Wallbridge Mining Company Limited (WM.TO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It's now 4:30 p.m. My name is Tony Makuch, and I will chair today's meeting on behalf of the Board of Directors and officers of the company, I welcome to Wallbridge's Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Just before we begin the formal business of the meeting though, I'd like to recognize Alar Soever, he has chosen not to stand for election as a Director at this AGM. And we want to thank him for his many years of service and leadership to Wallbridge, a large traveling , so he's not able to join us today in person. But he was first appointed to the Board in 2003. He served as President from 2003 to 2011, and as Executive Chair until his appointment as an Independent Chair in 2018 and a post he held until 2022. Alar was instrumental in the growth of Wallbridge, including leading to spin of of Duluth Minerals -- Metals Limited, which was sold to Antofagasta; and Miocene Metals Limited, now C3 Metals. They played a major role in the identification, acquisition and exploration of Wallbridge's over 830 square kilometer land package incorporating Fenelon and Martiniere deposits and associated land package and -- which we now call the Detour-Fenelon Trend property. On behalf of the fellow directors, the management and shareholders, I would like to acknowledge a large valuable contribution to development and success of the company over many years and wish him well in his future endeavors. Thank Alar, and actually we're going to miss sometimes a chance to talk to him in his insights and his foresight. But we wish him well. We took a lot from them. And he is still working with us as an adviser. So we're still going to take him up on a few phone calls every now and again. And as we move forward, and I'm advised that the requisite number of shareholders for a quorum is present. We have the preliminary scrutineers' report, which indicates that a majority of shareholders had voted in favor of each of the resolutions and the final scrutineer's report will be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. Please note that our remarks and responses to questions today may include our expectations, future plans and intentions that may constitute forward-looking statements. We should refer you to our most recently filed management discussion and analysis and annual information form, which include a summary of the material assumptions as well as certain material risks that could affect our future performance and our ability to deliver on these forward-looking statements. As this meeting is being held online by a live webcast in addition to in person, it is appropriate to set up a few rules for online participants for the orderly conduct of the meeting. First, all registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders can submit questions using the Ask a Question button provided on the online interface. Questions submitted in respect of motions, if any, will be answered immediately prior to the close of voting and questions with respect to management presentation will be answered after the completion of management's presentation following the formal business. Secondly, for the purpose of today's meeting, voting will be conducted by online ballots. With respect to voting only duly appointed proxy holders and registered shareholders present in person or attending this meeting virtually who have not voted or who have previously returned a proxy and now wish to change their instructions and vote differently need to complete a physical or online ballot as applicable. Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have logged into the TSX Trust web platform with their control numbers and who have not voted and wish to vote during the meeting may vote live throughout the meeting until voting is closed. If you are a registered shareholder and have already voted by proxy prior to the proxy cutoff time and do not wish to revoke your previous vote, do not vote again when the ballot appears on your screen. By voting again, you will be revoking your previous vote. I would like -- I would now like to call the meeting to order and appoint Sean Stokes to act as Secretary of the meeting and Lori Winchester of the TSX Trust Company to act as scrutineer of the meeting. As a reminder, only registered shareholders who held shares in their name as of May 8, 2024, the record date of this meeting or they are validly appointed proxy holders are entitled to vote at this meeting. We will now commence with the formal business of the meeting as described in the management information circular dated May 17, 2024, which accompanied the Notice of the Meeting. Time flies pretty fast. The notice calling this meeting, the management information circular in the form of proxy relating to this meeting were mailed to shareholders in accordance with the Business Corporations Act and a National Instrument 54-101, Communication with Beneficial Owners of Securities of a reporting issuer and the company has received a statutory declaration from TSX Trust Company. I will append the statutory declaration to the minutes of the meeting. May I have a motion to dispense with the reading of the notice of this meeting.

I move that the reading of the notice of this meeting be dispensed with.

Will someone please second the motion?

I second the motion.

I declare the motion carried. The next item concerns the approval of the minutes of the last meeting of shareholders, which was held on May 8, 2023. I would welcome a motion that those minutes be taken as read and approved.

