Mines D'Or Orbec Inc. (BLUE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. Good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, as the case may be, wherever you're located. My name is Chad Williams, and I'm the Executive Chairman of Blue Thunder Mining Inc., and welcome to today's call. It's our pleasure, my pleasure to talk about some very exciting management and Board changes. Hopefully, you saw our press release from yesterday that highlighted all of these good things. These changes mark the start of a new chapter for us, as we strengthen our management team and, most importantly, our ability and expertise to accelerate exploration at our Muus Gold Project located just south of Chibougamau in Québec. During today's call, we'll also provide you with a brief update on our proposed exploration program and where our focus will be this year. Before we get too far along, a few housekeeping things. This webcast is being recorded, and a playback will be available on our website, which is bluethundermining.com after -- immediately after this call. [Operator Instructions] Please be aware that we'll be making some forward-looking statements. And please, of course, read our disclosure at the end of our recent press release from yesterday and that disclosure is also on our corporate presentation on our website. So first, I'm very pleased to announce that Rob Cinits has been appointed as President, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Blue Thunder, effective yesterday. I'm going to remain very involved as Executive Chairman and a Director. I remain the direct and indirect largest shareholder of Blue Thunder. So obviously, it's very near and dear to my heart. And obviously, I'm still outrageously optimistic about our prospects, not only on the exploration front, but as a company generally, with the people that we have and the prospects and the claims that we have. So Rob brings the wealth of technical expertise to the role. He's got over 3 decades of mining and exploration experience. Most of this past 12 years has been in senior management roles. A lot of the details on his past experience was written clearly on the press release yesterday. And Rob will be on momentarily. I'm also extremely pleased to announce the appointment of Orin Baranowsky as CFO, also effective yesterday. He replaces Ryan Webster, who's voluntarily stepped down to pursue other opportunities. Now Orin has more than 20 years of finance and market experience, 10 of those in the mining sector. And he's going to help Rob running day-to-day and, obviously, the financial operations of the company. I am thrilled -- absolutely thrilled to have Robert and Orin come on board. I think it's a -- and I share -- I'm reflecting really the Board's view as well that these are 2 major appointments for us in terms of our hopes and expectations to explore and hopefully find some gold at our Muus Project, as I said, just south of Chibougamau. Robert's got some very strong technical background and experience in corporate development, and Orin's has got a lot of experience in finance and capital markets. So we're very, very well positioned to go forward here. So I'm going to pass the virtual microphone over to Rob Cinits, and he's going to provide some thoughts on where he plans to take Blue Thunder in the future. Rob, over to you, sir.

