Thor Explorations Ltd. ($THX)

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Thor Explorations Limited Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, which I kindly ask you to submit your responses. I'd now like to hand over to CEO, Segun Lawson. Segun, good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Jack. Thank you. I'm pleased to be here to talk through our Q1 2026 financial and operating results. Welcome, everyone. We have a disclaimer here. There are some forward-looking statements here, and this can be read in detail on our website. I will start with my usual overview of the company for any new joiners that might be here. Thor Explorations is a West Africa-focused gold producing company. We're advancing projects in 3 countries. We have our flagship project in Nigeria, the Segilola Gold Mine, which we are now in our fifth calendar year of production after producing around about 92,000 ounces last year. We just completed our first quarter, and we poured just over 20,000 ounces of gold. In Senegal, we have our advanced Douta project, which we have continued to grow in terms of land position and equity stake in. We now have 100% stake in the Douta project after buying out our minority equity partners in this project. We're very excited by this project. We completed and filed the preliminary feasibility study in the current period, Q1, which we are reporting, which demonstrated some very strong economics with a project NPV of $908 million, 5% NPV asset using $3,500 gold price pretax. The project has grown to a mineral reserve of 1.2 million ounces at a grade of just over 1 gram per tonne and a total global resource of 1.7 million ounces. We're still very encouraged by the growth prospects of this project, which I will speak about in more detail in this presentation. And we certainly expect to continue to grow the size of this project in terms of ounces over the course of this year and throughout the construction period. Finally, we have an early-stage portfolio in Côte d'Ivoire, where we have acquired a number of exploration license. We're continuing to carry out drilling programs on 2 of them and advancing geochem geophysical exploration and also auger sampling across all our portfolio. We're very excited and encouraged by the prospects we have here in Côte d'Ivoire as well. As a company, we're listed on both the A market of the London Stock Exchange and the TSX-V market of the Toronto Stock Exchange. We have a market cap hovering just below CAD 1 billion at the moment. We are well institutionalized on our share register with a number of shareholders on both sides of the Atlantic. We still believe there is significant upside to come in our share price. We have a number of catalysts in terms of milestones to achieve through the course of this year. And after our performance last year, we expect that to continue through the course of this year. And you can see by some of the target prices written here. So getting into the nitty-gritty, our Q1 financial highlights. Our working capital and our balance sheet. Starting with the balance sheet, we've been completely delevered since the end of 2024, where we fully repaid all our senior debt. We are now in a material surplus working capital position and net cash position. I think it's clear to see that we have been really benefiting from the rising gold price. If you look at in the top left-hand graph on a quarter-by-quarter basis. I think the other key takeaways here is if you look in the bottom right-hand position and the bottom left-hand position, you look at our liquidity and our cash flow generation, that has continued to grow and is continuing to grow. We have a working capital surplus now of just under $200 million and an adjusted net cash position of $177.8 million. I think importantly, if you look at our costs, all-in sustaining costs and cash costs per ounce through the course of the last 5 quarters, they have been very well maintained with Q1 finishing below $1,000 per ounce. In Q1, we paid the usual $0.0125 per share, which is a quarterly dividend payment as per our policy. This was coming off the back of closing out 2025 in a surplus cash position, paying out not only our regular dividend, we paid out a bonus dividend of $0.015 per share. So following that to date, we have now returned to shareholders in the form of dividends just over $38 million, and our policy is continuing through the course of this year. In Q1 itself, our revenues were supported by the high gold price, the highest achieved gold price for the quarter, $74 million, and we finished the period with just under $160 million in the bank. We, however, did have 4,000 ounces of gold bullion, which we haven't sold yet and have since sold subsequent to the end of the period. So that resulted in an adjusted net cash position of $177.8 million. So from a financial perspective, the company is in a very healthy position, no debt, clean balance sheet, growing trends in all the right directions in terms of financial performance, and this is all being done whilst maintaining our cost discipline. In terms of our operating highlights, we poured 20,000 ounces for the quarter. And as I mentioned just slightly earlier, we had -- we sold 15,400 ounces at a very high in terms of quarterly gold price -- achieved gold price of just over $4,800 per ounce. We also -- in addition to our bullion, we had a gold draw of an additional 2,000 ounces. So in terms of operating performance, we've been running at a steady state. We had a head grade of just over 2.5 grams per tonne being fed into the mill and our recoveries were about 93.1% for the quarter. Mine production is slightly down as we