Maple Gold Mines Ltd. (M3G0.F) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kiran Patankar. I'm the President, CEO and a Director of Maple Gold Mines. Maple Gold Mines is an advanced Canadian exploration and development company, focused on advancing our district scale Duoay and Jitel projects in the Abu Dhabi province of Quebec. Excuse me, I just ran over here. So delighted to be back in Colorado. This is where I did my undergrad at Colorado School of Mines, and thanks to the organizers for having another great year at Beaver Creek. Before we get started, we do have -- we will be making forward-looking statements during the course of the presentation today. So Maple Gold, why Maple Gold? In terms of risk reward, Maple ticks every box in terms of district scale, 481 square kilometer land package, established and growing 5.2 million ounce resource with a past-producing mine complex on it. Lots of upside exploration potential in terms of 10% of the land package has really been drill tested. We've got a revamped company with a new management team, Board, strong long-term investors, strategic partners, including Agnico Eagle. And despite the fact that I thought about it where we were this time last year, Maple was a $30 million market cap company. Obviously, it's been a great time in the sector for all companies. The gold price is doing well. Maple is now a $237 million market cap company, and that's a credit to the team and the Board and everybody around us. But despite that outperformance, we're still undervalued on an EV to resource basis. And so there's a really attractive entry point here for new shareholders. So one of the reasons why I think we stand out from the junior mining crowd is that the say-do ratio within the company is quite high. When we say we're going to do something, we do it. I have more of a strategic corporate institutional background, less retail arm waving, TNVV, too much blah,lawh. We do things that really drive value for shareholders. We have delivered a 32,000-meter fully funded drill program at Dua and Jutel. That was the biggest program in the company's history. We're about to drill a lot more. We're currently underway at Jutel with 3 rigs, 25,000 meters. We delivered earlier this year. We delivered a major resource update with 5.2 million ounce total resource between Dou and Jutal. And importantly, it was a very robust resource that's underpinned by fundamental geology. It leads us very well into the next stage of growth for the company, which is going to be development of a PEA. So in parallel with the resource, we delivered An internal scoping study, which was done by Asanko gave our Board and our management team a view as to what this could be answering some key engineering trade-off questions that can support the PEA, which we expect to see in 2027. We're in the midst of a 25,000-meter drill program at Jutal. And again, we maintain a resilient balance sheet because we have lots more upside exploration to come. In terms of where we are, this is Canada. You guys know it well. We're in the Abitibi in Quebec. When you look at the Abitibi Greenstone Belt, obviously, great endowment, over 2 million ounces, 200 million ounces of gold produced, lots more coming. But Maple, again, we're going to compare this and you're going to see peer group valuation comparisons, but it's really important that we have a wealth of infrastructure. This is the 109 highway that goes up from the main mining centers of Val-d'Or and Renoranda all the way up to Metogami. We're on one of the major producing gold breaks in the Abitibi. This is Sunday Lake Detour. This is the Casa Berardi. Maple controls everything in yellow. This is a 481 square kilometer land package. We're about 40 kilometers east of the Casa Berardi mine, which is horizon. Agnico's Detour mine is up to the northwest, and there's grid power, road access year-round, et cetera. So -- keep that in mind as we go through a little picture of where we are and what's at site. You can turn right off the road, you're right at our camp. There's a head frame at Dua. And then you look at Jutel, which is a fast-growing high-grade underground restart project for us that was Agnico's first producing gold mine. This is what it looked like when Agnico was actually producing gold 1974 to 1993. So 2 known deposits, but lots more to find. The geology is highly prospective. I'm a geological engineer by training. I wear a lot of hats at this company. But one of the things that kept me going when this company was at its sort of nadir and needed turnaround was the fact that the geology is world-class. And we have world-class geos on our Board and on our management team, certainly our partners at Agnico that believe that there's a lot more to find. Our current 5.2 million ounce resource consists of 4 million ounces at -- due and 1 million ounces at J. You can see these 2 main splays of the Casa Berardi fault. There are a lot of fault controls. You've got volcanics here to the south, and you've got sediments to the north. The sediments remain completely untested. So we're looking for near-mine extensions, but we're also looking for major discoveries across the overall land package. And we now have a team, investors, a cash balance and a market cap that can support going after and prosecuting bigger step-out discovery opportunities while we continue to derisk 2 known gold deposits. The current resource, this is the DA resource. This is 0.78 million ounces at 1.33 and indicated 3.3 million ounces at 8.4 grams in inferred. 