Altius Minerals Corporation (ALS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Altius Minerals AGM. The AGM is being held live in Newfoundland, and the purpose of this webcast and conference call is to allow remote participation for attendees, including Q&A. All voting is done in advance as explained in the circular. I will now turn the meeting over to John Baker, Chair. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, both present here and online. I'd like to call the meeting to order. Welcome, everybody, to our 27th Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Hard to believe 27 years. I'm John Baker, for those who don't know me, Executive Chairman of the corporation, and in accordance with the bylaws, I will act as Chairman of the meeting. Shareholders have been given the option to attend this hybrid meeting in person or by conference call or webcast. And let me first address those persons that aren't in the room but joining us by webcast or conference call. The webcast allows participants to hear the meeting, but it is listen only. So if anybody viewing the webcast would like to ask questions either during the formal part of the meeting or after Brian's presentation, they should dial into the conference call as all questions are received through the conference call facility. The phone number for that is shown on our website. And for those on the webcast or that have dialed in and would like to view Brian's presentation when we reach that point in the meeting. You can find the presentation on our website. And for your information, if you go to the home page, go to Investor Information at the top of the page, and then in the drop-down, click on AGM and in the AGM folder is the proxy and information circular for this meeting as well as the presentation that will be given now shortly. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce Altius' senior management team that are in attendance today. I think most of you know these folks, but just in case, I know we have a few new people with us today. Brian Dalton, firstly, President and CEO and Director; Ben Lewis, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Chad Wells, Vice President, Corporate Development Project Generation; Lawrence Winter, Vice President Generative and Technical; Flora Wood, Vice President, Sustainability and Investor Relations; and Stephanie Hussey, Vice President, Finance; and Mark Raguz, Vice President, Corporate Development. Our senior management team and all our directors are also joining us today, but by conference call, as we actually held our quarterly in-person Board meeting last week. So I appoint Flora Wood to act as scrutineer for the meeting and Chad Wells, Corporate Secretary to act as Secretary of the meeting. Now the notice calling this meeting and all proxy-related materials were mailed to shareholders on April 16, 2024. A quorum for any meeting of shareholders is 2 persons present, representing at least 25% of the shares entitled to vote at such meeting. I have the scrutineers' preliminary written report and it shows that 32,589,746 shares are represented at this meeting by persons present and represented by proxy, and it represents 69.57% of all outstanding shares, which is quite a positive number. This meets the quorum requirement for the meeting. So notice having been given and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting to be properly called and constituted for the transaction of business. Our bylaws permit a shareholder to participate in a meeting by means of telephone or other communication facilities but do not permit voting to take place other than in person or by proxy. Any registered shareholder or proxy holder present in person or by telephone may demand that a ballot be conducted on any motion put before the meeting. But unless a ballot is demanded, I will conduct all votes simply by a show of hands of those persons present. And in order for the meeting to flow efficiently, I've also asked Altius officers to move and second all formal resolutions. I now submit and formally receive the corporation's financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2023, and the auditor's report on those statements as mailed to shareholders requesting same on April 16, 2024. Now the proxy items of business are, firstly, the appointment of an auditor for the coming year. As you will note from the information circular management is nominating again, the firm of Deloitte LLP as our auditors to hold office until the next annual meeting or until their successor is appointed and to authorize the directors to fix their remuneration. Deloitte has been the corporation's auditor since 2006. Do I have a motion for this item of business?

Mr. Chairman, I move that Deloitte LLP be appointed the corporation's auditor to hold office until the next Annual General Meeting and that the corporation's directors be authorized to fix their compensation [ made ] to the auditor.

Seconder?

Mr. Chairman I second the motion.

Thank you. Any discussion? If not, I ask for a vote on this motion by a show of hands, and I'll remind you, you can't vote against the motion, your choice is to vote in favor or to withhold your vote. All those in favor of the motion, please raise their hands. Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The second item of business is the nomination and election of directors for the coming year. The Board has fixed the number of directors to be elected at this meeting at 9. May I have nominations for directors?

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to nominate the following for election of directors until the next year; John Baker, Nicole Adshead-Bell, Teresa Conway, Brian Dalton; Anna El-Erian, André Gaumond, Roger Lace, Fredrick Mifflin, Jamie Strauss.

Mr. Chairman, I second the nominations.

