Gruvaktiebolaget Viscaria (VISC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

May 8, 2025

Nasdaq Stockholm SE Materials Metals and Mining earnings 53 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#1

Welcome to this Q1 2025 report presentation by mining company, Viscaria. The report will be presented by CEO, Jorgen Olsson; and CFO, Frida Keskitalo. This session will also include a presentation of update on the mineral resource and the feasibility study. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A and viewers can ask their questions in the live chat. By that, let me introduce to you, CEO of Viscaria, Mr. Jorgen Olsson. How do you do, Jorgen?

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#2

Good morning, Mattias, and good to see you again. I'm doing just fine.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#3

I assume so. We're looking forward to today's extended and fully fed presentation. So please go ahead, Jorgen.

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#4

Thank you, Mattias, and warmly welcome, everybody. So as Mattias pointed out here, this will be our first quarterly presentation in English, and that's very natural reasons for that. And not at least, we have our Board member, Mark Johnson here from Freeport-McMoRan in U.S.A. But also during this day-to-day at the AGM, we start to have a lot of stakeholders from abroad, banks, analysts and market participants. So hence, in order to respect everybody, we will do our presentations in English from now on. So it will be an intense and informative session here, but we will try to make it as clear and visible as possible. So with me today, besides Frida, our CFO, it will be Ross Armstrong, our Head of Geology that you met before, but also one of the fantastic skilled member from our mining team, Koen Vos that will present a bit about the costly and advanced mine development plans and mine optimization within the feasibility study. To run a mine is complicated, and we will make an effort to describe that to the market that we know what we are doing. So Viscaria is one of the largest copper projects in Europe. We have had a fantastic exploration year last year. As you all know, we have spent many years in rigorous planning to get all the permits in place, but also planning for open our mine operations. Last autumn, we really started an intense exploration program. And as you will hear later today in the presentation, so in just 1 year, with only 20,000 meters drilled, we have actually managed to increase our mineral resource with 25%. It's a fantastic result. You can't phrase it in another way. Since inception since we started this in May 2020, we have injected SEK 1.8 billion so far. And of course, that has managed us to do well advanced planning. You will hear more about that. So Q1 so far 2025, I mean, the major milestone was, of course, on April 16, shortly after the first quarter when our permit gained full legal force. and directly after that, we could continue to start with all preparatory works. As you all remember, we got an execution already -- order already last year, 1st of August. So there have been done a lot of development this year. Today, we will also present a resource update, and we will present the feasibility study. Everything is published on our web page. It's a huge amount of numbers and documents. So we will try to guide you through here today and point out the important things in the studies. And we're also, of course, thrilled to, at today's AGM, welcome Lars-Eric Aaro and Mark Johnson to our Board. With that, I hand over to Frida a bit for some numbers.

Frida Keskitalo

executive
#5

Thank you for that. I will do a very comprehensive and brief review of quarter 1 '25 because today, we want to put our effort and time to inform you about our resource update and also our feasibility study that we published earlier today. So if we look at the income statement, we have this capitalized expenses, SEK 84 million. Operating profit, minus SEK 11 million, in the same level as previous years. Net profit, minus SEK 18 million, and we have a positive cash flow for the period refers to this shareholder loan that we raised in mid-January. Looking at the financial statement, we got exploration and evaluation assets, almost SEK 1.4 billion. We have this ongoing development. Major part is according to the investment in our water treatment plant, SEK 218 million. We have cash at -- cash and cash equivalents of SEK 382 million, where SEK 61 million of these are trapped cash for our first stage of the deposit according to closure costs, and we got equity of SEK 1.6 billion. Here you see a graph of capitalized expenditures relating to exploration and evaluation assets. We see it quarterly from 2021 until quarter 1 2025. And if you look at this first quarter '25, the lion part of these expenditures relate to exploration, drilling and analyzing costs according to this drilling campaign that we've been working with. And in other areas such as mine and processing, the preparatory work has continued according to plan. And by that, I leave the word over to Ross.

