Aya Gold & Silver Inc. is a rapidly growing, Canada-based silver producer with operations in the Kingdom of Morocco.
The only TSX-listed pure silver mining company, Aya operates the high-grade Zgounder Silver Mine and is exploring its properties along the prospective Anti-Atlas Fault, several of which have hosted past-producing mines and historical resources.
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Good to see you. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. It's my pleasure to take you to Morocco. It's an unknown jurisdiction for mining for most, but it's probably now number one in the world, and you want to see where we're going, what Morocco is doing. Morocco is the big winner currently of the war. Because the states are landing all their planes in Morocco and then taking off from Morocco, the Middle East has now selected Morocco to be the world reserve of oil. So the infrastructure what's going on in Morocco is second to none. Plus you know they have the World Cup in 2030 with Spain and Portugal, so Morocco is buzzing. They just came up with their new mining code. You'll love that royalty 0. Free carried interest, 0. Taxation 32%. Permitting takes 2 weeks to 3 months on a PA. Once you're permitted, you're permitted for life. So you can't beat that. So you just cannot beat this. So Morocco is and and the geology is great. So I'm gonna walk you through. You don't need the forward looking statement. And I've lived through 1990, 2000 when gold went up and up and up and up. We were in Burkina, Guinea, Mali, you name it. We were everywhere, and you know what happened? Every place tax went up, royalties went up, indirect costs went up, demands went up. It was out of control. Right now, if you look at West Africa, it's out of control. Its royalties are up to 12%, so jurisdiction in a fast moving commodity price has got to be your number one criteria for looking at a project. In Morocco, jurisdiction ranks in the top 3, top 5 in the world, with other jurisdictions that we are familiar with. Geology is the best because it was untouched for 100 years and I'll explain that, so untouched. So now we're like when we got to Burkina in 1995, CFO, we obtained permit number 3. So 34, 18 permits to 21, we discovered the Hyundai Belt because there was nobody there. Well, there's nobody in Morocco. There's one company you want to invest in Morocco. There's one, it's us unless you want to go into the state-owned Manage or OCP, but otherwise there are no companies. So jurisdiction, geology, people, we have a great board of directors and it controls 40. 6% of the company. So that's pretty interesting. And the management team, we've built like 10 mines. We just completed one on time and on budget. We've built 4 in Africa. Mustafa Elwafi, who is right beside me at the top, ran the largest mining company in Morocco called OC20 mines, 26,000 employees. So we've done it, we've done it over and over again. So it's, it's, it's, it's a company that's got a good management team, a very good board that's fully, fully invested, and have a very clean capital structure. We have 143 million shares at the board. We control 40% of that. We have a great institutions. Many are in the room. We have a very clean balance sheet. We have one debt, one debt. They're the best. They're fanta colony. It's an loan, and I always joke around. I said when we went out on tender for financing, we had 7 offers. We kept 2. did a 30 day due diligence. 28 days on social matters, 2 days on the project. Everybody else did 30 days on the project. Nothing on social matters. So they are partners with us. Everything we do socially, they participate. So if you followed this weekend, there was a rally called de Gazelle. It's a world renowned rally. You saw the Ayaar we have. A Car, we have a team and we are part of what is being done in the country to promote to promote what we do and female involvement in business. So very clean balance sheet currently approaching 200 million in cash. The $100 million loan which we can pay back, it's sour plus 4. That's when the company was structured. So the key thing with Aya right now is for the next 3 years, 100% of our revenue is silver. So we produced last year 5 million ounces. We're producing this year close to 7 million ounces. We produced last quarter 1.5 million ounces. We're producing about 17,000 ounces of silver per day. And so it's extremely profitable in this environment. So when you want leveraged to silver, we are 100% leveraged to silver. It won't be like that on our second project because when it kicks in, it's going to add 10 million ounces of silver, but 350 ounces of gold on the second project. So I talked about that. That's the government, the royalty. It's absolutely fantastic. And why for 100 years nobody could go to Morocco? Because in 1914 they discovered the largest phosphate resource in the world. They created OCP, which means Le F Cherifier de Phosphate, so it's a phosphate company, and they wanted nobody to touch that, not the French, not the Spaniards, nobody. And today OCP is the largest producer of phosphate in the world, and for us in mining we like mine life. They have today 700 years of mine life as being number one in the world, so it is a mining country. We have first mover advantage, as I said in Morocco right now there's either phosphate, Manage state owned or. The beauty when you arrive into a jurisdiction where there has been no work, you start drilling. Our drill program this year is 240,000 m. Last year it was 200,000 m. We have 450 people dedicated to geology and to exploration. We have 18 rigs turning, 16 to 20, depending at all times. And we have discovered in 5 years close to 600 million ounces of silver equivalent, and this is ongoing. We are drilling. Every day 24/7 ongoing and and hence the the the number in the little bubble is ounces per share outstanding. So because ounces makes is not so important if you've over diluted the company we are increasing the ounces per share and now of course they even have better margins so it's, it's, it's, it's excellent. So the first mine was built last year. That's why some of you saw we went into the valley of Death or the Lason curve. We took a real skidoo ride right down the bottom