52% growth in indicated, 31% growth in inferred versus 2022. Again, great step-out drilling, better understanding of the geology, a great team to execute. The main resource at Uutll was 0.13 at 4.53 grams per tonne and 0.99 million ounces at 4.1. So we've got a high-grade underground to sweeten a potential low-grade bulk tonnage open pit. When you look at what that pit looks like, these are more mining pits now, especially vis-a-vis the 2022. It's 6 kilometers by 2 kilometers. So it's a big system. But the strip ratio on that today is 10:1, which is down dramatically from where we were back in 2022. In long section, you can see there are some areas that we believe that this has the potential to extend the depth. In 2025, we drilled a hole here. It was a 300-meter down plunge step-out that returned 2.1 grams over 108 meters, including 5.2 over 17. We've since identified this plunge across multiple portions of the deposit. And again, the key thing here for us is this is very similar to some of the other deposits in the Abitibi where you have multimillion ounces at surface, but you have a plumbing system here. You can see the line 750, 1,500, very limited drill testing here, right? So this is where we think there's real potential to add ounces and make a new discovery at depth similar to Canadian Malartic and other deposits in the Abitibi. Again, 3D representation of what we believe is still open within the deposit. You can see the strike length and the width of the deposit. Importantly, when we did our internal scoping study, you can see here, none of this, everything in the green is it falls below the current pit constraint. We did not model this as part of the mine plan yet. We're still coloring in what the potential for bolsonage underground is. So again, that represents additional optionality for us as we continue to move forward, drill and derisk. We're going to turn our attention now to Jutel. It's 11 kilometers away as the Crowe flies. This is where Agnico over -- when Agnico actually had a single gold mine, the namesake mine in Agnico Eagle was the Eagle mine, which was part of this Jutel mine complex. Jutel produced 1.1 million ounces at 6.5 grams between 1974 and 1993. It was Agnico's first producing gold mine. And they moved on from this at a low gold price environment. The real reason they moved on was because they acquired Dumagami Mines, which was -- became LaRonde and is still producing today. So you can't fault the capital allocation decision. But they did not leave this behind because they ran out of ore. Their cutoff grade. You see the head grade of 6.5, their cutoff grade was 6 grams per tonne. And what that mine complex looked like when it operated, it was a 3-mine complex. You had the Eagle West open pit, and there was a ramp there as well. You have the namesake Eagle mine with a shaft down to 900 meters, and you have the Talbal mine with a shaft down to 1,200 meters. Everything you see in green are the mined out stopes. The important thing for us in terms of drill targeting and looking for how Jutel can potentially grow is when you look at this deposit, we are not mining narrow coarse veins down to 2,000 meters deep. -- right? You can see this long section, when you look at it in cross-section, it's a pretty nice looking plane, right? So this plane is subvertical. It's called the main iron carbonate horizon. And this is an area that we're targeting with regularity when we drilled it this past winter. First, I'll show you what the resource looks like. This is the 1.1 million ounces, which is really driven by Agnico historical drilling. When we were a JV partner with Agnico on these projects, Agnico digitized all of their analog data, was gathering dust in boxes and vaults and Val-d'Or. So all this data was QA/QC by Agnico. SLR went to the length of actually digitizing and doing mine stope optimization work. You can see from a -- we're always being realistic in thinking about this through a mining lens. So for example, you see things that aren't typical for maiden resources, especially from juniors. We left 30-meter crown pillars at the top of each shaft. We left 10-meter buffer zones around each of the mined out stopes. And we did the full mine stope optimization exercise to make sure that we knew what was accessible, and we're not just looking at remnant mining. But in terms of attacking it from a drilling perspective, since the beginning of 