McEwen Mining Inc Stock

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to McEwen's Second Quarter 2026 Operating and Financial Results Conference Call.

Present from the company today are Rob McEwen, Chairman and Chief Owner; Ian Ball, Executive Vice Chairman; William Shaver, Chief Operating Officer; Perry Ing, Chief Financial Officer; Jeff Chan, Vice President of Finance; Stefan Spears, Vice President of Corporate Development; Michael Meding, Managing Director of McEwen Copper; and Carmen Diges, General Counsel and Secretary. Other management of the company will also be available to answer questions during the call. Please note, this event is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Rob McEwen, Chief Owner. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'd like to do something a little different today. You've already seen our financial statements. You've had an opportunity to read our press release. You know our production numbers, our revenue, our costs. Rather than simply repeating those numbers, I'd like to step back and talk about what they really mean because I've learned something over my career, markets are very good at measuring what happened last quarter. They're much less effective at recognizing the value that's being created for the future.

So today, I'd like to focus on one question. What really matters? Before I entered the mining business, I spent 18 years in the investment industry as an analyst, portfolio manager, a mutual fund manager and later controlling a member firm of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Every day, my responsibility was to decide where capital should be invested and just as importantly, where it shouldn't. Eventually, I made a decision that surprised many people. I stopped looking for companies that created value and decided to build one instead. That perspective has never left me. I still think like an investor. I still ask the same question I asked 40 years ago. Is this company becoming more valuable?

That question I want to answer today. Let's begin with the hard part. This was not a quarter we wanted. Operationally, we fell short of our own expectations. Production was lower than we had planned. Costs remained higher than we consider acceptable. Those results were disappointing to you and to me. We could point to inflation, labor shortages or industry-wide cost pressures, but those explanations don't create shareholder value. Execution does, and our execution wasn't consistently where it needs to be.

The most significant operational issue during the quarter was at Gold Bar. We encountered more carbonaceous material than expected in portions of the ore body. Carbonaceous ore presents a metallurgical challenge because it can be -- can absorb -- dissolve gold during leaching, thus reducing recoveries. Simply put, we recovered fewer ounces than we should have. That's on management. The important question today isn't whether we encountered a problem. We did. The important question is whether we understand it and whether we know how to fix it. I believe we do. We've expanded metallurgical testing. We're improving our geological modeling to better identify carbonaceous zones before they're mined.

We're modifying mine sequencing and blending strategies, and we're evaluating additional processing improvements to reduce the impact of preg-robbing. These are not overnight solutions, but they're practical, measurable actions that should improve recoveries over time. I've learned something more after 40 years in the mining industry. Nature always has another lesson to teach. Great companies aren't defined by whether they encounter problems. They're defined by how honestly they acknowledge them and how effectively they solve them. And that is what we're doing.

Now having said all of that, I don't want anyone to conclude that one difficult quarter defines this company. It doesn't. What really matters isn't whether every quarter is perfect. What really matters is whether every quarter leaves us stronger, smarter and better positioned for the future. And that's where my optimism comes from. Unlike many companies in our industry, our biggest challenge isn't finding metal. It's unlocking more of the value we already own.

Our exploration programs continue to demonstrate that our assets have significant room to grow. At the Fox Complex, I don't simply see a mine. I see the emergence of a mining district, Grey Fox, Stock, Whiskey Jack and our other targets continue to strengthen our confidence that we can replace depletion and continue building long-term value through discovery. I've always believed that exploration is one of the highest return investments a mining company can make. Every important discovery begins with a drill hole that challenges yesterday's assumptions. Those discoveries don't simply add ounces. They extend mine life, improve economics, create optionality and ultimately create shareholder value. That philosophy has guided me throughout my career, and it's one of the reasons I remain so excited about our future.

And then there's Los Azules. I've spent much of my professional life looking for assets capable of changing the future of the company. Those opportunities are rare. I believe Los Azules is one of them. We're entering a world where artificial intelligence, data centers, electrification, modern power grid and energy security are driving unprecedented demand for copper. At the same time, very few world-class copper projects are advancing towards production. That creates an opportunity for projects with the right scale, the right economics and the right environmental profile. Los Azules has the potential to be one of those projects.

The progress we've made over the past year has reduced technical risk, strengthened engineering, advanced permitting and expanded financing discussions. There is still much work ahead, but every milestone moves us closer to unlocking what I believe is one of the most valuable assets in our portfolio. One thing that has remained constant throughout my career is my approach to capital allocation. Shareholders entrust us with their capital.

Our responsibility is to treat every dollar as if it were our own because in my case, it is. I've invested a substantial portion of my own wealth in this company because I believe our best years remain ahead of us. That doesn't mean we'll never have disappointing quarters. We will. Mining doesn't work that way. What it does mean is that we will continue confronting problems honestly, investing in opportunities that offer the greatest long-term returns and making decisions based on intrinsic value rather than short-term market sentiment.

As I look ahead, I see 4 priorities. First, improve operational execution and recoveries; second, continue expanding our resource base through disciplined exploration; third, advance Los Azules towards becoming one of the world's premier copper projects. And finally, allocate capital with the same discipline that has guided me throughout my career. Those priorities won't necessarily produce the perfect quarter, but I believe they will produce a much stronger company.

I'll leave you with one final thought. When I entered the investment business many years ago, I learned that markets eventually recognize value. When I entered the mining business, I learned something equally important. Value has to be created before it can be recognized. That is our job. We still have work to do. We still have challenges to overcome, but I believe we're building a company whose future will be considerably stronger than its recent past. And in the end, that's what really matters.

Thank you. Now I'll open it for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jake Sekelsky from Alliance Global Partners.

So just looking at the Gold Bar production target, the multiyear target of 90,000 to 100,000 ounces a year. Can you just touch on the permitting processes for the surrounding deposits that are going to drive this hub-and-spoke model? How should we think about the time line there for tonnage starting to come in from the spokes?

Permitting is about 2 years away. We have to have some water well studies done. And during that period, we'll be coming forward with our production. As you looked at the exploration results coming out of our Eureka properties, we can see that making a large contribution to that production number you spoke of.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just switching gears to Los Azules and the NSR. That seems like a hidden gem in the portfolio a bit. Can you just comment on how you view this asset going forward? I mean, is it something that you expect to keep in the MUX portfolio? Or are there other avenues to unlock value with the NSR that you're looking at over the medium term?

Jake, it's Ian Ball speaking. So just on your point, we've looked at it. We've been doing a lot of work on the tax implications of whether you keep that inside of McEwen or whether you give that to shareholders in a spinout. Right now, it is in a U.S. corporation. And one of the things that we've looked at is, does it make sense for McEwen to hang on to it until Los Azules actually paying. Right now, to make it on a tax-free basis, it would have to go into a U.S. corporation, which has additional corporate governance surrounding it versus going into a Canadian corporation, which would be taxable to shareholders.

So the thought right now is keep it inside of McEwen so there's no extra G&A costs associated with running that company and to sort of evaluate it when Los Azules is entering production because then it could obviously incur that extra cost being a U.S. company. We also announced yesterday that we have created a small royalty on this agreement we have with Paragon. We have other royalties within the company. And the thought is we could probably build up that royalty portfolio alongside Los Azules, obviously, as you mentioned being the key royalty. And at some point, it probably does make some sense to look at giving that to shareholders in the way of an IPO because it should trade at a higher valuation based relative to the operating company.

Makes sense. Okay. So maybe over the medium term, kind of build up a bit of a royalty portfolio and potentially spin it out down the road when the timing makes sense.

Yes. I think that's something we would have to consider, yes.

The next question comes from Mike Kozak from Cantor Fitzgerald.

A few questions for me. First, how much cash was in the San José JV at exit Q2? And do you expect any more distributions over the remainder of this year? I know you're already through guidance, but just some color there would be helpful.

Okay, Mike, this is Perry speaking. So at the end of the second quarter, I believe San José had roughly $130 million in U.S. cash and cash equivalents. We're not expecting a further dividend this year. Part of that is due to kind of the Central Bank regulations and the need to pay dividends out of audited surplus earnings. So -- but we're in regular discussions with our partner, Hochschild and the team at San José. So if there's an opportunity to, certainly, we would discuss it. But at this point, we would expect dividends to resume next year.

Got it. Helpful. And then my second one, if I can. In your 10-Q, there was disclosure around, I think, what you're calling an enhanced financing proposal from Finland's export credit agency. Could you give a bit more color there? Like how did Finland of all places come to get potentially involved in Los Azules? What are the next milestones for that proposal to maybe convert into something more definitive? What's the size as it stands right now? Anything you could give there would be helpful.

I'll ask Mike to address that question.

Sure. So as part of our financing, we look into financings for export credit agencies. One of the export credit agencies in Europe that is very active is the Finnish one. And why is that? Yes, because Metso is headquartered there. And Metso is one of the key suppliers for mining equipment, specifically crushing, conveying acid plant, SX-EW and so forth. So we have engaged with the authorities from the ECA actually some years ago already, and we had received prior financing offers, and that is just one part of our overall financing package.

We have engaged also North American ECAs. We have engaged Japanese ECAs. We have engaged other European ECAs. We think that the financing through an ECA on top of giving you the financing itself that typically come with good tenders, they typically come with good pricing and they typically come with the political support of the project. While we have the RIGI in place, which gives us good protection in Argentina, this is just another layer to make this project much more robust as we go through the different decades ahead during which the project will be operating.

With regards to the amounts, that is depending on the amount of equipment sourced or equipment or engineering sourced from the countries involved. So you can look depending on the ECA, somewhere between $200 million and more than $500 million each. One of the reasons why we engaged Societe Generale was actually to support us bundling all those activities because those activities have been done mostly by myself and Stefan Spears in the past, and they require quite some bench strength to do. So we put on the team, SocGen to support us in getting all this together in an overall project finance.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Don DeMarco from National Bank.

So Rob, I'll start off with Gold Bar. My question, is the revised guidance based solely on the known reconciliation issues? Or does it include additional conservatism for areas that have not been kept in mind? I'm referring to the higher-than-expected carbonaceous material in certain zones that didn't reconcile with the resource model. I'm just wondering how localized that is and what assumptions you're making going forward?

Yes. Thanks very much for the question. It is Bill Shaver, I guess the models for this kind of operation are under continuous scrutiny by ourselves and by our consultants. And much of the information about where the carbon is in the various benches comes from the blasthole drilling, which is sampled on a routine basis. So -- and those holes are approximately 12 or 14 feet apart. So those are all sampled, and those are used in the operation to understand where the ore is and where the carbonaceous material is and where the waste is.

And so the model is basically in a state of educating itself on an ongoing basis. And so basically, I don't think we've changed the conservatism of the overall model, but it's just -- as it happens in this quarter, we ended up with a significant amount of waste. And so what we've done to alleviate that situation is to increase production overall, which allows us to move more waste and hopefully, the same amount of ore. And of course, you can imagine that when you're in a pit, if you have this carbonaceous material in a phase, you have to mine that material to get at ore that will be encountered either behind it or beside it.

So it's unfortunate that these kind of things happen. I think there is some unpredictability about it because the carbon doesn't necessarily show up in the drilling that was originally used to put the resource together. So it's a continuous process of having sampling, passing, marking up benches with geologists and so on. So -- and that's the routine that we have and that normally works. And so we just didn't mine the right amount of ore during the period. Does that help you?

No. Yes, that's very helpful. And I think with that, I think that kind of satisfies my questions on Gold Bar. I'll shift over to Los Azules then for my second and final question. With the FID work program expected to conclude in Q4, what are the remaining major work streams that we should focus on? And what milestone do you think is most likely to unlock value recognition?

Mike, would you like to...

Yes. So I think that we don't know through the vendor engineering. I mean we have done the work required that was missing for the engineering in the first quarter with regards to drilling, condemnation. So the thing is that at June, we had completed roughly 27% of the planned FID work program. And as you said, we're targeting completion of the program in the fourth quarter. That curve is by design. We had the plan ramped up beginning in the second quarter and the piece that drive the second half are now in place.

The major process packages are awarded, the SX/EW plant, the sulfuric acid plant and the crushing system, they sit with Metso. And with vendor data enhanced design is advancing quickly. What is also interesting is that we had a very good geotechnical campaign. So that is going into our mine design. We had a zone where in the feasibility, we had certain restriction with regards to angles. And the new data that we obtained in the beginning of this year now allows us to consolidate the pit design from 8 sectors to 4 and to shrink the zone that had to have flatter angles in the pit by roughly 22%. This will increase the ore that we can mine, and it will also decrease the amount of stripping that we have to do. So those are all important milestones that we have to go through now the mine design, the final one and the rest of the engineering.

On another note, on exploration, I mean, the work that we did was condemnation was geotech, hydrology, but we used also a lot of the information that we obtained from that drilling for exploration purposes. We have done lots of prospecting, and we now have our first integrated district model together, which defines the structural corridor of exploration targets beyond the current resource. Three of them, Franca, [ Luneta ] and Austral rank high in terms of priority and are planned for drill testing the 2026, 2027 season, which begins in September with we think maybe about 8,800 meters.

So this is all very interesting. The additional exploration will not change our plans with regards to the feasibility and the final investment decision and the engineering, but it will open up future opportunities and add to this already very long life asset beyond the initial 22 year asset life, the potential to increase the 33 years either with the concentrator or with Rio Tinto's Nuton technology beyond that. So we are quite optimistic for the overall district for Los Azules.

The next question comes from Jeremy Hoy with Canaccord Genuity.

Just a follow-up on Los Azules. On financing, Societe Generale is now an exclusive debt adviser. IPO preparations have begun and there's an enhanced Finnvera proposal. What is -- I realize that this is an evolving discussion, but I guess I'm looking for an update on how you view the likely financing stack for the project? And could you also remind us what McEwen's expected funding obligation and dilution tolerance at the McEwen Copper level are?

There are no obligation.

Okay. Sorry, Rob. Apologies.

Please go ahead.

Maybe I'll take the part of the financing package, Rob, and then you can talk about the overall strategy. The overall financing package that we're looking for is about $4 billion. We had in the feasibility CapEx of about $3.2 billion. And with working capital with some interest payments and with some room for an overrun facility, we're looking around $4 billion.

We think that reasonably, we can finance, I would say, 60% debt, 40% equity for a project in Argentina of that size. And we think that the majority of the debt financing will come from ECAs. I had mentioned before that the ECAs beyond having interesting terms, they come with a lot of other benefits for projects of our size. They come with long terms, typically 10 to 15 years. And they make the overall project much more robust.

On debt side, we think that, that should cover maybe 80%, 85% or more percent of the overall debt financing package. And the rest would be then a traditional project finance setup. On the traditional project finance setup, we have an agreement in place with IFC, they are working with us together to audit us and support us on the IFC performance standard compliance that is quite advanced. They also wanted to have the [ OFA ] as being one of the lead arrangers for project finance, which is another international [ organization ] that comes with lots of support over the project life, the initial financing and then overall the project life. So we think we can put that package together on one hand with the ECAs, on the other hand with IFC and other DFIs and then maybe some commercial banks, whatever is remaining.

On the equity side, we are looking for about $1.6 billion, and we try obviously to maximize the debt financing as long as it generates additional value for our shareholders. On the $1.6 billion, we think that $600 million could be coming from one of our existing partners, $600 million from another partner. Then we have our IPO in the mix, and then we have specialized mining funds. That would be the breakdown.

Now this is just one scenario in terms of sources for the financing. We are looking at a couple of others, but that's the general direction that we're pushing for at the moment. Rob, you wanted to add something with the overall strategy?

Sure. Jeremy, you were asking about how much dilution is acceptable. As small as possible. It's -- we think we have a rare asset that can contribute significant value. So we're not keen to issue a lot of stock on that. We'll see how the market behaves. There's been a couple of issues recently. We're looking to do an IPO in the latter part of this year to address a component of that equity requirement. And as Mike said, there are some partners we're looking at to put other equity in, but retaining as large a piece as possible. I hope that addresses your question.

Our next question comes from online user, Terry Devries. The first question is, why is all-in sustaining cost rising so high? And the second question, how does a $10 move in crude affect AISC?

Sure. I'll take that question, operator. It's Perry. So in terms of our AISC, our all-in sustaining costs, I think you'll see that consistent with our news release, the main driver of that was the shortfall in production and ounces at Gold Bar. It's a fairly fixed cost operation. So with the decrease in the denominator, obviously, there is an overall impact in AISC. Would you see that trending down as we increase ounce recovery in the second half of the year? Despite moving more volume, we do see AISC coming down from where it is in Q2.

