Japan Gold Corp. (JG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Very welcome back inside our proactive newsroom. Joining me now is John Proust, the CEO of Japan Gold. And John, it's good to see you again, how are you?

I'm just great. Thanks. Nice to see you, Steve, good morning.

So first time we've got a chance to talk to you in 2021. I know you've been extremely busy. I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to sort of give everyone watching a bit of a look back at what's happened over the last year because as I said, you have been very active for sure.

Indeed. 2020 was a real pivotal year for Japan Gold. We were able to put together that portfolio of projects that are, ultimately, now 31 projects across the 3 main islands of Japan. So an important milestone for us there. But probably most significantly, in February of last year, we announced our alliance with Barrick Gold Corp. and the alliance with Barrick was a very -- an important element for our development of the business. In that Barrick is advancing 29 projects of our 31 projects. They're solely funding the evaluation and advancement of those projects. And that advancement is a very short 2-year evaluation, again, sole-funded by Barrick, to determine which projects they would like to advance and which projects are going to meet their prior criteria going forward. And so we embarked on an ambitious program of geochemistry and geophysics to evaluate all 29 projects. Geochemistry is really simple. That's -- our team is walking up all the streams and catchments, taking soil samples and stream sediments and rock samples, and that assaying those for gold and multiple elements to determine the background level of gold and the areas that are highly anomalous in gold. And in addition to that, we're doing geophysics. So we have been doing a type of geophysics called Gravity over all 29 projects, which, by the way, cover about 1,900 square kilometers now. So a significant area of Japan. And we've been able to try and identify the key structures that might have supported the mineral-rich fluids coming up to the surface and making these gold deposits. So we've been doing both of those areas very, very -- both those activities very actively now, and we've made some great progress in 2020. And so at this point, we've now covered that 1,900 square kilometers, 73% of it's been covered by geochemistry. And in the Southern Island of Kyushu, where we have a large concentration of projects, we've now covered just over 50% of the geophysics there. And we'll be expanding that coverage now soon with not only the domestic contractor, Sumitomo and JX Nippon, but also hopefully, bringing back in our international contractor from Australia.

And we should mention that the alliances has approved $4 million now for the next year to continue this work that's done as this alliance will go until February of 2022, right?

That's right. So we've just announced that the Barrick Alliance -- so we completed our annual meetings with Barrick, where we have a Technical Committee with Barrick and we also have an Executive Committee. And there, we analyze what's done with -- in the previous year and the results that we've come up with, et cetera, and then we determine the plan going forward. And so Barrick has agreed to fund a further USD 4 million to complete that evaluation of the 29 projects this year. And it's an aggressive program. So to give you an example, we hope to have all the geochemistry and geophysics completed across all projects by July of this year. And what's more important is that to date, we have results now coming back from those programs. And as we analyze those results, we've now already, on the results from 11 projects -- so 11 of the 29 projects, we've now identified 19 significant gold anomalies with pathfinder elements. So the process is working. This systematic, methodical process is working. And it's interesting because I get a lot of calls and comments about, "Why aren't you drilling everything right now, et cetera, et cetera?" But the approach here is a countrywide systematic approach, which sounds like a long time, but we've been able to compress it into quite a short period of time so that we can really identify these anomalous areas of Japan. And then we can rate and rank those areas and then go after them with the drill bit, which is our best exploration tool.