Ross Armstrong

executive
#6

Thank you very much, Frida, and good morning, everyone. Today, I'm very excited, and I think there's a lot of excitement within the company and also outside of the company as well as we released our first mineral resource estimate since November 2022. This has been a long-awaited day. Since that point in time, we put a heck of a lot of drilling meters into the ground with the predominant focus of securing our first mineral reserve, which we now have. But on top of that, we've recently embarked on an exciting exploration campaign, the results of which we see now have fed directly and positively into our new mineral resource estimate. Let's not beat around the bush, we can dive right into that. So for the mineral resources in Viscaria in 2025, we see positive change across all of the key metrics. The total tonnage for the mineral resource has increased to 108 million tons. We see an increase in the average grade of the deposit as well, now up to 0.9% copper on average. And at the same time, the contained -- or the amount of contained copper in the deposit now sits at around 970,000 tons. Here, we see a full breakdown of the mineral resource statement zone by zone. And on the right-hand side of the slide, we can see visually a cross-section of the deposit. As you may know, the Viscaria deposit consists now of 4 steeply oriented ore bodies. At the highest stratigraphic position, we have the A-zone, which still remains our highest grade ore body with 19.2 million tons at an average grade of 1.3% copper. Behind that, the B-zone, which sits at 44 million tons with an average grade of around 0.8% copper. The D-zone consists of a copper-rich and iron-rich and an oxidized domain with the total combined tonnage equaling 29.2 million tons with a weighted average copper grade of 0.9%. For the first time as well, we present a maiden resource for our new discovery, the ABBA zone, which we've defined to have a total tonnage of 15.6 million tons with an average grade of 0.8% copper. Now in this full mineral resource statement, there are a lot of numbers on the screen. So I think I can let you digest them by yourself as well. This presentation will be fully available on the Viscaria website this morning. I'd like to draw your attention to the D-zone, where due to the magnetite content in the ore body, we also plan to extract and produce an iron or a high-grade iron concentrate from the magnetite. To illustrate the added value of this iron, we can calculate a copper equivalent, which takes into account the metal prices of both copper and iron and the expected recoveries. And this equates the different grades of the iron and copper to an equated or to -- sorry, I lose my train of thought. But essentially showing the added value of the iron, we can show a copper equivalent grade, which for the total mineral resource of 108 million tons sits at 0.97%, which is up from 0.9% if you just look at the pure copper grade of the deposit. Next, let's take a look at a comparison between today's mineral resources and the previous resource estimate from 2022. We can compare these resource estimates directly, which is shown in this table on the bottom right of the slide. From 2022 to 2025, where the tonnage increased by 15 million tons, an increase of 16%. As mentioned, the copper grade also rose from 0.88% to 0.9% copper. And at the same time, we saw an increase of 150,000 tons copper, which equates to an increase of 18% as well. But this direct comparison doesn't tell the full story in how the resource has evolved. For that, we need to look at this waterfall chart, which shows step by step the additions and reductions as we move from our resource estimate in 2022 on the left, where we sat on 93 million tons at an average grade of 0.88%. And to the right, where we are today, 108 million tons at 0.9% copper. The first step was applying a stricter cutoff grade. In 2022, the main cutoff was 0.25% copper, and we since increased this to 0.4%, which is logical as the mining plan has evolved to have a bigger focus on the underground operation. This has resulted in a decrease or a reduction of 15.5 million tons, but a relatively low-grade material, which realistically didn't have the best prospects to eventually be mined. So this step did lead to a decrease in the tonnage, but we see that as a positive in a way because the resource improved in quality. The second reduction we see, the next step in the waterfall, it relates to the updated depletion model in the A-zone, where we see a decrease of 6.5 million tons of quite high-grade material. And this relates to uncertainty in essentially how the depletion is modeled from the historical production in the A-zone. During the '80s and '90s, it wasn't possible to have these accurate 3D scans of the old voids and stopes. So today, there's an inherent uncertainty in how the mineralization is modeled and whether that mineralization actually remains in situ or was depleted as part of the mining operation. We at Viscaria have decided to take a cautious and conservative approach to derisk at the resource level and through that, remove any of this uncertainty in our downstream models. And this allows us to have a really confident and robust resource. So we can say to summarize both of these reductions, yes, the headline tonnage has decreased, but that has led to a more confident and robust and higher quality resource and a more realistic platform to illustrate the resource growth that followed. And this growth is illustrated on the right-hand side of the waterfall chart. First, we had some smaller scale exploration between 2022 and 2024, which added a modest 8.6 million tons over these couple of years. However, more recently, in our focused exploration campaign, which discovered the ABBA zone as well as deep continuations in the B-zone and D-zone, we added 