Vista Gold Corp.

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And ladies and gentlemen, Ross, thank you and thanks to Denver Gold. It's great to be back in Zurich, once again. As many of you will know, Vista Gold, completed a, a revised and updated feasibility study for the Mount Todd Gold Project in July of last year. I will not be talking about the technical aspects of that study in great detail. You can find the study on our, on our website. I will be talking about what we're doing to, realize value through discipline execution though. I will be making some forward-looking statements. I'm sure you're all familiar with these. For those who don't know where the project is, let me introduce the project and just what we're doing. the project itself is located in the northern part of the Northern Territory of Australia, what the Australians call the top end. It's about 250 kilometers south and east of the capital and port city of Darwin and about 30 minutes north of a regional commerce center named Katherine, which is home to regionally somewhere between 160 and 18,000 people. The The project itself is very accessible, paved roads all the way to the site. The site is located about 10 kilometers east of the Stuart Highway. Mount Todd is among the largest undeveloped gold projects in Australia with 10.6 million ounces of total resource, 9.1 of which is classified as measured and indicated. As I indicated, we completed a new feasibility study in July of last year, and this year, all of our programs, all of our work is focused on. On positioning the project and leading to the commencement of detailed engineering and design in year 2027. We, Or, are executing an independent development strategy. But we remain open to the concept of the appropriate corporate transaction, whether that's a joint venture or other form of transaction, provided that it rewards shareholders appropriately. I'm going to digress for just a moment and just talk briefly about the capital structure of the company. Some will be aware that we successfully completed a public offering in March, just last month. We raised $44.85 million at an offering price of $2.50 on a pro forma basis. We have just shy of 145 million shares issued and outstanding, and we have approximately $55.5 million in cash as a result of that. We have no debt, and you can see at least a partial list of our largest institutional shareholders. This will be updated in the coming month or so as institutions complete their filings and we're able to disclose what they publicly report. So going back to the project itself, and this is really the only slide that I have that I'm gonna talk about the results of the feasibility study. This is. We set out to accomplish a couple of things with this study. First of all was to significantly reduce the capex. We did that in part by right sizing the project. Previously, the project had been designed at 50,000 tons a day. We've reduced the, the, the scale of the project to commence with an initial 15,000 ton ton per day plant. We've retained the flexibility of being able to expand that. That allowed us to reduce the capex from over a billion dollars to $425 million. The grade has been raised. We did that by raising the cutoff grade for the deposit. I know that in this environment, many people are lowering their cutoff grade. Our philosophy is that grade pays, tons cost. And as a result, we raised the cut-off grade from 0.35 g per ton to 0.5 g per ton, which allowed us to raise the reserve grade from 0.77 to almost 1 g per ton. The 1.04 g per ton is the average grade over the first half of the life of the project. Third, we targeted a very stable production profile, and with that grade and the recovery, we were able to produce at the project over the 1st 20 years of a 30-year mine life pretty close to 150,000 ounces per year constantly. You see some of the, you see the reserve numbers there, 5.2 million ounces of reserve today. That's down a little bit from our previous feasibility study in part because we're going to be putting almost a million ounces of gold in the corner of the waste rock dump. That's the 0.35 to 0.5 g per ton material, and that we envision will be processed at some later point in the life of the project, but it's not included in the reserve. As I mentioned, 10.6 million ounces of total resource. The economics for the study were done at what we felt at the time was a conservative gold price of $2500 an ounce. I guess today we look back on that and say that would be a very conservative gold price assumption, but you see that at that price, the project generated an after-tax NPV 5 of $1.1 billion and an IRR of almost 28%. And if we raise that gold price to just $3300 which by today's standards is still very conservative, the NPV 5 after tax goes to $2.2 billion and the IR, I'm sorry, the IRR goes to almost 45%. The all in sustaining costs, the life of mine are just shy of $1500 an ounce for the first half of the life of the mine. They're estimated to be $1450. I'd love to tell you that that's the lowest quartile. It's not. It's right in the center of the pack of all Australian gold producers, and we're very confident that that's an achievable, all and sustaining cost. So what is our focus? What is it that we're doing now that we've completed this study? As I mentioned, our focus this year is completing work programs leading to the