Altius Minerals Corporation ($ALS)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Q4 and Year-End 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Also note that this call is being recorded on Wednesday, March 11, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood, VP, Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sylvie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 and Year-End 2025 Conference Call. Our press release and filings were released yesterday after the close and are available on our website. We also filed our AIF last night. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access a replay of the call along with the presentation slides that have been added to altiusminerals.com. Brian Dalton, CEO; and Stephanie Hussey, CFO, will be speakers on the call. The forward-looking statement on Slide 2 applies to everything we say both in our formal remarks and during the Q&A session. And with that, Stephanie is up first to take us through the numbers.

Thank you, Flora, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday, we reported Q4 net earnings of $22.5 million or $0.48 per share and full year net earnings of $299 million or $6.45 per share. Net earnings were mainly impacted by the $375 million gain on the sale of the Arthur Gold royalty interest. We had lower amortization, interest and other costs, partially offset by an increased loss from joint venture. The corporation also recognized a $64 million gain during the year in other comprehensive earnings following the Orogen Triple Flag plan of arrangement. Royalty revenue and adjusted EBITDA for Q4 and the year reflect higher potash and base metal prices, an increase in copper stream deliveries as well as growth in the ARR portfolio, including interconnection financing agreements. These increases were partially offset by lower dividends from iron ore. Operating cash flow followed the trend of revenue, which were offset by higher taxes paid. Adjusted net earnings for both the quarter and year are higher than 2024, with the main adjusting item being the gain on the sale of the Arthur Gold royalty, impairment charges at GBR on the Hodson development portfolio and any related tax impacts. At the end of 2025, we had cash on hand of $294 million. Last week, we closed the previously announced plan of arrangement with LRC for Altius share consideration of approximately 9.6 million common shares and cash consideration of $140 million. Following the close and factoring in transaction costs, total liquidity available is approximately $332 million, and that includes cash on hand, $125 million available under the revolver as well as $62.5 million potentially available as an accordion feature, which is subject to certain criteria under the terms of our credit facility. We also expect future proceeds equivalent in value to approximately 960,000 Altius shares that stem from LP-based investments we made in funds controlled by Waratah Capital at the time of the founding and early development of LRC. It's expected these funds will wind up and distribute cash or share proceeds to unitholders in the coming months. During the year, we made debt repayments of $17 million, which included a $9 million voluntary repayment on the revolving facility and $8 million of scheduled principal repayments on our term debt, paid total cash dividends of $16 million and issued approximately 49,000 common shares under the dividend reinvestment plan. In August, the corporation renewed its normal course issuer bid for another year and repurchased and canceled 54,000 common shares for a total cost of $1.6 million. Yesterday, our Board approved a quarterly dividend of $0.10 per share to be paid to shareholders of record on March 19 with a payment date of April 2. Our renewable royalty business has seen increased market activity and new opportunities arising from development, construction and operating level investments. In late '25 and early '26, GBR deployed or committed approximately USD 96 million in new royalty investments, including the reorganization of an existing portfolio investment. This deployment includes USD 42.5 million royalty investment with Apex Clean Energy and up to USD 50 million investment with Granite Source Power. We can expect to see continued growth in this business. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.