28.3 million tons of inferred resources in just a single year of exploration. This is really a huge growth within just 1 year. Now we can take a closer look at these discoveries. On this slide, we have an image that you might recognize if you've been following along our quarterly exploration updates where we shared results from the drilling. The image shows again a cross-section of the Viscaria deposit, where we can see the exploration drill holes, which we're targeting beneath the existing resource models at the time. And highlighted, we see the new areas where we've added inferred resources. In the D-zone Deep, 6.1 million tons at 1% copper or a copper equivalent of 1.27%. In the B-zone Deep, 6.6 million tons at an average grade of 1.1% copper. And the maiden resource for ABBA, 15.6 million tons at an average grade of around 0.8%. So it's worth noting that in the ABBA zone, some high-grade material does exist, around 8.5 million tons sits at an average grade of around 1% copper. And as mentioned, this is the result of just 1 year exploration, which is a seriously impressive effort and especially when you consider the amount of meters drilled into the ground. In less than 20,000 meters, we've added 250,000 tons of copper to the resource base. And that's a huge bang for your buck to put it simply. And the exciting thing is from a geological perspective, this is just the start. Based on the ongoing drilling, the geological interpretation and supporting geophysics, we have already set an exploration target for immediate resource expansion in all 3 of these areas. Across the D-zone Deep, the B-zone Deep and the ABBA zone, we've set an exploration target of 27 million to 54 million tons with an average grade ranging between 0.9% and 1.3%. Based on our recent success in exploration, we see this as an achievable goal within the short to medium term. It should be noted, however, that these areas are not the only places that we see potential for resource growth within Viscaria. These are just the immediate expansion areas in the vicinity where we've already been drilling. Viscaria as a mineralized system remains completely open at depth, both down plunge and then along strike. And this is supported from our geophysical data sets we have, where 3D inversions of potential field and magnetotelluric data show the deep-rooted nature of the system. We see an example of this on the right-hand side of the slide here, where we see a slice through the constrained 3D magnetic inversion. It shows in the warmer, hotter colors, higher magnetic material or material with more magnetic susceptibility. And in the cooler colors, it shows material with less magnetic susceptibility. In Viscaria, we have magnetite across all of our ore zones, but with varying proportions. And we see in the D-zone, a clear strong anomaly extending beyond 1.5 kilometer depth. And we see in the ABBA, the A-zone and the B-zone more of a moderate combined signal, which also extends deep beyond 1.5 kilometers at least. And if we focus on the ABBA zone, which we see in here, this is a real proof of concept for discovering more blind mineralization. We say blind because the ABBA zone was a well-developed mineralization that showed no clear surface expression in terms of mineralization and alteration. So in that sense, there could be a lot similar scenarios like the ABBA zone, where perhaps they've been overlooked because of shallower drilling historically. We see several instances where we expect to find a similar case, and we've already defined conceptual exploration targets, which you see outlined or a couple of examples outlined in these white dash lines on the slide. I think the clear message is that Viscaria is -- the growth potential in Viscaria is no longer limited to the classical A, B and D zones, and we're very excited in the coming years to test several of these conceptual targets. Naturally, today, our focus has been in the near-mine area, which makes sense. We're talking about a resource update, but we can also take a step back to look at the wider context. The Viscaria mining area, where we've done the predominant amount of our drilling, composes just 2% of the total exploration permit area that we have, which expands 120 square kilometers across the Kiruna district. If we take away the satellite image and show a magnetic map across the same area, this reflects well the geology, and we start to see that it's no coincidence why we've consolidated this portfolio of exploration permits. We see here stretching to the Northeast and to the Southwest, a major extensional basin, which within that hosts the most prospective stratigraphy and structural architecture for finding more copper discoveries within the region. Already, we've carried out preliminary geophysical investigations and even some drilling, finding notable copper grades several kilometers from the mining area. And this really indicates a widespread dispersion of copper throughout the system. However, let's zoom back in to wrap this up by summarizing the resource update, the main news here. We have more copper mineral resources with higher grades and a clear exploration upside. That's the message for today. We see increasing grades in the deposit now up to 0.9% on average. We see a significant increase in tonnage, up 16% and an increase of 18% in the contained copper. And you see that we're now approaching this major milestone of 1 million tons copper in the total mineral resources. Finally, within just 1 year, we've seen huge success in the exploration drilling, which has added a total of 28.3 million tons or 0.25 million tons of contained copper to the resource base, which is a huge return with less than 20,000 meters drilled, and we expect to continue with this momentum as we carry on our near-mine and district scale exploration. Thank you very much for today.