Thank you. As was stated in the information circular, these 9 persons are management's nominees for election to the Board. And of course, our -- are existing directors without any change this year. Now we have an advanced notice bylaw, and this requires that any person proposing to nominate a director must provide the company with advanced notice and prescribe details concerning any proposed nominee. As no advance notices have been received in accordance with this bylaw, we may now proceed directly to the election of directors. The Board has also adopted a policy a number of years ago, stipulating that any nominee proposed for election as a director who receives based on shares voted at the meeting, a greater number of shares withheld than shares voted in favor, must tender his or her resignation to the Board to take effect on acceptance by the Board. 9 persons have been nominated then to fill the 9 directors position. Do I have a motion for this item of business?

Mr. Chairman, I move that the 9 persons who are nominated for election as directors be elected as corporation directors until next year, to hold office until the next Annual General Meeting and as the shareholders authorize the election of the 9 nominees by a single resolution.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Any discussion? If not, all those in favor, please raise your hands. Thank you. Any opposed? I declare the motion carried. The third and last item of business is the advisory resolution on executive compensation. This is to consider, and if acceptable, pass a resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation, which is generally known as a say-on-pay resolution. The details of which are set forth in considerable detail in the management information circular. As noted there, the corporation believes that its compensation objectives and approach to compensation appropriately align the interest of management with the long-term interest of shareholders. Under our say-on-pay policy, we provide shareholders the opportunity to cast an advisory vote at each AGM on the corporation's approach to executive compensation. This policy reflects our ongoing efforts to meet the highest governance standards and to ensure a high level of shareholder engagement. The Board, with myself and Mr. Dalton abstaining, unanimously recommends that shareholders vote in favor of the advisory resolution as set forth in the management information circular. Do I have a motion then to this effect?

Mr. Chairman, I move on an advisory basis not to diminish the role [indiscernible] Board, that the shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation [indiscernible]

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion? All those in favor? Thank you. Those opposed? I declare the motion carried. Well, you'll be pleased to know that concludes the formal business of the meeting. Is there any other matter a shareholder wishes to raise either here in the room or online? And for these purposes, I'd ask the conference operator to open the phone lines if there are any questions or any other matter to be raised at this time.

[Operator Instructions] Currently no questions on the line.

