Amaroq Ltd. (AMRQF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this one-off webcast from Amaroq. This is following the results from the Nanoq drilling program, the successful results that we announced this morning. We wanted to dive a little bit deeper into some of these results. So thanks very much for joining us. The format will take place. Eldur will do an introductory few words, and then James Gilbertson, the VP of Exploration, will talk you through a bit more of the detail with Eldur as well. And then we'll do some Q&A moderated by me at the end. So -- thanks very much for joining. Eldur, I'll hand over to you.

Thank you, Ed. Welcome, everybody. So I'm extremely pleased to be with you here today and announce this announcement this morning, which were put together in a hurry because we effectively just got the results yesterday, and therefore, a lot of the data is very raw in the release, as you can see it. But as you can clearly see, Amaroq has discovered its first elephant, a very large deposit, we feel. And as we say in the press release, we've only scratched the surface on this. Now the reason why I'm here with you today before I introduce James to take you through all of this introduction is that in Amaroq, we've always set out a strategy and explained the strategy, which is the following. We want to build high-yield mines like Nalunaq and Black Angel. High yield means high grade. You get good cash flow out of them. They are high grade, that means they are low upfront cost because these are past producing mines, and therefore, the risk around them is low. And why do we want to do that? Well, we want to utilize this cash flow to support exploration such as in Nalunaq, I want to say. So we have cash flow to support elephant hunting, right? Now this Nanoq, which we have been working now on for 4 years, is our greatest success so far. And I'll give you a few reasoning and ideas why that is and why this is such an important release from us to the market. When we explore for minerals, we effectively set up a certain, what we call exploration strategy. That means we start on surface sampling. We then usually want to do to understand what is the geology on surface, how does it look? We then want to do geophysics to understand what is happening, how does the geology look into the ground to see a visibility into the ground. Then we do scout drilling to test that. And following that, we want to do systematic drilling to proven the geological model. Now this can be quite tricky, right? Because not always the seismic will show you exactly how to drill. This can vary meter by meter or 10 kilometer this direction, et cetera, et cetera, even though the deposit might be there. I'll give you an example. In Stendalen, we did exactly that. We found the surface expression. We did geophysics. We now have drilled 7 holes. We found copper and nickel, but we haven't found the heart of it. It will take time to get there. Now with Nanoq, this is completely different. Every single bit that our geological team has done, has proven to be correct. This means we have a key to the deposit. We sampled, we did geophysics. We drilled for geological model and in 60 -- more than 60% of the whole, we hit not only gold, but massive thick intersection of gold layers. And when I say that, what is important there is that the geological team wasn't even hunting to drill down these deposits to define them in the largest scale possible. It just came out like that. And this is in an area that is simply only 600 meters of a zone that is more than 1.5 kilometer long, we've only drilled down to a depth of 30 to 70 meters, and this can go deep, deep, deep, just like in Nalunaq, this can be several hundreds of meters or even kilometers down deep. And on top of that, the geophysics that I just explained, we've seen it in West 1, West 2, West 3. We see it on surface now in 4 or 5 different structure, and we sampled on them and look and behold, we found it there as well. So there's a clear recipe to find this. So we are looking at something we feel is really, really large, meaning an open pit scenario or even an underground area or a combination of a scale that brings us to a Tier 1 asset, meaning one of the larger production assets that you are looking at around. And that is the importance of this. And that's why we're so excited to explain it. And where we are at the moment with the production in Nalunaq going so well and with good cash position and good cash flow next year, we can support this going forward to create value going forward. This is raw information. James will walk you through what we know now, but there will be a lot more work being done on this data to give you a better and better understanding in several releases, and then we will speak towards the end of the presentation on kind of next year's plan. But let me say this, we have not to date found a world-class deposit. We think we are on our way towards something like that, and that is why it's so exciting for us to be here with you today. Over to you, James.