move down to the southern end of the open pit. However, that has also had a, should I say, a net positive effect on our costs in terms of using less diesel and lower production rates. One thing we are pleased to again highlight is we've added another 3,844 ounces of gold to our stockpile. This has all been part of our strategy of delivering sub 1 gram material to the stockpile. That's now sitting at 54,000 -- just over 54,000 ounces grading at 0.76 grams per tonne. So given the fact that we have sunk the majority of these costs in terms of mining and stockpiling, there is a significant amount of value here still remaining on the stockpile at today's gold price, around about $250 million. In terms of exploration, we are -- there has been a lot of feedback and questions as to extension of the mine life and transition to underground. There is a lot of focus on this internally at the moment. We are trying to get to a minimum milestone to transition to update our reserve officially. We have 6 rigs currently working at this. It is a learning process. It is an understanding process of structural controls underneath the pit. We are on the positive side, continuing to intersect mineable widths and gold that remain open at depth, and that will continue. We had in our MDA, some of our highlight results, which we're continuing to follow up on. We do have a near-term plan to begin to carry out the scoping studies of the underground. And when I say near term, that means sometime over the next -- the course of the next 6 months whilst we continue to carry out the exploration. We're aiming to have another set of drill results out in terms of this underground. There is a bit of catch-up to make since this last update, and we're aiming to have that through the course -- sometime through the course of June. We've also continued to progress work in satellite areas of -- within the 50-kilometer radius of the plant. We have a new project area -- not new project area. We have a project area, should I say, which we are continuing to work up gradually down to the south where we've consolidated a number of licenses. We also have a number of previously drilled smaller satellite deposits, which we're also evaluating the economic potential of, which we're aiming to incorporate into any resource update we do from underneath the pit. The ideal situation would be to combine the best ounces in terms of the mine processing sequence. So whether it's from satellites, whether it's shallow underground, whether it's stockpile or a blend of all 3. These are all part of the scoping studies we're looking to carry out now. So moving across to Senegal, where we delivered our preliminary feasibility study on the Douta project. We were very pleased with the outcome of the Douta project. The project economics there were economically robust. This is a project which we've grown from grassroots having made the first drill hole discovery as far back as 2012. We've drilled over 130,000 meters here, and we've had a very successful, should I say, delivery cost in terms of ounces, indicated ounces of $8.5 per ounce. It's in the Birimian, in the Kéniéba Inlier, in the Southeast area of Senegal. And we've now expanded our footprint to over 540 square kilometers here. This project is now growing into a district scale project. There's over 40 kilometers of mineralization to be further tested and converted into resource -- economic resources and reserves. We're currently sitting with over -- just over 1.2 million ounces grading at just over $1 per ounce. And in terms of resource, we're sitting at 1.7 million ounces. Looking at the Douta project itself and the economics, we've increased our ownership here to 100%. This is prior to any government free carry. And we have now been spending since completing the PFS, spending a lot of time progressing additional work streams on the engineering and the other critical work stream being in country with the government to advance this to collect our mining, should I say, our mining license to transition to get the fully permitted for our mining operations. We're still targeting and expect this to be done over the next couple of months, and we are still in the position to -- we're aiming to complete all our work streams and make this final investment decision in Q3 with a targeted first gold pool date in the first half of 2028. I've spoken and I've given an independent presentation on the PFS. So I won't spend a huge amount of time here. But I will just highlight a few things here. First of all, the project is a 2-phase project with an oxide phase and a fresh ore phase. The oxide phase has an all-in sustaining cost of just below $1,500 per ounce and an extremely fast payback period at a $3,500 gold price has a payback period of 11 months and a $4,250 gold price has a payback period of 9 months. So it's extremely cash generative and extremely profitable with a very fast payback period. And this has driven our rationale to continue to extend the length of this oxide period. And we believe we're well on track to be doing that now. We've had a recent press release with our initial first set of drill results, which has shown exploration success from all over. I mean, if we start off with looking outside the resources and looking at the earlier stage targets, we have -- we are in the process, should I say, of doing a 40,000-meter drill program where we've defined, should I say, grassroots mineralization targets for an extent of 14 kilometers. So what we're seeing on my screen now, soil and rock chip results on a structure that runs parallel to Makosa and the existing Baraka 3 South deposit. So we're very excited about this. We've