DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. (DMGI.V) Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Good afternoon, and welcome to the DMG Blockchain Solutions Q4 and Full Year 2025 Update Conference Call. Participants of this call are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live over the Internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. A webcast replay of the call will be available on the company's website. Joining us today from DMG Blockchain Solutions is Sheldon Bennett, the company's Chief Executive Officer; and Steven Eliscu, Chief Operating Officer. During this call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address DMG Blockchain Solutions' expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in DMG Blockchain Solutions' most recently filed public periodic reports and the company's recent press releases, particularly the cautionary statements within. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, December 18, 2025. Except as required by law, DMG Blockchain Solutions disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Sheldon and Steven. Sheldon?

Thank you, Adrian. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone who has joined the call today. My name is Sheldon Bennett, and I'm the CEO and Founder of DMG Blockchain Solutions. With a similar format as recent quarters, first, I will provide an overview of the company's strategy and accomplishments. I will then pass the call to Steven, who will review the company's performance. We will structure the call to focus on the 2 strategic pillars we have been presenting in our most recent monthly result press releases. The acceleration of our Core business, namely data center operations to AI infrastructure and the progress on our Core operations, namely our data, digital asset Financial Services. This structure will result in no changes to our specific business lines and how we report our financial statements. But we are reorienting our message in a way we believe will be easier for investors to understand. We will end the call with our Q&A session based on questions submitted to us prior to the call as well as from those using Zoom chat. So now on to providing an overview of our strategy. First, Core, our data center infrastructure and DMG's focus on AI infrastructure. To preface this discussion for AI, we are focused on a business model of providing AI data center co-location services. As typical, contracts provide certainty of revenue streams for a decade or more. While we would consider providing meal cloud services in the future, we are focused on colocation in the near term. Now to discuss the particular sets of opportunities. First, Christina Lake. As we announced in a press release earlier in December, we are focused on accelerating the schedule for our previously stated guidance that over time, we would convert our Christina Lake facility to an AI data center that can provide at least 50 megawatts of critical IT load, but we believe there is potential for that number to be higher. We believe there is a window to deliver next-generation AI data center infrastructure in the 2027 time frame, as there are very few sites in Canada that have as much readily available transmission power as our Christina Lake site. We are working to choose the right partner. We plan to continue to mine cryptocurrencies in Christina Lake as long as we can ahead of a site conversion to AI. Second, our Boardman, Oregon property. In addition to Christina Lake, we announced the planned purchase of a building on leased land in Boardman organ. We are working to close this deal in the coming weeks and believe it could ultimately become a major AI data center as AWS already has multiple sites in Boardman. As such, there is already ample access to power, fiber and labor in the region. This development will take time as it would likely require an interconnection study and transmission substation to access more than 100 megawatts, which is what we're planning on achieving. Canadian government. Regarding the Canadian government, in addition to our conversations with the Department of National Defense, we continue to work at the ministerial level to accelerate our progress. We are encouraged that there are remains resolved within the Canadian government and specifically the military to move its sovereign AI strategy forward. But given its low pace of development, this effort has taken a back seat to our push to work on private deals with an initial focus on Christina Lake, but more expansively across Canada. Next, First Nations. We are working to advance our relationship with indigenous communities in Canada as the mandates to include them in Pan-Canadian AI build-out are as strong as ever within government. We continue to work on our definitive agreement with Malahat. As once we have this agreement in place, it should become a template for multiple other indigenous communities with which we have had discussions. Additionally, we continue to be having access to favorable financing for projects as a potential major competitive advantage. Next are prefabricated data centers. As we have mentioned in the past, our 2 megawatts of prefabricated data centers, we are considering ways which we can play them right now either commercially or for government use. We're also considering purchasing the remaining 8 megawatts that we have an option to purchase. Next, I