I move that the minutes of the previous meeting of the shareholders held on May 8, 2023, be taken as read and as approved.

Will someone please second the motion?

I second the motion.

Okay. I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is the receipt of the audited financial statements of the company for its financial year ended December 31, 2023, and the report of the auditors on such financial statements. The audited financial statements of the company for its financial year ended December 31, 2023, and the reports of the auditors on such financial statements are hereby received. These financial statements are available for review on Wallbridge's profile at sedar.com. We will conduct the votes on the matters before us via poll. On a poll, every shareholder entitled to vote on this matter has 1 vote in respect of each share entitled to be voted on the matter and held by that shareholder. I now instruct the scrutineer to open the polls and this will allow you to choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait until conclusion of discussion on all resolutions prior to casting your vote. If you are attending this meeting in person, ballots for each matter are provided to the scrutineer -- by the scrutineer to all registered shareholders and proxy holders when you registered. If you did not receive ballots upon registration, please raise your hand and the scrutineer will provide them to you now. To complete your ballots, if you are in favor of the motion mark an X in the box opposite the words For. If you are against the motion or wish to withhold your vote on a motion, mark an X in the box opposite the word Against or Withhold, as the case may be. Please sign your name, and if you are a proxy holder, indicate the name of the shareholder for whom you are a proxy and confirm the number of voting shares you or your ballot represents. The ballots will be collected by the scrutineer following the last motion. We will run through each of the items on the Agenda in turn. Once discussion on all items of business has concluded, I will give you time to enter your votes and then declare voting closed on all resolutions. The results of the meeting will be publicly released and will be available on our website. So the next item of business is setting the number of Directors at 9 -- sorry, at 7. May I have a motion?

I move that the number of directors of the company be set at 7.

Will someone please second the motion?

I second the motion.

The next item of business is the election of directors. I declare that the meeting open for nomination of directors.

I move to nominate each of the following persons to be elected as a Director of the company to hold the office until the next annual meeting or until his or her successor is otherwise elected or appointed. Anthony Makuch, Brian Penny, that's me, Jeffery Snow, Janet Wilkinson, Danielle Giovenazzo, Brian Christie and Michael Pesner.

As the company has not received advanced notice in accordance with the company's advanced notice bylaw of any other nominations, I declare the nominations closed. May I have a motion directing the Secretary to cast a single ballot for the election of each of those nominated.

I move that the secretary of this meeting be and is hereby authorized and directed to cast a single ballot for the election of each of the 7 directors nominated.

Will someone please second the motion?

I second the motion.

I declare that those persons nominated to serve as directors until the next annual meeting of the shareholders will be duly elected upon completion of the formal business of this meeting. The next item of business is the appointment of the auditors. KPMG LLP, the current auditor of the company is proposed as auditor of the company to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders. May I have a motion?

I move that KPMG LLP be appointed auditor of the company until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders and that the directors be authorized to fix the auditor's remuneration.

Will someone please second the motion?

I second the motion.

Please cast your votes for those of you who have not yet voted on any of the resolutions, please do so now as I will shortly close the poll on all matters. Are there any questions? Okay. We'll now direct the scrutineer to close the polls. Okay. Based on the preliminary scrutineer's report received, I can confirm that the number of shares deposited with management prior to the meeting in favor of each of those resolutions is sufficient to declare all motions -- sorry, all resolutions carried. So this concludes the business of the meeting. May I have a motion for termination.

I move that the meeting be terminated.

Will someone please second the motion?

I second the motion.

Okay. The meeting is terminated. Thanks for your attendance. I'll now turn the microphone over to Brian Penny, our CEO, who will review 2023 and our progress and plans in 2024 and beyond. Off to you, Brian.

