NorthIsle Copper and Gold

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Executive of North Isle Copper and Gold. Do we have the, dongle? Over here? Thank you. Thanks everybody. good afternoon. It's great to be back at the forum's conference. my name is Stan Lee. I'm the president and CEO. I'm very excited to talk about, what is one of the most, if not the most important, large copper and gold porphyry in British Columbia, 2025. It has been a transitional year. we were the top performing, one of the top performing stocks on the TSSV, ranked number 7th. and in 2026, we are endeavoring to advance what we think is going to be the next transition for the company. I will be making forward-looking statements. So the reason why this project is so important is that it is not only the value opportunity that's underpinned by our major copper gold porphyry located in British Columbia, but it's also the growth across a 50 kilometer bona fide porphyry district of which we own 100% of 40 kilometers of that district. And so we came out with a study in 2025 that showed very attractive economics that the market ended up. Sanctioning, with over $155 million of equity, in, six months. we've also advanced two discoveries across this 40 kilometer portion of the 50 kilometer district, which has positioned us today. We've also built our group, second to none, board, management, and investors that we have amassed over the last 5.5 years since this company has been under new leadership. So in February of 2025, we released the PEA, the Preliminary Economic assessment, that boasted at the time some of the most compelling economics that we saw. This was done, keep in mind, at a $4.20 long-term analyst consensus pricing. For copper $2150 per ounce of gold, which was annals consensus at the time in 2025 of February, and it yielded a $2 billion after-tax NPV with an IRR after-tax of 29%. payback of 1.9 years, and NPV to CapE of 1.7 times. that's on an after-tax basis. Under those assumptions, that would make this project one of the most compelling economic projects, not only in Canada, but in the world. So the market, as I said, has sanctioned us to move this project forward, not only through pre-feasibility, but feasibility and sanctioning as quickly as possible, and hence the reason why we're able to raise about $155 million in the last six months. and part of the reasons was that typically during the de-risking phase of a project like ours, there are complications. You go. From 8 30%, level of certainty down to 15%, things are going to expand, which, at the end of the day is reality. But the fact that this project has so many levers around not only commodity price appreciation, put things in perspective. When we were, sensitizing this project back this, pretty much this time last year, the price for gold was about $2150 per ounce. At spot at the time, $2900 per ounce, the Project NPV increases to about $5 billion after tax MPV and a 45% after tax internal rate of return. So this project is a very important copper critical metal project that we all know is the critical metal to electrify and decarbonize to the extent that our world is looking to do. But it has a massive leverage to gold. It produces approximately 200,000 ounces a year. It will produce approximately 200,000 ounces a year of gold in the first six years, making it predominantly a gold project, and that is our competitive advantage. It has a massive leverage to the commodity price upside. But in addition to that, the things that we can control as we go through this de-risking phase this year. As we progress to a pre-feasibility study, it's to increase metallurgy significantly, and that's something that we're looking to come out with our solution around how we're going to do that, especially around the gold, which obviously has an incredible lever to these commodity prices. We're coming out with that in Q2 of this year. The second thing is resources. We're expanding our resources significantly. The discovery of West Goodspeed, which we made approximately 2 years ago, and we've now released all of those results, results and have confidence that it is going to have a very material impact on our resource estimate that's going to come out in Q2 of this year as well. And then finally we've just been added to the BC's Critical Minerals Office, which is an office that was. Focused on advancing projects on an expedited basis. We are in a very charged political environment today where in Canada we have identified that we need to extract and take advantage of our greatest commodities, our greatest assets, and that that is our natural resource commodities including copper and gold. So That's the value proposition as we go through the next 3 to 6 to 9 months. That is what the market is looking forward. As it relates to progressing the project on an expedited basis. And as a result, we expect a rereading event at each stage of that process. Now, the growth proposition is something significant. We think of this as a pretty much a free call option in the sense that we own 40 kilometers of a 50 kilometer porphyry district that started with the extraction of copper and gold, similar type asset back in the 70s by BHP for an island copper mine. So we pretty much own everything to the northwest of that copper and gold mine. So today, excuse me, we have. Allocated $10 million purely towards exploration budget, which would make this the largest exploration endeavor that this company and this project has faced over the last 70 years. Within that exploration strategy, we're breaking it up into two very distinctive objectives. One, The first objective is to Increase the higher margin of resources that's making this project so economical today in that phase one, and we're just about complete that exploration program and set to release our first batch of results around that high margin northern corridor area that are creating these great economics for our project. The second is to be big and bold right now. We haven't drilled deeper than 350-400 meters in this northern corridor, which carries the high grade, high margin. We're talking about up to 1.5 g per ton of gold equivalent pretty much at surface in the pit shell. That's what we released over the last couple of weeks as it relates to our initial results around infill, but we see that higher grade and potentially higher