Thank you very much, Eldur. Yes, just to reiterate something that Eldur said that this is -- the results have only just come in. We're spending a lot of time to interpret these. And this is a culmination of a lot of hard work over the last 12 months to get to this point. And I hope to just give a little bit more flavor around the technical aspects of this. So I'm going to start off with just running through a short video that's going to give us an overview of where Nanoq is, where it sits within the Nanortalik Gold belt, how we have gone about our exploration, the styles of geology and mineralization that we're seeing and then where that fits in the wider picture. And then we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more -- a little bit more flavor about the main take homes from these results. So if you could play that video, please. [Presentation]

Great. Thanks. So yes, that gives a little bit of a visual of Nanoq and what we've achieved in 2025. We've got this slide here in front of us as well so that when I talk now, we can see some of that detail as well. So some of the key take homes is that we've drilled in 2025 a little over 4,800 meters of core drilling. This follows on from the scout drilling that we did towards the end of the season in 2024. As Eldur alluded to, the program here was designed very much to give us the best -- the firmest geological control and understanding of the architecture as possible. But in the process, we have got a 63% hit rate. So 17 out of the 27 drill holes that we targeted to get that geological understanding actually came back with economic grades of mineralization, both copper -- sorry, both gold and some copper in there as well. And if we average out those intersections, we're looking around 3 to 3.5 meters wide with grades of between 9 and 10 grams per tonne. So these are really quite significant intersections. Added to that, that these intersections are shallow. They're from surface to about 70 meters deep. We've only tested that far. We haven't really tested below that. The topography here is very, very gentle. We're on a flat plateau area. So this is open -- very, very open pitable, shallow resources. And the architecture that we have developed from this drilling, which hopefully you saw in that video is of this nested or the stacked saddle reefs they called. So these are sort of Chevron-shaped ore bodies that are stacked one top of the other, and they strike the full length of that 600 meters that we've drill tested. So we have these -- the gold in these saddle reefs. We also have gold in the shear zones. These are the things that come up and bring the fluids from very deep down and bring them up to these saddle reefs. So we've got multiple styles of mineralization, multiple structures over a 600 meters drilled area that is shallow and untested at depth. Another key detail here is that the mineralization that we've identified is not just hosted in quartz veins, although we have obviously got those. It's also hosted in the host rock. What that means is that when you mine this, you're not just chasing narrow discontinuous quartz veins. You're taking a much more bulk sample. You're taking a much more bulk mining operation here. So you have these large thick intersections that are really quite critical to the final economics of the mine. So veins material, the sediments that these veins are in as well are all mineralized. The next key point for me is that the -- that we've got multiple repeated structures. And what that means is, as you can see on this image, these dotted black lines, the central zone is the area that we had identified from previous work that we had been working in 2023, 2024 to identify. We knew that this strikes somewhere around about a kilometer in size. But our field work this year has managed to extend that into the southern extension. So we now have over 1.5 kilometers of strike length along that structure. But the geophysics that we had previously done, had suggested that there were these repeated units to the west. And after the initial drill results were coming in from the drill rigs as we were there in the ground, we could see this repeated structure, this folded structure. We thought we'd take another look, and we went and discovered West 1. It's about 600 meters to the west of central zone, where we have the identical same geology, the same architecture, same structure. We haven't drilled that yet. We have taken graph samples from surface, and they've come back to about the highest grades were up to 9.5 grams per tonne. So this is a significant feature, and it's, again, striking around a kilometer in length. And then, of course, we've got West 2, West 3 and West 4 to review as well. So this is work ahead of ourselves. So we've got these the repeated structures to the west, and we haven't even started to look to the east as yet. So all of this, the repeated structures, the fact that the mineralization is not just in veins, but is in the host rock as well. It's shallow, untested at depth and it's these thick intersections. All this means that we're actually looking at something that's quite distinctly different to Nalunaq. Nalunaq is a high-grade narrow vein underground operation. What we're seeing at Nanoq here is similar age. It's in the same mineral belt, but it is a different beast, and it is a much more substantially larger beast in my opinion, in that we've got this open territory to extend in all directions at depth along strike in repeat structures and in defining more and more of these stacked features. So it's a particularly exciting time for us. So now we've got to start thinking ahead to 2026, and we have laid the preparation for this already. So we took 2 metallurgical samples during our fill season. Firstly, we took that in a core and we took it in surface. Now we have these samples, and we will now go and take these and have those tested at the same facility that took -- that we have run our test work for Nalunaq. So we're going to be able to understand over the winter, how amenable is this ore to traditional processing technology and how amenable is it to the flow sheet that we have at Nalunaq. We've also started the environmental work, which is obviously an important piece if we were to get -- ultimately get a mining license here. We need to ensure that we start that environmental baseline, and we've started that, and we will continue doing that through winter and into next season. We took the decision also to winterize the entire camp and drill rigs and equipment on site. What that means is that we have that all there. We don't have to wait for shipping windows to bring everything in for 2026. We just essentially have to unpack it, pop the camp back up again, and we're on our way again to drilling. So we're looking to do a substantially large drill program into 2026. Another thing that we're going to be doing during the winter is, as you saw in that video, we have started to generate a fairly robust 3-dimensional geological model. Now that is really critical. We want to get the geology right from the beginning because that's going to allow us to have continued success from season to season. We know how to drill this thing, what's controlling where the gold is in the same way as we now understand at Nalunaq, where the high grades are, and it took some time to get to that. We have done the hard yards this year to be able to build that model, and we're going to continue to work internally and with external consultants and experts to get this right so that we can have a real concentrated drill effort into 2026. Eldur, is there anything else that you would like to raise on the programs to '26?