Thank you, Tony. Unfortunately, I don't have a monitor here. So I'll have to flip through the paper copy, that's not going to work very well. Anyhow forward-looking information. Tony provided us with a discussion of that in his opening remarks. So I will leave that section. Our investment thesis at Wallbridge. We're exploring in the Northern Abitibi. We have two discoveries, Martiniere and Fenelon. Fenelon is about 4.1 million ounces in all categories, while Martiniere is about 1.1 million ounces in all categories. The exploring in the north is challenging. In dark blue, you can see our property position there because it's less accessible, it's quite far north. There is -- most of the properties covered with 20 to 50 meters of overburden. So it wasn't as simple as exploring 100 years ago in the Southern Abitibi. And it is further away from the European centers of Val d'Or and Rouyn. Here is our property position, 97 kilometers on Strike, Detour Lake is on the other side of the border. The fault zone runs right through our property. Just to talk a little bit about some of our properties. One, the Detour East option. Agnico is [earning] in that property they have until the third quarter of next year to spend the $7.5 million. They have about $5.2 million to go. We understand on Monday when Agnico announced the plans for how do we get Detour to 1 million ounces a year. They talked about exploration activities in the rounding area, which included a mention of Detour East in the news release. So we're excited to see the drill moving there, and we're looking forward to results over the next 18 months as that gets advanced. The next property is Casault. We're earning into that from Midland Exploration. We have about $1.9 million to spend by mid-next year, and it's in part of our exploration plans. And what that did is, it fills a gap that we had in between our properties. And then the Beschefer property, which is optioned to Abitibi Metals. They have to spend about $900,000 there by the end of next year, or February of next year. And we anticipate that happening, and that was a small orphan claim that we inherited from our original acquisition. So then you can see 97 kilometers of strike. Great mineralization. The geological footprint is very similar to the Southern Abitibi, but we just have to look a little harder to find it. Here's a time line of the company. We -- in late 2016, we acquired 10.5 square kilometer property of Fenelon. It's a [postage stamp] in the middle of our property position. But all of the Fenelon resources right now are on that original property. We had the discovery of Area 51 and Tabasco in 2019. 2020, we did a capital markets transaction, an all-stock deal and bought Balmoral Mines. First mineral resource was published in 2021. It envisions a large open pit. We'll talk a little bit more about where we got to from there later on in the presentation. In 2022, we made a decision to simplify the company to not have a base metal gold exploration company combined. So we divested of our base metal assets. So we are a pure gold company focused on gold exploration in the province of Quebec. In January of 2023, we did an updated MRE at Fenelon and Martiniere. Focusing Fenelon on an underground bulk mining scenario, and we'll talk a little bit further about it later in the presentation, which was followed by a PEA 6 months later which gave us the preliminary economics of the project. And our goal right now is we see synergies between Martiniere and Fenelon. We need to unlock those synergies, and we've set a goal by the first quarter of 2026 to put out a combined PEA on how we can develop these 2 projects, how we can look at the right size for a start-up operation similar to what Armistice did with the Blackwater product in British Columbia. Can we start with a smaller scale mill to reduce the upfront CapEx to improve the finance-ability and then rightsize it later on in life. So those are all the things we're working on right now. Last year, what did we do -- sorry to repeat myself, but updated MRE, positive PEA. We've drilled about 49,000 meters on the property. We had a few new discoveries. And most importantly, it's been 5 years since we had a lost time accident at Fenelon. So I'm superstitious. I'll touch wood. Everybody has seen this slide before, but this is a snapshot of the PEA. I remind everybody, this was done at $1,750 U.S. gold. So at today's gold prices, the returns would be even better. The payback would be shorter. But upfront CapEx, about $645 million cash costs and all lengths sustaining costs quite respectable, and an after-tax NPV of $721 million. At $1,750 gold we are grossly undervalued. Our current market cap is about $80 million or $90 million, depends on what we closed at today. And there, we think there's an opportunity by doing things right, staying focused that we can unlock value in these challenging markets. The interesting thing