from 20 down to 11, and that that's, that's, that's, that's the ride that people do take. They were ramp up normal issues, and we are now coming out of the ramp up period and hence we had a very, very good quarter. So now the first mine is currently as it stands, it's a 6 million ounce producer. $16 cash cost, $19 a 6 for 11 years as it is right now we are spending 20 to $30 million there on exploration as well to increase the mine life and hopefully to increase the production profile. So a very good year last year, 2025, we showed $72 million of free cash, 48 million of net income after tax, 200 million of revenue, but the funny thing is 2025 is now repeating itself in Q1. Because if you look at the plant and all our KPIs are all really doing extremely well because when you do a ramp up people follow your KPIs, your key performance indicators, you know, is your recovery good? Is your availability good, your throughput good at the plant, at the mine? They are all stellar, all stellar KPIs. But to me what's important is on the left, look at the margin. The margin has gone from $10 to $10 to $20 to $40 and in Q1 this year, the margin is over $60. So that's key today. So when people say, Oh, your grade has gone down a little bit, I say, you're missing the point. You're totally missing the point. Don't don't call me about grade because we go into a structure. If we find a 100 g pocket, we leave it there, we take it out. We take it out. It's not in the model, but once you're underground and you're opening stoves and you're an open pit and you're opening a new area and you've got pockets at 80, 100, 120, they're not in your model. You take them out, you put them through, so the grade can be down 5 g 10 g, but at the end of the day our goal is to make sure we don't leave anything there. We take it all out, we process it all, and hence, because because the margin is so good and it continues to be so good. We were in a price setting environment in Q1, so we would set the price if and when you saw the price of silver go to 100, 15, 110, 115, 120, we were doing that. So because if you sell and you hit the the bid, you sell, you hit the bid we never at CFO we never did that is we take, we, we assemble quantity so we don't sell for. A month, two months, and then we take this quantity, we look at the bid and we go $5.05 dollars, $5.05 dollars, and we put very large quantity of silver and in Q1 it worked perfectly well. Now not as much because now the market's a little bit different currently, probably changing soon, but currently not doing as well. So the, the, the revenue as you see per quarter. And it's so it's, it's an open pit plant in Morocco. You have, and what I love about Morocco is there's no NGOs, not allowed. You can't go and protect the frogs and stuff like that. You, you, you, your life span will be one minute. So it's, it's control, but you need to be, it's in business. They follow you. When can you build? How fast can you build, and there's one element, as little expat as possible. When we ran CFO, we had 3000 employees, 10% expat. We're running this 2000 employees, 11 expats, 11. We had 300 at CFO, so Morocco, they have their own people and they want you to employ them. So beautiful construction, open pit. The guidance, what's important to see is in yellow is by 2029 we will be a 43 million ounce of silver producer. The first mine is 6 and the second mine is 37. So by 2029 we will be there and we love to compare ourselves with Hela and First Majestic and see that we need to climb up. There's got to be a rerate of our evaluation because that 37 million ounces of additional production is permitted. It's found. PEA is done, feasibility is being done. Water is there. Power is there. Employees are there. It's now execution. And that will take us to 43. So The, the, the, the fault, the line it's called the Atlas fault, we have beside the government the largest land position. And there's so much more to be discovered because it's never been looked at and and and we go like we're we're doing a deal right now, 21 permits with a family and they because they produce byri, which is sand, so they all produce byri and they never sample for anything else but buyri and so we go look at sometimes the core that they have they've never looked for gold or silver. And this is why some of you saw that at our second project we're producing a million ounces a year of gold equivalent because we had stockpile dating back 500 years and they never looked for gold or silver, so we got 240,000 tons of stockpile with gold and silver that were never treated because they were not looking for that. So this is the first mine. It's 1.4 kilometers long, 700 m deep, 200 m wide, a loaf of bread. It's all mineralized in there. You have control zones, so you have sometimes very high grade that you see on the left. Sometimes you have 100, and our task is to get everything out at the best price possible, make sure we leave nothing, and now we're seeing extension. Extension to the to the west, which is at the end extension to the east and when you look at this, this is our ground. The mine is that star in the middle and we are the only player in town. So now we're using geochem, geophysics, satellite imagery, AI, a lot of AI, and we're looking at new targets and we have a team there. It's not as big a budget as the first one. It's 25, 30 million. And we're going to be drilling a lot of these new targets. So this is our little baby. It produces 300 million a year. It's built, it's paid for except for EBRD, and it's funding the Big Brother. The Big Brother is a world class tier one asset that we've. Well, it's not true. It was discovered by the Portuguese and they were there before, but when we arrived, no one had seen what it was. They had been producing out of it for 500 years, so it's a district. It's very large. We did the PEA on the resource of 2024, so the PA is being updated as the feasibility is being completed, and we did it on the resource of 2024. So there's 200,000 m of drilling missing. And look at $2800 gold and $30 silver. You've got an NAV of $2 billion and an internal rate of return of 68%, and we're using a before tax number because that size of a project will have its own tax agreement, and