No. I think just kind of maybe a couple of things. I think to James' point earlier, we are going to run a resource assessment on this. We're going to start the right away. And we'll see if we have a major resource early '26 or following the '26 drilling program. Now on the drilling program itself, we have 3 rigs on site. We are looking to see if we can add more rigs to site to be able to drill West -- sorry, centers on West 1, the extension, effectively drill as much as we possibly can with people and rigs. We have -- and that is all to kind of build the resources and get larger and larger resources, so the margin can start attributing direct value to a confirmed resources on site. And I would say that other work that we are looking as well is that within the drilling, we will drill deeper to test the extension down dip, and that will be extremely interesting for us. While this is happening, we are assessing now to set up a road towards the area to give you an idea of cost because that is important for people to understand in terms of what are the total contribution of cost to this. Last year, we drilled this 5,000 meters at about $1,000 a meter, right? So if you drill 10,000 meters, you're looking rather than a $5 million program, you're looking at a $10 million program. Now once you increase the rig count, dollar per meter will come down. We see that every single year. Secondly, once we managed to set up a road towards the deposit, we don't need to use a helicopter any longer. And we are then in a position to start taking out bulk samples from that central zone, especially if that material is amenable to the processing plant in Nalunaq, okay? Now previously, in our operation in Nalunaq, 1 kilometer of road, both in the flat area and also up the mountain is about $300,000 per kilometer to give you an idea of a cost. So that is something our contractors have provided in the past. And this is -- the distance is about 3 kilometers. Previously, if we set up a harbor, if you need like a large-scale harbor like it is in Nalunaq, where you have a harbor where you can bring in a 30,000 tonne ship. You effectively set up the harbor facility then put in a barge and 2 anchors. That is a part of 100 meters in length and the rock goes into the fjord and that gives you enough that for maybe 30,000 tonne ships to come in. That cost was about $2 million when that was all put in place. So if you take into account some contingency and this is in a different location, then you're looking at $2 million to $3 million for a facility like that. For a camp in Nalunaq, again, we're using direct numbers, about 30 room are about $500,000 containerized camp where you can operate all year around, right? So if I combine this -- another 5,000 meter drilling program would be around $5 million with helicopter. It would be a lot less, probably 1/3 less if it is not with the helicopter. A road is up to 1.5 million and a harbor is around -- if you do a full-fledged harbor of there on site, it's about 2 million. So it's not more than that to allow you to operate all around and start taking out [ bulks support ] and then to continue to drill this over a longer, longer season, right? Obviously, with more rigs, more activities, more people, you can do more, but you can control that relatively well. But for next summer, you need to have the rigs, you need to have the people, you need to have all these things. So there is a certain amount of things we can do next year, which fits well within our budget that we are going to be guiding towards end of February. Ed, that's maybe over to you, I think, for questions and other things.

Yes. Thanks very much, Eldur. So we'll go to some questions just I've received online. There's a couple of questions, and we can cover them with the same answer. Could you outline the program for now for 2026? I think you touched on that slightly, James. But if you could just elaborate timing, et cetera, to maybe embellish a bit what Eldur just said, I think that would be useful.

Sure. So as we said, we have 3 rigs already winterized on site. So we'll be able to get to those. We would look to commence drilling again as early as possible. But conservatively, we'll say we'll be drilling in June, and we can drill right through until sort of October, November. So we've got a pretty good drill window there. And of course, that's before we add any additional drill rigs to that. I think we are still -- as you know, we are still -- we've just received results, and we are still interpreting that. So exactly how and where we position the drill rigs and to what quantum we put in an infill versus extension is still being debated. But I would say that the program will almost certainly involve a program of infill drilling on those 80-meter centers that we have in that central area, as well as some deeper drill holes just trying to understand what is below us and what is the depth potentials that we're looking at. But then also to take a step forward and extend out along and get some indication of this the full 1.5 kilometer strike extension. I'd also like to make sure that we put some drill holes into West 1 as well. We know it's there. We've identified that. In parallel to that, we'll run initial ground reconnaissance on West 2, 3 and 4 and of course, the greater area as well. So I think it's going to be pretty much more of the same, but a lot more of the same thrown at both infill and extension from June onwards.