margin rock extend beyond the. So it's incumbent on us to go deep. We are a billion dollars market cap company right now, so we have the ability to be bold and to go deep and to find those much larger intercepts by being bold. We can, we can afford to go ahead with development and growth at the same time, and that's exactly what we are doing. The third part of our exploration strategy is extremely important because it effectively takes into account the overall nature of this 50 kilometer district. We have inherited over 70 years' worth of data, that's 7 companies' worth of data that you would not be able to replicate in a short period of time, no matter how much money you have. And so. We've collaborated with a think tank out of Stanford University out of Silicon Valley to synthesize the data over these 70 years. We've got the right people in place now to create or at least convert the correlations into causation effects by eliminating those false positives. So this is something that is pure option value across a district that is 100% owned by North Isle. So what's driving the development strategy around the value proposition at North Isle is the political environment. In the 30 years that I've been in the mining industry, I've never seen such political alignments across the board in Canada for natural resource extraction industries. And my chairman, who's 87 years old, most of you know him, Dale Corman, Mining Hall of Famer, in those 70 years of being in the industry, the last time this. Has happened. This incredible coalition of support for the natural resource industry was in the 60s when they built the infrastructure around our project for the island copper mine. There are hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure that has been paid for by the government, sunk costs to get this material to our global partners, in which case In the case of BHP, it was the Japanese. And so that is what's driven this momentum certainly within the province but also in Canada around expediting projects as quickly as possible and that's what the market sanctioned us for with this 115 $115 million offering of the 18 critical metal projects identified by the government, which is the projects on the left hand of the slide. 5 of them have already been expedited. These are low hanging fruit projects that effectively our mines are already in the process, permitting process previously. They were expedited. Now comes the more challenging part of development projects, and of that group of 14 and 13 left, we are the top priority of that group. So nothing happens without good execution, and throughout the course of the last 5.5 years we've created a team. We've put together a team that have been the leaders in the industry around mining, finance, development, exploration, and then of course production, and that's something that we hold very close to our hearts here. Our leadership team comes from the top. We have two Mining Hall of Famers on the board, including Dale Corman, my chairman, who most of you know, but also Alex Davidson. for those of you don't know Alex, Alex spent most of his career obviously building American Barrack from a $30 million dollar company into a $30 billion company, and he's in love with districts. This is something. Thing that he really does, have a fondness towards and for and what he views is, that our 30 year project that we've defined as part of our study work is a starter pit to a much broader district that which of which we own 40 kilometers, 100% of so this is truly a very important time, in our company's progress around execution and discovery. This is why we are one of the top, if not the top performers in our peer group, no matter how you cut it, 1 to 5 year period, whether it's copper or gold piers, we're the 7th best performer on the TSX in 2025. We're very well capitalized. We have about $140 million of cash in the bank today. We have no debt, very clean balance sheets, no warrants, nothing that encumbers the upside of a project's share price. And it's because we are fundamental owners, we being the inside. The company management team are fundamental holders of the company, owning now over 12% of, of North Isle. So this is something that we always discuss internally when we issue $1 worth of dilution. We have to see a multiplier effect, a 3 to 5 times return on that dilution, and that's a shareholder mentality that's alignment with our shareholders, and that's something that will continue on the positive impact around our share price appreciation. I'd be remiss. I've spent 20 years. I ran various functions at CIBC including a lot of cross-border M&A. This is something that is very interesting, right, because M&A speaks to where we are in the cycle, and I've always said copper is always like a tomorrow story, but copper today is the thing that's driving M&A. People are understanding how insatiable the demand is going to be, obviously through the electrification, decarbonization, but also the dependence on AI technologies and things that just have a massive consumption of power. And so what we've seen certainly in our peer group since I started about 5.5 years ago, is a complete consolidation of this peer group to the point where I can't actually count more than 2 or 3. In companies that are part of our peer group now because they all have been taken out. So this is something that has really driven, I think, how we think about our project around developing it as quickly as possible within the the the the confines of consultation and consensus, the things that really drive project expedited behavior. So, in conclusion, there are a lot of very, very important catalysts in 2026. Part of it belongs to the project development side of it. So the de-risking, re-rating, so new resources coming up with the inclusion of West Goodspeed, which is the new discovery in Q2. The optimization of metallurgy that is significantly going to impact the recoveries hopefully on gold, that's something that we continue to believe is going to be a significant value driver for our project. Thirdly, something that we've experienced briefly, which was the success of being included in the Critical Minerals Office, BC Critical Minerals Office, as one of the top priority projects in in British Columbia. So to advance that progression, as quickly as possible. I have about 6.5 minutes right now. So, we have an option here. We could either just take Q&A, which I'd love to take. I'd love to make this a little bit more of a collaborative, discussion, or I could go through a really cool verify deck that just shows where everything sits. so maybe that's with a show of hands and the hands representing questions, we could make that determination. Does anyone have any questions at this point? OK, verify it is. Yeah, so this is essentially the landscape in British Columbia, as I said, about. 