And in terms of the other question, a $10 move in crude, overall, we're not directly exposed to changes in crude oil prices, but operating the Gold Bar mine, going back to that is our main user of fossil fuels. So there, we are exposed to U.S. diesel prices. In 2025, U.S. diesel was kind of in the $3.75 range. So far this year, with the onset of the Iran situation, it increased to about $4.75 per gallon. So I think that increase overall has about $100 cost per ounce impact on our overall AISC costs. So again, if diesel were to rise another further dollar to $5.75 a gallon, then you'd see close to another $100 impact. If that addresses that question, operator.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Rob McEwen. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. I just want to conclude saying we see the future looking very bright. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Meeting of McEwen Inc., and we're here today with a number of members of management and the Board of Directors. Could I ask them all to put up their hands. I think it's almost all the room. There you go. You can attack any one of them when you like or congratulate them.

So we're going to hold this meeting and it's going to be much different than any annual meeting we've had before. We're taking an inspiration from Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. And so we have the pleasure today of Anthony Vaccaro, The Northern Miner Group, and he is going to be posing daunting questions, particularly to Mike about both our McEwen Copper, and Ian and I will be addressing McEwen Inc. And there'll be some overlap in between there.

So with that, we'll get started, and I'm going to relinquish this podium and give it to Carmen, our General Counsel, who will take you through the formal part of the meeting, after which we'll get into this prize Q&A period. Thank you for coming.

Thank you very much, Rob. It's great to see so many familiar faces after many years of doing these virtually. So thank you to everyone who came out today. And my name is Carmen Diges. I'm the General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of McEwen. And at Rob's request and in accordance with our bylaws, I'll be the chairman for the meeting. And Stefan Spears in the front row here, will act as Secretary. A representative from Computershare is acting as scrutineer for this meeting and is also in attendance.

Today's meeting is conducted personally and also simultaneously broadcast via webcast. As we believe in engaging with our shareholders, we hope that the live broadcast will maximize participation of shareholders regardless of geographic location. This technology enables us to reach a larger audience and encourages your participation wherever you are.

Today, we'll consider the election of directors for the ensuing year, the ratification of the appointment of our independent public accountants, and approval of the issuance of shares of common stock to Robert McEwen pursuant to an Arrangement Agreement with Canadian Gold Corp that's been previously announced and closed. For convenience, certain persons have been asked to propose and second resolutions. Those of you who are registered shareholders don't need to vote if you've already voted by proxy, unless, of course, you wish to change your vote in which case, please raise your hand as we go through the vote.

All owners of record as of the close of business on April 20, 2026, are entitled to vote at this meeting. Those wishing to vote would have received a ballot when they registered with the scrutineers. If you'd like to vote but did not receive a form and you are a registered shareholder, please register with the scrutineers at the front table over there, and they will check your registration details.

Should participants in the live broadcast wish to pose a question or comment, they will need to click on the Q&A icon on the webcast interface. Questions can also be sent by e-mailing [email protected], and we've received a number of those in advance.

Our Vice President of Corporate Development, Stefan Spears, will also be managing questions for this meeting. A complete list of the owners of McEwen as of the record date for the meeting, which is April 20, 2026, as required by Colorado law has been on file at McEwen's office and was open for inspection by any shareholder up until this meeting and also by e-mail request since April 24. The list is also still available for anyone who wants to take a look at it. So just come up and chat with me if you'd like that.

I have an affidavit from Computershare Trust Company, our stock transfer agent, attesting that the notice of the meeting, the proxy statement, annual report and proxy were made or made available to all shareholders of record as of April 2026 in the manner prescribed by law. Copies of these documents are available today as well for anyone who wants to see them. Copies are also available on our website and on SEDAR+ and EDGAR. There are a total of 59,452,799 shares outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting today.

I've received the interim inspector's report on attendance, our articles require not less than 1/3 of the outstanding shares entitled to vote at this meeting for a quorum. And on that basis, I can declare that we have a quorum for this meeting.

The first item of business is the appointment of the scrutineer and election judge. I have appointed Computershare Trust Company of Canada to act as scrutineer and election judge for the purpose of tabulating votes at our meeting today.

The next item of business is the approval of the minutes of our last meeting held on June 19, 2025. Copies are also available for inspection by any shareholder tonight. With your consent, I propose that we dispense with the reading of the minutes unless there is any objection. Thank you.

The polls have been open for voting since April 24 of this year, voting by Internet and telephone have been available until 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time today as declared in our proxy statement regarding this meeting. Voting at the meeting by ballot will be open immediately after the introduction of all of the proposals and will remain open until I declare them closed. Please note that voting is not available through the live webcast. We'll provide an interim result of voting on each item of business at the end of the meeting today.

Management believes it has sufficient proxies to carry each of the proposals. And as such, the outcome is expected in favor of management's recommendations for each resolution. The first item of business is the election of directors to serve until the next annual meeting or until their successors are duly elected and qualified. Mr. McEwen, McEwen's Chairman and CEO will now recognize the 11 persons nominated for election to the Board of Directors. As Mr. McEwen calls out the names, I ask that each director who is present stand or indicate their presence when called.

The Board has nominated the following persons to serve as directors of the corporation to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of McEwen and until their successors are duly elected. Ian Ball, Dalia Asterbadi, Richard Brissenden, Alfred Colas, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, he is not with us today. He is, today? Thank you. I didn't see that. John Florek, Steve Kaszas. Michelle Makori, I can say isn't here. She's here in spirit. Michael Melanson, William Shaver and myself already standing.

Thank you, Rob. Is there a second to the nominations?

I second the nominations.

Thank you, Mihaela. The corporation has received no other nominations for directors in the manner prescribed by the corporation's bylaws. I therefore declare that the nominations for directors are closed. Is there any discussion regarding this matter?

Thank you. We'll now move on to the next item of business, which is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as auditors and independent registered public accountants of the corporation. This will be for the year ending December 31, 2026. And I can report that the Audit Committee of the Board has approved the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP and recommends ratification of their appointment. Robert McEwen will make the necessary motion to approve the auditors.

I move the following resolution be adopted, resolved that the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the corporation's independent registered public accountants for the year ended December 31, 2026, be ratified and approved.

Thank you. Quick to the draw there, Mihaela. Thank you. You've heard the motion. Is there any discussion?

Thank you. We'll move on to the next item. The remaining item of business before this meeting requires a little explanation. It's the proposal to approve the issuance of shares of the corporation's common stock to Mr. Robert McEwen, pursuant to an arrangement agreement dated as of October 10, 2025, amended in December 23, '25, by and among McEwen Inc., Canadian Gold Corp. and in accordance with NYSE listing Rule 312.03 (B (i), which I'm sure you're all very familiar with. But basically, it's given the related nature of the transaction, this requires a vote of the disinterested shareholders of McEwen. And under the arrangement agreement, McEwen acquired all of the issued and outstanding shares of Canadian Gold Corp in exchange for shares of common stock of McEwen by way of a court-approved statutory plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act of British Columbia.

And that was completed effective January 5, and all Canadian Gold shares other than the Canadian Gold shares held by Mr. McEwen were exchange for shares of McEwen. Mr. McEwen had subscription receipts instead. And that NYSE rule that I mentioned requires the corporation to obtain stockholder approval prior to the issuance of common stock, where there's a related party and where the securities exceed 1% of the number of shares outstanding before the issuance.

We've determined that Mr. McEwen is an active related party under the NYSE rules, and we are soliciting stockholder approval for the issuance of the company shares to Mr. McEwen as set forth in the arrangement agreement and described in your proxy circular. So we need the affirmative vote of a majority of disinterested votes on the proposal of this meeting. And if shareholder approval is not obtained, the corporation will have to deliver cash to Mr. McEwen for the company shares he's entitled to receive upon conversion of the subscription receipts under this agreement.

So I'll now call for a motion on the proposal with all that.

I move that the following resolution be adopted, resolved that the issuance of shares of the corporation's common stock to Mr. Robert McEwen pursuant to the arrangement agreement be approved.

You definitely had the easier side of that equation between the 2 of us. You've now heard the motion. Is there any discussion? Any questions on that one just because it's a little out of the ordinary? All right. Thank you.

We'll proceed to take the vote and representatives from Computershare will collect any ballots that are out there. I didn't see any coming in, but if anyone's got a ballot, could you just raise it up.

Okay. Polls are now closed. And the final tally of the vote will be published on the SEC website and on EDGAR -- sorry, on SEDAR within 4 business days of the meeting and minutes of the meeting will be prepared and available for any shareholder in the coming year.

On the basis of the substantial advanced vote, however, that we've had today and the fact that I saw no ballots going in, we can take the motions as having passed. We'll safeguard any proxies that we received, any ballots, the affidavit of mailing the oath and certificate and report of inspector and keep them with the records of this meeting. And on the basis of all of that, I'm pleased to announce that Ian Ball, Dalia Asterbadi, Richard Brissenden, Alfred Colas, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, John Florek, Steve Kaszas, Michelle Makori, Michael Melanson, William Shaver, and Robert McEwen have been elected as the corporation's directors.

The proposal to ratify the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the corporation's independent registered public accountants for the year ending December 31, 2026, is approved. And further, the issuance of shares of the corporation's common stock to Mr. Robert McEwen pursuant to an Arrangement Agreement is also approved. Thank you.

Are there any other items of business to come before the meeting today? If not, I would entertain a motion to terminate the meeting for McEwen Inc. Could you move that for me?

Okay. I moved it.

And a seconder?

I second the motion.

Thank you. Unless anyone is opposed, the formal portion of this meeting is now terminated, and we can move on to the fun bullpen that has been planned for the rest of our afternoon. I declare the meeting terminated. And now I invite Mr. Anthony Vaccaro to moderate the rest of the meeting.

Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. I had fun. I was told it was a hard-hitting bullpen, I sharpened up my old journalism pen for this one. Thank you, Rob, for inviting me. And Ian and Michael, I'm really happy to be here, perhaps not as happy as Rob. I've been in the industry for about over 20 years. So I've had a front row seat for Rob's consistent, bullish gold forecast, and I think we're all happy to see last year that the market finally relented and decided to stop arguing with Rob, kind of what the way that he said it was going to go for all those years.

There's a bit of a running joke in the industry that Rob's bullish forecast on gold lasts longer than most marriages, I would honestly say that Rob's relationship with Bullion has also aged considerably better than even those marriage that have perhaps lasted long, a long enough time. So but listen, we're going to start talking about copper because so much of what's going on in McEwen is around copper. And there's a lot of buzz.

Rob, I hear it all the time when I'm out networking and hobnobbing with the industry, the IPO. When is McEwen Copper going to do its IPO? Can you give everyone here a little bit of a time line and more detail on what's happening on that front?

Sure. We've mentioned going public several times in the past. And each time before we sort of signed a piece of paper, there were private interest that came forward and said they'd put up the money. And the first 2 were Rio Tinto and Stellantis. So the second largest mining company in the world and the sixth largest car manufacturing company in the world. We said, well, taking money from them is easier than doing a prospectus and doing an IPO. And then as we moved along, we started saying, well, we have a preliminary economic assessment.

We're probably creating more value for our shareholders if we go to a feasibility study. And then Argentina introduced a large investment incentive regime that's -- the acronym is RIGI, but it reduced the tax rate, it lifted exchange controls, it did a lot of things to make a project have significantly more value.

So we said, all right, we're going to wait until we get that and then we're going to put it in the feasibility study. So we have the feasibility study done that was October of last year. We have an environmental permit in our hand. The project is shovel ready. And right now, we want to start production in next year in January.

Production in 2030, construction in 2027.

I want it next year. So it's -- we're in a position now where we're going to need to raise money for the CapEx. And the market is ready. There are not a lot of large projects such as Los Azules. It's a rarity in the market, and we think it's an opportune time to go public, and that will -- it was always trying to lift the value of that and make it visible for shareholders of McEwen Inc.

And we've seen the effects over the last couple of years on that going forward. I think there'll be a good lift from where we are right now when we go public.

Right. And listen, we're fortunate to have Michael Meding, the Managing Director of McEwen Copper, so we can get into the weeds a little bit. It's a big build. It's an expensive build. Can you talk shareholders through a little bit about what the financing -- what the plan for is, how to finance it?

Okay. So in our feasibility that we -- when we published the results on 7th of October last year, we published headline figures of approximately $3.2 billion, $3.17 billion for CapEx, which we think will result in an overall financing package of about $4 billion, including interest that we have to pay to construction plus working capital plus a little but over our facility so how do we get to $4 billion?

The important thing is that each of the different buckets has already a home where we are trying to address those figures. And it's basically -- we think that for a project in Argentina that size 40% equity, 60% debt is something achievable. The 60% debt, what we have seen over the last 4 years and my colleague, Stefan and I, we have been traveling a lot talking to export credit agencies that are the -- export development banks, that the different countries have to support business opportunities have been very interested in getting back into mining and doing business in Argentina.

Even before we had the feasibility out and even before we had the RIGI approval, we had several nonbinding offers for more than $1 billion on the table. And now that we have talked to about 20 different organizations in between DFIs. Those are the development finance organizations and the export credit agencies.

We have engaged Societe Generale to lead this process going forward because that's not a job that we can do side of desk. We have a big team now working on that. Then since 25th of September last year, the World Bank through the IFC announced that we have a collaboration agreement in place in this collaboration agreement.

We do 2 things. First of all, we work with the IFC to show that we are compliant with the IFC performance standards which are environment, social and governance standards that you want to be compliant with when you develop a big project. And obviously, Los Azules developed according to the equator principles. And they have agreed to work with us on that front. They have agreed to potentially become a leader arranger.

So they have reserved the rights to do financing with us and those processes run alongside and SocGen, as we call them, are basically engaged also to make sure they are kept on the best terms in terms of interest rates and overall cost.

And on the equity side, it's basically existing shareholders, potential industry conglomerate plus the IPO that Rob mentioned. That's how the finance package comes.

When you bring up equity, then I want to bring in Rob on that because shareholder dilution has to be something that's at least thought about by our audience when we're talking about a big spend on this. I do want to set this up a little bit, Rob, to take a second to remind everybody, almost USD 300 million of your own money invested in your businesses. And then -- but you do pull out quite a bit, right? You pull out $1 a year in salary.

So I did a calculation in your tax bracket, it's going to take you about 1 billion years to recoup your investment in salary. Only 1 billion years, a dinosaur time, right? What's your philosophy around dilution when we are talking about a big build like this?

Avoid it as much as possible. If you look at Los Azules just for a moment, and let's convert it into an equivalent gold asset, and that will be achieved by taking the gold price, dividing it by the copper price, coming up with a ratio, it's about just over 700 pounds of copper equals the value of 1 ounce of gold.

So we have 35.7 billion pounds of copper in resources, use that ratio, and that's equivalent to a 50 million-ounce gold deposit. If you use that same ratio and project it on our feasibility cost of $1.71 a pound, that is just under $1,300 cash and just under $1,600 all-in sustaining. It's 21 years plus another 33 years possible that is a giant gold deposit. And that is when I look at it, I said, we want to give away as little as possible of that as we go forward. So that the benefit accrues to the shareholders of McEwen Inc. and the shareholders of McEwen Copper.

Excellent. I mean you alluded to it, this is a world-class massive deposit. I have no doubt that this is going to be built, this is a mine, Los Azules is going to be going on long after all of us are dead. It's that kind of project. But when you get into projects of this scale, cost overruns are almost the norm. This is basically a mega project, and that has been a concern from the outside looking into our industry.

I'm going to bring it back to you, Michael. You're the one on this front. What can you do to assure shareholders what steps you're going to take to mitigate that risk of cost overrun?

Okay. So for those of you who don't know my history, I mean, I'm now about 2 decades in the Americas. I spent more than 15 years in Argentina. And I worked for Barrick Gold Corporation in Argentina quite successfully as a CFO, for the Veladero gold mine, very big gold mine at my time, 1 million-ounce gold producer, 2 million ounce on silver. And I had also the chance to work on the Pascua-Lama Project, very big build that didn't see the light of day.

And there are a lot of learnings from this time and learning such as having the right team, having the right in-country knowledge. I mean the Barrick people at the time, they put their star performers on the build, but we're not able to perform on the ground. They didn't have the traction on the ground. And every lack of decision-making, every delay, every scope creep is costing you significant money. So that caused a lot of headache. And so what we said is, okay, what can we do to reduce that risk.

And best is, I mean, you cannot have cost overrun on stuff that you don't build. So what we went for is a much simplified flow sheet. So we chose to go via heap leach operation versus a conventional concentrator that is significantly lower in CapEx and levels of magnitude less complex. And this reduction of complexity helps us to be able to plan, I would say, better. There is experience in the same province where our project is located to build this kind of project. We want to do something that's very similar to Veladero.