released our first set of drill results here. The first set of drill results here, we had success in all 3 of our targets. The drilling program -- first part of the drilling program has been designed to increase the project economics. And when I say that, that's by converting previously existing inferred resources that lay within the pit shell, for example, to indicated so they could be included in our economic evaluation. So we've done that at the Baraka 3 deposit. We've done that at Makosa Tail, where we were very successful hitting high-grade mineralization within the oxide. We're fleshing that out now. And also in the Bousankhoba prospect, where in the previous slide, I showed the rock chip and soil samples. We've now done some first-class air core, and we're continuing to flesh that out and finding additional wide high-grade oxide mineralization, which is -- which we're looking to follow up. So where does this leave us as a project? We have set ourselves up with an internal target of adding an additional 500,000 ounces of oxide reserves prior to the end of the year, prior to the -- and also prior to our first gold pour here. And that takes -- that's a step change in terms of valuation in terms of the Douta project oxide phase, changing the low-cost phase from a 4-year period at this rate to an 8- or 9-year production period producing north of 100,000 ounces per year. Drilling is ongoing here. We will continue to have periodic updates with the next update coming again in the course of this quarter, Q2. So to summarize our next steps, this 40,000-meter program is targeting and extending this oxide phase. We are looking -- once we receive all these results, we're going to put these into, I say, an updated or optimized feasibility study. We're still on track to close out on ordering our long lead items. We're finalizing our engineering -- detailed engineering designs at the moment. We're in advanced discussions with financing parties with looking at closing all this out in line with closing out with the Senegalese government over the next 5, 6 weeks. And we're targeting our first gold pour in the first half of 2028. And we see ourselves very well positioned in this high gold price environment to build this project without any additional shareholder dilution, where we believe our growing balance sheet, combined with project financing opportunities that are out there should make this possible. Moving over to Côte d'Ivoire, where we have a much earlier stage portfolio. We've added a new license here, the Loudiba license in addition to our 2 priority licenses, the Guitry and Marahui, we also have the Boundiali license. Needless to say, exploration potential in Côte d'Ivoire has been extremely encouraging over the last 10 years. We're seeing mines being built there. We're seeing a very friendly mining code there, and we're very pleased to be advancing our projects there. Starting off with a summary of the Guitry project, we carried out a first pass drilling in only a small area of the soil anomalism, which was 4,600 meters of drilling. We've now taken our drilling activities to an additional 2 targets -- and apologies, our exploration activities to additional 2 targets within the license and working them up into much higher resolution drill targets to be drilled out as well. We've already put in a number of scout holes in these additional areas, and we're encouraged by these results, and we look forward to drilling these out and updating the market with our drill results. Looking at some of the results, these are combined results from last year and earlier this year. We are -- in the first area where we drilled, we've previously released these results, these loads and this target remains open in several directions and has demonstrated a number of high-grade shallow plunging, low -- also oxide mineralization. So we think we have a number of good targets here, which remain open. We look forward to drilling these up. And we've allocated a significant budget for our projects in Côte d'Ivoire, both in Guitry and our final project in Marahui. This is a project which I have spoken a lot about. We're very encouraged by the early-stage exploration, which has shown very high-grade gold mineralization in rock chips at surface over significant strike length. I can't say too much because we haven't released any drilling results, but we're also looking to have our maiden drill results from Marahui out in this quarter. So I look forward to updating the market here. Looking at a snapshot of some of the rock chips we've already got here. It's demonstrating very typical quartz vein mineralization, Birimian style, very high grade, and we're very encouraged by this. We've set out a wide space drilling program. If you can see these lines here, 400 meter white space drilling program to design -- that has been designed to test both of these parallel structures, and we are looking forward to getting these results out. So I will summarize now with our production and cost guidance remaining on track. We're allocating around about $30 million towards our exploration across all 3 jurisdictions. We continue to target as a priority, the extension of the mine life with scoping studies being carried out into an initial underground phase. We're finalizing our permits and engineering designs of the Douta project. We are still on track to reach investment decision in Q3 and start construction this year. And we continue our exploration in Côte d'Ivoire to advance both the Guitry and Marahui projects. And we are maintaining our dividend policy through the course of the year at a minimum of $0.0125 per share per quarter. Thank you very much.