Super. Thanks, James. Next question, how long do you -- Eldur, one for you. How long do you think it will take to confirm Nanoq as a Tier 1 deposit via an MRE? Is it after the 2026 drilling season, 2027 or beyond?

I mean I think, obviously, going technically to confirm something in the geometry of the ore body and the scale, it will take many, many drill holes and years. However, with the simplicity and understanding of the geological method that we are doing. So geophysics drilling and understanding, I think we have a very good -- we'll have a very good handle in the next coming months on this year's drilling when we model all of that out. And then next year's drilling, we will then infill drill that. That gives you a cradle of a resource that you effectively the idea is just to expand to all of the other regions. So I would think, if not the market, but then certainly the other major companies and/or special investors who are not in mining will be able to understand the scale of this relatively quickly because you can have analogs with the likes of Telfer in Australia and others that are very similar. And that is a good thing about this deposit is that it's quite well understandable what has happened here. And therefore, we can revert relatively quickly back on these results, even though we just got them to see how amazing they are.

Super. The next one, and I think that was slightly covered, but for specifics, how much drilling are you planning on the Southern extension and West 1? And will you touch the other parallel structures further west in the next drilling campaign?

I guess that's one for me. So yes, just to reiterate what I said earlier. So it's uncertain as yet, but I would broadbrush say that about 2/3 of our drilling will probably be focused on the central zone, both infill depth extension and strike extension. And then another 1/3 will be looking at these parallel structures to try and build out the full potential beyond that. That's our feeling at this point in time.

And I think maybe just to give also a little bit of an idea, like what we did this year, we are drilling on an 80-meter spacing only down to 70. We'll probably continue that spacing to cover most of the structure over time and as quick as possible. And it's a question of how many rigs you can put in and time, right? So those are the 2 elements and the infrastructure have alongside. Ed, do you have anything else here?.

Sorry, I was on mute. What's the potential impact of the proximity of the field if you want to start with an open pit, both technical and also permitting-wise? Is it a benefit being that close? And if so, why?

I think generally, for mining, if I take this one, like the good thing about Greenland, it is so close to sea and to be able to bring materials on sea is very beneficial because it's much less handling cost and it's much less expensive than actually truck anything, right? So that benefit of being so close to the seaport and the deep water fjord is very helpful, right? Secondly, it's also helpful from when you're bringing equipment in. So say this will be, over time, a stand-alone asset and effectively, we would set up everything there similar to what we did in Nalunaq. I'm talking about some years ahead because we will obviously try to use as much as Nalunaq processing plant for the ore in the short term. Then that is something that you can also bring on sea directly and then you don't have to truck or put on trains, et cetera, et cetera. And both having those logistics in place is very, very helpful.

Super. Thanks, Eldur. We sort of touched on resource drilling, but specifically, the question is, when do you expect to release an updated or full MRE for Nanoq with indicated or inferred numbers?

I would expect this either in the next few months before the season or straight after the season. That would be my best guesstimate. The reason for that, just to give you an idea of this is that we see all of the resources. We see all the gold and copper. So we're very confident in all of that. You might have to drill one hole in a place that -- where you have a spacing that is 95 meters. So it's more of a mathematical thing. And so therefore, now the resource geologist will start doing the linear representation between the hole, understanding all of the germ ore body and then we start either you run the resource on that basis or you drill some infill drilling to tie it together and then you run the resource number, right? So that's why I can't give you an answer before or after right now until we run that model. We just got the result, as we said.

Very good. Thanks, Eldur. The next question is around the sort of the upside number here on Nanoq. So prior to these results, I recall you were targeting 2 million to 3 million tonnes for Nanoq. After these results, do you think that target has changed?