18 priority projects, 5 have been expedited. The remainder has to go through the permitting process. We are the top priority. The reason behind that is we are located on Vancouver Island, about 500 kilometers away from Victoria. This is really significant because everything that was built north of Campbell River back in the 70s was built for the Island copper mine. This is the mine that BHP ran for 24 years. In fact, Port Hardy was built for the Island copper mine. As well, it was about a 300 person town in the sixties and through the same type of political sentiment that exists today, all this money was put into the area to build the roads, the power, the infrastructure that is able to support a large scale copper coal porphyry mine such as ours and the island copper mine. This is what the Island copper mine looks like today. Today it's in reclamation, but this has significant advantages, for us potentially and something that we are looking to pursue with BHP. on a pretty expedited basis as well. to the north of us, we have one of the largest, if not the largest, wind farms in British Columbia. It, produces about 100 megawatts of clean power into the current distribution grid substation that's only a few kilometers away from us. This is what our project outline looks like. This is the economics that support the project outline. It's effectively a two-tier, excuse me, a two, phase project where you have the high grade portion in. Phase 16 years of gold production, about 200,000 ounces a year and about 50 million pounds a year that has a high NSR value per ton of rock, high, returns that allows us to reduce our capital intensity upfront. And then that allows us then to fund phase two, which then takes us to the full 29 years life of Mine project. So that's sort of how it lays out, in terms of the construct of that first phase, that higher margin that consists of red dog, which is shown here, which is a, which is a medium grade zero strip ratio project, which gets mined out in the 1st 5 years. Then we have a very, significantly higher margin project called Northwest Expo. This is really the driver of the economics in phase one. We just came out with our final infill results a couple of weeks ago. And not only did we see, the continuity in the medium to lower grade areas in this pit, but we also saw, a con continuity and an increase in the Higher grade portions that did not get reflected in the pit. So what that means is that the, the lightly shaded colored pit shell blocks, which are medium to low grade, will be converted into high grade based on these results. in addition to that, we found that this high-grade zone in that red area. Towards the northwest continues down at surface. So this is also informing our exploration plan that we're currently drilling right now, the $10 million plan that I talked about. This is Hushiu. This is about 700 million tons of total resources, but there's about 200 million tons there that exists. That is about. 0.5 0.6% copper equivalent. So above average mining grades in the world. That essentially represents the final, 6 to 29 year life of mine. So expect that to be obviously identified clearly when we move on to the growth projects, or the growth exploration strategy that I mentioned. Right now, the first two phases right now that's being drilled out is in the Northern Corridor. So again, this is the area that is the high grade, high margin area that really kicks our project into gear in the 1st 5 years. our objective there is to not only expand those high-grade resources, but also to, to find different discoveries within this northern higher grade area of no, of, the Northern Corridor. The second, sorry, this is quickly, this is the area that is not in the resources. This is called West Good Speed. So that's the area that's not in the resources. This is the area that is in the resources. This is about a 750 kilometers. 750 m kilometer, I wish strike. This is about a 1.2 kilometer strike. So this is going to have a significant impact on our resource estimates as we release them in Q2, because this currently, this area of West Goodsby currently is not in the resources. And as you can see, it's right next to phase one. It's about 100 m away from Red Dog, which is in phase one. So that's something that I think the market is anticipating and continues to anticipate. positive results on. So the thing around the district scale opportunity, and this is the really exciting part, the call option that I keep on talking about, we have 70 years terabytes worth of data. That we've inherited through 7 companies. We're now taking this data, we're synthesizing it through this, Silicon Valley think tank, Stanford MineralX. We've just hired John Thompson to, advise us on the technical side, foremost expert in the pore-free space. We, retained Pablo, Doctor Pablo Mejel as our VP exploration, who came from Aero Copper to do exactly this data generation. Around, probabilistic, targeting around, district scale exploration activities. So this is, this is information, this is data that you just cannot accumulate in a short period of time. And we have, again, 70 years' worth of this data to effectively take what we currently have in terms of deposits. All of those 4 deposits that I talked about exist here. And BHP The island copper mine Exists here, OK? So all of that data in between, we are now using to generate a targeted district scale exploration target that we know can help us increase our probabilistic chances of world-class discoveries, and that's being funded through the $10 million offering and then some, and once we get a better idea of that targeting program in the second half of this year. So I think that's my time. I don't think there's any time for additional questions, but please, come reach me if you have any questions. Thank you very much. That was right on the button. Thanks, Sam.