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#7

Thank you very much, Ross, for that comprehensive and detailed presentation and update of the geology. Now dear listeners, we will challenge you even more and get into even more details. Because to have mineral resources in the ground is one thing, but to mine them economically, it's a completely different ball game. We have now published our feasibility study, and we are ready to have that scrutinized by the market, by banks, by analysts. I just want to take the opportunity here in a few minutes to let one of the guys from our mining team tell you a bit about the extensive and detailed work we have done within mine planning to understand the level of detail. So Koen, please welcome.

Koen Vos

executive
#8

Yes. Thank you, Jorgen, for this kind introduction. So I talked to Jorgen before. He said I was only allowed to have 4 slides, so he was scared I would talk all day. The report is quite extensive. So without much further ado, I think we go to the first of the slides, which I borrowed from Frida, who will talk about it more later. It's making a comeback. Here on the left, we have the reserve Table 1 mine plan, the chart on the left, showing about 41.8 million tons of ore being produced over the life of mine. And then on the right, we have our business case mine plan, which includes an 8 million ton extension based on inferred resources, thanks to the good discoveries by the geology team that we managed to define that quite a very interesting area economically to show a growth potential. In later pictures, there will be some designs from the mine shown. There, the reserves are always in green, so you can easily visually see the difference. Here to note between both charts, they work the same is that we try to mine the highest copper grades early in the life of mine and then the slightly worse grades come towards the end to optimize the cash flow over the life. This has been roughly defined by one of my colleagues as we rush for D, we take A and then we delay B as much as possible. So if we start with the open pits, these are the same for both the reserve and the business case. We have a long series really of pits in the B-zone, very continuous. And these are mainly here for providing waste rock for the tailings storage facility for construction. In the A-zone, it would have looked very similar if not this deposit had been mined before. So we have had to stop every bit along the way to go around old existing mined out areas without making anything unsafe. I think there's not so much interesting on the tonnage. If you want to know more about that, I suggest you read the report instead, that's much more extensive on that front. The main focus and the main economic driver of this deposit is the underground mine. And there, we have a hair over 95% of the total ore tonnage that's in the business case, 47 million tons. And this is mined with longhole open stoping with backfill. And in the beginning, that will be cemented rock fill. And then once we get the enrichment plant running, we have a paste fill plant there, so we can put tailings mixed with cement back underground to both reduce our footprint and it's significantly cheaper. So that works out for everybody. In total, we have 160 or so new kilometers of tunnels we are putting in. They are here on the screen, mostly yellow. You can see the ramps coming down from the surface. Main portal all the way top right in this picture goes through the A-zone. It's the existing portal from the old mine and then moving through the B-zone. So all the ore flows through B and A up through this main portal. Luxury we have with this deposit being mined is that there's a lot of existing infrastructure underground. We are planning to reuse about 30 kilometers of the 65 kilometers that's there. And this allows us to go really fast to a high rate of production since it's easy to create a large amount of access. As it is now, we can access this lower drive to the D-zone that's on the screen in about a year, maybe just a bit longer from when the dewatering starts and begin developing that. If we had to start from surface, it would take us about 5 years to get to the same point. Then we have the whole schedule, and this is again true for both the reserve case and the business case really optimized with Deswik's latest and greatest tool, APEX, to get to a schedule that's as optimized for net present value as possible. And that really weighs the cost of developing something with the potential upside, so you make the best decision. Every single shaft tunnel and stope that's to be mined is in this model. So it gets a bit overwhelming to do that by hand. I think there's a bit over 20,000 things in the background here. So if we look at just the design where we have taken the stopes away, we are now looking from the Southeast, roughly from LKAB really towards Norway. We have, I think the main thing to focus on this slide is the ratio for the copper equivalent is the lowest row of the table. This ties into our -- what I said before on, we want to mine the highest copper grades. That's not very useful if the highest copper grades are also very expensive. So these 2 work in a balance here. And there, we are in the very fortunate situation that the D-zone that has the highest copper equivalent grade that we can extract, also has the highest copper equivalent tonnage per development meter that we have to put in. So it works out on both fronts. That's why the D-zone is our main focus in the mine plan. And looking at the pictures, the D-zone has as a suspicious hole in the middle. The D-zone has not disappeared there. It's just very thin locally. So as of right now, that's not the economic part of the deposit to mine. With this mining method, we can potentially mine that later if that changes. A and B-zone, which is shown below that, they share the old infrastructure of the existing mine and their infrastructure, the new infrastructure to be built is tied into that. So it's one hole. The A and B zone sandwich the infrastructure. In A-zone, there's also some holes within the deposit. That's what's been mined before. There's some very thin lines going through it, which are the old drives we are going to reuse. I think with that, I will leave it to Frida to talk more about the business side of the business case.