commencement of detailed engineering design in 2027. We are presently undertaking and completing what we're calling pre-development optimizations. We have drilled and shipped a batch of core to ALS, AMTech in Perth for some metallurgical testing which will provide the last numbers and parameters that we need for detailed engineering design, for equipment selection, and for equipment size optimization. We have just started in the past week drilling on a geotechnical study specifically focused on the west side of the pit where we saw the pit slope be flattened as a result of what the new geotechnical engineers perceived to be a lack of data that we believe that there's an opportunity to steepen that wall back up that will reduce stripping and add to the project economics. We've commenced project execution planning. We're beginning the work that we need to do to understand the pathway forward and to establish all of the steps that need to happen and when they need to happen to be able to ultimately start detailed engineering which will lead to the commencement of construction. We, as I'll show you in a moment, we have, we previously had all of the permits for a 50,000 ton per day operation. And given that this project is now going to commence at 15,000 tons per day, the fact that we've completed 4 different drilling programs since those permits were originally issued, the shape of the pit has changed. There's been some other minor changes. We're in the process of modifying those existing permits, and I'll, I'll show you a timeline for what that looks like here in just a moment. The other thing that we've commenced since the start of the year is that we are building an Australian project development team. We've always said that we will not manage the development of the Mount Todd project from Denver, where our corporate headquarters are. And so we have started hiring people. We're going to have a small executive team based in Perth, and we already have 3 of the 5 or 6 people that we're going to place in that office are already have already joined us and commenced working. And then the rest of our team, our operations team and project development team will be based in the Northern Territory, where our general manager is currently, located as well as our exploration staff. So Why, why do we do this? What's the, what's the purpose? What's the objective? What's the opportunity for you as, as shareholders and investors? The graph before you shows the valuation, the reserves, and the annual production of what we would consider to be our peers in the junior gold producers in Australia. That's the blue balls. And then we have Vista and the and the Mount Todd project over here on the on the right in in the gold ball, and you'll see that we have more reserves. We have Equal to or greater annual production, I should note that Capricorn Metals is in the process of an expansion, and I expect that they will soon be at 150,000 ounces per year, which is what we're targeting. But the size of the ball represents their, their, I'm sorry, the, the, the, the vertical scale represents their market cap. And you see that while we are. Have, a very large, I guess the pointer doesn't work, a very large resource reserve. We have large production profile compared to our peers. Our market cap is quite low being a developer. We expect that with making the transition from being a developer to a producer that we will see a revaluation. Hos initially. We think that it's quite reasonable that we'll be valued like Bellevue, which would be a 7 or 8x increase from where we are right now. Aspirationally, we think that we should be valued much the way Capricorn Metals is and so that's the opportunity is taking Vista from the company that it is today with no production and a quite modest, market cap to becoming a initially a junior producer. With the aspiration to expand the project in time and become a mid-tier producer, but with that, a resulting, a significant resulting increase in the market cap. Timing wise, the process of modifying these permits, you see the list of the permits that that we need to modify and amend. We already have two Aboriginal Area Protection Authority certificates. We're applying for a third one that will give us an additional area on the west side of the project. We, as a, as a legislative act or mining management plan or mine operating permit was reclassified to be called a deemed environmental mining license, and all mining companies have 4 years to convert that license to a full environmental mining license. We have filed that application and expect sometime the end of this quarter, first part of next quarter that we'll achieve the, the, the conversion of that license. The environmental impact statement will follow that. there's a, then we'll follow or file an amendment to our, our environmental mining license to align it with the 15,000 ton per day study. And then there's a federal authorization. That we've already commenced the work on that's going to be in the background and we estimate that that will take us until mid next year before we secure that authorization. Again, that's an authorization that we already have, but there's been changes in legislation that we need to comply with and that will involve some ecological studies that one has already started and there will be another one later this year. So Why, why Mount Todd? You know, we, we talked to a lot of people, investors. People who could potentially be partners in one form or another. And some of the things that appeal to them about Mount Todd, and I throw these out there so that you might reflect and ponder on them and and see where they, where they fit in your hierarchy of of criteria that you assess but. There's a scarcity of large deposits in tier one jurisdictions. 