Kodiak Copper Corp. (KDK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome back inside of the Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Claudia Tornquist, the CEO of Kodiak Copper. And Claudia, welcome back. Nice to see you.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Steve.

Yes. Yes. Excited to put a capper on 2022 with you because it was a very, very busy exploration season of your MPD project. And maybe you can sort of give us just some overall thoughts on what you thought about the program this year.

Well, it certainly was a big year for our company. We drilled 26,000 meters, biggest exploration program to date, even bigger than last year's, which was a big program already. And we're very pleased with progress to date. We have extended the Gate Zone, our first discovery, which is now very sizable dimensions, kilometer in length, North, South, about 350 meters across and down to a depth of 900 meters. So it's starting to look big. We're very pleased to discover a parallel zone, porphyry zone at Prime, which is slightly smaller, but also interesting and exciting, and more results to come from that. And then the latest new development is obviously the discovery of the Beyer Gold Zone, precious metals zone, which is an exciting new development. And we'll certainly follow up on that next year, and more to come from that, too.

I know that when you look at it and go, "Hey, we extended the one zone that we started with, plus we had 2 new discoveries," that's very a successful year for a lot of different companies. But I know that there's a lot more to come from your company next year. And the thing is that you have a lot of money in your treasury, so you have the opportunity to follow up on pretty well everything that you found this year. That's a good position to be in, Claudia.

It certainly is. We still have lots of results to come. So far from this year's 41 holes, we have had results only from 9. So next batch in January and then more to come in 2023. And we still have $8 million in the treasury. That means we're under no pressure to go back to the market to finance. We have the cash to do our work. And yes, lots more to come next year and another big drill program planned.

Yes. Claudia, when you look at the MPD project as a whole and you talk about what you've had this year, but there's also other targets that we've talked about in the past, and Dillard and Axe and all those, what should people understand about MPD as a project as a whole?

That's a very good question. This year, the focus of our drill program has shifted from [ just in ] Gate to drilling multiple other targets that have the same discovery potential as Gate has. So we take the same approach and apply it now to Dillard, Dillard West, Man, the other targets in the Southern part at Axe, with the aim to make more porphyry discoveries. And that's, of course, exciting and looking forward to the next year. I think we have a very good chance to make one or several more porphyry discoveries. And now, obviously, with the Beyer Zone development, we have a whole slew of gold targets now added to our priority list, and we'll certainly look at those as well, and so more potential for gold discovery on top of the copper.

All right. Well, we look forward to talking again in January, when you have more results to share with us. Happy holidays, Claudia. Thank you so much for the time, and congratulations on a successful year.

Thank you, and happy holidays to you, too.

Yes. There's Claudia Tornquist, the CEO of Kodiak Copper.