Frida Keskitalo

executive
#9

Thank you for that, Koen. Now me, together with Jorgen will present the business case from the financial perspective. Starting with this table where we show our sources and uses from June 2020 until quarter 1, 2025. During this period, we have raised capital of SEK 1.8 billion. Raised capital is mainly through issues, but we also got this shareholder loan of SEK 315 million. And according to the terms of this shareholder loan, there's an option and also intention from the lenders to offset the loan amounts against share in the future. Approximately SEK 1.5 billion has been used during this period, as you can see to the table at the right, and that's including the first stage of this deposit for our closure cost of SEK 61 million. In these figures, it also includes some pre-initial investments of approximately SEK 300 million. Here's our funding requirement. It's, of course, a large investment to start a mine or to reopening a mine. This is our funding requirements. It's approximately SEK 5.4 billion, and it's an unlevered basis. The funding requirement also take in consideration a next level of trapped cash, also that according to our closure cost, this cost is about SEK 146 million. We are now exploring different options for debt financing. But for now, we're targeting a gearing level of 50% to 60%. Here are 2 graphs showing the annual miner production. The first is for FS Table 1 and the other one is the business case. It's the same picture as Koen recently talked a little bit about. And here, we can see a significant improvement in the production profile within the business case. And the major difference here is increasing of the tonnage in the high-grade D-zone, where we go from 11.6 million up to almost 20 million, where you can see in the green areas in both diagrams. And this will improve the profile of copper equivalent during the LoM, as you see in the gray line in both sides. And you see that this makes substantially more profitable in the business case according to the base case. And as Ross also mentioned earlier in the presentation, our copper mine has great potential ahead. And by continuing to increase the knowledge about our deposit and increasing the resource and the reserve as well, the profile will be kept at this higher level even longer than we show today. And through that way of working, this mine will continue to increase both in LoM and also in the profitability. We see option for that. And then I let in Jorgen to talk a little bit more about this.