will speak about our Core services, which are focused on digital asset financial services. We first want to emphasize that we are not exiting Bitcoin mining. We view Bitcoin mining as fundamental to our business and critical to our Bitcoin holding. As we are bullish on Bitcoin, we expect to maintain a Bitcoin balance in the longer term. We also see the opportunity to provide cutting edge services via our Systemic Trust subsidiary, along with DMG's crypto asset mining, hosting for others and in particular, for treasuries. For Systemic Trust, as assessed on our Q3 earnings call, we expect our revenue ramp to start in calendar 2026. Over the past several months, we have been focused on operational upgrades to be able to support large institutions, including having just received our SOC 2 Type II certification. We are encouraged that we can build this business as a cornerstone of our digital asset financial services business. For Bitcoin mining, as we recently disclosed in our MD&A, we have withdrawn guidance to expand to 3x a hash by the end of this calendar year, given the challenges of the market. Additionally, we have tuned our fleet to revenue about 1.8x a hash at approximately 21 jewels per terahash by operating our legacy miners at the best possible efficiency. We continue to look for attractive power sites that can be used for either Bitcoin mining or provide AI colocation services. Next, Terra Pool. For our other software initiatives, we continue to make incremental progress. Terra Pool has been running since October with small amounts of hashrate to fully test a new approach that addresses the issue of losses in our net pool revenue line item on our income statement. To date, we have been realizing small net pool revenue gains and looking forward to providing updates as we scale up. Helm. Additionally, our Helm software has become an indispensable tool for our mine operations. And in the coming months, we plan to implement AI agents and other optimizations to maximize mine profitability and uptime. We offer helm bundled with Terra Pool. Reactor. For our Reactor hashrate contract assurance tool, we have slowed this effort to focus on upgrades we made to Terra Pool. However, we are currently testing reactor with plans to offer it both for Terra Pool members and to hash brokers on a licensing basis in the new calendar year. Blockseer. Blockseer continues to be available for no fee in order to fill the void of Blockchain. Bitcoin Blockchain Explorers. As we receive feedback from users, we will consider upgrades with new features. Now for a summary of our strategy. For our Core data center strategy, we are encouraged that the conversion of Christina Lake to an AI center will be transformational for DMG. We are focused on making this happen. For our Core plus digital asset financial services, Systemic Trust is the cornerstone of this strategy. Our long-term goal remains for revenue from custody and other financial services to ultimate eclipse our Bitcoin mining revenue, even as Bitcoin mining remains integral to our overall business. Now I'll hand it over to Steven to review the company's performance. Steven?

Thank you, Sheldon. I'm Steve Eliscu, DMG's COO. Now to review our financial results. Revenue decreased 1% sequentially to $11.4 million in the September quarter, mainly a self-mining revenue decreased to similar percentage on 10% lower hashrate a 5% lower network Bitcoin per hash, generation, offset by a 16% increase in the realized Bitcoin price. On a full year basis, revenue increased 4% and to $47.3 million on a 76% cash rate increase and 84% realized Bitcoin price increase, partly offset by a 61% decline in the network Bitcoin per hash generation. For our mining operations, our average cash rate in the September quarter was 1.61x ash down 10% sequentially, but up 64% year-over-year. On a full year basis, our average cash rate was 1.7x as up 76% year-over-year, and our efficiency was 22.7 joules for terahash an 18% improvement year-over-year, primarily due to the addition of new, more efficient mining machines. Hosting revenue decreased 9% sequentially to $0.1 million in the September quarter. And on a full year basis, hosting revenue decreased 51% year-over-year to $0.6 million. We expect our existing hosting revenue to decline to near 0 in fiscal '26, but hosting has the potential to grow to support new clients. Operating and maintenance costs increased 5% sequentially to $6.5 million in the September quarter, mainly on higher seasonal energy rates. And for the full year, it was up 40% to $27.7 million on a year-over-year basis on a 34% increase in energy demand along with the additional expense of utilizing a third-party hosting provider. Over the past year, our non-firm power cost has been slightly less than our firm power costs. As we expected, but non-firm power is subject to price fluctuations, which makes it difficult to provide near-term guidance. On a full year basis, our year-over-year energy rates were about flat. Our margin percentage on our revenue less operating and maintenance costs was 40% in our September quarter, down from 44% in the June quarter, mainly on higher energy rates. Consequently, our energy cost to mine a bit coin was about USD 64,000, up from USD 51,000 in the June quarter. On a full year basis, our margin percentage on our revenue less operating maintenance cost was 42%, consistent with 