Gunnison Copper (TSX:GCU) - Commercial Production Hit, 5% Partner Stake Targeted

Craig Hallworth (0:00)

Hi, I'm Craig Hallworth, CEO of Gunnison Copper. We're an Arizona pure play producer and developer. We've got our Johnson Camp Mine that we built last year, and we're producing. We've also got our flagship Gunnison Copper project that we're advancing with our Feasibility Study.

SPEAKER_2 (0:15)

Craig, good to have you here at Beaver Creek. Busy?

Craig Hallworth (0:18)

Very busy, so good to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_2 (0:20)

No, no, it's good. So you've been here for a couple of days now. Can we get a sense of the feeling and the types of meetings that you're having? Have you been here before?

Craig Hallworth (0:30)

No. Yeah, it's our first year.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

You like it?

Craig Hallworth (0:32)

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_2 (0:33)

What's the take for you, though?

Craig Hallworth (0:35)

Well look, the conference, I'm seeing a lot of interest in copper. You know, copper's at all time highs. When people look at the fundamentals and they look at the supply and demand, they are all projecting big increases. So I think everyone's interested in copper, especially this year, especially right now, and that's what we provide. We provide a lot of copper. We provide leverage both from a production point of view with our producing Johnson Camp, which is in Arizona. So we're selling copper at the ComEx price. And that's very important because there's a premium right now versus LME.

People think the president might bring in some tariffs on copper, on American copper, and we're going to benefit from that because we make the copper from American ore all the way to Finnish copper and we sell it in the US. So we're going to capture that value of any tariff.

And secondly and more importantly, we have a extremely large project. I believe it can produce 80,000 metric tons of copper a year, maybe even as much as 100,000 metric tons of copper a year with optimizations. And that's something that we have perhaps two more years until a final investment decision as we complete our feasibility study. Okay.

SPEAKER_2 (1:42)

Let's get back to the beginning there.

You've got this newton technology, which you've implemented and you're going through a process there, a startup process. How's that going? Remind people what it is and what it's doing for your project.

Craig Hallworth (1:57)

Right. So our Johnson Camp Mine, we've got oxide, we've got sulphide, the newton technology, this is something new from Rio Tinto. They invented this and we're the first ever full scale real world implementation and it's used to process the sulphide copper.

And it's amazing because we can leach the sulphide copper just like it was oxide copper. And what that means is we don't have to make a concentrate, send it to Asia for smelting with all of the costs, all of the emissions, losing control.

We're able to keep control and we're able to make it into the finished copper at the site. And that's exactly what we've been doing since December 2025 when we've made the first newton copper. So we've got almost a year of track record now. We've been ramping that up to the nameplate capacity. We actually just announced this week, we're now at commercial production. So that means 60% of nameplate capacity, or in other words, 1.3 million pounds of copper per month. Right.

SPEAKER_2 (2:50)

And you just added another 3 million tons to that. And there's an $8 million associated with that. What's that for?

Craig Hallworth (2:57)

So what that is, we announced a deal last week where we added some additional tonnage to our deal with Newton. Because if yours don't know, our deal with Newton currently only goes until mid 2030

SPEAKER_2 (3:10)

Okay.

Craig Hallworth (3:10)

So at mid 2030, after that, the mine is free and clear to us. But up until mid 2030, any profits from the mine have to go towards repaying the investment, which is over $200 million so far from Newton. And so the earlier of we fully repay that investment, or mid 2030, that's when all the cash flows of the mine accrue to us. But look, investors have been saying, you know, we want to see cash flow from the mine now.

And so I went to our partner, we have a very good and strong relationship. And I said, look, are there some ways that we could get cash flow now?

So I view this $8 million as, you know, essentially operating cash flow. We added additional ore to the plan and we got cash. We can spend that on the Gunnison Project. It means non diluted funding. It means I don't have to raise that in the equity markets. And so I think investors are very happy to see essentially operating cash flow coming in our pocket from Johnson Camp today.