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#10

Thank you, Frida, for that, and I will come back to this picture me myself as well. So there's a lot of numbers in the feasibility study, and I will try -- just try to highlight a few of them. So what we present here is an initial life of mine of 17 years, and I think it's quite important to be important about the first word there, initial life of mine. This will be, of course, extended throughout the years, and we will immediately start the process of submitting an extended permit application for extension and expansion, so we can raise the tail. Let me come back to that later. The cash cost, which is an important item is USD 3,700 per ton, and the all-in sustainable cost is USD 4,500 per ton. And we have an IRR pretax of 20% and post-tax of 17% and NPV pretax of SEK 6 billion and post, we are standing at SEK 4.4 billion. And the payback period is 3.7 years and post-tax 4.3 years. If you go up in the chart again and look at the cash cost and all-in sustainable cost, but also in the production there in the first line, you see numbers within brackets. And that is the -- that is what we call the steady state, the 8 years between 2029 and 2036, which will be the steady state, the top chart in the previous picture here that you can see where the production is even at the top. During those years, the cash cost will be just above USD 2,000 per ton and all-in sustainable cost $2,800. You can see up -- one level up there in the copper equivalent production, we will produce 35.3 tons -- 35,300 tons of copper equivalent per year in a steady state rate. And the goal here is, of course, to keep that steady state and as Frida pointed out, even to grow that. The CapEx then here, you can see the distribution between the different areas, process, infrastructure, mining, process equipment and contingency up to SEK 4.5 billion. In the lower chart, you can also see the distribution over the years, whereby we will invest approximately SEK 1 billion this year and SEK 2.5 billion, the lion part then next year until we then ship our first copper concentrate in 2027. And of course, many of you have seen this picture before where we benchmark ourselves. And again, the USD 3,600 per ton in cash cost, we see here is throughout the whole life of mine period, but you can see in the chart how steep the tail is. So of course, it's a bit unfair to do these numbers just based on the initial LoM. It's important to actually look at the steady state rates. Frida, some more comments from you.

Frida Keskitalo

executive
#11

Yes. Here, you see the project's free cash flow before financing. And you see that we are positive cash flow already in 2028, and we reach breakeven early 2032. And then you also see that we have this large and steady positive cash flow for these 8 years that Jorgen also mentioned, the year '29 until 2036. And the goal is, of course, to be able to maintain in these levels even after '36. And the payback period is 4.3 years. Our model, of course, includes a number of calculations and assumptions that we know will vary over time. To stress test our model, we have conducted sensitivity analysis on different parameters to see the impact of our NPV for our business case. And we can clearly see in this table that it's the exchange rate, the copper price and the payable copper that's most sensitive and give most impact on the NPV, and that goes in the both directions, both plus and minus. And here's a summary of the economical outcome during Lom presented in billion SEK. And Viscaria -- the Viscaria mine is forecast to generate revenues during the life of mine of approximately SEK 41 billion, and we forecast a total EBIT during this period of SEK 14 billion. And the mine is expected to generate this NPV post tax in SEK 4.4 billion based on a discount rate of 7%. And that is the first stage of reopening this mine. And as you know, we are already planning and working to reach new potentials in our deposit. But still, we feel confident that this is a good and stable start for this project. And then I'll leave it back to Jorgen again.