here is on the PEA sensitivity, like these are the sensitivities we provided when we did the technical report. If I wanted to add 2,350, I have to open up the tech report, get a [indiscernible] to opine on it, and it's not worth it. We can see that $1,950 gold the IRR is very respectable. The payback is very respectable. And I can say at today's gold price, it would improve even more. There is a snapshot of the PEA and how the underground workings go. The black line that comes at the bottom is the shaft. We will start off with a ramp environment. This whole ore body sits in about a 1 kilometer tube. So the closest proxy that we know of is Young-Davidson, and I'll give you some [consolidation] in the presentation, but it's very amenable to bulk mining, and I believe it's transverse mining. Our objectives this year, we have a $21.2 million budget, $17 million goes in the ground. $4 million on corporate G&A and nominal capital expenditures, basically upgrading the bridge into the site and a few covers on the road for safety purposes. But in the first half this year, we drilled 2,400 meters at Fenelon. It's completed. The news release went out a few months ago. The Martiniere geo-mechanical, metallurgical and exploration drilling is completed. It was 9,100 meters. The samples are out for assaying. We should receive those results in late July, early August at the latest, which will be our next news flow. The samples for metallurgical testing will go out in the next week or two, and we expect results from that late in the third quarter, early in the fourth quarter, so September, October. We're doing some rock characteristics in the process. Again, SGS is engaged to do the net sampling and net analysis. And we continue to do environmental baseline studies. We need to make sure we lock and load all the baseline studies when it comes to permitting, we're ready to go. In the second half of this year, we're planning to drill another 6,100 meters at Martiniere following up on what we've done to date. We're going to do another 3,000 meters of regional stuff. By the way, the first part of the regional is completed, and those assays and results should be out sometime this summer as well. And continue to look at the various technical studies, whether it's rock sorting, rock mechanics, all the ancillary studies we need to do to put together this combined PEA later -- in early 2026. And it's challenging for a small company like ourselves to focus on sustainability, but it's the right thing to do. We will put together a sustainability report before the end of this year. It's not going to be a glossy Barrick style report. It will be a -- provide the information we need for our Wallbridge stakeholders. So again, here's looking at Fenelon. Again, predominantly an underground resource. There are a couple of starter pits envisioned. But will we start with the starter pits to go right underground, that will be all figured out this year. And more than half is in the indicated category. And there is one deep hole that demonstrates that this continues at depth. For us to spend a lot of money on deeper holes right now is probably not in our best interest. So we know it continues. At the right time, we will go deeper. For now, we're focusing on extending what we know and some infill drilling, filling in some gaps that we've identified. Martiniere is probably 2 years behind Fenelon. Fenelon was a primary focus. Martiniere was a secondary focus. Most of the drilling this year is -- about 60% is focused on Martiniere to advance Martiniere so that we can put together a combined PEA. And then we have the first 6 months of next year to figure out where do we need additional drilling to be able to hit that deadline of a combined PEA in the first quarter of 2026. So in 2025, as we put our budgets together, we'll figure out where to from here. And with Martiniere, it's very -- Mark is very excited about the project, although he doesn't look excited right now. But very, very little drilling below 400 meters. So there's a lot of potential there. And this is mostly in volcanics, I think, is correct. So I'm very excited about it. This is a slide that tells the whole story on -- we started off looking at a large open pit and maximizing on the number of ounces. Then as we got to understand this thing, we looked at -- and I remember having a similar slide in the early days of [indiscernible], which talked about gold ounces per vertical meter. And if you look at it, you see about 7,000 meters at that part of the deposit done. That's where the underground transverse mining will happen. That's why underground makes so much more sense. It's very compact. It's very mineable, and that's what we needed to focus on. If you look at Young-Davidson, they have 4,169 ounces per vertical meter over about a 1 square kilometer cube. We've got 4,034 ounces. So it is a check. It's a decent comparable -- looking at other