Thank you. I will then entertain a motion that the formal part of the meeting be terminated.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the meeting be terminated.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. All those in favor? Anyone opposed? If not, I declare the motion carried and the formal meeting terminated. I'll now pass the floor over to Brian for his annual presentation. The question period will follow that either from those in the room or on the conference call. And if anyone wants to follow Brian's presentation, they can go to the website, as I noted at the beginning of the meeting, and it is on the website. Brian?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, everyone, for joining us here today. Going to figure out how to use a Mac these days, so I don't know how to use anything in this. So just to begin, I wanted to give a little sort of overview state of the union where I see the business -- how it's represented through its assets today. So what this slide shows you is the mixture of different commodity exposures as the chart on the left-hand side. And you can see that right now, the business looks quite balanced across the key commodity areas. There's certainly a notable new piece of the pie on the chart this year and that will be gold. And a lot of that has to do with some pretty incredible developments we've seen across a project that we hold the gold royalty on in Nevada, and we'll certainly be talking about that a little later in the presentation. Also really happy these days to note that there's a real balance to the pipeline of the business for 9 mines and 11 renewable energy projects that are currently producing. There are 3 mines and 3 renewable energy projects under construction and 5 mines and 21 renewal projects that are at different stages of advanced study, which I think augers very well for the flow of new assets becoming part of the production profile over the next number of years. And finally, I just wanted to touch on the mix of jurisdictions that the business is exposed to, and you can see that it's dominated by Canada, but also throughout the rest of the Americas. So pretty low political risk profile, but also now building up some diversity within some better jurisdictions. I thought to start things off a little bit by taking you through where I think we're to in the cycle right now. So this chart here was actually one that was presented in last year's AGM. And why it was presented last year was a thought that there was a big looming deficit of copper coming into the market that was only about 2 to 3 years out. And we thought that this was pretty exciting. So what the chart shows in the light blue is projection of demand for copper and then the dark blue line shows the projection for supply. And in this chart, you can see that, that begins a -- it was meant to begin a steep decline in around 2025 as a number of old mines in the world were set to shut down as they were depleted, and there just aren't enough mines currently in the pipeline being built to replace that. Well, the big change that's happened year-over-year here is that looming deficit is no longer looming. It has now actually arrived. And that's because late last year, there were some real big surprises and mines that were meant to be operating this year or operating at fulsome rates this year suddenly left the market. So there have been some -- one was the political situation in Panama that took a mine out of the market. And the other was just previous expectations for production rates from a couple of big mines in Latin America, failed to live up to expectations and that company was forced to announce that their production rates would not be what they had originally promised. And so here we are, we're now actually at the point that a looming copper deficit is no longer looming, it is upon us. And this kind of goes to the point I'm trying to make here around where I think we might be to broadly speaking, cyclically. And we talk about copper a lot when we do that because it tends to be a great proxy for a lot of the other commodity exposures that we have as well. I don't know any of you can see the little graphic here, but I'm a bit of a Lord of the Rings fan. So the caption on that graphic is, "And so it begins." So I think that is where we're, too. And to support that a little bit. This is a chart that might seem a little busy. But what it shows in a blue line here, the solid blue line shows the copper price. And this goes back before the beginning of the last peak cycle, which began around 2002, 2003 and which came to a conclusion around 2016. And it also shows in the yellow line, another price reference point, which is what we calculate as the incentive price. And all that is, is the representation of the price that based upon the cost to build a new mine and the cost to run a new mine, it's the price that's required for a new mine basically to be able to operate profitably. And that changes with time as costs go up both to build and to operate. Obviously, you need a higher price in order to support that operation profitably. So that line has been going up pretty steadily. Shown in green and red periods when, in green would be periods when the actual copper price is higher than that which is required to support the building of new capacity. And the red would indicate periods where the copper price is actually below what is needed to bring supply into the market. One could look at the price part of this chart and make an argument that we're pretty advanced in the cycle. The price that we -- was reached earlier this week in copper is, in fact, higher than the highest point it reached in the last market cycle. And you can also see that since 2016, you've now had a similar duration of time pass from bottom as it took to go from bottom to the peak in the last market. So you could make an argument here that we've reached that -- a fairly advanced stage in this market cycle. But that niche is something really, really important. These commodity cycles, they're not random. What happens here is when markets go into deficit, the price rises. When the price rises, people build lots of new supply because they're incentivized to do so by price. Usually, they overdo it and they overbuild it, and then you've got a surplus in the market and the price crashes. So that's the normal rhythm. It goes into deficit, price goes up, goes in oversupply, price goes down. So why I'm saying this is absolutely not anywhere near the top of this market cycle is that we haven't even started to put money in to build new mines. We can't be anywhere near reaching a point of oversupply. And