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#12

Thank you, Frida. So some closing remarks. Dear listeners, you stand in front of one of the fastest-growing copper deposits in Europe. But maybe much and way more important, you stand in front of a copper deposit where the remaining time to market is 2 years. Then we are in the top league in the whole world of having that short-term period of time to market. Now you don't get the time to market of 2 years for free. And that is -- the reason for that is, of course, that we are dared to make all these investments of close to SEK 2 billion already over all these years. We are dared to invest in access roads, building office, doing ground infrastructure investments, all that intense drilling, almost 200,000 meters of drilling, the vast majority infill drilling for the mine planning. And to the right here, you have a rendering sketch of our industrial estate. Some of these buildings and [ ejections ] are already made. And some of you, investors, banks and analysts have been on the site a couple of times. And for every time you're here, you see how more and more buildings are erected from the ground. Up in the middle here in the picture, you see the water treatment plant is well underway. And latest 1st of October, the ponds will start and we start to drain the brain. The Viscaria office down to the right is built, and that's where we're sitting and have all our plannings. Last summer, after the execution order, we did the parking area up to the right. It will be further furnished this year. We also did the storage and waste station down to the right there already last year, and many of the storage tents are already ejected now -- erected now. We will start with our own rail yard work, construction work this summer and week 24 next year, 2026, the switches will be connected, one to the south and one to the north to the iron ore line. And the power station that you also see is under construction and the groundwork is starting this summer as well as for the processing plant. Had we done all this work in a sequential way, we had been way off in this time line, 2 years' time to market. We are, of course, also, as mentioned before, thrilled to welcome our new Board members that has a fantastic quality networking experience from the copper mining industry, Lars-Eric Aaro and Mark Johnson. But I will also take the opportunity to thank our 2 Board members that leaves our Board, Henrik Ager and Sven-Erik Bucht. They have made significant contributions to where we are today, and they definitely participate in an active and qualitative way to get where we are today with a permit in full legal force. So thanks a lot for that, Henrik and Sven-Erik. And a summary of how fast our resource is growing that Ross also talked about and pointed out in detail for you. We are now standing at 108 million tons. And based on the fantastic successful exploration results last winter, we have now increased our midterm resource target. So within 3 to 5 years, our resource will stand at between 140 million and 60 (sic) [ 160 ] million tons. And I'm thrilled to see the continuation of this midterm resource target. So a summary and outlook. Well, I can summarize that in just a few words, full speed ahead. Thank you for listening. And Mattias, I promised you 45 minutes, and we stand at 43, I think. So I held that promise as well.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#13

Perfect. And thank you, Jorgen, Frida, Ross and Koen for that presentation. I want to remind the viewers that they can ask their questions to the company in the live chat. And also say that for you that couldn't see details in the presentation, I'm sure you can find numbers and graphs on the Viscaria website. So let's start off the Q&A by asking the NPV of SEK 4.4 billion and 17 years in life of mine, how do you rate this forecast or facts, Jorgen?

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#14

No, we are very satisfied with that. But I think it's important because we -- I know that we have a broad audience here. I think it's important to point out that NPV is just for the initial life of mine. And you can see how fast this deposit is growing. You can see how much we have added on, of course, last year. So me personally as one of the largest owner, I don't invest based on the NPV, even though I'm satisfied with that. The value of this company is, of course, including what's beyond there. Yes.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#15

Thank you. Are you satisfied with the copper grade of 0.9%?

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#16

Indeed, we are that. So I mean, we have a global copper grade average of all the, I think, 700 copper mines that we have in the world of around 0.55%. But you can't put 0.9% in comparison with the 0.55% because it's not even apple and pears. It's pineapples, apples, pears, nuts and everything. I mean, one mine is not looking the same cash cost-wise, operational-wise. So we have to look at our conditions. And as you heard from Koen here today, 95% of the ore will be underground mined. And considering our underground mine conditions, we are very happy with our 0.9%. Most happy, of course, we are that, that copper grade is increasing. And for those of you that have followed the latest exploration results, you can see in many drill results, we are above even 2% in copper grades. So we look forward to see our copper grade continue to increase. Furthermore, when it comes to the 0.9% to put it in perspective, let me point out the thing that Koen said. So due to the fact that we have existing infrastructure, 30 kilometers that we will use of the 65 kilometers, we will manage to go down to the high-grade deposits 5x faster than if we would have made all the development ourselves and at 1/4 of the cost. The main infrastructure tunnel, 5x 5 meters, the cost for 1 meter is around SEK 30,000 to SEK 40,000. Then you can understand the value of having an existing infrastructure that we can start with. Long answer, I'm sorry for that.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#17

That's perfectly all right. Excuse me. Can you elaborate a bit more on increasing the resources? How will you do that?

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#18

Ross will be way better than me to elaborate a bit to increase the resource. So please, Ross.