It's a different production process on the chemical side. But in terms of earth movement, in terms of crushing, in terms of heap leaching, it is very similar, and that has been done. And they've been able to secure a team that has on-the-ground experience, has done part of that build in Veladero before. On top of that, we have secured people that have built mega projects in the Andes, such as Florence, Morenci, QB1.

So we have a mix of people that have lots of experience on the ground and lots of international experience, and we have formed a team that I think can work -- it has been able to work very effectively in Argentina over the last almost 4.5 years now. I think that is part of the game. And then obviously, top-notch project controls and a really detailed project plan.

And then staggered CapEx. We don't build everything at once. We built the leach pad in stages. We built the crushing circuit in stages. We built the SX/EW in stages. We built the acid plant in stages. So everything goes in stages so that you don't have to eat the elephant at once, but plate by plate.

Okay. I want to pick up on one word that you said there. Rob told me I could be hard hitting in the question, so I'm going to take them up on his offer. Argentina. Yes, Argentina has been a volatile place. We all know that. Rob, you personally know Milei. Things are looking good there right now, but what confidence can you give shareholders that Argentina is the proper platform to be putting billions of dollars of investor money into?

So what we had seen when Argentina was opening up and mining had its first boom in '90s through the implementation of the mining investment law. There was the idea of giving guarantees. But unfortunately, the mining investment law from the '90s wasn't as clearly written.

So over the years, unfortunately, was eroded and didn't have automatic international arbitration built in. And what I can say, though, is that, for example, during my time, when I was the CFO for Barrick in Argentina, I bought $2 billion out of the country and have been able to sell 50% of the asset for $960 million, and that worked out also. So a top player went into the country.

And then afterwards, when we were -- through the job changes, I ended up as Managing Director for McEwen Copper. Now we were working towards development. We were trying to reduce the risk on an operational side, what we now saw is the movement towards a much improved investment protection agreement, which is the large infrastructure investment incentive regime that Rob mentioned, the RIGI, which gives you a 30-year tax stability, it gives you a reduction on tax rate from 35% to 25%, gives you a reduction of tax on dividend from 7% to 3.5%. And it gives you legally baked in the right for international arbitration, a big item that was missing in the money investment law from the '90s.

So what I estimate is -- and not only for mining, there's lots of money flowing into Argentina in the moment, more than $40 billion of projects have been approved. And significant investment is flowing already in projects such as Vaca Muerta and some energy projects. There are a lot of other mining projects that have applied, copper projects as well that haven't been approved yet.

But well, I think that this is something that will help to stabilize those projects and to ensure that they have defendable rights going forward.

Right. And I think we are seeing from where I sit on the media side, we are seeing a discernible trend in South America with the recent elections in Colombia. It looks like better results for a more business-friendly leader there. There is a tide going on there right now of realizing that we need -- they need more economic business-friendly policies. So thank you for that, Michael.

Rob, coming to you, listen, entrepreneurs of your ilk don't go into anything without a bit of an end game, right? You're thinking about what's the long-term strategy here? What is it with Los Azules? Do you want to build this? Or do you -- is this something that you're trying to get into the best shape that you can for someone else to build?

We have a team that has experience building aspects in the Andes, in Argentina, so conceivably, we could build it. We could also -- but right now, what we have is a very scarce asset. The major mining companies around the world are looking for large copper projects. They're looking to build their pipeline. So it's conceivable you'll see a price that might look attractive. But if that doesn't appear we want to take it forward. I mean, this is an asset that -- I mean, at current prices, it's got a better than 72% gross margin.

First, it's got a payback of under 3 years on an almost $3.2 billion CapEx. You're looking at the first 5 years, 450 million pounds of copper cathode a year. And I also -- I mean that would be $2.8 billion, and you'll be looking at $2.1 billion gross profit. I mean it's a huge enterprise. And you look -- it's on a large property package where we found other porphyry targets that we want to explore. So we're looking 55 years, it could be, maybe 70, could be 100. They're deep rooted, but it's -- I'm particularly drawn to it because 4 or 5 years ago, brought in an architect who's considered the Steve Jobs of the green living building space. and saying, how do we change the public's negative impression of mining? What do we have to do? It has to be more than words. It has to be action.

And so it was designing a mine that if you were to compare it to a conventional copper mine that produces a concentrate of a comparable size, this -- the design for this mine, it would use less than 1/4 of the water, it would emit 1/10 the carbon. It would have no tailings that would threaten downstream communities. It would be powered 100% by renewable energy. This is a model for mining going in the future, and we have to get the world to take out those pictures they have in their minds of what mining was 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago and understand that the industry is much more responsible and a much better steward of the environment today than it was back then.

And the other thing people have to understand is that everything around us, modern civilization is dependent on what comes out of the ground. And if you can't get the social license to build a mine, this is going to disappear. That's why we want to move that forward.

Well said. Unless anyone thinks, including you Ian, that Ian is getting off easy so far. Don't worry, I'm coming for him. I'm coming for him. We'll loop back around. But I didn't -- that's going to temporarily move on from Los Azules. I mentioned off the top, obviously, we're sitting here with Rob McEwen, he's still the gold guy, even though now he is becoming the copper guy. I want to get your take, Rob. All those years saying where gold was going to go, then it happened. What made it? What were some of those fundamental drivers that are at play in the gold market right now. And then we'll start talking a little bit about the McEwen Gold operations.

If you're a student of history, economic history, you can see that when governments are printing large amounts of money, and they're taking on lots of debt, they're debating the currency. What we have in our wallets, the fiat currency. And that is -- you can go through a millennium and find all sorts of examples of that happening. And what we're seeing is governments around the world accumulating a lot of debt.

They're very lax in their monetary controls and then you get a war someplace that gets even heated further. People are going to go to hard money. You're looking at central banks buying at a rate we haven't seen in several decades. You have major central banks picking up gold at a very quick rate. In fact, gold is now a larger asset in many of the central banks than their U.S. treasuries. They don't trust the dollar. They shouldn't trust the Canadian dollar, but we're a commodity country. So maybe it'll buoy up. And if our government ever gets their act together, maybe we'll have more mines. Our exports will get higher. And our inflation will drop as a result of a stronger currency, but I see gold going higher, right now it's just floating around. I can see the next stop, but could drop a bit more, but up to 7,500. And then beyond that, I'll go to Peter Schiff and Pierre Lassonde and they're in their $10,000 and $20,000 numbers.

Okay. And I think we have a few slides a little bit later on that we'll give some data around the thesis.

I mean I look at Gold. I have a large holding of gold bullion and I view that as liquidity. You can borrow against it if you want. If you need liquidity, you can sell it in 2 days. It's not like a house where you're waiting for something to sell. And you don't have to give an insider report when you sell it. Not that I have 10% of the gold hoard in the world, but...

Not yet anyway. All right. Let's bring in Ian, Executive Vice Chairman of McEwen. McEwen has stated that a lot of the growth should be -- being funded from gold operations. What can you tell investors here today about how that's going to work? And what kind of confidence can you give them in the strategy?

Right. Well, first off, I'm a big believer, almost a religion, you do not issue shares. The last company that I was running. We had the smallest share count of any gold mining company in the world, and that accelerated the share price. And I think -- what you see in the mining industry is a lot of vanity projects where shares issue it without a lot of regard for the shareholders that own the company.

When we look at McEwen and you look at the gold price today, obviously, it's the gold price that's driving the cash flow right now. And we've had some recent examples of our San Jose mine issuing $58 million to us so far in 2026. Silver has actually been the largest change in that operation. For our 100% owned mines, we're looking at about $80 million of free cash flow this year. And we have between cash and securities, about $100 million on the balance sheet. You have to kind of build in a buffer, right? Like how are you going to build out about $0.5 billion in CapEx over the next 5 years.

And so one of the things we have been looking at is in our Mexico operation, it's a $30 million CapEx to build that starting in the second half. We're comfortable bringing on a little bit of debt and mostly because it's a quick payback period. You're looking at about a 9-, 10-month payback period, so we can bring on the debt without having to use our existing balance sheet. But we've also been discussing we have some, what I would call, noncore assets within the company that we would consider selling.

So none of them that would affect our production profile. And I should say that we have a royalty on Los Azules that we consider quite core, so we would not sell that as well. But we want to have those in place as a buffer because there's no point growing the market cap of the company if the share price doesn't follow, right? There's no use having 300,000 ounces of production if your share price went nowhere.

Yes. And I think. To wrap our minds around it because there is a lot going on with the gold operations, right? You have Black Fox in Timmins, Tartan in Manitoba. You mentioned Mexico, Phoenix and El Gallo, Gold Bar in Nevada. 50% in Argentina. What is operationally looking at that portfolio, what's the biggest lever you could pull operationally to really kind of get this -- the market impact that you're talking about.

Well, I think if you look at McEwen mining from an outsider, we've always been viewed as having these mines that are small, they're high cost, they're very short live. And I think that was actually a very accurate perception. And I think we've suffered because of an valuation standpoint. If you look at us versus our peers, we trade at a discount relative to the peer group. What we've been trying to do through exploration is transform the assets, exploration as well as bolt-on acquisitions around the existing mines.

And if you look at Timmins, we're going to be putting out a new technical study, feasibility study looking at our Grey Fox operation. So we're going from a very short life of 4 to 5 years to what we think is going to be a decade, into possibly 2 decades of production. If you look at Mexico, that was an asset that nobody was giving value for. We purchased a mill there.

We're going to be beginning construction and we're going to be putting out a new resource base, and we see a situation there where that could run for 20 years when you look at Phase I and Phase II. And if you look at what we're doing in Gold Bar, we have a very short life right now 4 years. We've come out with new resource estimates for the windfall lookout deposit and then we're coming in with a third.

So we're trying to move these 4, we're trying to not only increase production but expand the mine life and hopefully have our costs come down to closer to the industry average. And I think if we're able to execute on all that plan without the share issuances I think that's what you're going to see as the biggest lever is our ability to execute on the plan, and these are not new builds. Like these are either reactivation of existing mines or their extensions of our current operations. So I think inherently, there's a lot of advantages and your ability to execute when you're not doing something from scratch.

And we should say, I mean, you're sitting already globally, I think, almost 6 million -- close to 6 million ounces, right, including inferred measured indicators. So it's not -- it's a pretty good base to be building up on. Can we call up some slides. I think we have -- we're going to get into the gold price. And I want to bring it over to Rob. Yes, but I got a question for you before I -- do you want to set it up?

You can ask questions.

Thank you. I wanted to be a little bit tough on you now. I've been tougher on Ian and Mike. But for you, you have this big run-up in the gold price. MUX has done well, but do you think it's done as well as it should? Do you think that the gold in the portfolio is being reflected in the share price? And if not, what's going on?

It isn't. It isn't. It's been our Achilles heel. It needs consistency. It fluctuates too much and we have to make guidance. And over the past several years, we've had difficulty achieving guidance. Once we achieve that, and we seem to be on that course now, then I think it picks up. This is just looking from last year, our annual meeting how we performed since last year relative to gold, copper silver, the GDX, GDXJ. And we've outperformed all of them.

So that was -- yes, we're up 120% in that period. If you look longer term, back to when we closed the first financing not to fund Los Azules, we're up 600% and again, outperformed all of that. I mean you can look at the Dow, we're 10x what the Dow has done in that period. But that was helped by getting the global players I mentioned earlier on coming into the copper project and suddenly saying, hey, you've got a big copper project there. And the inconsistency of our gold operations in my mind, obscured the value of the copper.

So now the copper is being recognized as we get the gold assets running the way, then we'll go back to outperforming our peers in the gold space, which we -- was our history, coming out of Gold Corp and early on in the life of US Gold. And what could it be worth? There are 3 parts. There's McEwen Copper. There's a royalty portfolio. There's a big royalty sitting in -- on our copper projects. It's 1.25%, it would be a big cash flow generator -- will be, when Mike gets his mine up and running. But this is just looking at -- we were $9.46 last year at the annual meeting. And this year, we're -- last night, we closed at $20. Those are U.S. dollars, real dollars.

And you can see where we see some estimates. And this is just a copper price. And when copper can buy an ounce of gold for 200 pounds, buys an ounce gold, copper is expensive.

Right now, it takes 700 pounds. And the average is 400. So we get down there. I think there's a lot of room on the upside both for copper and gold.

Ian, let's bring it to you. Any other factors that -- when you think about hitting, I mean, everyone that runs a company I think there's some hidden value there that the market is totally missing. What's the hidden value in the market?

I'm a little biased because I was previously running a royalty company. So when I look at McEwen Mining, I always thought that the royalty on Los Azules was not being recognized within the portfolio. And one way of looking at it is it's almost like bringing on a new mine based on today's copper price, that royalty should generate about USD 30 million per year. And initially, there's a 22-year life. Rob has spoken about with the Nuton technology or if we decide to build a mill, you're looking at a 55-year life.

There's additional resources that could see it go much longer. Is it 70 years? Is it 100 years. If you look at the first 22 years of reserves, it's $0.5 billion of free cash flow that would accrue to McEwen Inc. If you look at the 55-year plan for the mine that's close to $1 billion of cash flow. And I bring this up because the most famous royalty in the world was Franco-Nevada's on Goldstrike.

And when they sold to Newmont in the late '90s that had generated approximately $1 billion of cash flow to Franco and that created a $3 billion company. And I don't think anybody is looking at this asset and if you look at Franco and Wheaton right now and the cost that they have to pay to create these large new royalties because everything that's out there that was already created has been purchased. So they have to recreate new royalties and I look at Los Azules and there's very few royalties that you could buy that could run for almost a century. And I think those are very rare in the market space, and I think it will ultimately be worth -- if I had to have one asset personally, I would take the royalty from the company.

It's a strong point. And I like that it's a nice, simple answer. One could argue that the structure of McEwen isn't always simple. We just got into it. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of smaller gold mines, you have one of the biggest copper developments. Is it too -- is the structure too complicated, Rob? Is that also a factor maybe that's complicating the market valuation?

It might be a factor. I don't see it as that. I feel I'm using a similar playbook to what I use to develop Gold Corp. And that was by underappreciated assets and work on getting them operating better, then consolidate them and create a larger organization. I mean we went from $50 million to $8 billion. And I think we have assets that can drive a lot of value. I don't know if it's in there. There's a graph I missed. But I just wanted to show one -- there, this is a sensitivity of Los Azules to the price of copper. A 10% move in the price of copper generates $1 billion change in the net present value.

So we did the feasibility study at $4.35 a pound, and the NPV was $2.94 billion. Today, the copper price was -- I think it was $6.30 or something. So if you go down here and look at $6.09, you've got a 72% gross margin. Our 46% ownership is $3.3 billion based on that net present value. And it's got huge leverage. If the copper price ever doubled from when we did the feasibility, you're looking at $13 billion. This has got incredible leverage.

So you look at it and say, I was blessed having a world-class asset we discovered in Red Lake when we were building Gold Corp. And here, we have another world-class asset. And so you have to look through some of that to see it. But I think it will become much clearer as we do the IPO, and that gets reflected as the gold assets move along and have become more consistent and we have our growth plans, we're realizing that, then the value will grow. And in this industry, you have to be patient. There are setbacks. There's -- it's cyclical. And I found it's time.

The IPO does a lot to simplify the structure, of course. For sure. Okay. We've covered hitting guidance, the execution, all that. I love the highlight on the big royalty. And for Rob and Ian, anything else that you think can really drive the stock price, close this valuation gap in the next -- in the near term for the rest of 2026.

Gold price.

Sensitivity to gold and copper prices, clearly. Anything else?

Yes, I think you're looking at the McEwen Copper IPO should highlight that it's worth a lot more than what we're carrying it on our balance sheet for us. I would say that's one. And I think you're seeing on the gold side, we should have the stock mine producing in the second half of this year. The construction of El Gallo should be happening. And I think that's going to -- you're going to start to see the precious metal operations starting to make its turn. This should be the low.

Okay. Well, that's exciting stuff, then. Michael, let's get you back in the conversation. So let these gold guys talk their gold, let's bring it back to copper and like move into a bit of forecasting. Everything that I see and that we all see is forecasting, when you look at the supply and demand fundamentals going out to 2035, it's pretty bullish case for copper, most now predicting a 30% deficit in copper production by 2035. How are you reading it? What's your forecast look like? What's going on in the copper?

