins offset by a fracture or fault? That I would say possibly. There could possibly be, for example, one of these in the middle here, we haven't really done much exploration in between. There's about a kilometer in between the 2 zones that we haven't done any exploration on. So it's possible there could be some kind of vein or structure fault that connects these 2 together. And yeah, we'll have to see.
58:17 Awesome. Well, David, appreciate your time today. Going through a presentation, also dealing with some really rapid fire questions. So absolutely, thank you for the hour. And for the tons of people who are in the chat, really do appreciate all of your thoughtful questions. If for whatever reason I didn't get to you today, I think I was pretty close to everybody, but I will be sending the transcript through to David and the Kuya team, so they'll get back to you hopefully as soon as possible. I really appreciate everybody joining us today. I think this was a great event, David, and hope to talk to you soon. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate your interest in Kuya, and Happy to answer any other questions you have. ♪