Thank you, Steph, and congrats on completing your first full quarter reporting as our CFO, a quarter that had some meaningful M&A activity thrown into the mix to get you kicked off properly. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, as always, for taking the time to be with us today. Last quarter on this call, we spoke about efforts that were underway to find ways to accretively deploy the capital resources we gained through the monetization of part of our interest in the Arthur Gold district discovery in Nevada. We noted that we were actively considering various options and that we hope to be able to tell you more about these in coming quarters. And so here we are quarter end later with 2 such updates to share. The more visible of these came with an announcement we made in December that we had reached an agreement to combine with Lithium Royalty Corporation in a transaction that would see the addition of 37 new royalties to our portfolio plus some new like-minded and long-term shareholders and added further depth to our management team with Ernie Ortiz joining. The near-term impact of this transaction will be a healthy bolstering of royalty revenue from several recently commissioned projects as well as several already financed or planned expansions and restarts. A deeper motivation for the transaction was, however, rooted in a more medium- to long-term outlook around the geared optionality we saw embedded in the portfolio. This stems from the very long implied resource lives and highly competitive future investment attributes of the portfolio assets. Meaningful scale in the lithium market is developing very fast now as the role of batteries across a growing myriad of use cases becomes more and more important. Electrical energy continues to grow in absolute and relative dominance in powering global industry and countless elements of our individual lives. The rapid advancement of battery technology so far this century has provided a potent new delimiting ingredient to the growth trajectory of electrical power utilization. As a result, we can now store, trade and regulate power in ways that enhance overall generation utilization rates while diminishing intermittency challenges more efficiently and effectively than ever. We can now even transport and deploy power at scale without the constraint of a continuous physical tether to grids or generators. The impact of these technological and scaling breakthroughs is arguably still underappreciated in terms of the impact it is enabling for electricity, irrespective of generation type to continue to gain market share within the global energy mix. Lithium, the raw input materials that have emerged most critically through this battery technology revolution is, as a result, growing in consumption at compounding rates that are nothing short of eye watering. Consider for a moment the speed at which this consumption has caught up with the supposed oversupply that was incentivized during the early part of this decade. We've gone from a narrative still dominant barely a year ago that it would take eons for this overhang of supply to be absorbed to now suddenly finding ourselves facing market deficits that will take incredible amounts of effort and capital to overcome, starting right now, if not sooner. We firmly believe that our portfolio holds an outsized share of exposure to the production growth that will ultimately be commercially reincentivized and prioritized in solving for this challenge. And this takes us back around to why it is the medium- and long-term outlook here that has us so enthused about combining forces with LRC. The second, perhaps less visible capital deployment initiative we were able to execute on during the latter part of 2025 was to increase our interest in Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation, or LIF. This is a company that holds on a shareholder pass-through basis, 2 highly distinct forms of interest in the high-purity iron ore operations of the Iron Ore Company of Canada and Labrador. These deposits have been in continuous production for more than 60 years and still hold extensive mineral endowments that could potentially allow them to continue for as long or more going forward. LIF holds both a direct equity stake in these operations and receives a share of its marginal operational cash flows, less capital investment requirements as dividends. It also holds a royalty interest, and this provides it with a share of IOC gross sales that are irrespective of operational margins or capital investment requirements. The latter part is where we see the most value and longer-term growth potential underpinning our investment. At the moment, the operations of IOC are struggling. A protracted period of underinvestment in properly sustaining the mines and processing plants during the end of the last decade and early part of this one has come predictably home to roost. Thankfully, however, this is now being met with meaningful amounts of effort and investment in restoring IOC to its potential. We believe that it will likely still take a few years to really get the ship righted, but it is happening and happening under the watch of one of the world's most established and financially capable iron ore operators. We made our investment with eyes wide open that while royalty revenues will continue to flow through the recapitalization program, equity dividends to lift will probably continue to be severely curtailed while IOC cash flows are prioritized towards restoring the operations instead of issuing dividends. The vision for our investment is, therefore, clearly a medium- to longer-term one in which once the significant work on the ground is completed, royalty production volumes will not only increase into a rising demand market for high-purity products, but also one in which the overall multi-decade sustainability of the asset has been insured. So this covers the new ways our team has recently found to deploy capital in ways we believe will continue to strengthen our portfolio and enhance our growth trajectory for decades to come. It also hopefully provides you, our shareholders, with a clear picture of and a shared belief in the long-term rationale behind our new investments. Turning now to a number of other positive but more incremental developments that we saw across our portfolio during the quarter and it didn't involve us having to deploy any additional capital. Sentiment has turned up for several of the subsectors that comprise our industry. For several years now, you've heard us preach of the inevitable consequence of what turned out to be more than a decade of broad-based underinvestment, during which we have also been strategically preparing for it in terms of our portfolio positioning. The cycle has now finally turned and the mining industry is collectively preparing to mobilize to meet the daunting challenge of replenishing declining assets and building a new to meet ever-increasing demand for the essential, some would even say critical materials that it produces. So during the quarter, we heard positive commentary from Lundin about moving forward with incorporating the new Saúva discovery into the broader Chapada district mining plan and in so doing, potentially increasing copper production levels by 25% to 35%. Silvercorp reported on continued construction progress in building the new El Domo mine in Ecuador and reiterated its expectations for first production of copper, gold, silver and zinc for the second half of next year. Vale spoke of the success they are having in bringing its 2 new underground mines in the Voisey's Bay district fully online and in ramping up nickel, copper and cobalt production. AngloGold provided an upbeat update on the Arthur Gold project as they move through studies and permitting processes. The recently reported PFS highlights indicated a greater than 500,000 ounce per year producer at Tier 1 cash costs with initial production targeted for the beginning of the next decade. This followed earlier stated commentary from AngloGold, and I quote, "That when fully developed, the complex is anticipated to be a long-life multimillion ounce producer, which will become the center of gravity for AngloGold Ashanti." Nutrien and Mosaic both stated expectations of a record year for potash demand in 2026. Nutrien reiterated its intent to continue to grow its production in line with the goal of maintaining their industry-leading market share, while Mosaic noted expectations for record production levels from Esterhazy, which has now become the world's single largest potash mine. Altius Renewables and its underlying Great Bay Renewables delivered another record year for royalty revenue as its portfolio of development stage electricity generation project royalties continues to progressively mature to active operations. It also was successful in deploying into 2 new investments totaling USD 96 million for both an advanced stage near-term revenue-generating wind-based royalty and a development portfolio relating primarily to a number of battery energy storage projects. Champion and its partners, Nippon and Sojitz consummated their new partnership during the year and reported on continued methodical advancement of the Kami project towards a definitive feasibility study that is expected to be completed later this year. We'll wrap up here by simply saying that the team continues to be very busy in sourcing and evaluating new opportunities for investment across both of our royalty and PG platforms and that we hope to be able to tell you more about these in coming quarters and probably not so much in the Q&A that we'll now invite you to begin. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, it appears we have no questions registered. I would like to turn the call back over to Ms. Wood.

Thank you, Sylvie. And I know we've got analysts traveling on site visits and also to other provinces. So I'm not surprised there's no questions today. But I'd like to thank everybody for joining us, and we look forward to speaking with you in Q1.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending. And at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines. Enjoy the rest of your day.