So I think what you're referring to is probably ounces if -- but I can at least speak for ounces, yes. But yes, so I think we are looking at something when we said 2 million to 3 million, and by the way, that was a bit of a guesstimate and still is. But we were then thinking of this, okay, this is a 1-meter thick vein. It's dipping quite well and then has a 1 kilometer extension. So we take an analog to Nalunaq where you have a 1 kilometer extension coming to surface, it extends for 1 kilometer is high grade. Now everything is thicker, bigger over a much smaller area and much shallower. So yes, we think this is larger than we anticipated at first, actually much larger. And the reason is because we have the geophysics that has giving us all these other structures as well and the extension and the fact that it's going to be deeper and it's thicker, right? I mean we've gone through 9 meters of thickness in some of the holes. And I just want to stress this, we weren't even targeting being smuck about finding the thickest pit. We just drilled these things systematically in the same way. And so there is a lot of upside potential here, we feel. And especially with this good geological model, we feel very confident in building that number up.

Thanks, Eldur. Another question was in relation to the strikes. Does the strike continue under the ice? And how would you know if it does?

The answer is yes, it does. And maybe James can speak to it in more detail, but we have geophysics over the ice. So we can see underneath the ice sheet the same geophysical anomaly continuing under the ice. James, I can't recall how many kilometers we can see there, but it continues distance.

So the geophysics, we've run geophysics over this license and our neighboring licenses of SeaCube. And that's what identified the structures that we've drilled. And we can see that this structure, this is quite a significant long-lived structure. It's actually trends about 25 kilometers under the ice all the way through to another project that we have called Jokum Shear where there's gold mineralization outcropping again. So I'm not saying it's necessarily continuous for 26 kilometers, but that structure is continuous, and it's a very obvious structure. So yes, I would expect that the mineralization as we can see it at the moment, comes up and terminates against that ice. And I would expect it to continue underneath the ice, yes.

Okay. Super. Just one last question on my thing here. Why is it important that you have gold in the surrounding geology, not just only in the quartz?

James, do you want me to start? I can give some idea from a mining perspective. So in Nalunaq, we have it in the quartz and it's brilliant because we can follow a wide quartz and take it out. In this instance, you just have more geometry, more room for the gold to settle in, right? This means you can have much larger host to host the gold and keep the gold. And that means that they are thicker, they're easier, they're more homogeneous, and therefore, you can then start building larger machineries and open pit things, everything becomes less expensive and larger. That's one of the idea. And you don't have to be as surgical about when you're following this and finding this. This also goes back to why more logistics as a whole are bang on it because it's just thicker and more of it, I would say. But I don't know, James, if you have a different way of explanation.

No, that's pretty much exactly what I was going to say. You summed up there. You don't have to be so surgical when dealing with a simple quartz vein. So if you've got a nice thick -- if you've got it going into the host rock as we do here, then you are going to end up with thicker intersections. And as we've shown, we have intersections of up to 9 meters. On average, we're about 3, 3.5 meters. So these are very, very minable features. If you think about the size of the equipment that you would do, it can be a challenge when you're trying to mine something that's quite narrow. So having it into the host rock gives you much more room to maneuver. It also on the technical side and the geology, it means that you've got additional traps in there. So you would hope that your grade would be better because of that it's going into the host rock as well. But the main point for me is just the scale and therefore, the mineability side.

Super. Thanks very much, James. So with that, that ends the questions. If anyone has any other questions, please direct them towards me, Ed Westropp, as you can see on the screen there, my details on the website or on the bottom of the press releases. But thanks, everyone, for joining. Thanks for your time.

Can I just stop you very quickly on one thing? I just want to say one nice thing to someone. James Gilbertson, who has been the VP of Exploration with us since 2012. He and his team of 10 geologists or more, Will Gray, who is the Head of Exploration, have done a tremendous amount of work understanding Greenland in its entirety, built up databases, built up exploration method, built up a whole fleet of equipment and a way of doing things in Greenland that is unmatched. And I think what we want to kind of -- we're very thankful and honored to have them as part of a team, and we want to congratulate them for this tremendous success. So it shows how well how far we've gone and how good handle we have on geology, especially when we are now seeing more and more results. And that's one of the reasons why we're now being seeing a lot more of positive results in Greenland and what we're doing is because of the team is getting better and better of understanding it and due to all of the hard work and understanding. So I just want to say that about the team and James, so congratulations on that from us here in Amaroq and probably most of the shareholders who are on the call as well.

Thank you very much. It's been an honor working on it.

Thanks, Eldur. Well, very well set here. And thank you all for your time. We'll end it there. Have a good Christmas, if we don't speak beforehand.