2024. As a proxy for cash flow from our business, which assumes we're selling 100% of our generated Bitcoin, our earnings before other items, excluding depreciation, amortization and stock-based comp was $3.5 million or 30% of revenue on a percentage basis in the September quarter increased from $2.7 million and 23% in the June quarter. as we benefited from capitalizing $0.9 million in R&D expenditures during fiscal 2025. For the full year, our earnings before other items, excluding depreciation, amortization and stock-based comp was $11.2 million, up 81% from 2024. Our cash flow from operations was $1.9 million in the September quarter and $16.2 million for the full year, up 97% from 2024. Our cash balance decreased slightly to $1.7 million as we used cash in the quarter to fund our capital additions and net paydown of debt. Non-mine expenses, excluding depreciation, amortization and stock-based comp were $1.2 million in the September quarter, down 52% from the June quarter on the onetime R&D expense adjustment that previously cited. For the full year, non-mining expenses rose 6% to $8.5 million from 2024. We will continue to manage expenses, limiting software development hiring as we continue to adopt AI coding tools. We have been selectively hiring for business development and operations especially as it relates to AI. Depreciation expense of $4.3 million in the September quarter decreased 5% from the June quarter is 37% of revenue among the lowest in the industry. We have also underclocked our legacy miners to the maximum degree to extend their useful life, which we expect to last at least through part of calendar 2026. Our earnings before other items was minus $1.5 million in the September quarter, similar to the minus $2.5 million in the June quarter, excluding the onetime R&D adjustment. For the full year, net income was minus $10.3 million or negative $0.05 per share versus minus $5.2 million or negative $0.03 per share in 2024. Our comprehensive income, which combines our P&L with unrealized Bitcoin valuation gains on our balance sheet was $11.3 million for the full year versus $5.1 million in 2024. Regarding our balance sheet, our cash, short-term investments was Bitcoin holdings on September 30 was $65.2 million, up 81% from the prior year-end. With the increase in value of our digital asset holdings and reduction in debt, working capital increased 11% to $52.8 million from the June quarter and was up 135% from the prior year-end. The value of our property and equipment and long-term deposits decreased 10% to $53.6 million from the end of the June quarter as depreciation exceeded our capital additions. Accordingly, our total asset base decreased by 3% to $132 million from the end of the June quarter and increased by 27% from the prior year-end. We are utilizing about half of our current Bitcoin balance as collateral for our Sygnum Bank loan facility. Note that our Sygnum loan balance was $10.9 million in the September quarter, but as we have paused liquidations, we have utilized this debt facility to support rebuilding our Bitcoin balance in the current quarter. Specifically, our Bitcoin balance rose from an unaudited low of 307 at the end of July to 380 Bitcoin at the end of November. For at least the near term, we will not be providing guidance as to how we will manage our Bitcoin holdings as we want maximum flexibility as to how we utilize our big line given increased market uncertainty. In the September quarter, we sold 71 Bitcoin or 99% of our mines output generating $11 million of cash. For the full year, we sold 113% of the Bitcoin mined versus 98% in 2024, as we focused on debt reduction during the second half of the fiscal year. Regarding raising new capital for a future where AI could be a major component of our business, our capital raising would most likely be debt instruments tied to colocation contracts. I will now hand the call back to Sheldon to summarize our prepared comments, and we will answer questions. Sheldon?

Thank you, Steven. To reiterate our key results outlook, DMG earned 334 Bitcoin from mining in 2025 on a hashrate of 1.7x a hash and a fleet efficiency of 22.7 joules. Cash, short-term investments and digital currency at year-end totaled $65 million and total assets were $132 million. Our cash flow from operations for the year was $16.2 million, up 97% from 2024. Our operating income, excluding depreciation and amortization are base compensation was $3.5 million for the fourth quarter and $11.2 million for 2025. We had a net loss of $10.3 million or $0.05 per share and a net profit of $11.3 million comprehensive income. We are focused on realizing revenue from our AI and digital asset finance services initiatives that can help return us to profitability and drive shareholder value. For our Core infrastructure, we're positioning DMG to expand into AI in a meaningful way, with a focus on developing our Christina Lake descend into a large colocation facility. For our Core+ services, we are committed to systemic trust as a Core of our digital asset financial services business and believe there are opportunities to build a strong base of business with material revenue in the next 6 to 12 months. Fiscal 2025 was successful for DMG and we are focused on initiatives that can significantly grow our revenue and cash generation. We appreciate your continued support. Now we will move on to the Q&A questions.