we're not gonna be at the 32% tax rate. We're gonna be a lot lower than that in in country. So when you take this. And you look at the capex, it's 450 because the cost of construction in Morocco is about one third of North America. So we build the first plant which we had priced in North America at around 4 to $500 million. We did it for 140. This plant, everybody was expecting 1.2 billion capex. It's actually 400 million capex. So when you look at it on a. Spot price as of February, that was before the war, we were at $5000 gold and $80 silver. The NPV is $7 billion. Don't forget, missing one year of drilling. And 148% IRR and a beautiful CE ratio efficiency ratio. So it is a tier one world class asset going into production by 2029. It will produce in silver equivalent 37 million ounces. And all of that, what I just showed you, all of that. Is The X, the little bubble underneath the X, that's what we're putting into production, that's it. That is 550 million ounces of silver. Everything else is ours. It's all ours. And this is the geophysics we've done like 50 different types of geophysics, and I'm showing you just one, and we are tracking the resistivity and the conductivity. And we're tracking it extremely, extremely well, and we have positive results on all the the the the the pink color there. We have gold results, silver results, copper results. So when people say, what are you going to do after boom adds in? I say, after boom ads in 1, we're going to be producing 37 million ounces, but then we'll do boom ads in 2 and 3 and 4 because that's that kind of a project. We've done all the work. We've done the M plan. It's changing because we are putting more drilling. We have done the layout, the concentrate. Everything has been done, what it's going to look like in 3D. We have already gone out with RFPs on mining contractor, underground, open pit. The design has been given to Lecopodium. We're going all out on ECM contract. We have 9 bidders, and that's going to be done before year end. People were saying, and I know you, not you, but some people were saying, oh yeah, but the recovery is not going to be good. Yeah, you're right, it's gonna be 96% for gold, 96% for silver, 74% for zinc, and 82% for lead. The recovery is fantastic and to that. We're going to be looking at the government, the government is looking at a roaster. But the country has got port, so we can ship the concentrate to Europe, Finland, Poland. I mean they're they're all bidding for the concentrate. The government last week calls us and said, OK, we read the PA. You need a railroad. So that, that would be nice. No, we'll come and see us. We're going to build a railroad for you from Boumedin to port. No, no, no, it's, it's us. Why? Because it's a $37 million a year moving contract. So they, they, they come to us first before we call them. Send the power line at Boumazin when they arrived, they say, yeah, you need power with the team you have here. Here's the power line. OK, so you don't see that anywhere else, and the beauty of what's happening, I'm sure you're all following the price of sulfur has gone from $100 a ton to $100 a ton to $700 a ton. The price of sulfur in here you have gold, zinc, the concentrate, the lead concentrate, you can see what it looks like, but the pyrite concentrate, the pyrite, 1 million tons a year. As 4.8 g of gold, 84% gram silver, 45%. Sulfur. That's not yet priced into those numbers because that's something new, so we haven't signed a contract. When we started the feasibility study, the payability was at 73. They came back to 75. They call us back for 80. Last week they were at 84 and they said we haven't priced sulfur yet. So it's a project that is extremely, extremely powerful. Capex 446 manageable. OPEC, that's what I wanted to show you. The OPEC, you see the, the, the, the shipping $38 a ton, a million tons a year, $38 million. Sure they can build a railroad line. So this is what Morocco is all about. It's like. We deliver. You deliver. We'll put the money and we're going to make this into something really big. Now the question is maybe they'll want a roaster in country which they'll take care of. Maybe if it's that, we'll we'll, we'll decide with them. We're pushing this in the project timeline. Historically we were to be in production in 2030. We'd like to be 2029, so we're pushing that in as much as possible, but it's a very simple story. One ATM machine. Runs super well. Debug running well will produce 300 million. And a world class asset that's being developed. Lots of results coming out because we have 240,000 m of drilling, so lots of results coming out, and we will start trading on NASDAQ. We heard the previous company, their volume is 5 times. We were penalized because we don't trade on an American listing, so a lot of ETF reduced their position in AA because we did not have enough volume. in the states, so we are starting before the end of April on NASDAQ, which is important, and coming back, one element geology is great, jurisdiction is fantastic. People have done it. It's not a lifestyle company. People have done it many times. Strong growth profile from 6 to 43 million of production. Core assets are fantastic, and the exploration track record, that's not me, that's David Lalo. David was with me at CFO. He found 10 to 12 million ounces of gold. He's a gold retriever. He's like a little dog. He just retrieves gold. Here he's like and some of you were at. Site last week some of you are going to be at site in 2 weeks and many, many people are visiting right now. David knows his stuff inside out and he's got a team of 4450 people just thinking about finding more ounces. That's it. He's not involved in the operation. There's another team doing that. That's the story. It's very simple. Best couscous, best tagin, fantastic hotels, and a third of the price of Europe. You're invited. Thank you. Thanks, Reno. That was a great update. I ran out through the question period.
Recorded at Mining Forum Europe 2026, Park Hyatt Zürich, Zürich. Prepared for information only; it is not investment advice or a recommendation. Statements are those of the presenting company as at the date of the presentation. Market figures in US dollars, not as at the date of the forum.