comparables. And I'm a CPA, so I like to do my checks and balances. When we looked at Young-Davidson's most recent year-end production compared to ours, sure, we have a resource. It's not a reserve. So -- but our grade is a little bit higher. So their plant is 1,000 tonnes a day more. So if you analyze those differences, it was within a sandwich of each other. So it checked. We looked at the all-in sustaining cost, looking at the different royalty loads and other things, it checked the box, too. So that tells me that, we built the PEA from zero principles. We looked at getting contracts for underground mine development or [indiscernible] some underground mine development from contractors, et cetera. We built it up from zero principles. Then we looked at our closest comp and it ticked the box saying it's reasonable. Again, here is the map of our exploration property. The stars are some of the regional targets we're going to look at this year. But we're basically finished drilling at Fenelon for this year. The focus for the balance of the year is on Martiniere and some of our regional targets. ESG, we're always focused on that. We have great First Nations relationships. We are -- as I said earlier, we're going to publish a second sustainability report later this year. We committed and is now completed a road improvement project that makes the drive from Matagami to the exploration site, probably 30 minutes shorter. We contributed $1.5 million. The province contributed $7.5 million. So it was a win-win scenario. And if you've driven on Highway 8-10, it takes away a lot of the bumpy ride. So it's very helpful. Again, an excellent health and safety record, 25% of our indigenous workers -- our workers are indigenous. We do have a PDA signed with our 2 Cree partners of Waskaganish and Washaw Sibi, and we're working on one with the -- our Algonquin partners, the Abitibiwinni. Here's some photos. They were -- last week, we had the grand opening of our cultural center. So the tall guy there that's me. But we did have an opening ceremony. We invited our partners. We got to taste some First Nations cuisine. If you ever had a chance to taste goose, it's amazing, but anyhow. So great relations, and we continue to work with them. Last time I went to the site or earlier this year -- when I went to the site actually went and made a presentation to the Matagami Town Council. So working all those avenues at the same time. Our share count is a bit high. And at the end of March, we closed the quarter with $24.4 million in the bank. We collected our refundable tax credit from the Quebec government very early this year. Thank you to our partners at the Quebec government, the refundable tax credit and the [province] of Quebec regime is just incredible. It was $8.1 million. So today, we probably have $2 million more in the bank than what we did at the end of the third quarter. So well funded for this year. It will take us through part of next year. We're looking to close the year with about $14 million in the bank. And depending on the results this year and what our program is next year, we will need to raise a little bit of money between now and mid next year. So to summarize it all up, we believe there's a regional opportunity here with Fenelon and Martiniere. And we have to unlock those synergies. We believe the resource will continue to grow. The economics, the first go around are good, but we think we can improve them. We've got a strong technical team. I'm pleased that Mark has joined us on a consulting basis. I've known Mark for 10-plus years, and he brings steady hand and helps mentor and guide our younger geologists. So we've got a great team of young people working at the site. They all work their guts out and I'm very pleased with that. The recent survey on the best places to do business in the mining industry at the province of Quebec is 5. I think that survey was wrong. It's number 1. It's the best jurisdiction in the world. Case in point is that jumping ahead, we have the James Bay power line 27 kilometers to the west of where our site is. It gives us an opportunity. We've already put an application in. We will start promoting that within the Quebec government. And a successful allocation, today, they're paying $0.055 per kilowatt hour, and it's green energy. It's hydroelectric. So it gives us lots of options on where we go to from here as far as financing and how we build the project. Obviously, with that, you try and electrify as much as possible, but I'm getting way ahead of ourselves, but it's very, very exciting. I've said in conferences that our biggest asset is not on our balance sheet, it's that access to that green power. That will be a big plus in the future. And we continue to respect our shareholders, our stakeholders, our environment and our communities. And we're always out there talking about them. And with that, I will say thank you and we'll open it up for questions.