10 million ounce deposits are not easy to come by. Finding one in a tier one jurisdiction like Australia reduces that list substantially. Many companies that come and have taken a look in the past when we were looking at a much larger project made the statement that Mount Todd is just simply too big to ignore. We have tremendous opportunity for resource growth. In addition to the 10 million ounces that we have, and all of those ounces are located within the boundaries of the mining license. We have an additional over 1000 square kilometers of exploration licenses where our geologists have identified no less than 20 targets. And if we gave them $50 million they'd be happy to drill for the next 5 years. So we believe there's tremendous opportunity for resource growth, including a district scale expansion. We, as I mentioned briefly at the start, we've designed this as a smaller scale project. We felt that right sizing it to 15,000 tons a day helped us to achieve our objectives with regards to capital costs and being able to design and build a project that could be developed efficiently, and yet we've retained the optionality to be able to expand the project at the appropriate time. Last of all, as I mentioned, you know, this partner strategies. Joint venture we recognize 150,000 ounces a day might not be the right size for some people, but being able to expand that to 3000 or 400,000 ounces per year with one or two expansions all of a sudden puts the project in a scale where many different companies could take an interest in the project. We're focused on value creation and value realization. And this slide really just summarizes everything that I've told you. I'm not going to read it to you again. But I'll just leave it up there for, for a couple of minutes and Ross, perhaps we can take questions from those who are here today. Thanks, Fred. Any questions from the room? There's one at the back there. maybe you can describe a little bit of the history as to why in a country is rich in gold, experienced miners in Australia that this deposit of this size has been left behind and it's not been developed to date and why is it in, in, in, why is it not listed in Australia? Maybe you just can give me a small summary. I'm sorry, it's too many questions. The answer to the last one question the last question first, we don't have enough shares issued and outstanding to really be competitive on the ASX just yet. But we may consider a listing on, on the ASX. The history of the project is this. This is a brownfields project. It was, initially built in 1996 as a, open pit heap bleach operation. To this date we don't understand why it was a heap bleach operation. The recovery from the heap was about 53%. The ore, everything that I've seen come out of core would not suggest to me as an operator that this should be a heap bleach operation. In 1996, Pegasus bought out the Zapopan and Billitin and converted it to a milling operation. Unfortunately, in hindsight, we believe that they picked the wrong equipment for the crushing circuit. They chose BMA vertical shaft impact crushers as the 3rd and 4th stages of crushing. Kept adding to the numbers of those crushers when the project shut down. They had 19 in operation. The, the project itself, has been plagued by some reputations, we call them legacy issues. Many people, when you talk about Mount Todd, think that the ore body is hard. they think of copper, The size of the deposit that you mentioned when we first acquired it in 2006, there was only 3.3 million ounces. The rest of it has come through the drill bit as we've completed exploration. We've drilled all of our cores. All of our drilling has been core drilling, and so we've learned a great deal about the deposit. And the fact is that when we, when we talk hardness, geologists use a scale to describe the hardness of rock. We call it the Mosscale of hardness, diamond being 10, talc being 1. The mountain top ore body is no harder than any other ore body around. We're somewhere between 6 and 7. What makes it different is the way that it's glued together. It's a very fine grained sedimentary deposit that's heavily silicified, and on the crushing and grinding side, there's a factor that we call the bond work index, which is a measure of the power it takes to crush and grind the rock, and our rock requires more energy than other projects. At today's gold price, at today's power costs, that extra power that it takes to grind that rock adds about $50 an ounce to our production costs. And so we don't consider that to be a very substantial or significant number, but it is what Mount Todd is remembered for as a result of decisions that were made by the early developers. So I, I hope that kind of helps create a little bit of a picture that. Sometimes project get monikers tagged to it that they really don't deserve, and we've been working very hard to overcome that. OK. Thanks, Fred. I think we're probably out of time for questions, but thank you very much.