that's the bottom part of this chart. And you can see that the green period that was the top of the last cycle, if you look down at the bottom, that's money, that's the flow of money coming in to build new mines. And you can see it work when prices got to incentivization levels, boom lots of money came in, and of course, eventually too many mines got built and the price crashed out. But what's happened since is that we have not yet reached a point where -- even though prices are higher than they were at the peak of the last market. The reality is that costs have moved up even more. So there's no profit whatsoever in the idea of building a new copper mine at anywhere near these prices. So basically, the point here is that the party really hasn't begun. I would put us right now, for comparison purposes, probably somewhere in the, I don't know, maybe the '05, '06 period. Prices are getting close to minimum incentivization, but not quite there yet and certainly not there in a way that is giving mining companies confidence to start building new mines. So that's where I see the cyclical backdrop for our business right now, pretty bullish. On this chart, this is just an update chart, I think we started to show this a couple of years ago. But the top bars across each of the assets that we've made , invested in over the last many number of years represents the purchase price and the bottom bars would be the combination of royalties we've since received and what analysts today estimate the value of the future royalties that we will receive from that asset. So you can see that in most cases here, there's a pretty healthy multiple of returns relative to purchase price, which, to me, I think is a good testament to the countercyclical approach we've taken in making these investments over time. Things have worked out pretty well. There's one exception in this and that would be our coal in Alberta where we will not receive back in royalties the amount that we originally paid for that, and that's basically because the asset was expropriated by the Alberta NDP and the federal liberal government. But I will refrain from saying any more about that because my blood pressure will get a little too high, and we don't need that today. But generally speaking, the other point I'd make here is the blue part of those bottom bars, which are the net asset values. So that's an estimate that an analyst makes that all the future cash flows you'll get from that mine and the discounts at the presence. We believe that these are all -- almost all, woefully, woefully, understated and low. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we are going into that better part of the cycle. Prices are moving up and analysts tend to use a price to calculate their estimates of those future cash flows. On more of a trailing base, they're not predictive at all. They follow the market rather than lead the market. So that's one way. But the other point is that almost all - well, all of the royalty assets that we have left in our business today have quite long lives attached to them. So they have optionality to be expanded upon, that's what that means. So when you start to go into this part of the cycle and prices have worked their way up, and now you've got incentivization for miners to start to build and grow. It's mines like these ones that will get invested in and the production rates will grow. So again, we see over the next number of years as the cycle progresses, the net asset value part of this that analysts estimate really having to go up based on higher prices as well as higher volumes in a lot of cases. And there are, in some of these situations, there are entirely new mines that will be built. So it's better than it looks, even. I'll quickly take you through the kind of the core commodity areas that we're focused on, starting with potash. It's been a wild ride in potash for the last few years. We had an incredible surge in the potash price a few years ago, and a lot of that had to do with the build up to and the onset of the Ukraine war. The major competing producers of potash in the world are in Belorussia and Russia. And so there was a real sense of fear in the market that there would be shortages of potash as supplies from those regions wouldn't be able to make it to market. Potash is not an optional thing. We don't have potash, we don't eat, it's pretty basic stuff. So there was a real crisis and a scare in the market and it drove the price up. Price got up to the point that in some ways, it actually became damaging to the business because potash became so expensive, it wasn't really affordable for farmers to apply to their land. And so they -- to the extent that they could, they sat out buying potash for a little while. So on the bottom chart there, you can see that that's the long-term demand for potash and it just grows the population and a couple of other factors. And you can see beginning a couple of years ago there was the real dip in that trend line, which shows that there was less potash being bought and applied to farms than was required. And that was a function of that higher price. Well, since then, prices have come back, and they're at a higher level than they were before the crisis, but they've come back to the point that we're now being farmers catching up. They're not only buying what they need for now. And on an affordable basis, they're having to buy even more because they've got to catch up what didn't get put into the ground in those other years. So it's kind of neat. The way I would characterize potash right now is that it's kind of returned to its normal sort of stability, if you will. Where basically farmers, I think, who are applying what they need to. Prices are at a pretty reasonable level where we're certainly doing very well on our royalties. But the other thing that's changed after Russia, Belorussia and I think this is quite important, is that Russia, Belorussian potash is still going into the market, but it's not going to the places that it did. Everything has shifted. So potash from Belorussia that might have made its way to Europe doesn't go there anymore because it's sanctioned. That now it goes on a much longer path and probably on trains and all kinds of things across the whole of Northern Europe and it might find its way to China or something like that. So it's caused the overall cost, landed cost of potash in the world will go up just because the logistics networks have all changed and shifted. And that doesn't do anything at all for potash miner. They have an extra cost to deliver the potash, but they're getting a little bit of a higher price, but there's no real net