Perfect. Thank you, Segun, for your presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] For your reference, a recording of today's presentation will be available on the Investor Meet Company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. But for now, Segun, as you can see, there are a number of questions which have been submitted. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and give your responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Which exploration license in Nigeria are you most excited about and why? Not life of mine question. It's difficult to say. There's an evaluation that has to be done internally. But I would say it's slightly earlier stage. But if you look at our South projects where we've consolidated a number of licenses there demonstrating initial at least gold and soil and gold stream anomalism and results. There is a lot of work to do to try and understand, but that's probably where I think I'm most excited about in terms of scale in Nigeria. What are your thoughts on exploring listing on additional major exchanges with high liquidity there? Would you consider share repurchases? Okay. I do get this question a lot. Look, at the moment, we haven't considered another major exchange. We're extremely busy. We are exploring very aggressively, and we are developing a project, which we're looking to go into a build on, and we're also looking to go into a development phase underground in Nigeria. So we haven't looked at that. But in terms of -- if we continue to hit our milestones, we get to that final investment decision in Senegal, we're going into the build. We've demonstrated at the moment a plus 12-year mine life. It might be worth looking at, should I say, promoting ourselves to more senior exchanges on the existing exchanges we're on at the moment. So this is all very hypothetical, but it might be just part of the evolution of the company. But to give a definitive answer on that, no, we're not currently exploring any additional major exchanges. Why all the trades on U.K. AMS off book for this may be giving higher spread and thus reduces volumes? My honest answer is I don't know, and I didn't realize they were all off book, but it's something we can speak to our Nomad adviser about and figure it out. You've mentioned previously you intend to release an upgraded resource when you have material reserves to release, what level do you consider material in this context? Look, we discussed this internally. I would personally like to have set a target of between, let's say, 250,000 and 300,000 ounces, which is extremely material compared to the initial 500,000 ounces we started off on there. And that just enables us to continue to explore aggressively, continue to return cash to our shareholders and also to carry out the development work we need to do in Senegal. Looking at the revenue growth chart, it looks like Q1 '26 volumes down versus Q1 '25 in revenue. No, that's not the case. In Q1 2025, I'm going to freestyle this, but I could probably quickly check. Q1 2025, I believe our revenues were around about $64 million. Q1 2026, our revenues were just over $74 million. I think maybe ounces produced is what you're referring to. But if -- yes, the ounces are certainly then we have a lower guidance this year than we did last year. Okay. This is -- given the improved lithium price, what is your approach to lithium deposits in Nigeria? It's interesting that that question has been asked because we continue to prioritize our gold. However, we do have an early-stage lithium portfolio. And we haven't absolutely stopped exploration there. We continue to advance low-cost exploration. In Nigeria, we own our own drilling rigs that are prioritized on the gold. We are also trying to find a window to maybe remobilize these rigs if we get the right opportunities and the right drill targets on the lithium to actually drill some of our lithium targets. But we're doing some low-cost work to see if we can actually generate some drill targets in the meantime. So the core -- our core business remains gold. And we are -- our core business is gold, and we're still looking to focus on that the biggest bang for our buck we can get at the moment is additional ounces underneath the pit in Nigeria and satellite deposits that are within a trucking distance of the processing plant. So that takes a priority of where we allocate our exploration dollars and also where we position our drilling rigs. Can you confirm that you're targeting to release Marahui results in Q2? Okay. That's a loaded question. Yes, I think the key question here is targeting. So we will continue to target that. A lot of things out of our hands in terms of labs. But yes, we are targeting a release in the next 6 weeks for sure, before the end of Q2, 5 weeks. Okay. Two questions. Please provide an update on safety at site and any time lost. Please speak about government relations in the respective geographies. Can you provide a sense of how often the company engages with respective government representatives? Look, we put all our health and safety numbers in our MDA every quarter. We take this very seriously as a priority. We are a pioneer of the country in the mining sector, and we try and keep everything at best practice standards. So all the data is there for you to -- for anyone to refer to. We also include our sustainability report on our website. Our community activities are also there on our website. In all 3 jurisdictions, we're very, very active with the government with all the regulatory bodies. There is monitoring on site in Nigeria. There is from the Ministry of Environment as well in addition to the work that's carried out by the Ministry of Mines. In Senegal, we have a very strong relationship with our communities, local mines offices and at federal level. I'm regularly in all 3 -- in front of all 3 regulatory supervisors -- supervisory bodies, should I say? And yes, I would say we have a good relationship. Okay. I think, yes, that's it for now.

Brilliant. Thank you, Segun, for answering all of those questions. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is important to you, if I could just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.

Yes. Look, I would close by saying it's been a strong start to the year. We are very privileged to be in this gold price environment. Our cash position and balance sheet continue to grow. We remain on top of our costs. I think we have -- very importantly, we have some big catalysts to come this year. There's a lot of work that's going on in between the 2 catalysts. So it may seem a bit quiet in between the -- I think 3 major catalysts that we're aiming for. And I think in addition to all this, whilst we're underpinned by our strong cash, we still have a lot of very encouraging and exciting exploration potential to deliver as well through the course of this year. So we look forward to that as well. Thank you.

Perfect. Thank you, Segun. Once again. Ladies and gentlemen, can I ask that you don't close the session just yet as you'll now be automatically redirected to a page to give your feedback, which helps the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. I wish you all a good afternoon.