Thanks very much, Chad, and thanks to all the participants in today's call. I really want to just thank Chad and the Board who have given me this opportunity to so-called steer the ship in these very challenging and uncertain times that we're in right now. And I look forward to working with all of the Blue Thunder team, but most importantly, representing our shareholders. So in the short term that we've been public, we have achieved a lot, but we have an ambitious path in front of us. So buckle-in and join our journey because we've got a truly unique opportunity here with an incredible exploration land position, covering about 47,500 hectares in a geological hotspot in Québec. And for all of us, Québec is considered one of the best jurisdictions in the world to explore it. So we're happy to be there. So just real quickly, I'm going to give you a little bit of background on our project. Our Muus Project is 100% owned by us and sits in a very compelling structural setting, covering about 24 kilometers of the Guercheville Deformation Zone and about 8 kilometers of the Fancamp Deformation Zone. Now these are both really important since they are host or associated with a lot of the nearby gold deposits in the Chibougamau gold district. And this includes a Nelligan and Monster Lake. These adjacent deposits were discovered just recently and are both operated by IAMGOLD, a very important mid-tier gold producer in Canada. And they are in JVs with Vanstar and TomaGold, respectively. Just to give you a little bit of scale here, the Nelligan deposit host an inferred resource of about 97 million tonnes grading a gram of gold or about 3.2 million ounces of gold. While Monster Lake is a different beast. It's a higher grade, smaller, but it's an inferred resource of 1.1 million tonnes grading 12 grams of gold, which would put it on the higher end of upgrades for gold deposits in most jurisdictions in the world. And that would include about 433,000 ounces of gold. Now the reason I'm bringing this up is that both of these deposits are on strike to our properties, and they occur within a few kilometers of our Muus Project. These are very important targets for us to apply to our own property. So there's many other companies active as well in the district, and this is evidence of the rush on staking, consolidation, acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions in this area. So Blue Thunder is now the largest landholder in the district, placing us in a great position to make a discovery or be part of some future M&A activity. So just a bit of history here, the Chibougamau-Chapais Mining District has seen exploration and mining activity for close to 100 years. And over this time, it's produced about 4 million ounces of gold and 3 billion pounds of copper. And we believe that this district remains significantly underexplored. And it provides us with an excellent opportunity to make new discoveries. So we think we're well placed in an amazing part of Québec. So speaking of acquisitions, earlier this year in February, we announced that we had signed a nonbinding letter of intent with O3 Mining, which is part of the Osisko Group, to acquire 100% interest in O3 Fancamp and Embry gold properties. Now this is in exchange for about 4.5 million common shares of Blue Thunder equivalent to roughly 8.7% of the current issued and outstanding shares. In addition, we will grant O3 a 2% net promotor royalty with the option for us to reduce it to 1% or a cash payment of $750,000 at any time. So we're currently completing our 60-day due diligence period on the properties and working towards the completion of a definitive agreement and if completed and if all the necessary corporate and regulatory approvals are provided, O3 will then become a significant shareholder in Blue Thunder, which will be a really exciting time for us. And more importantly, we will have the Fancamp and Embry properties in our portfolio, and we'll start exploring on them. So just a little bit of more background on Fancamp. That property is strategically located between our Muus and Muus East properties, and it's underlain by the Fancamp Deformation Zone and the Fancamp Fault, which has a splay off of it. And once again, these are both important conduits for gold mineralization in the district. Fancamp has been worked intermittently since the '50s, up until about the mid 2000s. And over that time, 5 high-grade gold zones, named A to E were identified and a lot of these have drill-ready targets, which we intend to further explore and drill this year. Some selective historical drill results from the A and B zones include values ranging from 5 to 20 grams per tonne gold over which ranging between 1 to 6 meters. And importantly, our interpretation show that much of the mineralization remains open in several directions and numerous targets have never been tested below much more than 50 meters vertical depth. And as well, other geophysical structural targets on that property have never been drill tested. So we are really excited about this. And opportunities like this don't come by very often. And like I said, we're really excited about incorporating these properties into our growing land position and starting to explore there. So we are currently building a Québec-based exploration team. And as soon as possible, we plan to put boots on the ground and evaluate our best targets followed by diamond drilling. We also look forward to building relationships with the local first nations groups and local service providers and, of course, the residence of the Chibougamau area. On a slightly different note here, I just want to talk a little bit about where the world is right now. And as everyone's aware, we're in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic. And in response to this, the Québec government recently issued a directive that all nonessential businesses, including mineral exploration, must temporarily suspend operations. This was declared on March 25, and the initial directive goes until April the 13th. So Blue Thunder had yet to initiate the field portion of our exploration program and, therefore, our programs are not immediately impacted. However, if the directives is extended significantly, the company may need to reevaluate the timing of field programs and other activities, and we will update our shareholders at that time. So importantly in helping to offset the aspects of this directive, the Québec government is considering providing certain incentives such as deferring claiming cost for a period of time, and we are watching these developments in Québec very closely as they relate to mineral exploration, and we'll report back with any further announcements at the appropriate time. And just to reiterate, the health and safety of our staff, contractors and our community are of the utmost importance to the company. And within our company, we are adhering to our work-from-home policy for our employees, contractors, partners until further notice. So that pretty much wraps up today's presentation. And if there's a few questions here, I'll do my best to answer them right now.

So there's 1 question here. Let me see here, having trouble get to this one. Okay. So one of the questions is, basically, do you consider Fancamp better than our other ground? And then will your focus change? Well, that is true in some regards and not true in others. Fancamp is a much more advanced property with drill-ready targets and has been drilled a lot more than other parts of our property. So we intend to move as fast as possible on that and be drilling on that as fast as possible. However, the breadth of our property are just is important. But they're at an earlier stage, so we'll continue to evaluate the targets on the rest of the properties and move towards finding exploration -- the strong exploration targets and drill targets on that as soon as we can. So it's at a different stage and earlier stage, but we will evaluate both properties at the same time. So Chad, have you come across any other questions or...

I don't see any, but in case -- because I know there are lots of calls and lots of stuff going on, and this call will be recorded for folks to listen to later. One of the questions that I get commonly is how much cash does Blue Thunder have right now? So Orin, that might be a good opportunity for you to add some color on, on where we stand financially at the moment?

Sure. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can.

Okay. Great. So based on the -- our filing document that was filed on SEDAR on February 3, we had a pro forma working capital of around $1 million less some legal fees for transactions. And in that document, we outlined a proposed budget for the year in the document that showed around $800,000 for this year. So showing some room in terms of the working capital that we had coming into the year. We're an extremely lean organization. We don't have significant levels of overhead expenses, and we're making sure that we are putting our capital to work to grow and expand the project. So I think -- I hope that answers the question.

Yes, perfect. According to Ed, who is monitoring the questions, we don't have any right now. So I guess, this would end our call. Unless Rob or Orin, do you guys have anything else to add?

No. Not at this time. I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to everyone. And hopefully, I can start to meet people either online or in person, once all of these restrictions that we're going through with COVID-19 are eventually relaxed to some point. So thanks for everyone and -- for participating, and look forward to staying in touch.