Yes. So I mean, it depends a little bit what we believe. But I mean, generally speaking, all the forecasting houses are foreseeing significant copper shortages to 2035 to 2050. So if you just look at 2035, as if the 5 biggest copper mines in the world would be switched off, yes. And that obviously creates a very interesting price scenario for copper. There is -- I would say there's certain sensitivity in terms of -- on the demand side to price, but they're certainly on the supply side because bringing on a new mine takes 15, 20, in some cases, I mean, El Pachon, another very big mine in the same province -- a project in the same province as us was discovered 60 years ago. It's sitting there for 60 years.

So we have a project that can be developed very, very quickly. It can be brought online very, very quickly. In a time frame where we think there will be significant copper demand. Copper demand driven by urbanization. I mean, yes, there is some, I would say, slowing down in China, but then India is picking up significantly. And on the other hand, what we see is the electrification of vehicles has developed maybe less strong than the automotive industry thought, but it's still the way to go.

And all of a sudden, you have this huge AI boom. And it's not only the AI data centers. If you look into the forecast, people start thinking about, okay, how much cable is in a data center, but it's not about that. A data center in today's world is not calculated in TeraFLOPS in floating operations per second, it's calculated in gigawatts in electricity use. And somebody has to bring the cable with all that electricity and that electricity needs to be generated, whether it's nuclear, whether it's hydro, whether it's wind, whether it's solar, everything needs copper and need significant amount of copper.

So I think that over the next decade, we continue to see a shortage of copper. There are always people that say, well, we have lots of projects, but it's very difficult to permit a project. In some jurisdictions, you think you should be moving fast, but you're not and as Rob said. I mean, our project is permitted, so we can move and we can move in a time when we think there is a significant copper shortage existing in the market.

Excellent. I mean, AI data centers, it's 10x the uses of copper from what I've seeing. And I always think the other demand driver, I'm a Stanley Kubrick fan, the movie Full Metal Jacket, right? Full Metal Jacket refers to the copper that goes around, I need to get more of it, but the copper that goes around the large bullets that are used in military.

So the military applications for copper as well is huge. So we are seeing massive drivers here just as like Grasberg and the big mines in Chile have come down, yes. Yes, very strong stuff. Okay. Let's move on to -- from the far-flung places of the world that produce the copper that we need to Canada. Rob, you're wearing your order of Canada pin, you are someone that people listen to when it comes to talking about Canada.

So what are your feelings about how the Canadian government is certainly starting to say the right things about mine development and the importance of critical minerals, are you a happy camper as a Canadian that is one of our great mine builders in this country? What's your read, Canadian government, Canadian policy for the industry?

I'm not a happy camper. If you look at our country, we have so much potential. And yet our biggest exports right now, our talented youth and successful individuals. And you have to ask the question, why? Why are we criticizing pension funds for investing outside the country? Shouldn't we be asking why is it more attractive to invest outside the country than our own country when we have all this potential.

What do we have to change? And I listened to our Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, and I thought he was going to talk about all the good things that were going to happen. In the first 10 minutes, he had his elbows out like this. so we're just going to go into the boards with the Americans. And I said, come on, you got to reconcile with this. And I look at it and go, in 1975, on a very appropriate day, April Fool's Day, our government moved from metric, from Imperial measure to metric, with the express purpose of expanding our export markets because more people on metric than Imperial measure.

So here we are, 56 years later and the same government party is saying, we've got to go around and get away from our dependence on the U.S. It only takes 75% of our exports, and I'm going, come on, the first rule in Investor Relations, customer is always right. You don't run down to Washington and punch that customer in the nose and expect them to do nothing. What you go down there and say, what could we improve? How do we reconcile the relationship that's so important to this country rather than fighting and saying -- you just don't do that.

The words are there. We're a superpower. We're an energy superpower, we're a natural resource superpower. Where are the pipelines? Where are they going east? Where are they going West? Where are they going north? Where are the permits being given? Have we got rid of the regulations to the degree that speeds up investment in this country? Because that's what we need. We need more exports. We need more exports to get the Canadian dollar stronger so that everything we're bringing in keeps our cost of living lower, but they're not addressing that, and they need to in my mind.

And we were talking earlier, you mentioned gold is now Canada's second biggest export. It should deserve a little more credit from the government, you would think, is it?

Absolutely. I mean it's right behind oil. And those are the 2 things. They didn't like mining, the last government, and they didn't like oil and gas. And the fact is the world doesn't work without oil and gas. And mining is a big -- there's a big economic multiplier in society. There is secondary and tertiary industries. It's high-paying jobs. It's not a factory that can be closed, the deposit might run out, but you can't take that deposit and take it to a different country.

Wonderful. Okay. I do want to get to investor questions, we have a lot here. But before I do, while I still have Rob on a hot seat, it's rare that you get this opportunity. One more for you, Rob. What is your most expensive lesson that you've learned in your career? And if you could bring it into applications to the current situation, that would be, I think, useful to the audience.

It's going to take a while. When I was 10 and 11, my father who was in the investment industry had me charting stocks. So when I was 12, I made my first investment and it was a glorious investment in the space of a couple of years, the stock -- I invested $200. I'd done a job and my dad said, what are you going to do with that? Sir, I'm going to put it in the bank. No, you should put it in the market.

Okay. So in the course of 2 years, the stock I bought split 2 for 1 and then split 3 for 1, and that $200 became $1,800. And I thought, wow, this is how the stock market works. Well, I just put some more money in there and hey, it's not supposed to become 1/10 of what I put in. So it's the cyclical nature of the market. And mining is a very cyclical part of the market, and you want to watch when you come in and go out.

So one was a cautionary tale about the market. The other would be, have you hired the right people because you can get way off track if the wrong people are sitting in a job that you can't move ahead. And I think the industry is very resistant to technology, and we have to embrace it. I don't know if anyone saw the cover of The Economists that just came out this week and had a picture of a solitary soldier standing and above whom was a swarm of drones.

And I looked at that and said, this is what AI is going to do to business if we don't get on top of it, it's just going to come in so fast and overpowering businesses that do not embrace it and understand its power, are going to be decimated. It's just -- it's a very powerful tool. And I mean it's addictive. It keeps asking you what you want. And it keeps -- it's going into the world and all the knowledge in the world with all its biases. But you can pull information out that you can plan.

And as you hear stories and say there's going to be a single person that creates a $1 trillion company using AI. Maybe that's fantasy, maybe that's like the $5,000 goal I called in 2010. But it's going to happen.

If you stick to it long enough, it will happen. But the challenge being for business leaders, how do we get our employees to embrace something that they feel threatens their position sometimes. I think that's a challenge we're all trying to grapple with. But if they don't, we're going to get left behind. Great stuff. Really thankful for that. Rob, Ian and Michael. Now I'm going to come into the shareholders' questions and see, maybe they're even tougher. I don't know. Let's see what we got.

Tara, thank you for providing these. I think these were submitted in the -- today and yesterday, I think over the course of the last few days. First one here comes, we're going to bring this one to Ian, I think, from the looks of this. Production has repeatedly missed -- guys, it's a tough one, sorry, Ian. Production has repeatedly missed guidance in recent years, what specific operational management changes have been implemented to ensure the 2026 guidance is going to be met rather than adjusted downward again? We have covered this, but let's hammer it home.

I will go through it fairly quickly then. One of the things, if we look at it from our guidance perspective, we did have to downgrade guidance last year in terms of production and increase the cost. And no investor wants to see you do that twice. So one of the things is when we're forecasting, I think you've seen like the teams at site have been more conservative in terms of the numbers that they're projecting. So that's one.

Two, we've added a fair bit of training to both of our sites in Timmins and Nevada trying to say how can we be more efficient to ensure that we can execute on the numbers that we're actually delivering. And then third is trying to figure out what has gone wrong. Is there a specific reason? Can we get on top of it? Is it a fatal flaw? Is it something that we've just misjudged. And so we're trying to tackle it on a few fronts to ensure that we don't disappoint the shareholders because if we can't execute on a daily basis, which confidence are you going to have -- you can build these gold mines and then build a copper mine. So you have to instill that confidence from the day-to-day operations to the large build.

Okay. Well handled. So let's stay with you because you did handle that one well because there's another one for you. I'll try and read it in the tone that I think that it was written in. If the gold price was to fall back to $3,000 per ounce. What's the plan?

Close up shop. No, just kidding. No, I think, first of all, stock is halfway built. So that's going to be completed with the existing treasury. El Gallo is a very small CapEx project. If gold was to fall back then you have to start looking at where are the highest return projects in the company, where are the CapEx where it's manageable. We're not looking to build every mine at the same time.

So we're doing this in a phased approach where if the gold price was to pull back, we're not going to just go ahead, issue the shares and there's an old Warren Buffett quote, right? You don't ask a barber if you need a haircut. You don't ask an engineer if you need to build a mine because usually the answer is yes.

And I apologize to our engineering team that is here. But it's one of the things where you have to take a bit of a pragmatic approach and say, okay, well, is something better to be deferred rather than just being pushed ahead. But we are moving in phases. I think that if that was to fall back, we wouldn't just issue a bunch of shares to see the growth.

Right. Because their follow-up was, would you go ahead and dilute the shares. So there you go, very proactive answer to that. Next one. S&P 500 Gold years ago -- now this one's for Rob, I think he's speaking to Rob on this. Years ago, Rob, you spoke about building McEwen into a company that could one day qualify for inclusion in the S&P 500. Is that still part of your long-term vision? And what would need to happen between now and then to make that a realistic outcome?

It's still a goal. And just recently, we were -- I guess, last week, we saw that we were put on the preliminary list to be included in the Russell 2000 Index. So that's preliminary. And on the 26th of this month, we'll know if we're on it. So that's marching.

That's a step in that direction now.

A step in that direction. With the IPO, with the growth in our gold development projects, we're moving much closer to that.

Okay.

So the goal remains there.

Okay. There you go. And marching right along. If McEwen Copper ultimately proceeds with an IPO, how are you thinking about participation by existing shareholders? That's a good one.

We welcome them. They're very welcome. If they want. They can be on the President's list to be insured they're in there.

Okay. Okay. Now next one, would accredited investors have an opportunity to participate directly in the offering?

Same question.

Same thing. Yes, same answer.

Same answer.

Slightly different question, same answer. Which milestones should investors watch over the next 12 months to gauge whether the strategy is on track? For Ian or for Rob.

IPO, the construction, there's a pre-feasibility study coming out later this week for Grey Fox. We're building -- there's a ramp going down up at stock. We're looking -- we've -- as Ian said earlier on, we bought a couple of companies, exploration companies that are adjacent to our existing operations where we feel as we develop those, it will extend the life of our operations. There are a couple of wildcat areas where we're exploring.

We have a property sitting in Nevada that's just below Cortez Hills, which is Nevada Gold's large property. It's never really been tested to depth. It's got the same structure and rock. So we're putting some holes down there. I mean if there's 50 million ounces sitting right next door to us, if you clip a corner of that, that would be exciting. So there's some speculative aspects of which could accelerate it.

That's some fun stuff. So agreed to lead, those will make some great stories for the Northern Miner. So let's hope you hit something there. How much ownership does McEwen Inc. ultimately expect to retain in Los Azules?

Unchanged if we get $100 a share.

Right. We should say so, McEwen owns 46% of McEwen Copper, so that's the current.

Yes. It's going to depend on the price of the IPO.

Yes. Okay. So that is to be determined in some ways. What are the biggest execution risks to achieving 2030 production targets? So that comes back to you, Ian.

First of all, the gold price. If the gold price falls below $4,000, the execution becomes less and less likely. I should say you pull back on some of that growth. And I think the second thing is you're going to be putting out CapEx numbers. And can you meet that? The industry rarely comes at CapEx below what they have stated. So if you're going to see a lot of inflation, if we're wrong in our estimates, I think that's a significant risk. The operations can deliver the cash flow, but if you missed on your spending, and you're probably in jeopardy as well.

Right. Right. You got to watch both sides of it. If we took the initial reported all-in sustaining costs of the different mines and compare the percentage change in ensuing years, wrap your heads around this, how would it compare to the change in price of underlying metals? Wow, I don't know, Ian, you want to take a stab?

Yes, I would. So obviously, cost and industry are going up for every company. Where we're seeing some relief is at our San Jose mine. They've changed the mining method. They've increased the mill so they're able to gain economies of scale that we've actually seen the cost at San Jose year-over-year decline. And we have seen the cost of our other operations go up.

When you blend them together, our costs have actually been flat year-over-year for the first quarter. We've seen gold prices have gone up by 70%, we've produced a little bit more gold this year than what we did last year. So you see margins expand by 70% because of the factor of the gold price.

Overall, the costs have stayed the same. But that will be an ongoing challenge going forward is keeping on those costs because it's something that people always assume that if the costs are going up, everyone who's running a mine must be incompetent, right, how do costs go up, people don't realize a lot of it is currency. You report in U.S. dollars, but if you're operating in Canadian dollars or in Mexican pesos, if those currencies are strengthening in value relative to the U.S. dollar, even if nothing has changed your cost structure will go up when you report back in U.S. dollars.

And just like on the reverse side, when the gold price was going down in 2016, everybody who's running a major mining company said, well, we're getting our cost down because the Canadian dollar was weakening relative to the U.S. dollar but everyone makes it sound like they're the superstar and there's something that they're doing operationally when a lot of it is currency driven.

Yes, it cuts both ways. That's a great point to make. And then we do have the little issue of a certain war in Iran and an oil prices and input costs there. So imagine that factors in. Do we -- I believe there was still the opportunity for other questions to come in. Tara or Casper, do we have -- we're okay because that would be the last one that was submitted.

Okay. So we're good. Please join me in thanking our esteemed panel here for your forthright straightforward answer. Much appreciate it, gentlemen.

Thank you, Anthony.

Thank you so much.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to McEwen's First Quarter 2026 Operating and Financial Results Conference Call.

Present from the company today are Rob McEwen, Chairman and Chief Owner; Ian Ball, Executive Vice Chairman; William Shaver, Chief Operating Officer; Perry Ing, Chief Financial Officer; Jeff Chan, Vice President, Finance; Stefan Spears, Vice President, Corporate Development; Kevin Bromfield, Project Director, Grey Fox; Michael Meding, Managing Director of McEwen Copper; Carmen Diges, General Counsel and Secretary.

[Operator Instructions]

I will now turn the call over to Mr. Rob McEwen, Chief Owner. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for McEwen Inc.'s first quarter 2026 results conference call.

Our vision is clear and ambitious. McEwen Inc. offers investors a unique and powerful combination, direct exposure to growing gold and silver production, proven hard money assets that have served as stores of value for millennia, along with large optionality to copper, a foundation metal of modern civilization, essential for electrification, renewable energy, electric vehicles, data centers and the infrastructure of the future. We are scaling the company to 250,000 to 300,000 gold equivalent ounces GEOs per year by 2030, while maintaining a strong balance sheet.

We just released our Q1 results, and I'm very pleased to report that we delivered a strong quarter. We generated net income of $33.4 million or $0.56 per share. This compares to a net loss of $6.3 million or $0.12 a share in the same period last year. This is a significant turnaround and reflects our improving operational performance, higher gold and silver prices and a more disciplined execution. We are advancing our multi-asset growth strategy with internal funding positioning the company to nearly double production while minimizing dilution.

Just like to talk about our operational and project highlights in Canada, at our Fox Complex in Timmins, Ontario, we're making good progress. And the Stock Mine, underground development remained on budget in Q1. Initial production is expected in late '26 and commercial production starting next year. Grey Fox, we're finalizing a pre-feasibility study expected in the next coming months. And so combined, Stock and Grey Fox are targeted to deliver 75,000 to 90,000 gold equivalent ounces annually by 2030. We are also advancing the Tartan mine project in Manitoba with an updated resource of 309,000 indicated ounces and 303,000 inferred gold ounces. We're targeting initial production of 30,000 ounces per year with the potential to reach 45,000 to 55,000 ounces per annum.

Overall, in Canada, we expect production to grow from 16,000 to 19,000 ounces this year to 105,000 stretching to 120,000 by 2030. At Gold Bar in Nevada, operational optimization and exploration success are driving increased outputs and extended mine life with gold production expected to reach 90,000 to 100,000 ounces by 2030. And in Mexico at El Gallo, ongoing improvements, we expect to boost production up to 20,000 ounces again by 2030. Together, Canada is scaling to 105,000 to 120,000 GEOs plus continued growth at Gold Bar, El Gallo and our Argentina assets, San Juan positions us to achieve our company-wide target of 250,000 to 300,000 gold equivalent ounces by 2030.

