Maple Gold Mines (TSXV:MGM) - 2027 PEA and Fully Funded 25,000m Joutel Drilling Programme Ahead

Kiran Patankar (0:00)

Hi, I'm Kiran Patankar, I'm President, CEO and Director of Maple Gold Mines Ltd. Delighted to be here today with you, Matthew.

Matthew (0:06)

Good to have you here, and you brought us on with you. Thank you very much for that. Now, I think last time we saw you, we were a slightly different setting. We were up in Nova Scotia, meeting some great people and enjoying some great sailing.

Kiran Patankar (0:17)

Sailing, which is always the beauty, right? When we can get out on the water and do fun things, we're obviously doing a lot of busy things in our day jobs, but nice to get out with you like that.

Matthew (0:26)

Now we're hitting the hard yards. The hard work begins. Okay, look, I want to talk to you today about the, I guess some of the decision making you're going to make around the kind of internal scope and study that you've carried out. But first of all, we better reflect on the last year. A heck of a lot has changed from when I saw you sitting roughly there this time last year. This year, yeah.

So how do you kind of rate yourself? How do you sort of, how do you think about what you achieved last year?

Kiran Patankar (0:51)

I think last year was a tremendous year for Maple.

It is good to reflect on what a year it's been. Obviously, for the sector, it's been great. You know, the momentum and the gold price has been fantastic. A lot of companies have benefited. Certainly, companies have executed. I think Maple stands out for its execution.

You know, from this time last year, Maple was a 25 or 30 million market cap company. Our value today is 10x. We're about 237 as of yesterday's close. The share price is up almost five, six times. So shareholders have benefited from all of that. But importantly, while we look back, we always look forward to where we're going, right? Because nobody at this company, we built a company that really works on behalf of shareholders tirelessly to deliver returns, right? To deliver things that are actually going to add value to our projects and thus to our shareholders. So, you know, as we kind of look at what has actually produced that out performance, frankly, I think we were mispriced. I think the market didn't understand all the things we had done to set the company up for success. I think there was recognition, certainly from, you know, institutional investors, our partners at Agnico, Mike Gentile, you know, we now have, you know, plenty of capital to execute. We've drilled successfully. We've got three rigs turning at Joutel right now. At the moment, we've delivered a 5.2 million ounce total resource, which is, you know, three million ounces of inferred at Douay, 770,000 ounces of indicated at Douay and about a million ounces at Joutel at high grade.

You know, and we've also completed this internal study for ourselves to answer the question of whether or not we believe we've got a mine. The great thing for us is, I think, we believe we have two, right? And that's what's propelling us into 2020, this fall and then into 2027, where we expect to deliver a PEA, which I think is going to be a big, another big step change of valuation for Maple.

Matthew (2:46)

Let's go back to your original starting point there. I think there were some legacy issues before you came in and took control of this, and there's a lag. People want to see you continually and successfully execute. I think you've been doing that all year, which kind of leads into the looking forward bit, because ultimately this conversation for me is around, can this company go from being rated on the ounces that you're drilling through to, let's just say, executing on a mine build or two?

That's what I want to get out of this conversation.

Can we go back to this internal scoping study? You said you set out to understand whether or not you had a mine in place. How do you break that down? How did you answer that question?

Kiran Patankar (3:30)

Yeah. Again, when we delivered the resource update, we didn't just all of a sudden say, hey, we have a potential Tier 1 asset, and we have one of the rare projects in Canada that has that size of resource, and now we're going to start the work. The work on the scoping study actually started in parallel with the development of their updated resource. When we talked about the delivery of that resource, it was a, not only, people will certainly focus at the headline numbers in terms of number of ounces, grade, etc. But one of the things we know is it's a tighter resource in terms of the wireframes, in terms of the technical, the geological understanding of how this resource holds together, where we can grow it, where we can upgrade it. The scoping study which we did with Senco was looking at for ourselves before we just launch into a PEA, because at some point you have to decide, do we think we have enough ounces and now we're moving down the development path. With us, as we've talked about before, we've talked about with your audience, we've only explored about 10 percent of our overall land package. It's almost 500 square kilometers straddling one of the most productive breaks in the Abitibi in Quebec.