I have one from the Internet here. Brian, if you could start it off. Question is, can you elaborate further on the hiring of ICP Securities? What benefits do you expect from this service?

Thank you. ICP Securities were hired because we need more information on how our stock trades. I've seen occasions where a small block of 1,000 shares caused the stock to downtick by $0.005. And we need to get in, understand the details behind our trades to understand that to figure out where to from here? And so it's our first step in figuring out, is there a problem here? And what are the solutions? These guys are great. We have a secured chat line that we exchange information. Tony uses them at Discovery Silver. And he is pleased with them. And it was recommended by Eric Sprott. He said, "Why don't you try this?" And after listening to their pitch, listening to Tony's experience, it was the right thing to do.

There's one more here. Can you give shareholders an idea of where the Board would like to see Wallbridge in 5 years?

Well, that's a tough one. I'm hoping in 5 years, we have a plant that's almost built for commercial production, but it all depends on the permitting time lines and other things.

That's all.

Any questions from the room?

I hear what you're saying, Brian. Things certainly sound good, but what I'm really confused with is $0.08 a share. We can't get anybody interested in this project at above $0.08 a share? What's going on? I know there's probably some shorting going on, but if there is value there, you would think that you'd have people clambering to get in?

Well, you're absolutely right. We're trading at 0.15x NAV, and that's very low for a company with a completed PEA. I agree wholeheartedly. But the junior market is a mess right now. There are 0 institutional buyers out there. And as a result, it is very challenging and the pressure is usually on the downside. That's why we're bringing ICP in to get behind the data to see if there's anything we could do to move it. We need to stay focused. We need to focus on raising our funds when we need them. We don't want to run out of money because that's a horrible story. But we need to manage the programs. And that's why -- when we put our budget together for this year, we had 3 options. One was and some of shareholders were saying, "Why don't you put everything inventory, shut it down, put it on care and maintenance, keep the money and wait for better prices?" That's not a value creation opportunity. The second one was, okay, we got a PEA on Fenelon. The next step is to go to a pre-fees, but we would have needed $50 million or so and the dilution would have been horrible. So it wasn't an option. So we decided to keep going. We raised about $10 million of flow-through advancing the project, but not going all in. I remember when gold hit $250, I'm going to say that story again that the entire industry stopped exploring. It took a decade to catch up. We have to keep advancing this project but being fiscally responsible. We need to deliver, and that should be reflected in our stock price. I think this is a great investment opportunity. I've been buying in the market recently. And I just think we have to be patient. We have to avoid knee-jerk reactions as my mother would use to say, and we just have to stay focused, and that is our plan.

I agree with, not knee-jerking but I'm looking at the spend rate, we're going to run out of money and then we're going to have to raise money at God knows what the share value is going to be. And we're in trouble.

We're planning on closing the year with $14 million in the bank.

And what's the planned spend? What's the budget for next year?

We haven't developed a budget for next year, but assuming it's the same as this year, $21 million. So $7 million to finance flow-through eligible expenditures is, in my opinion, doable. We have to work between now and that time to get the news flow, improve the story, hopefully, get more data and managing our trade with ICP and see when is the appropriate time to finance.

Has any thought gone into maybe just taking Fenelon and selling that off, seeing if there's any interest?

We look at all options.

And no takers?

We haven't gone outside. We're looking internally at what is the best value creation for Wallbridge.

I know you guys have traveled the world here. Do you think that we get some more interest in what has been shown so far? And I find that -- I find it amazing really.

It's a really, really challenging market.

Thank you for a very nice presentation. Just a little clarification if we could on Detour East. Is that correct that Agnico Eagle has not yet done drilling there? I know you mentioned you're planning on doing some.

Mark, have they done any historical drills?

Yes, that is incorrect. They did do a bit of drilling previously prior to my arrival in February. So they did -- they have done some, but it's a big piece of ground. They're faced with the same challenge that we are big piece of ground, no outcrop. So they've kind of been going steady as she goes rather than just chase every opportunity put a drill hole somewhere. They're going about it very systematically with airborne geophysics last year, they're doing some more this year, a different method. But my understanding based on what they've disclosed to us in their quarterly updates. I believe they do have some drilling planned for this summer field season. And it's going to be guided by the airborne work that they already did. And there is evidence, and it's been recognized that there's -- there are some features in the geophysics that really suggest good strong structure passing through there. The challenge is where along that do you want to be because it's a big scale features. And the other advantage that they have is that they're exploring Detour East in the broader context of their entire Detour Gold deposit geology. So they -- the level of knowledge that they work from is just at a much higher level of understanding. And -- but they are exploring all around their broader regional holdings at Detour. And you can go on their website and see their longer-term plan. They are planning to. I think they had quite a few years of mine life to that operation. They're going to be there for a very long time.

Brian, first of all, congratulations on hiring ICP to find out what the heck is going on with your stock. I hope that you get the report, and it comes up with some conclusions that you can take some actions. Because something definitely is happening with your stock. I share the concern of a lot of concerned shareholders. But yes, times are very tough for the mining industry. There's no questions about it. But I do believe that Wallbridge is worth a heck of a lot more than what it is today. I don't know what the time frame for the expectations of a report from ICP to you?