benefit in it for them. Don't forget, we're royalties. We don't get the extra cost. We just get the extra price that comes along with it. So net-net, I think I'm pretty happy with where things are in potash. Sure, it was a lot of fun getting those royalties back 2 years ago when price of potash was $800 or $900. But it was never real and it actually in long haul it wasn't even healthy. Where we're to now a very healthy place. There's still a huge need. Like on the bottom part of that chart, you can see how that trend line goes up over time. I have no idea where that much potash in as little as 8 and 10 years from now is actually going to come from. But I have a strong suspicion that more than its share is going to come from the mines that we already have interest in. What's the cost of capital to build a new mine in Belorussia right now versus building one in Saskatchewan? And if you think about that and how that has changed the competitive advantage of Canadian potash, I feel pretty bullish about the mines that we hold royalties on. Not only maintaining the share of global markets going forward, but actually continuing to earn market share from less advantaged providers. That's potash, feeling pretty good about it. Electrification metals. So this would be copper or nickel lithium, primarily in our business here. So year-over-year updates, we've already touched on what's been happening with prices. Things are a little different on the nickel and lithium side. Lithium has gone through a period of very high pricing that caused lots of new mines to get built and that has subsequently resulted in a significant drop in the price of lithium. That's played itself out to a large degree by now, and we saw this year, late last year, early this year, a number of the higher top lithium mines starting to get pushed out of the market. That's the market, that's the cycle doing its thing. And on the nickel side, there was a lot of low-cost production that came from Indonesia over the past several years that had the effect of driving down prices and knocking out some other players out of the market. And that really feels like it's ran its course now as well, and we don't think at this point that there's much ability for Indonesia, basically Chinese-funded Indonesian production to come in and to continue to do that in the marketplace. So probably seeing -- I think in both cases, nickel and lithium, we've probably seen or near the bottom and so constructive forward from here. Well, most of the good news on the base metal side or the metal side in the past year has really come from the assets themselves. We had 2 new mines reach first production last year that will be Reid Brook at Voisey's Bay and Groto do Cirillo, which is a lithium project in Brazil. We had great news from Lundin at our Chapada district project in Brazil. Last year, I would have been talking about a brand-new discovery that they've made. They've continued to advance that discovery and this year announced significantly expanded reserves and resources there. And they've also let it be known that they are considering various amounts of expansion now at the Chapada project. That is at least partly or largely motivated by this newer high-grade discovery at Saúva. So we're pretty optimistic there that over the course of this cycle, we will begin to receive much higher royalties in the Chapada project once investment decisions are made to expand production. And to underscore that point, we bought the Chapada project royalty in -- or stream back in 2016. At the time, there were about -- in the ground, there were about -- to just under 400 million pounds of copper that were known to be sitting in the ground, and that was the basis on which we purchased the stream and how we price that purchase. Since then just over 1.1 billion of those pounds have been mined and we've been paid for them. But when we look at what's left in the ground today, it's actually higher by 2.5 billion pounds than when we started. So this is -- again, we were so excited when that opportunity came up because we really felt -- I think it goes to the technical nature of our group. We really felt that what we were buying was a fraction of what we would ultimately get and that this is a brand new -- this is a district that would be a lot of positive surprises and it most certainly has. More recently, we had great news come out of advances with respect to our El Domo Curipamba project in Ecuador. This is a high-grade copper and gold project. And what happened there -- over the course of the year, a lot of things happened, including great progress and milestones with respect to investment agreements with the government and permitting. But there was still, up until a little while ago, a gap in the total funding requirement to build that mine. And that looks like it has now been closed as Adventus has agreed to be acquired by a company called Silvercorp, which is an existing producer that has a very strong balance sheet and it seems very committed to building the project. So we have a royalty on Curipamba, and we -- I guess, we have significantly higher confidence now that it's an imminent new cash flowing royalty in our portfolio. And beyond that, I would say the highlights would be the fact that there are 3 additional mines that are currently fully sanctioned and in construction. These would be the Mariana and Tres Quebradas lithium projects in -- both of which are in Argentina. And the Eastern Deeps project at Voisey's Bay is expected to reach production later this year. So lots of good things happening there. I think last year, we would have been talking about 777 was over, we finally come out of our -- basically it depleted itself. But that we had lots of other earlier-stage investments in our pipeline that we've made in anticipation of that. And now this year was the year, I think that we've really started to see that -- a good many of those earlier stage bets are, in fact, going to reach the point that they do come in and replace and I believe ultimately, eclipse what was lost on the 777 Mine last year. Altius Renewable Royalties. This thing has been incredible, it's exceeded all of our expectations. The business is not very old. It was a concept that was borne out of, I think, in some ways frustration with that expropriation in coal that I talked about, when we knew we had to find some way to fight that loss back for our shareholders. And we landed upon the idea that perhaps we can build a business that acquires royalties on a different type of natural resource. In this case, renewable energy. We had no idea if it would work, if the industry would adopt royalty