I'd like to talk about our investment in McEwen Copper. As shareholders, we benefit from our 46.3% interest in McEwen Copper. Based on the most recent financing of McEwen Copper, this stake is valued at approximately $456 million or roughly USD 7.67 per McEwen Inc. share. Los Azules is on track to become one of the world's first regenerative copper mines and carbon neutral by 2038. Coming into production, we're looking at 2030. It's delivering significant embedded value and upside to McEwen Inc.

Gold prices remain supportive. Our operations are cash flow positive, and we have a strong project pipeline. Our strategy is straightforward, execute development projects safely and on budget, aggressively explore to grow resources and reserves, self-fund growth to protect shareholder value, deliver consistent production increases and rising cash flow.

I'd like now to turn the conversation over to Perry, our CFO. And before that, I'd just like to thank the entire McEwen Inc. team for their work this year. We're excited about what lies ahead and remain committed to disciplined growth and long-term value creation. Perry?

Good morning. Thank you, Rob. So I think I'll just touch on a few highlights from our first quarter earnings and then talk a bit about the financing of the growth plans that Rob just outlined for us. So starting with the quarter, as Rob said, we had a great quarter. We earned $0.56 a share basic and $0.47 a share fully diluted. Our revenues from our 100% owned operations more than doubled from a year ago, given high gold and silver prices. We also noted the benefits in this quarter of the capitalization of our equity recorded investment in McEwen Copper. So having published a feasibility study last year, we now capitalize those costs on a U.S. GAAP reporting basis. So we only record a small net loss compared to having to expense our share of all of their exploration costs in the past.

I'll note that we did receive an $8.8 million dividend during the quarter from our MSC mine in -- from Minera Santa Cruz from the San Jose Mine in Argentina. We expect on the balance of the year to receive an additional $30 million to $40 million in dividends given strong silver and gold prices.

I'll note our cash increased during the quarter despite our continued spend to complete the stock ramp. Our cash balance at the end of the first quarter was $57 million versus $51 million at the beginning of the year. And I'll note that our cash cost and all-in sustaining cost guidance, we believe we're well on track to meet our full year targets as we expect to increase ounce production for the balance of the year on a quarterly basis. And as well, we expect the costs -- our development costs at the Froome mine to decrease as we finish ramp development towards the end of mine life, which contributed this quarter about $800 to the all-in sustaining cost at the Fox Complex.

So just taking a look and kind of expanding on Rob's point in terms of how we're going to build our operations to 250,000 to 300,000 ounces from our current basis. So in terms of projects we have on the go right now for 2026, we see total project CapEx this year of approximately $50 million remaining to be spent from Q2 to Q4. We have approximately $35 million remaining for the Stock mine to complete development and other related costs there. And we expect in the second half of this year to begin construction on Mexico. For El Gallo, we are currently budgeting about $15 million. So all of that will be funded by our existing cash flows as well as the dividends we expect to receive from the San Jose mine.

Looking forward to next year, 2027, we see the CapEx profile approximately double to about $100 million as we finish Mexico as well as begin work on the Grey Fox as well as expansion projects in Nevada. We expect free cash flow from our operations as well as dividends from MSC to exceed $200 million at current gold prices. So we do have a significant buffer even at lower gold prices, say, to the $4,000 level at which we can still sufficiently fund from -- easily from free cash flow. In 2028 and 2029, we see those costs subject to permitting time lines increasing to approximately $150 million. But at the same time, we'll have the benefit of production from Mexico as well as increased production from the Fox Complex, providing additional cash flow of over $250 million annually, which will provide more than sufficient cash flow to achieve the growth stated.

So with that, I think that provides kind of a high-level overview of how we can achieve this growth without additional dilution to our shareholders.

And with that, I'll turn the presentation to Michael Meding in Argentina.

Thank you, Perry. Good morning, everybody. I will keep my remarks focused on Los Azules and specifically on the question that matters most to the project of the scale. How we finance the path from where we are today through construction?

A quick word on Q1 execution before I turn to financing. Q1 was about putting the building blocks for FID, the final investment decision stage in place. Our integrated owners team is up and running with Samuel Engineering, an engineering firm that has supported us over the last 4.5 years very successfully to PE feasibility and now their personnel embedded alongside McEwen Copper staff. Jim Solomonson, who served as Study Director from the feasibility study has stepped in as Project Director. Jim brings with him a 45 years of experience in mining, including significant roles building large-scale multibillion-dollar mining projects like Cerro Blanco, Galarza, Cefa, Loreto and Florence. Together with more than 10 years of mine operating experience, including Vice President role in New York Mining Corporation. Detailed engineering is advancing across every major work stream, drilling access roads, heat leach pad, stockpiles, major equipment packages, trade-off studies and our EPC and partner selection process.

On the regulatory side, the RIGI, the large infrastructure investment incentive regime in Argentina, the VAT section was fully operational during Q1 and is already delivering a meaningful cash flow benefit. We also had a productive international finance cooperation part of the worldwide site visit with our conversation advancing on the lineage to the IFC, the International Finance Corporation. The technical and regulatory foundation for FID are in place.

Now towards financing. The total financing cost from FID to full operation is approximately $4 billion. That number gives you a scale of what we are building. To-date, we have raised over $450 million in private financing between 2021 and 2025. The capital came from a strong group of McEwen, Rio Tinto, Stellantis, McEwen Inc. and others. Together with McEwen Inc.'s early exploration investments, this funding carried the project to PEA feasibility study and into the detailed engineering phase. Our shareholders have already invested substantially behind the conviction in this project.

The next step is bridging to FID. In January 2026, we established a $240 million secured loan facility structured with an according feature, so additional participants can join. Rob McEwen, McEwen Inc. and Will Shaver have committed approximately 1/4 of the facility and about 3/4 remains open, and we are having several conversations with potential investors to close the remaining part. The facility comfortably covers our pre-FID budget of about $197 million with a cash need there that we have of approximately $161 million. In short, this funding takes us cleanly through to FID. Post-FID, the construction ramp-up package is approximately $4 billion. We are working with a target capital structure of 40% equity and 60% debt. We see that as a realistic and bankable structure for a project of this scale in Argentina.

On the debt side, we are in the final stages of appointing debt financing leads, primarily focused on export credit agency financing alongside other debt financing components. The IFC has expressed interest in serving as arranging financing, and we are progressing the steps required to formalize the growth. We expect the debt side to be anchored by an ECA-backed senior tranche complemented by traditional project finance.

On the equity side, we are in active conversations with several potential strategic partners. Our preference is to bring in a senior mining partner together with an industrial or trading counterparty for offtake alignment and to round out this contract with other equity participants. These discussions are advancing well. Putting it together, the technical work is on plan, the regulatory framework is delivering, the bridge to FID is in place and partially subscribed and the FID financing is taking shape with high-quality counterparties on both sides of the capital structure.

Our objective is to reach final investment decision by the year-end of 2026 with construction commencing in early 2027, obviously, subject to project financing and customary approvals. We are advancing well toward FID. Thank you so much. And now I hand it back over to you, Rob.

Thank you, Mike. We're going to move to Ian Ball to talk about one aspect of Los Azules, another value we have there.

Yes. Thank you, Rob. Yes, one of the assets inside McEwen Mining, which I think is often overlooked is the 1.25% royalty that we have on the asset. And in the quarter release we put out yesterday, we wanted to highlight some of the cash flow possibilities there once Los Azules is in production. If you look at the royalty based on the spot price of copper, you're looking at total cash flows well in excess of USD 0.5 billion, and that's based on the 22-year mine life that was outlined. There's also a scenario using the Nuton technology that would add an additional 33 years of mine life on top of the 22, getting you to 55 years of life that we don't factor into that $0.5 billion. And then there's resources beyond that.

We've also excluded all the gold and silver, because currently there's no plans to extract that, but it is an additional possible revenue stream. We bring these numbers up because if you look at the biggest royalty company in the world was Franco-Nevada, based on the Goldstrike royalty. If you look at the revenue they generated from Goldstrike from 1985 to when they were acquired by Newmont, it was approximately $1 billion of cash flow. If you look at Los Azules, we have a profile that, although it would be over a longer period of time, could generate something similar. When you look at the world today, there's not many world-class royalties available. If you look at Franco and Wheaton River and the price they're paying to acquire these royalties, the valuations of these have been going up. We want to highlight this because we do think it's going to be a very meaningful asset for the company going forward.

I also want to touch upon our exploration as we put out results at all of our sites. I just want to highlight a few items for you. We put out a new resource for our Windfall deposit in Nevada. So if you look at reserves resources right now at the Gold Bar Mine Complex, we're about 1 million and a quarter ounces now with one more resource to come out from Trinity Ridge. We think that number is going to go up. We put out some good exploration holes today at Windfall. With the recent acquisition of Golden Lake, we think that deposit is going to continue to grow in size. That's going to be important because we have a run rate of about 100,000 ounces per year we're going to have to be able to sustain, and we think the exploration is going to be able to achieve that. We're also looking to drill south of Barrick's Fourmile and Goldrush discovery. That's a 15 million ounce deposit, probably one of the most exciting discoveries out there today where we have the fault, the Cortez fault that goes directly south of that, so we're looking to drill there for lower plate rock.

We have put out some good results at Grey Fox, approximately 90 meters below, where we're going to be looking at a pre-feasibility study for mining, showing that once we put the infrastructure in place, there's additional high grade that we think we can access that will be well in excess of what we're putting in our pre-feas.

And I just want to touch upon just 2 things quickly. At Tartan, we put out a number of drill results today. I think what's interesting at Tartan, we're seeing now 4 or 5 drill holes at depth that are somewhere between 15 and 50 meters wide at 4 to 5 grams per ton. It's starting at approximately 1,000 meters depth. And if those drill results could continue and we're able to find some strike length to that, we go from being a small operation to something potentially of a much larger size. We've hit on all 5 holes that we put down at depth, and we are drilling down there currently. So we have pretty meaningful expectations of what could come there.

Lastly, I just want to update on future resources. We have our Stroud deposit, which is part of the Grey Fox Complex or the Fox Complex. An initial resource is coming out there with the pre-feasibility study. We're going to be putting out an updated resource for El Gallo, which I think is going to show a resource base there that would support a mill for a considerable period of time. We have our Trinity Ridge resource coming out in early 2027, which will support the Gold Bar Complex. Lastly, although a non-core asset, we're going to be putting out a resource on our Buffalo Ankerite deposit also in Timmins. Previously, that resource was approximately 1 million ounces at a lower gold price and we're going to be updating that just to highlight some of the value that has currently not been updated in quite some time.

So based on that, I will turn the call back over to Rob.

Thank you, Ian. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Perry. Just before moving into Q&A, I always like -- since I started in the gold industry, I always like looking at other assets and saying, what's the gold equivalent And it changes. So looking at Los Azules, just to give you a sense of its size, and Ian was talking a little bit about how Franco-Nevada was formed on the back of Goldstrike.

Our Los Azules property has estimated resources of 35.7 billion pounds of copper. If you take the current gold price, which is right now about $4,753 an ounce and the copper price right now at $6.02, you end up there's 790 pounds of copper equivalent to 1 ounce, the value of 1 ounce of gold. You divide that into the 35.7 billion pounds, you're looking at the equivalent of a 45 million ounce gold deposit. And based on the feasibility study of cash and all-in sustaining, you would get numbers of below $1,400 cash cost and below $1,700 all-in sustaining, and you'd be producing at least in the first 5 years, in excess of 500,000 ounces a year. That in anyone's book is a terrific gold asset. But we're looking at a long-life asset here. And I just wanted to point that out that we're very fortunate to own, control a world-class copper asset.

I'd now like to open the session to questions and answers.

Your first question comes from the line of Jake Sekelsky from Alliance Global Partners.

So starting with the stock, how should we be thinking about the ramp-up there as we head into the second half of the year? Do you have a throughput target in mind that you'd like to be at by, let's say, the first quarter next year?

Okay. I'll ask Will to answer that question.

Yes, what we see is that the transition from the Froome mine will continue until the end of the year and the ramp-up of the Stock East mine will start relatively early in the second half of the year and hopefully, by the end of the year, be ramped up to its full production. So we see the continuity of the gold production to be relatively the same in 2027. And I think the important aspects of that are the kind of the optionality that we have with regard to the ongoing development at Froome, which has performed very, very well in the first quarter of this year, and we see that continuing to the end of this year at relatively the same gold production as we had in the first quarter. So that will make that transition kind of very smooth. And I think that's the critical part of the whole story with the Fox Complex. Did that answer the question?

It does. That's helpful. And then just switching gears to Tartan. I mean, you mentioned the possibility of expanding capacity there. I'm just curious, what does the permitting process look like for that, and wouldn't the expansion happen prior to a restart decision or would that come after?

Kevin?

Kevin Brownfield here. We're currently embarking upon a notice of alteration for permits so that we can do some site cleanup and continue with our activities. We've got a lot of excitement coming out of the drills there. And so we're currently evaluating the path forward. Does it consist of an advanced X program and also challenging aspects of the validity of past permits. And so we're understanding that landscape right now and making sure that we have the baseline data to support a decision that we're going to be making as the exploration activities go on.

Do you want to add to that?

I do want to add a little bit to that. So the reason why we're looking at it from the 500 tonnes per day and then looking to expand to the 1,000 is that we do believe that we can utilize the existing 500 tonne per day permit that was put in place in the mid-80s. So we want to get the mine up and running at that run rate. And then if we were to expand to 1,000 tonnes per day, that might require a major alteration to the permit, which obviously had more time inherited to it. So we want to be able to phase it to open the 500 to the 1,000, but we use the existing permit, we think we can get there a lot faster than trying to expand it all in one go.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Kozak from Cantor Fitzgerald.

A few questions from me, if I could. First, I think the CapEx for El Gallo Phase 1 is in the MD&A. I think it's at $25 million, if I'm right on that. My question is, what is the expected CapEx on Phase 2? Have you refreshed that recently at all? I know it will be over a longer time period, but I was just curious what that number might be.

Yes. So we've been looking at that as well. It's a number that's well into the future. Right now, we have a plan that 10 years into the future, but we're doing approximately $40 million is what we've been looking at, and that would be consisting of a haul road connecting the 2 sites from El Gallo to the mill, converting it from a CIL to a Merrill-Crowe and also switching parts of the plant from gold to silver. So right now, that's kind of what we're thinking. But we can move that ahead if we wanted to or we can keep it where it is. But the $40 million is generally what we've been thinking about.

So it's not in the hundreds of -- it's a manageable number. That's kind of what I was getting at.

We do believe it's a very manageable number.

And then second, I just noticed quarter-over-quarter that the cash is really starting to build up in the San Jose JV. And I got your guidance for dividends from the JV this year, $40 million to $50 million on the year, $30 million or $40 million remaining. My question is based on your discussions with your partner there, can I assume that run rate of dividends will continue in '27 and '28 if we were to hold gold and silver prices around these levels, or have you not had those discussions yet.

Mike, it's Perry. We are having ongoing discussions. So I think the first thing is satisfaction of the reclamation obligations, which will take a significant portion of kind of the existing cash balance and kind of move that to sort of a restricted cash balance, if you call it that. But I would say, on balance, we can expect similar levels going into '27-'28. If you just look at kind of the proven and probable reserves, they only extend into '27. But given where silver and gold prices are, we think this mine can go into 2029 and hopefully beyond. So I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, Mike.

Okay. And then third, if I can. And Michael, I appreciate all the detail you provided on the funding strategy for Los Azules, the pre-FID bridge loan, the export credit agencies, OEMs on the debt side, et cetera. And you spent a bit of time talking about a new potential large cap partner on the equity side, if I heard that right. What I didn't hear and maybe I missed it, was mention of the potential IPO of the copper subsidiary. Is that less likely of an outcome now or how should I think about that or has nothing changed?

Nothing has changed. Go ahead, Mike.

No, nothing has changed, as Rob said. I mean, we are going full steam ahead with the separation of everything required to be able to do the IPO in the second half of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Hoy from Canaccord Genuity.

So for me, I'd just like to touch on Gold Bar. There's a lot of pieces coming together there with the acquisitions you've done. We're looking at initial resource estimates for Windfall and Trinity Ridge later this year, if I recall correctly. Can we expect some sort of study that provides visibility on how that's all going to come together or could you provide an update on your thinking on how those different pieces come together at that complex and ultimately, what are the production rate could end up being there?