Ross Armstrong

executive
#19

Well, as you see, the recent trajectory we're on in terms of total resource growth, but especially demonstrated by this recent exploration campaign where we added 28.3 million tons, it just goes to show that we're nowhere near depleting this total resource. Signs of that might be if we're adding tonnage with lower grades, but it's the opposite. The tons we're finding are higher grade. And I think that really reflects the growing and the better understanding geological interpretation that we have, where we're finding the higher grade shoots and really getting a good understanding of how this interplays within the bigger system and also the geophysics that supports that, which we can utilize as well. But what's important to consider as well is it's not just about adding inferred resources to extend the life of mine, we need to increase the category of these resources to indicated to measured in order to allow these tons to be utilized, to be assessed from the mining engineers as potential reserves. And a key component of that will be when we can start to drill underground because to get to indicated, measured level, the drill hole spacing that you need on your resources becomes finer and finer. And that basically equates to more drilling meters. So if we do that from the surface in these areas where we're adding deep inferred resources, that's going to be a heck of a lot of meters. Whereas once we start dewatering the mine and finish with the reinforcements there, I'd say within 1.5 years or so, we can get to the deepest levels of the existing infrastructure and drill holes from the surface to reach through the ABBA zone, the Deep B-zone, they usually are around 1.4 kilometers, 1.5 kilometers long. But from the deeper side of the A-zone, these meters are halved, even maybe 1/3 of the total. So this will be a key component in converting resources or upgrading the category and then allowing that to lead to extensions of the life of mine.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#20

Okay. Thank you. And I think I have another question for you, Ross, from a viewer and it says, what relation between exploratory and infill drilling do you see? What is the next step?

Ross Armstrong

executive
#21

Well, that kind of relates to the last answer as well. I think it's -- what we've done successfully is outlined the deep extensions of the existing ore zones and also the discovery of the ABBA zone as well. And that's fine to do from the surface. I think we will do the infill drilling of these resources once we're underground. And like I say, when the amount of drilling meters can be drastically reduced and hence reducing costs as well. And that's really just the zones that we've added inferred resources within the last year. As I mentioned, we have other exploration targets where we see really good potential and quite analogous conditions to our ABBA zone discovery to find more copper mineralization and hence more inferred resources at different stratigraphic levels as well.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#22

Okay. Thank you. And I think we move back to Jorgen. Everyone agrees that you are moving very fast, the first shipment in 2027. What threats do you see here in being able to do that?

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#23

I mean to joke a bit, then I can ask you how long time do we have. But to talk seriously, mining is everything but simple. And I hope that we have managed to get that message through over the years when we have done all our detailed planning. Some of you has been with us for a long time. And you may remember that we, autumn 2021, said in front of submitting our environmental permit application that our goal was to hand in Sweden's best environmental permit application. Some people laughed and some people criticized us for even having such a high goal. I do believe that the process to get that environmental permit was actually a result of very high qualitative environmental permit application. We have had the same ambitions with our now feasibility study and the mine planning, and we try to get that message come across with you when having Koen presenting for you here today. Mining is an extreme logistical challenge. We have indeed a copper-rich resource, as we said, 0.9% compared with a global average of 0.55%. But 0.9% copper grade means that 99.1% is waste. And if you don't then do that logistical planning in a detailed and experienced way with skilled, experienced mining people around you, you will go bust. So we do believe that we have been extremely cautious taking conscious decisions of the mine planning and all the logistics around that, so we can feed our plant with a planned 3 million tons input and then have the recovery rate in the processing plant, which is another huge challenge so we can get the output that we get. So we have a humble respect all the challenges that lies ahead of us, but we are confident that we are the team that expands every month that will make that -- this in a predictable way and steady way.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#24

Okay. Thank you, Jorgen. That would be a perfect ending to today's broadcast. Thank you so much to you and your team for the presentation and all your answers.

Jorgen Olsson

executive
#25

Thank you, Mattias, and thank all listeners.

Mattias Vahlne

executive
#26

Thank all the listeners, and we are looking forward to the next chapter of the journey of Viscaria. Thank you.

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