Mineros S.A. (TSX:MSA) - $230M Treasury Funds Growth to 300,000 oz Annual Gold Production

Daniel Henao (0:00)

My name is Daniel Henao. I'm the president and CEO of Mineros SA. We're a gold producer in Latin America. We're also building new mines, unlocking a lot of value for the benefit of our shareholders.

SPEAKER_2 (0:12)

Daniel, good to see you here. Here we are in Colorado Springs. How's the conference going? What are you getting out of it?

Daniel Henao (0:19)

Great. It's been great. Look, lots of happy shareholders, people that got to know about us a year or two years ago. And it's been an amazing ride for them since we started getting involved in the company. The share price has gone from about 60 cents to about $10 last week. So it's been an amazing ride.

About 15x in a gold producer, which is very unusual.

You hear about those stories in an amazing discovery, exploration type mining companies. But in our case, as a producer, that's pretty unique. So it's been great. There's still a lot of shareholders that have, sorry, investors that have never heard about Mineros. It's also a very valuable opportunity for us to come to these sort of events and share what we're building. We think it's a very significant, meaningful story. So it's been great.

SPEAKER_2 (1:15)

It's been a lot of fun. It's a long-established company. You obviously run privately for a long time and come public recently, in recent years. You guys have stepped in. There's been a step change clearly in appreciation of the company, the share price more importantly.

Let's start at the beginning to help people understand what are the kind of cornerstones in terms of that revenue flow? So where's that coming from? Because I want to get onto our Porvenir and that Builder. I want to talk about Columbia. I want to talk about Chile as well. So let's start with that history.

Daniel Henao (1:46)

Excellent. The way I like to describe it is that we're a very old news story, particularly to North American and European investors. We've been around for over half a century, mining gold and paying dividends for several decades now, listed in the Colombian Exchange since the 80s, but only in late 2021, the company became public in TSX, and Sun Valley started investing, and now we're working on a very significant transformation, unlocking a lot of value from the assets, from an operational point of view.

A ton of growth is happening organically, and that technical agenda, of course, is translating into record operational results, which in a very constructive, middle-price environment is, of course, record revenues, record financial performance overall. So that's been the trajectory. We're also bulking up in terms of assets, acquiring new assets, building a pipeline, having a growth strategy, which is also very valuable. We're very proud of the transactions we've been able to do, a very attractive valuation. So it's been great, very gratifying times to be in the market.

SPEAKER_2 (3:11)

Yeah. But let me, I want some cold hard facts in you, because ultimately, you increased the guidance to create answers, which suggests that things are going well in terms of operationally, optimization, and all of those wonderful things. But what is the kind of cash flow? Where does it specifically come from at the moment?

Daniel Henao (3:27)

Perfect. So we are mining in two Latin American jurisdictions, Nicaragua and Colombia. Nicaragua has been the focus from an operational point of view. That's where we identify the biggest low-hanging fruits from an operational point of view. So there are three main initiatives in Nicaragua that are unlocking a lot of value, improving recoveries, both for gold and silver, very meaningful improvements.

To give you a sense of scale in silver, our silver revenues went up 500 percent in this first half of the year compared to the year before. So very meaningful steps in the right direction. So improving recoveries, removing very significant historical bottlenecks, like processing capacity. So we're deploying this year about $25 million expanding the processing capacity in Nicaragua with very nice returns on that investment. So about 30,000 ounces extra production we're getting with $25 million investment, so very significant return on that. And then also a ton of initiatives about improving the grades, better mine plans, better mining methods, better controls on dilution. So all of that is translating into very significant growth, immediate growth. And that's, Nicaragua is the asset responsible for our increased guidance. So this year, 150,000 ounces in production and this year coming from Nicaragua. So very significant improvement there. And in Colombia, we are having very positive developments as well. New precedent, pro-investment, pro-development. Colombia is also a very special asset. It has been in production for over a century.

Producing from 80 to 90,000 ounces in recent history with 2.2 million ounces in resources.