We see the permitting of that project taking perhaps a couple of years. From that perspective, what we're trying to do at the present time is to do the drilling that's required to bring those resources up to the proper status in terms of being able to put together a mine plan and then, you know, creating the study, if you like, of how we're going to approach that. But basically, the strategy that we have at this point is to create a heap leaching operation that really would only be a leach pad with the carbon recovery of the gold and then bringing that carbon to our present day plant out at the Gold Bar operation for recovery of the gold. So that would keep the capital cost relatively low in terms of, you know, a significant leach pad that's capable of holding ore for couple of years is somewhere in the $10 million to $15 million range. So that is kind of the initial strategy.

There is a lot of potential gold to understand where it is in those properties. I guess, we're proceeding with the permitting, and that permitting, as you know, permitting in the U.S. has schedules that are not definitive, but we see that as building optionality in the whole organization, and we're also, on the drilling that we're doing at Gold Bar itself, we see that as extending so that we won't have a gap in between those two. It all good at this point. While we're seeing that production coming out of Gold Bar, which I suppose was your original question, that's carrying on at the rate that we're -- at the level that we're at this point.

Your next question comes from the line of John Tumazos from John Tumazos Very Independent Research.

Could you review the human resources development as you've added assets in the past year who are some of the key managers or technical people that came on board or stayed on board as you consolidated assets in Central Nevada and consolidated assets in Manitoba or anywhere else in Canada. Could you elaborate on the challenge of coordinating several small or medium-sized properties in Canada and Nevada and Western Mexico, assuming that McEwen Copper and the Rothschild partnership manages themselves. And just give us confidence as to the human resources development as you grow and they're a little more complicated.

Well, I'll ask Kevin to speak to that point. He brought in to deal with the Grey Fox expansion and is overseeing the Tartan development. Kevin?

You know, competing for talent in the current mining market is a challenge. One of the things I guess one of the people added would be myself. I'm located in Sudbury. We're in the process of building a Sudbury projects team that's going to support Canadian projects and beyond, so we're a growing group. We've also added government relations support. We've added to our human resources capabilities here at headquarters in Toronto. We are putting some pieces into place, and so far we've been able to assemble what I think is a very good team. And I would say that the growth needs to be ongoing as we get toward execution as we ramp up our capital spends.

I might just add that we've also added resources in terms of our permitting group, and our technical group, overseeing all of the projects. We've been fortunate enough to bring on people like Kevin. Kevin and I have a history, having worked together for about 10 years. I think we're building a foundation of a really good group, going into the future. We see Northern Manitoba as being an opportunity in part because around Flin Flon, there's a big mine that has closed there, but there's still a significant number of mining people who live there and are traveling now to work at other places, so they'll come back home. It won't be easy, but I think we have the rudiments of a really good team that we're building and that's the fundamental part of it at this stage.

John, I'd say we've been centralizing a number of the skills such as procurement, IT, looking at how do we incorporate more of that technology into our future operations and AI as well.

And it's impressive that you manage costs while you're metamorphosizing the organization.

Your next question comes from a line of [indiscernible].

The McEwen Copper IPO has been on the roadmap for a while. Given that the feasibility study is done, the RIGI approval is secured, and the FID is targeted for year-end, the de-risking work appears largely complete. My question is, has a bank been mandated for the IPO? And if so, which exchange is being targeted? If a bank has not yet been mandated, what is the specific remaining gate item before that happens? Is it the FID itself, a copper price threshold, or something else? And what should investors treat as the single most important milestone to watch between now and year-end that tells us whether the IPO is on track or slipping?

We haven't chosen a banker. We've had discussions with many. And in terms of listing, we're still debating that. It appears that you can get to market faster by doing a Canadian listing. It's considered faster and cheaper than doing a listing in America. Although, my preference is to go to America first, just because of the size of the market, and the pricing tension that would probably appear in the IPO. Those two have to be decided. In terms of catalyst, it's completing the financing for funding FID and we're getting close to having that funded. So I guess we announce that and then moving it on to getting all the engineering done to start construction in 2027. Did that cover off your question?

Yes.

And there are no further questions at this time. Mr. Rob McEwen, I turn the call back over to you.

That's very nice of you, operator. I'd just like to close by saying we're excited about what lies ahead and committed to pushing the company forward and building long-term value.

This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to McEwen's Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2025 Operating and Financial Results Conference Call. Present from the company today are Rob McEwen, Chairman and Chief Owner; Ian Ball, Executive Vice Chairman; William Shaver, Chief Operating Officer; Perry Ing, Chief Financial Officer; Jeff Chan, Vice President, Finance; Stefan Spears, Vice President, Corporate Development. Michael Medin, Managing Director of McEwen Copper; and Carmen Diaz, General Counsel and Secretary. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Mr. Rob McEwen, Chief Owner. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome, fellow shareowners and interested investors. 2025 was a very momentous year for us for MX 1 that I believe will be the first of many to follow. The higher gold, silver and copper prices certainly contributed to giving us a big reason to smile, but there are many more reasons for us to continue to smile. Beyond the excitement of the higher prices, our vision of the future is accelerating towards becoming a reality. Our focus on exploration has been adding resources that will extend lives of our mines.

Our focus on expanding our existing operations plus several acquisitions has created the opportunity for us to significantly increase more than double our precious metal production by 2030 and our focus on driving the Keen Copper's large Losesules copper project towards production has been extremely successful. So far, our efforts have attracted global corporations as shareholders and completed extensive work to produce a feasibility study, which we published last October. That outlined an economically robust, large, long life, low production cost per pound, environmentally sensitive model for the future.

Compared to a conventional copper in comparable size, LasAzules is planned to have much lower water constrain, energy needs, carbon emissions and it will have no tailings and be utilizing 100% renewable energy. It is designed to not only be profitable, but to improve the general public's impression and acceptance of mining. We are planning to take the Q public later this year. should the copper price remain around current price levels.

At the time of going public, we expect this world-class deposit with strong economics that it will attract a much higher price than the last private placement at $30 a share, and that will be reflected in a higher value of McEwen Mining's shareholdings.

I'd now like to ask Ian Ball to speak about the big questions that come out about our growth.

When you look at the press release that we put out this morning, the thing that becomes apparent is as a shareholder, I guess what I would be asking is how are you going to finance this growth because there's no point of growing, if all you're going to be doing is diluting your shareholders in the process. And when I rejoined the company back in September and my ownership from Canadian Gold has moved into McEwen's mining, you want to see the share price grow. And that was the only reason for coming back to the company. So I want to walk you through our plans on how we're going to double production and do so in a way that maintains your ownership.

First, the one thing you have to look for is that today's Canadian Gold prices, we are generating significantly more cash flow. We received our first dividend from the San Jose mine in quite some time. That's 1 due to metal prices, but also them having covered off a number of closure obligations, which is now freeing up a lot of operating cash flow to be paid out as a dividend. Second is we're finishing up our development at stock we're going to be getting cash flow coming out of Mexico as well. So when you combine that with our current operations, our internal cash flow will be ever increasing, which will go a long way to developing our next 2 projects, which are Grey Fox, which we're looking at as an underground operation that would feed our existing stock mill.

And then looking at our Gold Bar operation, where we're essentially continuing on what we're doing there today, which is or prestripping and expanding the leach pad. We do believe that these projects are scaled in such a way that we can finance them. We're hoping mostly internally. But if gold and silver prices were not to maintain these levels, it would not represent excess dilution to our shareholders. So we're very mindful of the cost of capital? And how does this translate into a per share value over the next 5 years? -- question is how realistic are these goals. And one thing to point out is everything that we're looking at is either at an existing mine site or rehabbing a mine site here within a precious metal basis. So we do think these are projects which are quite achievable with the time frames that we have set out today in the press release.

Thank you, Ian. I will now ask Perry to discuss our financial performance. .

Thanks, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone. Yes. as gassed earlier, the fourth quarter was very good. Our business delivered a strong finish to the year. Gross profit on an accounting basis more than doubled quarter-over-quarter. Rising to $17.4 million from $7.8 million just the quarter prior. For the full year, gross profit increased to $47.6 million, up from $30.9 million in 2024. The strength flows through to our bottom line in terms of reported net income. In the fourth quarter, we generated net income of $38.1 million or $0.70 a year compared to a net loss of $8.2 million or $0.16 a share in the fourth quarter of 2024.

For the full year, we delivered net income of $34.4 million, which is a sharp turnaround from a net loss of $43.7 million in 2024. What are the main drivers for that? I think both Rob and Ian touched on the higher gold price environment. So -- the higher gross margins come from both increased production that we saw in the fourth quarter relative to the rest of the year as well as higher realized gold prices at our 100% owned operations where we realized over $400, $400 an ounce gold in the fourth quarter. As Ian touched on, we also had solid operating performance from our San Jose mine, where we reported $33.5 million in the fourth quarter just for our 49% interest in the San Jose mine -- and as noted, subsequent to the fourth quarter, we received a dividend of $8.8 million in February.

Also tied to our accounting net income is a $27.5 million deferred tax recovery tied to the expected use of U.S. tax losses, which shows our expectations for continued profitability at our Gold Bar mine complex in the United States. I believe these results underscore the progress we're making in terms of our operations, cost discipline and positioning our assets for growth in 2026 and onwards. I'll also note that in terms of our balance sheet, we ended the year with a strong cash position of $51 million compared to $14 million at the year-end 2024.

Thank you, Perry. Now I'll ask Bill to speak about our operations and looking forward.

Yes. Thanks very much, Rob. So with regard to our operating entities at Gold Bar and Fox, I'm happy to tell you that it looks like the first quarter is going to be on target. And that will put us in a good position to have the whole year. If you remember last year, we kind of had a bit of a slow start to the year and kind of play us through most of the year. So this year, we're -- we put a concerted upward into getting off on the right foot, and I think we're -- we're doing well on that front.

And as you know, Mexico is also producing a small amount of coal, and that's not a significant amount of our production. However, it is carrying all of the operating costs out of Mexico. As we move forward in this year, -- we will complete the development of the stock ramp and the access over into what we call Stock East. And that portion of the mine should be in production in the second half of this year. We're also working hard on our Grey Fox pre-feasibility study, which will be out in the month of June. We're doing the detailed planning of bringing the Titan asset into production. And we have permitting work going on, on all of these projects including building the Phoenix project.

So as Rob mentioned earlier, our exploration over the last 4 years is now coming closer to production. And we can see all of these projects moving towards production this year. Of course, we will, in the third quarter of this year, we will complete mining at from mine, although we're still drilling some lower parts of the Room West and we're seeming to be pending or on some of these holes. So from may, in fact, find a way to go for another couple of quarters. So all in all, we're pretty happy with where we are on the projects and the project development. And I think it's nice when you're in the third month of the year that you're able to say that the first quarter is going to be on target. That's a rough summary of where we are.

Thank you, Bill. Now I'd like to ask Mike to talk about our McEwan Copper's Las Azules project. .

Thank you, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today with an update on McEwen Copper and the Los Soles project. I want to be direct with you. 2025 was a transformational year for this project, and we entered 2026 with more momentum than at any point in our history. When we look back at what we accomplished over the last 12 months, 3 things stand out. First, we secured DT approval. Locking in 30 years of regulatory and fiscal stability in Argentina. Second, we completed a robust feasibility study that confirms Losesules as a globally significant low-cost copper project. And third, we did all of this while the macro environment for copper has only gotten stronger. .

Let me start with 3D because this was arguably the single most important derisking event in the project's history. In September 2025, Argentina approved our application under a large investment center regime. What does this mean in practical terms? It means losses now benefits from 30 years of legal, fiscal and custom stability. Our corporate income tax rate drops from 35% to 25%. We received a 50% reduction in dividend withholding tax. We exempt from export duties at the start of the exports. And critically, we have guaranteed access to foreign crudes and international arbitration. VG was designed to attract exactly the kind of large-scale investment that losses represents. It has fundamentally changed the investment framework for mining in Argentina, and we were among the first to secure these benefits.

In October 2025, we released the results of our feasibility study -- and I won't walk you through the headline numbers because they tell a compelling story. The base case at $4.35 pound of copper gives us an after-tax NPV at an 8% discount of $2.9 billion and 19.8% and a payback of 3.9 years. The project designed for 22 years life of project with an average copper cattle production of 205,000 tonnes per annum in the first 5 years and 148,000 tonnes per annum of the full life.

Our C1 cash cost comes in at $1.71 per pound, and all-in sustaining costs at $2.11 per pound. Placing a azoles firmly in the lower half of the global cost curve. But here is what really excites me. At today's copper price of around $580 per pound, the economics are dramatically stronger. The NPV more than doubled to 6.3 billion. The IRR jumps to 30%, and the payback shot to just 2.7 years. The NPV to CapEx ratio moves from just under 1% to 2%. Every dollar increase in the copper price at roughly 2.3 billion to the project NPV. -- for Max shareholders, that translates to approximately $18 per share of additional value for every dollar move in copper.

Importantly, the feasibility study also identified significant upside beyond the base case. There is potential for an additional 33 years life of mine, adding another 141,000 tons per annum of copper production to either hear Tinto's new technology or a commercial concentrator. When you consider that full potential you are looking at 1 of the largest and long-life copper assets globally. I want to emphasize something that makes Rosasulastandard part. This project has been designed from the ground up as low impact operations compared to a conventional mine of similar scale, is expected to use 1/4 of the water produced 1/10 of the carbon emissions and has the potential to operate on 100% in newale power.

There are no conventional tending -- we produce a finished copper cathode on site, which can be due directly to industry. This matters enormously in the current environment. offtakers, financiers and governments are all increasingly focused on the sustainability credentials of the copper supply. Los Azules is positioned to be a supplier of choice in a world that demands responsibly produce copper. We have also been building the institutional framework around the project.

The International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank has signed a collaboration agreement with McEwen's Copper to align Losesules with IC's environmental standards, social and government standards. This agreement also provides IFC with customer rights to act as a lender or Ranger for prospective project financing going forward. Having the IFC at the table is a strong signal of the caliber of project we are building.

Looking ahead, our team is continuing detailed engineering work, and we are targeting a final investment decision by the end of 2026, with construction targeted to begin in early 2027, obviously, subject to project financing. We are well on track. On the financing front, we are seeing strong interest from multiple categories of capital providers. Export credit agencies and development finance organizations in particular have shown meaningful appetite to support the project of this profile, large-scale, long-life, responsibly designed and located in our ag qualifying jurisdiction.

We are advancing conversations with the IFC and other institutions and we are actively preparing opportunity for full financing packages that gives us flexibility and how we fund construction. At the same time, we are currently evaluating the ETL time frame for an IPO of McEwen's Copper in connection with these ongoing financing discussions. The combination of a completed feasibility study, secured regulatory framework, strong copper fundamentals and interest from institutional capital providers give us the right conditions to consider a public listing that would unlock value for shareholders and provide additional avenue to fund the project developments.

Let me step back for a moment. and talk about why the timing for Azules could not be better. We are building this project into what I believe is the strongest structural backdrop for copper that we have seen in a generation. Copper is trading about $5.80 per pound today near record highs. LME prices surged past 14,500 per metric ton earlier this year. Major banks are focusing prices to remain elevated. JPMorgan expects an average of around 12,000 tonnes per tonne for 2026.

Goldman Sachs has raised its forecast to approximately $1,400 per ton. The structural deficit forecasted going forward on significant growth and overall world work declining rates. What is driving this? Three converging mega trends: first, the explosive build out of AI data centers. JPMorgan estimates that data centers copper demand alone will reach approximately 475,000 tonnes in 2026, going rapidly year-over-year. A single large AI data center can require up to 50,000 tonnes of copper.

Second, the electrification of transport, electric vehicles used nearly 3x the copper for a commercial car and EV adoption continues to accelerate. Third, the massive investment needed in good infrastructure and renewable energy to power all of that. Power Grids worldwide need to be expanded and modernized to support all this demand. On the supply side, we have real constraints. Mine disruptions have tightened. -- declining outrates permitting time lets averaging 15 to 17 years from discovery to production and the weakening discovery pipeline all point to sustained structural deficits.

S&P Global projects that copper supply could fall 10 million tons short of demand by 2040. This is precisely the environment in which large-scale shovel-ready copper projects like Los Azules become extraordinarily value. The world needs new copper supply, and there are very few projects of our scale and quality anywhere in the development pipeline. Investors entered to our copper equities has shifted meaningfully over the past year and rightly so. The market is recognizing that we are at the beginning of a multiyear super cycle driven by electrification AI infrastructure.

Copper is no longer just an industrial metal. It is a critical enabler of the energy transition and the AI revolution. Now consider this -- of the 20 largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world, nearly all are either controlled by major mining houses or effectively stranded by permitting and political road blocks, some for decades. Los Azulos to our knowledge, is the only that is independently held fully permitted, has a completed feasibility study with costs in the lower half of the global cost curve has a secular framework locked in and is advancing toward a final investment decision this year. For investors looking for direct exposure to a world-class copper asset before construction begins, there's simply nothing else like it in the public markets.