financing. And it was a lot of work, in fact, the team in New Hampshire that does this, the first couple of years involved a lot of cold calling, a lot of nos. But I think it's very fair to say right now that renewable -- sorry, royalty financing is a fully adopted part of the business of developing and financing renewable energy projects, particularly in the United States. It's been at that joint -- it's a joint venture we have with Apollo. But at that level now, there's been over USD 380 million that's been invested in various projects. And what's also neat about it is that these aren't fringe players right now. The groups that we talk to now about providing financing to are some of the bluest of the blue chip names in the renewables business, and they are choosing royalty financing versus going across the street to major banks or to equity markets. So it really has been pretty amazing to watch. We're really starting now as well to see the revenue from those earlier stage royalties that we acquired start to ramp up. So you can see that on the right-hand side. There's still a fair bit of runway on that. Even without us making new investments, that ramp-up will continue for some time based on existing investments that have been made, and as new projects that we already hold royalties on continue to [ commission ]. That's probably well shown here. So at this point in time, there are royalties within ARR that are currently producing and cash flowing that are just about 2.4 gigawatts. There is almost a gigawatt of projects that are currently under construction. And then in the broader, later-stage development side of things, there's getting close to 5 gigawatts of additional projects are at various stages of development. So overall, that part of the portfolio, we have about 8.2 gigawatts. And that doesn't include a whole host of other earlier-stage development projects that we've made investments in through various earlier-stage developers. And if we included all of that, we'd be adding another 13 gigawatts of this pipeline. But there's a point at which we say it's an advanced stage development asset. But again, a lot of these will, I'm sure, over time, meet that. So on the right-hand side, what you see here is the -- just give you a sense of who it is that's paying up these royalties. So this is the Enbridges and the next areas of the world, Jera. Yes. So again, really amazing pack and progression to here. And just the fact that renewable energy, the renewable energy sector didn't have a royalty financing component to it prior to this venture. And now you talk to anybody in the renewable energy business. And it rolls off the tongue like it was always there. So pretty crazy. Iron ore. And again, if you would have heard me say this before, not all iron ore, only high-purity forms of iron ore that we believe are suitable to go into what is known as an electric arc farm. We see a transition happening in the steelmaking complex globally from what traditionally has been a blast furnace-based steelmaking industry. And what that means is you can take in varying qualities of iron ore, pack in a bunch of coal on top of it, melt it all up and out comes steel. In the last number of years, that path or process for producing steel has really started to come under various types of pressure. And there is an alternative. It's called the electric arc furnace, as I said. So this is a way to make steel from iron ore essentially using electricity and no coal. So there are no CO2 or other pollutants that result from that process or very limited, is probably a better way to put it, much more limited. And the way that's manifesting on the ground is that anyone who has an existing blast furnace -- these things have a 17- or 18-year life. And every 17 or 18 years, a big investment has to happen and you have to refurbish them completely. But one after the other, we're watching it happen that once that point is reached, when the decision is made to go and make that investment to refurbish that blast furnace, it's not being made. Instead the decision is being made to convert to the electric arc furnace. [ Proof, ] and so that's why this chart -- I think it's more than speculation. You can actually see this happening. You can go and watch it happening all over the place. But you can see that over the next few decades here, there's a pretty dramatic shift in the market share of steel that will be produced by the electric arc furnace versus the blast furnace path. This has really big implications for what we know now as the iron ore industry, which is probably the very single biggest part of the overall mining industry. It essentially means that most of the iron ore that BHP, Rio Tinto or Vale produces today is on its way to being completely redundant. It has no place left in the market, it cannot be put into an electric arc furnace. First is somebody like Champion who's building these mines in Labrador, some of our feed production. That Labrador ore is quite unique. And it's some of the only ores in the world, particularly that have available infrastructure to support it, that can meet that exacting standard, that high-purity standard that is required to go into an electric arc furnace. So we've been on this for quite some time, and we've been trying to lay in our bets to gain royalty exposure to these very high purity forms of iron ore. So obviously, we have our exposure to IOC, which is a cash flowing component. But I guess where a lot of our excitement today rests with the Kami project, which has been around Altius for quite a long time. But it found its way to Champion. Champion published a project study this year, which we felt demonstrated really competitive cost. They just filed the environmental assessment for the project and have been fairly public about the fact that they are entertaining a number of proposals from steelmakers about helping to finance an end partner with the project, right? I would say that probably the next big milestone that we're watching out for. But the significance here is that if the Kami project is built and begins producing, it will immediately become the single biggest royalty in our business. So that's the kind of implication and why we watch it so closely. So the chart here basically shows you, based upon all those new electric arc furnaces being built, we have a pretty good idea of what the market is going to need in the next number of years in terms of this super high-quality type of iron ore. We also -- because this is not that far away -- also have pretty good visibility on where that type of iron ore might come from. And when you put those two together, what you see