First question that I see, what happens to revenue through our Christina Lake facility transition from mining to AI? Does that mean no more mining and Christina Lake? So the basic ante here is that the Christina Lake site has 33 acres, and we see the move to AI having us build at least the first phase separate from our existing 30,000 square foot building that our buying is housed in. We believe, and there's no reason that we don't think this is correct, that the time frame from when we would have a future agreement for AI on the Christina Lake site from now there would be no reason we wouldn't continue to big clean mine there until that power, we switched over to a new building or multiple buildings for AI, which we believe is sort of in the 2027 year. And so we think we've got sufficient runway at Christine Lake for, call it, 1 to 2 years without having to touch our Bitcoin mining operations as we currently understand everything. Second question, do you think a 50-megawatt data center Christina Lake is large enough to be interesting for off-takers given what we see gigawatt AI factories in the U.S.? So we do acknowledge that hyperscalers are looking for data centers that can support hundreds of megawatts and we see that in the announcements in the U.S. But that being said, the Canadian market is about 1/10 the scale of the U.S. market. And it's likely, at least initially, that smaller data centers will be needed as AI factories start to be built in Canada. So right now, we're really just looking at how we can increase the capacity of Christine to 100 megawatts in the near term, most likely that would be by natural gas. There is a utility gas transmission line on our property that can support in excess of 100 megawatts of power generation if we were to go that way. in the current gold rush of building data centers. Obviously, larger scale is more interesting, and we could potentially move Christina to a larger scale data center. But we believe that the Canadian market from our understanding, will have a smaller footprint size compared to the U.S. data centers. Next question. Where is the second Canadian data center? What's its footprint, our capacity? It's been 2.5 years. Yes, we are aware it's 2.5 years. So we're very aware of that. We haven't disclosed this location, and there's a few reasons for why we haven't disclosed it, and one of the is that it's moving slowly. But in this location, we don't want undue attention to it as we are dealing with a lot of utility moratoriums on crypto mining. And we've come into this site 2.5 years ago with the intention to crypto mine there and we haven't been able to fully assess if we were to switch to AI as the planned usage of that site. And a lot of the utilities across Canada are indifferent, whether it's crypto or AI. They have their position on data centers in general. And so it's a very delicate discussion that's going on, and it's taken a long time to move that discussion to a place where we believe we'll be able to announce something where whether the intended use is crypto or AI, we will have the full power agreements that allow us to move forward to the site. And that's the best thing I can say right now. Next question we have updates on all MOUs, please. Okay. So we are working on both the AI in utility MOU at Malahat to become definitive agreements. These agreements are not simple agreements. I don't know how many people have experienced doing agreements on indigenous territory. It's not that they're more difficult, but there's a lot more things to think about on how things progress over a long period of time. And so they're a little bit slower than we would like. And we don't want to move into a definitive agreement until both parties are assured that we will have real viable projects. On the portable data centers, as we've said, we've already purchased 2 of the units or 2 megawatts, 8 megawatts left to purchase. We were hoping to move quicker on those on our option as they are really military assets or if their best use for the most value would be military and the Canadian military, which is who we're primarily talking to has been a bit slower than we were expecting with sort of all the announcements of what they're trying to do in their spend. We have an option to purchase those 8 megawatts yet. We are looking at a couple of alternative uses on these that may not be specifically military, but still at a level of I guess, secrecy that would make the additional cost of this type of equipment worth purchasing and putting into use in Canada. Update on offtake agreements, defense contracting and time lines. We're really active in discussions with Christina Lake. But as indicated, the government deals are progressing slower than we expected, especially since earlier this year. in our meetings in our discussions to seem to be quite a sense of urgency. I guess we maybe hit the holidays or some things have changed internally and that urgency is at least waned a little bit. Maybe it will come back in the new year. Update on the Oregon side. We are in the due diligence phase. As our press release said, we did do a heads of terms. So that sort of put us into a process to get an agreement done. We have a few milestones to achieve, but we believe we'll have that transaction done in the next week or 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks with the holidays. But we see nothing stopping that transaction from completing. Steven, do you have any questions?