For those of you who evaluating McEwen's copper value with Max, I would point to you the most recent private financings October 2024, which valued McEwen's at $30 per share, implying an over market value of 987 million -- but since then, we have secured the environmental permit for construction and operation. We have secured the regime -- and we have secured the feasibility study with strong economics, significantly derisking and increasing the value for the project. Let me close by bringing this all together. Loss Asure is one of the world's largest undeveloped copper deposits.

In 2025, we derisked it to reach the approval and a strong feasibility. We have a clear path to the final investment decision. The project environmental design positions it as a next-generation mine. -- and we are building it into the strongest copper market in decades. Los Azules has the potential to become a generational copper asset, one that will deliver value for shareholders for decades to come. Thank you. I hand it over back to Rob.

Thank you, Mike. Excellent. I'd just like to say, one, we have some questions, I'd like to answer -- and we, through the presentations, covered off some of the questions. One Terry. One, Terry was asking to provide more information on the IPO for McEwen Copper, which we're looking at later this year when we as Mike said, complete several other tasks. Steve was asking also about Los Azules and about the milestones, and I think that was well covered off by Mike. He also had a question about Goliath Resources, which we purchased an interest in, the rationale.

It's a rich gold deposit in British Columbia. It's had a high success level in its drilling. It looks like a resource that would grow. And buying into juniors was a strategy I used when building Goldcorp. I used that as a -- it served as a listening post and also one day could be a member of a farm team, but it also provided us with capital growth that allowed us to fund our expansion of production. We have John from Minnesota, and he's asking about our silver production, and I'll ask Ian to talk about that.

Yes. So regarding John's question, he was asking what is our current attributable silver production. Right now, we have silver just coming from our San Jose mine with Hoschchild. -- and our portion of that is approximately 3.6 million ounces of silver -- sorry, that's the total production. Ours is half. And we then convert that to gold equivalent when we report our production, and we're doing that right now based on a silver-to-gold ratio of 77:1. So that's a good question because it's not quite clear when you look at our news release. So if you take half of the 3.6, that's currently what we're producing in terms of silver. How does that evolve over the years where our next source of silver production comes from what we're calling El Gallo Phase 2. So that is obviously after El Gallo Phase 1. And we're looking at approximately 3 million to 4 million ounces of silver production there, which is 100% owned. In terms of how we look at rationalizing these, obviously, we do it based on gross profit margins, but also in terms of where things are practically in terms of CapEx and permitting. So the one things we are currently looking at is if the silver price environment was to remain as strong as what it was and the margins as robust, we are looking at ways that somehow you could accelerate the Phase 2 silver production closer to today and deferring some of the gold production coming from at El Gallo. So we are working on that to try to maximize the profitability of the operations, but a lot of that obviously is driven by the silver price. I just looking at the last question here. The last question that came from John was whether the company has considered a silver dividend. And right now, just based on the optics of that, no, it probably logistically would be very difficult for us to issue a dividend in silver. I think first and foremost, if we were to implement a dividend policy, it would start with cash and then proceed from there. I know when Rob was running Goldcorp, when I was running Abitibi, I'm not saying I copied his strategy, but we did copy his. That was to pay a monthly dividend. And I think that's something that here, we're looking to eventually strive towards while balancing our growth needs.

Operator, do you have any other questions?

Your first question we have comes from the line of Jake Sekelsky from Alliance Global Partners.

So just looking at the 2026 guide, you mentioned in the release that no contributions from stock were included there. I guess I'm just wondering, is that something that you expect to revisit in the second half of this year from a guidance standpoint? I'm just wondering how we should be thinking about the ramp-up there as it relates to consolidated production.

Yes. Thanks very much for the question, Jake. Yes, basically, the project development at Stock is going very well. We're more or less on schedule. We broke through into the second level a couple of weeks ago, we break into the fourth level before the end of this month. The headings heading over towards where the mining is going to start are advancing at the right pace, about in the 2 headings, about 14 meters a day. So we will see production from there in the second half of this year. And what we're hoping is that -- or what we're planning, I guess, is that the Pru mine is going to kind of fade out at the same time as we're ramping up at stock. So we're in the midst of acquiring the equipment for the operation. And so that once we get out to the ore, we'll be ready to start the mining operation.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just on the M&A front, I mean, Rob, you just mentioned you've been fairly active investing in juniors and picking up land packages surrounding some of your mines. Do you feel you have your plate full with the internal growth that you've laid out? Or are you seeing any attractive larger producing bolt-on type acquisition opportunities out there in this type of environment?

It's a good question, Jake. When you look at the performance of juniors relative to the producers and relative to gold, they're still lagging far behind in terms of performance. We've been concentrating on companies that have properties either adjacent or in close proximity to our existing operations that would allow us to extend the life that we believe have potential to grow and aren't expensive to acquire. So we're open to other opportunities. you never want to issue a lot of stock and dilute your position, but we're building our production. And right now, we can see more than doubling by 2030 assuming all the projects go ahead as planned. But I don't think I want to stop there. The metal markets are -- I see the gold price, the silver price, the copper price those commodities are getting in short supply and demand is increasing. So I see higher prices as some want to position benefit from that. .

Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Reagor from ROTH Capital Partners.

Rob, with Barts in a week or so. The -- I guess, just kind of following up on Jay's question about stock. Will you guys still report the production from there? It just won't be considered part of your ounces that are commercial. So therefore, it's not in the guide. Is that the rationale there?

Yes. So this is Jeff, Vice President, Finance here. So yes, I think that would be the expectation that we would start to report pre-commercial production ounces from stock our way through the year when we start expecting to see that come through. But at this time because it is pre-commercial production, we're not giving production or cost guidance on those notes.

And then over at Gold Bar, the new saw the new look out resource. But can you remind us like where Gold Bar is that as far as the remaining mine life at this point? .

Yes. the mine life at Gold Bar, as we know, it goes into the 1930 or 2030s. And I would say we're doing an extensive amount of diamond drilling exploration drilling on ground all around the Gold Bar site. And -- at the same time, we're doing an extensive amount of drilling on the timber line assets. And that is in basically in progress right now on an agrasion basis. We're also doing some mine planning, and we're also doing some permitting work on those sites. And as soon as we get all of the permits. There are areas there that are amenable to open pit mining.

And what our intention is at this point is we would build a small or small to medium-sized leach pad on those sites and leach the material at the site. But meanwhile, the plant will be very, very small because what we'll do is circulate cyanide solution and then we'll take the carbon -- back out the gold bar. So we won't have to build a plant there. All we have is a leach pad in a circulation system. There will also be some sums and so on for storm events and that kind of thing. But basically, it will be an operating mine without much infrastructure.

And then kind of one final thing, just Go ahead.

I was just going to ask Ian to comment on the resources.

Yes. The one thing I would take into account is what we refer to as Trinity rate is actually below the existing pits at Gold Bar. So when Bill talks about the current mine like into the 2030s, we then see it expanding much beyond that as Trinity rates taking into account mineralization that we know it exists, does not have a resource, but it's directly below where we're mining today.

And we'll have resources.

We're currently doing a drill program right now. There 10 drill holes approximately. We're about 1/3 of the way through. And once we finish that program and have the assays, we're going to be calculating the trinitrate resource while we're doing metallurgical test work on that as well. So we see that gold bar just dovetailing into a much larger pit.

That makes sense. And then last thing, just on MSC. Now there's actually dividends coming out of it. Is there an opportunity to reopen discussions with Cascil for 1 of you to buy the other 1 out there and consolidate that asset?

Well, there's been rumors they wanted to sell it from time to time, but I think has the price gone up, that desire to sell onto faded away. -- they were gathering lots of cash to cover off the closure costs and they've now exceeded what they thought they needed and -- they still have an active exploration program going -- it's a prolific area and right next to Cerro Negro.

On your end drop, would you consider monetizing that and redeploying the capital elsewhere?

At the right price, Joe?

Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Hoy from Canaccord Genuity.

I guess I'll start with -- there's a lot of growth projects on the go. It's rapidly evolving, and it strikes me there's a lot of catalysts coming up this year. Could you walk us through the capital expenditures in '26 and how those are divided across the assets? And if you can comment on '27 or '28, that would be helpful as well for the -- on the modeling front.

Certain last gen to address that. Sure. We expect the bulk of our capital expenditures this year to really be focused on the Fox Complex. So really looking at the stock mine, I think in terms of remaining CapEx through 2026 to complete, I think we're looking at sort of mid $50 million to $60 million to finish, possibly less -- we are also looking at a heap leach expansion at Gold Bar, which will take a $12 million this year. And we're also looking at Mexico and in terms of the plant refurbishment and bringing that back online about $25 million there. To about $100 million, and I think what you'll see is as we move forward with Tartan and Grey Fox the next few years will be around 100 -- that same $100 million a year.

Okay. And to be clear, that $100 million, I can -- we can calculate the what test is expected to be based on the ASIC numbers provided. But what's the approximate split between sustaining and nonsustaining.

In terms of those capital expenditures, I think the only amounts that are -- that we expect to report as sustaining are the gold bar figures given stock is a growth project, and we don't expect to bring that into commercial production until 2027, capital has not been included in our ASIC estimates at this time.

Okay. Great. That's really helpful. I guess just staying on the same vein of discussion here. Again, a lot going on, pretty exciting for the precious metals portfolio. Does -- does this require augmentations to the team? Are you guys building up on the technical side, the exploration side, just thinking about management's capacity to deliver on all these goals.

Perhaps I can answer that. Yes, I mean we're building up our capabilities in terms of our technical capabilities and our bench strength as we speak, and that has been going on for now more than 6 months and you might even say it started a year ago. So yes, we have a study group that's centered in Sudbury, the reason we put that there was because we had some, I guess, some people that worked with us in the past. And so we set it up so that they'd be home, and we have really had no more room for them here in Toronto, and they didn't want to drive down here anyway. And we're also adding key people at all the projects.

So it's for sure a work in progress. But recently, we appointed a person in charge of a Permian environment and social responsibility. We're building a substantial HR team. We're working with a couple of consultants to help us put more rigor around our internal reporting requirements and so on. So I mean, we recognize the hurdles that we have if we're going to build these projects.

Your next question comes from the line of Don DeMarco from National Bank.

Thank you, operator, and Robin team. Maybe a question on the Tartan mine. You've got the resource update that's pending. With this update, -- maybe just in terms of managing expectations, do you plan to start by derisking the existing resource? Or could we also see maybe some resource cushion at this early stage?

Yes. So we're taking into account all the drilling that's been done post the 2017 resource. So we do expect it to be larger as the vertical extent of Tartan was expanded by about 9%. But it's not going to be an apples-to-apples comparisons for a few reasons. The 2017 resource did not use a stope optimization as it was really not a requirement or sens requirement back in 2017. So we are going to be putting some preliminary stopes around the resource. And then the second factor that makes it hard to compare is the resource cutoff grade. .

2017 used a 3-gram per tonne cutoff at today's gold price, we're using $3,000 for this resource. You could theoretically use a much lower cutoff rate, which will increase your ounces as well. So again, the comparison is hard, but we do expect an accretion number over the previous resource I'd say, by a reasonable amount.

We'll look forward to that. And maybe just some comments on your strategy for M&A. I mean, obviously, you've been somewhat active. I mean Tartan is an example that would be Paragon looking at these tactical high ROI opportunities. Is it -- should we maybe expect more of these to come? Or what is your kind of your vision on M&A over -- in the gold sector over the next year or 2 to come.

Having greater exposure to precious metals, I think, is very positive development if you can find it on an accretive basis. We spend -- we have a large expenditure on exploration, and we've been meeting success there on our own properties, but we'd like to augment that growth. if we see Okay. And jurisdiction-wise, do you continue to focus on the Americas, I would presume then or Ontario? Or what -- is there any considerations on where you might be focused? We've largely focused -- while we have focused almost exclusively on areas in close proximity to our existing operations.

So we have the talent in place and don't have to spread ourselves too thinly. And so what comes up in a neighborhood, that's a natural fit where you have an opportunity to extend the life, increase your production. But there are other situations that might catch your eye and where you can see considerable growth. So it opportunity.

Your next question comes from the line of Jay Goldsmith of shareholder.

Good afternoon. I joined a little late, so I hope this question wasn't asked. Congrats to you and the team on a solid quarter, and nice to see the profitability turnaround and stronger balance sheet and progress on zu -- can you update the Ken's stake in Paragon, I think, like 31% in Paragon laboratories and the photon assay technical I'd love to hear how the adoption is going.

I'll ask Ing to speak on Paragon.

Yes. So just for your background, I did join the Board of Paragon when McEwen made its investment. The ownership is slightly below 30%. It's McEwen's was using Paragon for its assay needs before we made the investment. So we did see how it was working there. And as and it is gaining widespread acceptance -- right now, another supplier of the Photon machine is supplying Barrick. And I believe the number is about 18 machines that Barrick is now using worldwide. And so you are seeing turnaround times for assaying for gold and silver, down as low as 6 days, high as 10 days versus traditional fire assay you're seeing right now in the industry is running 3 to 4 weeks.

The cost between the 2 is approximately the same. A couple of the key advantages with the Photon technology is that the sample that you're able to analyze is much larger. So -- by that, it should be more representative of the actual assay. It's also very -- it's nondestructive -- so you're able to use that material for metallurgical test purposes later if you so choose versus having to drill a second call or another hall. And the turnaround time was much faster than obviously than fire assays. So there are many advantages, but you're still seeing through the industry -- it's still being adopted, but it's going to take Polly a couple of more years. The more people are turning towards it. And he said, Barrick is using it now for the majority of their needs, and we're using it for all of our current needs.

Okay. Exciting to hear so financial impact for Mack and still a couple of years down the road, I suspect .

Well, there's no real financial impact for us. We do include Paragon at an equity investment into our financial statements. very similar to what we do with Macan copper. But there's no real -- we're not adding any more capital for treasury to it or receiving any current dividend. So the impact right now is purely as a capital gain or loss. And right now, we made the investment at CAD 1.75. They're trading approximately $3.50 a share -- and we've been trying to help them realize what a customer wants to see because I think you are in a commodities business when you're doing things such as assaying. So what we're trying to stress and work with Paragon is how do you make your very counter-oriented business so you go above and beyond to get the level of service that your competitors are not to win over that business.

And there are no further questions at this time. Mr. Rob McEwen, I turn the call back over to you. .

Thank you, operator. and thank you for everyone on the line. We're looking to build a company that provides our shareowners with growing exposure to hard money, gold and silver and to a critical mineral, copper, a metal critical to modern society. And we're moving ahead on that front and I think once we take the cue and copper public, there will be a very positive impact on our balance sheet. So thank you for joining us today. .

This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to McEwen's Third Quarter 2025 Operating and Financial Results Conference Call. Present from the company today are Rob McEwen, Chairman and Chief Owner; William Shaver, Chief Operating Officer; Perry Ing, Chief Financial Officer; Jeff Chan, Vice President, Finance; Stefan Spears, Vice President, Corporate Development; Michael Meding, Vice President and General Manager of McEwen Copper; Carmen Diges, General Counsel and Secretary; Michael Swistun, President and CEO of Canadian Gold Corp [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Mr. Rob McEwen, Chief Owner. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, fellow shareholders, interested investors. We have been preparing McEwen Mining to benefit from the stronger metal prices we are seeing today. Over the past year, gold at just below $4,000 an ounce is up 45%, silver up 47% and copper is close to $5, up 13%. And I believe the intermediate and long-term prices will be considerably higher. This is an excellent environment for our portfolio mix of assets.

I go to -- as far to say that perhaps you could think of us as a mini Freeport with growing gold production pipeline and large exposure to a robust world-class long-life copper story. The improved gold and silver prices have buffeted us from the inconvenient unexpected events that can temporarily throw us off course and off guidance.

Fortunately, these moments are temporary and can be resolved in a relatively short period of time and have not seriously delayed our ambitious growth plans of delivering by 2030, 250,000 to 300,000 gold equivalent ounces of annual production, plus watching Los Azules become a copper mine. And in the first 5 years, we're looking at producing at an annual rate of over 450 million pounds of copper a year, which today, copper prices would be about $2.2 billion, and it has a -- at least based on the feasibility study we just put out and the current copper price would have a gross margin of 64%.