2025, we targeted really with the drilling, we've targeted -- we're drilling south to north. We're targeting that same horizon, right? Agnico did not assay from top to bottom, which is typical in a low gold price environment. They really looked at this main iron carbonate horizon, and that's all the assay. So when you're looking at these typical exhalative, semi-ehalative VMS style deposits, the potential for sub-parallel zones, stacked lenses of mineralization is very much there. This is a seabed floor-derived sort of deposit. And then you look at what we've actually drilled within this last program, 8 out of 10 holes that we drilled hit the zone of interest and actually hit with the grades and widths that were similar to what Agnico was actually mining back in the day. You can look at the tenor of some of that, 8.5 over 8 meters, 8.5 over 10, 4 over 17, 5.6 over 10. This is great, right? We're really happy because we're stacking up some pretty nice intercepts and you can build ounces quite quickly that way. But just going back to that view, you can see here most of those intercepts are in the zone, right? So it's easy to target. We can target it with regularity. But what gets us really excited is when you see things like this. This is off the zone. This is in what we call the footwall microgabro. It returned 7.57 over 5.3. And there is a real dearth of drilling on some of these subparallel trends, right? So the potential for us to discover really, the goal for us is to not just look at low-hanging fruit remnant mining at Jutel, it's to find another Jutel. Having said that, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here, right? The top 500 meters was never mined. The plunge directions are open in multiple directions. So we're drilling right now with 25,000 meters fully funded. We expect to deliver a steady stream of catalysts and news flow from Jutel over the course of the fall. You can see the drill pattern of what we've done. And as I said, we've gone after low-hanging fruit, top 500 meters. You can see the potential for us to even look at the periodicity of these deposits. We've got a target out here called Egg. You see a general plunge down to the Southeast. So our geologists are working hard, obviously, on targeting and doing value-added drilling as we go forward. Just a snapshot of the cap table. As of Monday, we were $3.19. We've got -- it puts us at a market cap of $2.37. Tight share count, 74.2 million outstanding, 82 million fully diluted with $23 million in the bank. Major shareholders, Agnico Eagle, Michael Gentile, new institutions that have come in over the last year. You can see who these are and growing research coverage. In terms of the team, I mean, very few junior companies boast a team with this level of capital markets and technical depth. I'll just illustrate. We've got a Director, Chair, who was Chair of the Board of -- sorry, Chief Legal Counsel for Turquoise Hill, major M&A transaction on Oyu Tolgoi with Rio Tinto. We've got a VMS experts based in Runoranda. We've got a company builder and geologist in Darwin Green. Chris Adams, who's here with us today, was a colleague of mine at Macquarie, was led project finance in the Americas for Macquarie, financed many of the biggest mines in Canada and the U.S. Great to have that expertise on the Board. And then Mark Lea joined us last year this time after a 35-year career at Agnico. You've got Pascal, who joined us this year from Glencore, Ian, who's got a major mining company background as well; and Alex Rodriguez, who just joined us from O3 Mining, which sold to Agnico in 2024. I think the peer group comparison is very important. I think we're rapidly closing the gap with our peers. But obviously, the peer group has done quite well. I think it's worth comparing cutoff grades, gold price assumptions, various things. And the key thing when you go across, look at not only current companies, but also companies that were taken out is that Naple's current $30 an ounce valuation is about half of what some of these guys are, right? So I think it's still an attractive opportunity for an investor entering today. When you look at the small subset of multimillion ounce Canadian gold projects, this is clearly where capital is flowing. This is clearly where there's potential M&A activity. Every one of these small subset of companies is either at the PEA stage or is going to deliver a PEA within the next few months, and we're on that list as well. Our plan is to do this by mid next year. The way we're closing this gap is obviously, we're now at 5 million ounces. We've got 57,000 meters that's been drilled since we delivered that resource update. We're doing all of our RFPs for who's going to complete that PEA for us. So stay tuned on the announcement there. And of course, we're fully funded with great shareholders and lots of catalysts left to come. So with that, we'll finish right on time. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Kiran.