It's ongoing monitoring, and we look at it on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

We had a couple of calls in which we discussed the illegal naked short selling. Eric, that recommended that you [or ICP] has been a very concerned shareholder and participant in safe Canadian mining itself. Do you have possibly any thoughts of maybe lending your support to safe Canadian Mining?

Until we understand the problem, no. We funded them a few years ago for $15,000 of seed capital. So we have funded them in the past. We need to figure out what's going on here before we go that next step.

So I guess not to be argumentative, but want to move forward. So we should be hearing something from the Board or from you in about 3 months as to what ICP has found out?

We will continue to monitor it. And if there's something that we need to disclose, we will disclose it.

Let me change subjects a little bit. You referred to Wallbridge as now a small company. I agree with you. $80 million of market cap is a small company, but it is also a large company by exploration standards, market cap. You also mentioned about the need to be fiscally prudent. A company this size, may I ask you what reasons do you find for the need to have, let's say, 7 directors?

We have 6 independent directors, myself, I'm the CEO, so I'm a nonindependent director. And we reduced it by 1 this year. We constantly look at it and review it through our needs and assessment. We have committees that we need members of. We can't over -- there's a Technical Committee, a Health Safety, Environmental Committee, an Audit Committee, a Governance Committee and a Compensation Committee. So we need enough people to effectively lead those committees. And is the right number 6 or 5 nonindependent directors? We're in the right ballpark.

Well, I urge you to consider possibly reducing it by another 2? At least. I think that you can do it for a company of your size itself. The most companies our size, run with less than 7 directors including the CEO. So please just consider it. Because every dollar that you save can be a dollar that you put in the ground.

Absolutely.

Okay. The other thing that I would like to ask is about the change in the key performance indicators. Why is it in 2021 that you changed that?

For our bonus?

Yes.

First of all, on the Health, Safety and Environment side, we lowered the -- we raised the bar, so to speak. Like the long-term accident frequency, last year was 3x. Today, this year is 1x. Because that's where it should be. But we look at our budget, we look at our business plans, we look at our objectives for the year and that is what drives the KPIs. And based on the budget we put together, those are reasonable goals as discussed with the Chair of the Compensation Committee.

But prior to 2021, the only basis for bonuses was shareholder performance.

There still is -- 1/3 of it is shareholder performance.

Yes. But in 2021, you changed it. You changed it to include Health and Safety, which, by the way, thank you very much. Congratulations, having so many hours with this. But from my point of view, itself, it is part of the CEO role, the leader of a company, to share and incentivize workers to work safely, to pay attention to social responsibilities. Why should it be attached to a bonus? The other thing is value orientation. That's another 20% Martiniere, which means exploration at Martiniere and creating the PEA. Isn't that part of management? I mean, why should there be a bonus if you actually go explore Martiniere? Or why there should be a bonus if you actually do your job and create the PEA? The other thing is financial performance. Adherence to the annual budget. Isn't that CFO's role? Why should there be a bonus attached to actually monitoring your budget? Finally, shareholder return. That's as far as I'm concerned, the only key measure that should be entitled to a bonus. You increase shareholder return, you increase value. We'll be more than glad to share that. But right now, the value the structure that this company has seen in the last 4 years makes me wonder where do you have the goal? To actually give yourselves bonuses based on this?

Well, if you look, last year's bonus was 47%.

That's right.

Yes. Because we didn't achieve a lot of those goals. Just so you understand, our base salaries are very low. We compensate by having a bonus structure. We could abandon the bonus structure and increase everybody's salary to be more in line with market. But the way we've structured it is a lower base salary and these incentives. If we hit all of these targets, the shareholder performance should happen subject to conditions of the market.

Maybe this is a very good rationale. I always believe that you pay people what they are worth. But you should not get bonus for doing your job. That's my thought.

Appreciate your comments. Are there any other questions? Anything from online, Sean?

No.

Well, I'd like to thank everybody online and here for attending this meeting and I look forward to updating as the year progresses. Thank you. All the best.