So we've done a number of things in the quarter, and we've made some investments, and I'll start with those. And then I'll move to asking Michael Meding to talk about the excitement at Los Azules, and then we'll get into our finances and our operations on our gold operations. So I'll start with Ian Ball to talk about our investment in Canadian Gold Corp and also [Technical Difficulty].

Ladies and gentlemen, we're experiencing technical difficulties, please stay on the line. We'll resume momentarily.

Thank you very much, operator. So on the Canadian Gold front, we're set to close that acquisition in January. Upon closing, we expect to issue an updated resource estimate for the end of February that will come out with our year-end financials, and that's going to be part of a preliminary economic assessment. Our shareholders will note, we have not included Tartan in any of our guidance going forward over the next 5 years, but we fully anticipate including that as we set to embark on our studies of that project.

Exploration is ongoing and Canadian Gold is scheduled putting out an exploration update over the next 3 weeks. The key there is we've been drilling on the main zone, continuing to build out that resource. We've been doing a lot of work on the recently acquired ground to the west, which is option from Hudbay, where historically, there was a lot of historical high-grade drill intercepts and surface. We think there's a lot of synergies between Tartan and that ground.

It really fits well with the McEwen mining portfolio in terms of the underground style, the processing plant, and we feel there's a lot of ways that we can optimize this and we can accelerate the permitting on this project to get it back into production upon some of the completion of the test work that we're currently undertaking. So we're quite optimistic both on the time frame for permitting, the exploration as well as the production profile that it can deliver for McEwen going forward.

Mike, would you hop on the call?

Okay. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, operator. Q3 was an excellent and transformative quarter for McEwen Copper. We successfully advanced Los Azules from a world-class deposit into a derisked politically endorsed and bankable Taiwan asset. At McEwen Copper, we are committed to excellence in 3 key areas: operations, ESG and exploration.

The most significant strategic event of the quarter was the acceptance of Los Azules into Argentina's [indiscernible] or the large-scale investment incentive program in Argentina on September 26. This is a fundamental game changer for the project. Through VG, Los Azules now benefits from 30 years of legal, fiscal and custom stability, access to foreign exchange and a significantly lower and internationally competitive tax rate.

This provides a predictable framework and strong protection against future regulatory changes. The approval of the VG is a powerful public endorsement, which was personally announced by Argentine's Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, and reinforced by President Javier Milei on their official X accounts. We also finalized a collaboration agreement with the IFC, a member of the World Bank Group.

This partnership will align the project with the IFC's rigorous ESG performance standards and establishes a framework for collaboration on future financing. Our most recent milestone was the publication of the NI 43-101 feasibility study results on October 7. The study confirms robust project economics driven by a production process designed for low environmental impact.

The leach and SX-EW process will produce 99.99% LME Grade A copper cathodes and as Rob already mentioned in the first 5 years, 204,000 tonnes of pure copper per year. The highlights include $2.9 billion after-tax NPV at 8%, 19.8% after-tax IRR, a payback of 3.9 years, $3.2 billion initial CapEx, C1 cash cost of $1.71 per pound of copper produced, all-in sustaining cost of $2.11 per pound of copper.

The financial model used a copper price assumption of $4.35 per pound. The full National Instrument 43-101 technical report is scheduled for publication later this month. Looking forward, detailed engineering for Los Azules is set to commence, and we are targeting construction for late 2026, beginning of 2027, subject to project financing.

Finally, let's talk about the upside. Our total mining rights cover approximately 32,000 hectares. To date, we have explored less than 10% of our holdings, about 3,000 hectares. We have already identified 8 significant targets, 4 of which we will focus on in the upcoming season. We have strong reason to believe we can significantly increase the resource size of Los Azules and ultimately convert this project into major mining districts. Thank you so much. I hand back over to you, Robert.

Thank you, Mike. Perry?

Thank you, Rob. Good morning, everyone. I'll just provide some brief highlights from our third quarter report. So in terms of headline numbers, we reported a net loss of $0.5 million or $0.01 a share compared to a loss of $2.1 million or $0.04 a share in the corresponding period. I will note that this net loss included $4.3 million in terms of the loss from McEwen Copper.

As we've noted previously, now that the feasibility study for Los Azules has been published, going forward from the effective date of the feasibility study at the beginning of September, we will be able to report those associated costs on a capitalized basis. So any loss attributable to Los Azules from prior periods will no longer -- will now be capitalized on a go-forward basis.

In terms of adjusted EBITDA, we reported $11.8 million of positive EBITDA during the quarter or $0.22 a share compared to $10.5 million or $0.20 a share in the corresponding period. In terms of our treasury, we ended the quarter with $51 million in cash as well as $24 million in marketable securities. Our cash balance was relatively unchanged from the prior quarter at June 30. So just looking ahead, in terms of our release, we've outlined a number of significant projects ahead of us. So just looking into 2026 and our capital needs, obviously, we expect to finish the stock ramp by the end of next year. complete a heap leach pad expansion at Gold Bar.

And as noted, we will undertake El Gallo Phase 1 with a capital cost of approximately $25 million. Overall, we expect to accomplish these using our existing treasury and cash flows from operations. And specifically for the El Gallo project in Mexico, we also expect to utilize some form of gold prepay for approximately half of the anticipated CapEx. So with that, we'll turn it over to Bill for some comments on operations.

And what we're going forward.

Good morning, shareholders. So from the operation perspective, as we all know, we started off the year poorly. However, we have a very good start to Q4. Q3 wasn't exactly as we anticipated due to some issues with the final few months of the Froome mine. And this is, I guess, to some extent, I guess, one of the outcomes of the end of a mine life.

However, the Froome West deposit has kicked in nicely in -- towards the end of Q3, and we see it producing gold at the rate in our guidance through Q4 and well into 2026. We now see Froome mining until Q3 of 2026, by which time the stock deposit should be coming into production, which we're now indicating as occurring later in the first half of next year. In terms of the development work that we are doing at Stock, the ramp development is going along on schedule.

And I would have to say both the mining contractor and our own mining crews continue to have their safety record in very good shape with no lost time accidents by either our contractors or our own forces. In terms of Gold Bar, Q3 has been quite challenging because of the fact that there was one part of our ore that we intended to mine in Q3, which basically did turned out not to be ore when we got to the mining.

But we pivoted there quite nicely to move into Q4. Q4 is already looking very good, and we're back into the normal routine of our mining and our stripping and are moving north of 1.5 million tonnes per month. So that's a very good outcome for operations.

From the perspective of exploration, we've had very, very good success in both operations at Gold Bar and at Stock. And at our Board meeting yesterday, we approved going ahead with the re-leaching of the -- of the assets in Mexico. So that will start early in the new year with construction and then move on into leaching of the El Gallo leach pad and then putting those tailings back into the pit. So we see a challenging fourth quarter, but we're in very good shape, I would say, in the month of October. And so looking forward to the next 2 months, and we're really looking forward to getting back to producing gold in Mexico. Thank you.

During the year, we've enjoyed exploration success at we discovered the Froome West deposit that allowed us to bridge our production. During a time when we found permitting delays, we're backing up our production pipeline and our development plans. Both at Gold Bar over at the acquired timberline properties, we're getting excellent grades and continuity.

There's one area that I don't know if everyone in the company shares my same optimism, but it's a property called even Seven Troughs. And historically, it excites me because of its historic record is one of the highest grade mines in Nevada at averaging more than 1.2 ounces per tonne. And there was a recent grab sample in an area that historically had shown a lot of plus 1 gram material, and that was better than 270 grams over a very short intercept, but still exciting given the history of that location.

Gold at in Timmins, our Grey Fox area is growing. We'll have a preliminary economic assessment out in the first quarter of next year. We've got plans to expand in Mexico, as you heard from Perry and Bill. And we're bringing in some other properties and have some investments in areas and in companies that I think have a lot of growth potential. So with that, I do have to say that our miss year-to-date on our production is inexcusable, but we're taking steps to remedy that and get us back on track. So with that, I'll open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question today comes from the line of Heiko Ihle from H.C. Wainwright.

Rob, can you hear me okay?

Loud and clear. Can you hear us?

Perfect. Just making sure. First of all, congratulations to Ian Ball on his appointment there. Rob, you actually early on this call preempted a bit of what I was going to ask you. But I mean, your deal for Britannia or Paragon Geochemical Labs, an interesting move there. A few follow-ups to that.

Do you think that you will engage in more vertical integration like this? And building on that last part, do you think we'll see a bit of an arms race for lack of a better word, or other guys want to get involved with suppliers, distributors in order to guarantee supply and fast processing? I mean like one example would be an assay lab. Obviously, you can't do it for independent assays, but would that be like a potential target? Just maybe elaborate a bit on what you were describing earlier on the call and what...

Heiko, Paragon holds a technology called photo assay, and it's an X-ray process that is faster, cheaper, more comprehensive in terms of the data being provided. I first saw this technology 5 years ago, comes out of Australia. Paragon stepped in and got in line to secure 12 units, and that's about the annual production. Some of the majors have bought units for their sole use.

I think as more money comes into the mining space, and that's surely going to happen with everybody, all the sovereign nations and corporations around the world looking for new sources of mineral -- being able to compress time and get more information for your dollar out of your assays is going to grow increasingly more important.

And the old suppliers of assays, I mean, you could see backups go 3, 4 weeks or more. And here, you can get it in 2 weeks or less and sometimes almost daily. So I think that's important. I mean the whole industry is under a lot of strain right now. There are labor problems, so there's going to be competition there. There's equipment supplies. When someone comes along, we're going to have all these projects coming on. Who's going to -- will they be able to deliver the trucks, the shovels, the drills and that.

You're already -- in Argentina, we looked at that problem with drills. We ended up buying 8 drills because there weren't drills down there readily available. And so mean you look at the world and say mining investments in a mix of global portfolios is very small today. It might be 1% or 2%. 10 years ago, it was up around 12%. We get back to that.

As you said, there's going to be a real battle for a lot of the inputs that are required to define an ore body. And at the same time, we have to compress time in this industry. It's taking far too long to reach certain decision points. And so you're going to see a lot more technology. I view what Paragon's technology, the crisis rather, is a disruptive technology that will advance the industry. And we -- we'll be looking for other opportunities to accelerate and improve the knowledge of the industry, first for us, but then for the industry.

Yes.

Yes, good answer. Obviously, interesting move. I've seen this machine in operation. I was trying to dig up where it was, but I've seen it on a site visit before somewhere. It was one of your assets, it was somewhere else. It might have been -- I go to so many sites. At Gold Bar, you did obviously 8,200 ounces, quite a bit lower, frankly, a bit lower than what we had in our model as well. You were talking about the reinterpretations of geological data and changes to your mine plans. What should we be looking at for next year? I mean this sure sounds like a temporary issue, but is it?

I would say absolutely that the particular zone of the mining operation that we were in, in the last quarter, we ended up with a part of the -- where we were mining that we anticipated would be ore. It turned out to be -- to, in fact, be unmineralized material. And as a result, that part of the pit basically turned into stripping material. So -- and for some reason, the historical drilling that was done many years ago didn't identify that horse of unmineralized material.

So we've mined through that with our stripping part, and we're now back into what we would call our normal ore. And what we're seeing in the rest of the mining that we're doing is that the reconciliation to the block model is standing up. And it was just, I guess, something that we missed in our confirmation drilling or something that we missed in the mine planning at the time.

And again, this is a part of the ore body that we decided more than a year ago to start stripping because of the increase in the gold price, and that's what brought that whole zone into ore. At the gold price that we had 1.5 years ago, that stripping wouldn't -- and that mining would not have been done. So in answer to your question with regard to next year, we see the mine plan being pretty consistent through the year, and we'll be announcing the production guidance for next year shortly.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Reagor from ROTH Capital Partners.

I think Heiko asked the 2 big ones there. But just kind of following up on Gold Bar. In the comments, you guys said that you're going to be doing some more work to review this. What degree of risk do you see to an overall resource change, if any? Or is this just a matter of sequencing?

It appears to be a matter of sequencing and not a large risk.

Okay. That's good to hear. And then you mentioned with Phoenix mid next year, how comfortable are you guys with that time line to have all your permits? And where do you see like the kind of the potential for to get started earlier on that front? And then do you expect to publish an updated financial study once you have permits in hand?

Yes, the last question, and the permitting is somewhat unknown. We have a permit to do some of the work and it needs to be amended. And we're hoping that the timing will coincide with what we gave you.

And we've had a number of meetings with the government authorities on permitting, and we're fairly optimistic that we'll have those permits in time and the construction of the plant will start in Q1.

Okay. And then part of your comments on the Canadian gold thing, I think got cut in the beginning. What is the time line to complete that merger? And then how -- what's kind of the time line after that by quarter as far as expectations for analysts?

The process, there's a shareholder vote in December, and then it has to be ratified by the courts, and that's set for the 6th of January, I believe. Mid-January? 6 -- early January. And in terms -- then we'll go in there and do a resource estimate and a preliminary economic assessment on that.

Okay. Okay. And when do you think the -- what's the rough estimate, assuming a Q1 close, what's the rough estimate on PEA being released, like how many months or quarters?

You'd probably be looking into the fourth quarter next year.

Your next question comes from the line of [ Gord Weber ] from RBC Capital Markets.

With respect to resource estimates, how would McEwen Mining now calibrate or estimate their proven resources?

The same way everyone else does.

And how many ounces or equivalent ounces would McEwen claim to have today?

It's all set out in our statements. We're looking at about 3 million ounces at Fox. And it's about 4.2 million, I think, between all of the operations. And then we have development going on at drilling at Grey Fox right now. We're drilling down in Nevada at Gold Bar over at Eureka, starting at Seven troughs.

The reason I ask is it seems to me a little inequitable that we're being asked Canadian as Gold Corp stockholders to tender 50 shares for one of those shares when, in fact, we have a proven resource.

Who are you representing? Sorry, who are you a shareholder of?

Yes, I'm a stockholder. I've been a long-term stockholder of Canadian Gold Corp. We know we have proven resources, and we also know that we have a lot of drilling that hasn't been analyzed to date. So I assume we have greater resources than has been booked. And it just seems to me 50:1 isn't -- well, it just seems to me very opportunistic.

We put a bid on the table. It was accepted by management, and it's going to shareholders in December. We thought it was fair at the time, and I believe management thought it was fair.

Yes. And will there be a resource estimate for we, the stockholders before it goes to vote?

We don't have any control over that.

Okay. So I think that's an...

I don't have an answer to that question, but we're not driving a resource estimate.

But as the majority shareholder, don't you want to know what that number is before you conclude the transaction? Or do you already have some inside information that leads you to believe it should be concluded?

No, the drilling is going. It's exciting. It's in an area that had past production, although the Tartan Lake mine wasn't run very well, and that's why it went into bankruptcy. But it's -- it's in a favorite area of the country in terms of energy costs and that and mineral deposit.

Yes. No, you don't have to sell me on the merits of the Tartan mine. My concern is that the majority shareholders may have insight or information that the minority shareholders haven't been provided with.

That isn't the case.

Well, that's refreshing to hear that.

Any other comments, questions?

Perhaps we can follow that up later.

Your next question comes from [ Terry A. DeVries ], a private investor.

You know what, I'm good. I'm actually really good. I've had a great couple of months watching your stock double. Congratulations for Los Azules. Really exciting what's happening there. And the gold market goes up, the gold market goes down, and we just got a fantastic buying opportunity. And so I stepped up to the plate again.

The one question I have I didn't really hear it from Michael Meding. The IPO for Los Azules, do you have any further information that you can give us when you think that might be happening? How much money you'd be willing to -- or looking to raise in the first issue?

Well, we were hoping to do it earlier, but the feasibility, we got that out in October and didn't feel the market would have enough time to do an IPO in the fourth quarter of this year. Now we're looking at going to sometime next year, doing -- taking the company public.

First quarter...

In terms of raising money, our last financing was at $30 a share. And I would expect that we're been accepted in the RGI. We've got the feasibility study. The project looks very attractive relative to a number of other development projects in copper that we'd see a higher price than that when we go public.

Any other market-moving news that you can expect in the next quarter or 2?

I don't know. I'm going to go meet with the President of Argentina tomorrow in New York. I don't think that will move the market.

Well, your drill bits success has been rather encouraging. So I wish you all the luck in pursuing that and look forward for some good news.

And there are no further questions at this time. Mr. Rob McEwen, I turn the call back over to you.

Thank you very much, operator. Thank you, everyone. We've set our course where we're going. We think by planning by 2030 to have substantially more production coming out of our gold mines. There are a couple of other projects we'd like to see brought into production, and we hope to have the copper mine up and running by -- in 2030. So all good news in the long term. Thank you.

And this concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.