is there's about 100 million tons missing right now. So you can think what you like about iron ore broadly, there is a major deficit looming in the iron ore market. I don't know if I'll be back next year saying looming is already here or not, but it is looming. I think we might have said looming on copper deficits for maybe 3 or 4 years, if we were really honest. But here we are, pretty exciting. Silicon, this thing is just nuts. The last year when we came, we talked about this gold royalty, AngloGold Ashanti, drilled a bunch of holes. Now they've published the first resource at the silicon deposit, and it was looking like a 4 million-ounce deposit, which is pretty big. That's pretty good. That's as much as you almost could hope for, really. It was like really exciting. Well, fast forward a year, that is now at 13 million ounces and still wide open. Every day, they're drilling more and talking about hitting more and more and more. Last year, we would have hoped that the production rate at that mine would be in the order of maybe as much as 300,000 ounces a year. Let's say that we get paid on the basis of the amount of ounces of gold that are produced, multiplied by the gold price times the royalty rate. So the production rate is important to us. Anglo has also shifted on that, now they're talking about more than 500,000 ounces a year and just in terms of how the ore body plays itself out geologically. They're talking about up to -- early years production up to 1.8 million ounces per year. So I don't know if that will actually be one will show up in the final results. But to put that in context, at today's prices, that year would generate $70 million a year in royalties for us. Again, that's early. They haven't completed final feasibility studies, but that's the kind of scale that they're talking about here. Yes, really incredible. We are being approached, I guess, is the best way to put it, by a lot of the gold royalty companies about this asset. These things don't come along -- if this goes to 1.8 million ounces a year, if it has that here, it will probably be the single biggest gold mine in the world [ that year ]. So this is rare kinds of stuff. I still don't know how hot is the base metals and [ vaults ] royalty company finds itself with a gold royalty of this magnitude, but here we are. But lots of interest from the more purely focused precious metals royalty companies around acquiring this from us now. So we're open-minded to that idea. It's also true that this project, in terms of future exploration upside, scale, quality of operator, it ticks a lot of the boxes we look for. It's not the commodity we've traditionally been looking for, but as far as mine royalties goes, it really does tick a lot of boxes. So I guess we're being open-minded, we're being open-minded to the idea of potentially selling it or maybe even trading it partially for royalties that some of these precious metals focused companies might have in commodity areas that we've been more traditionally aligned with or quite simply keeping it. It's a fantastic asset. So we'll let that play out, but that's going to be -- it looks like a big part of our work for the rest of this year. Getting to the end here now. So just a little update on where -- how the business looks from a balance sheet perspective. We have about $110 million in debt that's on our balance sheet right now. And if you consider that against our current cash of $10 million, you might be a little concerned. But the reality is it doesn't concern us at all because the other part of that side of the ledger for us includes a number of public equities, which in total now combine -- to be valued at more than $350 million. So we do look at ourselves as being very likely leveraged. And in fact, the cash balance at around $10 million is very much by choice because as [indiscernible] knows, every extra dollar that's been coming in over the last certainly 12 months, it doesn't sit in the bank account very long before it gets turned into more buybacks, more shares on our buyback that we turn and cancel. We have a lot of conviction in the strength of the business right now, the strength of the assets, where we're to in the cycle. And any time that we think the market wants to price the business at the price that we've been seeing a lot of the -- prices we've been seeing out over the past year, with the delta that is represented between that number and what we see is the value, well, why sit on cash? Buyback the shares and that's, quite frankly, really a lot of what we've been doing. I'll also point out that at our last quarterly meeting, we made the decision -- and this is another statement, I think, to our conviction in the strength of the business right now, we made the decision to increase our quarterly dividend to $0.36 a share. The last slide, I'm a little hesitant to put up maybe out of some modesty, but it is an important scorecard. Just really want to drive this point home to our shareholders. Everything we do is about maximizing things on a per share basis. We could not care less about the overall headline market cap of the company. It means nothing. It's the easiest thing in the world to do is a great market cap. But creating per share value is what we've made our mission and so this is kind of a little scorecard that we update periodically. And you can see that we've been doing this now for 27 years, as John said, right now, we're tracking at a 19.7% compounded annual growth rate over that period of time. But we're obviously not doing enough because we have to get that over 20 for sure. A little joke. But the other side of that is, I think the other thing we've been able to do for shareholders is just continuously return -- increase returns on capital through the dividend. And there are people in this room here today that the annual dividend that they're receiving meaningfully exceeds the amount that they would have originally paid for those shares at the outset. So that's something that we're also very proud of. And that is more than enough from me. So thank you very much, and I'll certainly take any questions.

And operator, if I could ask you to open the lines for questions from the online audience.

[Operator Instructions] We have no questions or comments from the phone.

And nothing in the room? Thank you very much. Thank you for your attendance. That will conclude the meeting, and we'll socialize a little. Of course, we have some sandwiches and so on here. Welcome you to -- invite you to stay and chat and we can answer questions that you might have directly of Brian or any member of management. So thank you very much. That ends the meeting.