Yes, I have a few questions here. Thank you, Sheldon. Just the first question here is just in light of the current downturn in crypto, what's your latest view on the opportunity for your custody business. And the bottom line is we're still very bullish on it. In the long run, the consensus for crypto is we're really in the early stages of adoption. If you kind of look at banks, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, the all recommending clients allocate up to 4% to 5% of their portfolios in crypto. And just focused on Canada, when you look at wealth management assets under management, it's $5 trillion. So you multiply that, that's a $200 billion custody opportunity alone. So we're very excited. Next question, you're targeting Christina Lake as a 50-megawatt critical IT load, liquid cooled AI data center. We haven't said all of those details, but just kind of looking at what are the key next 2-year milestones and CapEx we should expect, let's just say we're early in this process. We do have a time frame and CapEx and technology targets in mind. But really until we ink a deal that we can announce, we're just not in a position to give guidance. And then regarding the Boardman site, what's the realistic path to expand power there and do you expect to retrofit the building or build new facilities? Well, right now, we're largely limited by the utility to go beyond the initial guidance of 7 to 10 megawatts within the next year. would need to perform an interconnect study and build the substation. And these are things that Sheldon indicated earlier, it's going to take some time and how we can utilize the existing building. For a data center shell, we'll have to see that as well. Now that you've reactivated Terra Pool, what are the steps to ramp it up? And our testing process is rigorous. We want to ensure we can onboard clients, most seamless way. And it's just going to take a little bit of time before we actively seek to onboard third-party clients, but we're happy with our results so far and remain encouraged. And just or an update on software revenue. Our focus right now is to monetize our STC platform. We gave guidance in the next -- we expect to see revenue ramp in the next 6 to 12 months. And that Terra Pool, we've reactivated it. We're testing reactor, and we'll give updates as we progress. And then I think this is the last question, why the continued lack of marketing. And really, when we look at where we're going to focus marketing as we go forward, it's our custody business. Really that's where we're focusing on a credit investors, pension funds, the smaller accounts to help us build the business over time, and that's where we're going to apply the marketing. And then we already -- we have a BD person, Business Development person in-house Terra Pool Helm and Reactor, and that individual is focused on particular accounts already. So with that, I will hand it back to Sheldon to see if we have any additional questions.

Yes. There's a couple of popped up, not the best of reading the chat, but I think one of them is, I understand the needing to wait for a deal to announce time lines, but what about long lead time equipment such as chillers generated substations. Well, substation, at least when we talk about Christina Lake, we have our own substations that we own. And so that's not really an issue for us. generators, although there's a lot of talk in the market that all the generators are brought up. You'd be surprised at how many are available readily in Alberta and parts of the U.S. So yes, Elon Musk bought a lot of them, a few other people bought a lot of them, but that supply chain seems to be quite robust in building new generators and getting them to market quickly. And the same with chillers. I mean chillers, most likely, we would be using liquid cooling in an AI data center, not air-cooled. So chillers wouldn't really be a big issue for us. What stops the Malahat deal? As I sort of said, there's nothing that stops it. I think that the Malahat and DMG are getting along great and we have lots of great plans. It's just a process that we don't want to over promise what we can deliver on this partnership with Malahat, and then Malahat doesn't want to overpromise in what they can provide to us. So we just need to make sure it's rightsized and everybody is on the same page. And like I say, I don't -- there's nothing where anybody is saying, "Well, we don't agree with this or that." That's not the issue. It's just a matter of getting through everything. Is the goal of the Oregon site to partner with AWS or will you be looking at hyperscalers? We're probably looking at other hyperscalers. I would never say no if AWS was interested and working on that property with us. But right now, there are a bunch of other leads that we're following to grow out the Boardman property. I think that covers everything. So with that, this will now be the end of our Q&A. We thank everyone for attending and our call is now over.