Earnings Call - SEABRIDGE GOLD INC

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Red Cloud's webinar featuring Japan Gold, symbol JG on the Venture Exchange. We're delighted to have with us today John Proust, the President and CEO of Japan Gold to provide us an update on the company's portfolio of really high-quality low-sulfonation epithermal projects spread around in Japan. The company has been busy lately. They are a first mover into the Japan exploration scene. They hold about 3,000 square kilometers of highly prospective exploration tenements in about 22 different projects. And just recently, they formed a strategic alliance with the company's Solid Core Resources PLC, probably something that most of us haven't really heard of. Solid Core is a Kazakhstan-based gold producer, producing about 400,000 ounces a year. It's listed on the Kazakhstan exchange, has a market cap of around 17 billion dollars. In addition to the strategic alliance in itself, allows Solidcore to earn up to about a 70 percent share in the projects that they nominate by moving them forward to a pre-feasibility level. They can take it a little further to 80% by a feasibility and then beyond that within a joint venture, Japan Gold has the option of whether or not they want to participate or reduce their holding to a royalty. So ultimately these projects are going to be fully funded through to bankable feasibility. In addition to the strategic Alliance. Solid Core, together with Equinox Investment Group, have invested $10.5 million into the company in a private placement at a 50% premium to the share price. So obviously, there's some people that have been taking a really good hard look at these projects and see a lot of potential to them. So my name is Ron Stewart, and I'm a research analyst here at Red Cloud. I'll be your host for this afternoon's webinar. As John presents, we invite you to ask questions. You do that by simply typing them into the chat box that you'll find on the right-hand side of your screen. We'll get to as many of those questions as we can at the end of the presentation. Also, during today's webinar, I want you to be aware that John will probably make some forward-looking statements. We advise that you read the cautionary language that you'll find in their investor deck. It's usually on page two, and you can find that at japangold.com on their website. We'd also like to point out that today's presentation is for information purposes only. It is not a solicitation from Red Cloud to either buy or sell the securities. If you're interested in that, we recommend that you do your own due diligence and talk to your financial advisor about the risks and opportunities of investing into Japan Gold. And finally, you can find our research on Japan Gold, among others, on our website at www.redcloud.com. You basically form a Log in there, you can get all of our research. We advise that you read the cautionary language that is associated with our research as well. Anyway, with all of that, I'm going to pass the call over to John. I'm pretty excited to hear what they're doing in Japan on these epithermal projects. John, over to you. Well, thank you for that kind introduction, Ron, and great to speak with everybody today. This has been just an incredible past set of weeks, culminating in the announcement of the new strategic alliance with Solid Core Resources that we announced at the Precious Metal Summit in Beaver Creek, Colorado, on the 23rd of September. I wanted to meet with everybody today and explain in a little bit greater detail what we've accomplished here, which is really something quite remarkable and really transformational for the company, and get into some of the details about what you're going to expect to see next. I will have to say that certainly for the last six months, maybe even 12 months, we haven't had an enormous amount of news. And the background on that is that, as a number of the audience may know, in October of 2025, that's when we ended the alliance that we've had with Barrick. And the alliance with Barrack had lasted five years. We'd accomplished something quite extraordinary where Barrick had funded the evaluation of our full portfolio across Japan to the tune of 23 million Canadian dollars. And we ended up with an incredible database of mapping, geology, geophysics, geochemistry across Japan, which is really a definitive database that we rely on today. the last two years of that alliance the budgets had really been reduced to very small amounts where small dollars were being I'll say sprinkled on a broad portfolio of projects and so we weren't being able to come up with meaningful results or discoveries to demonstrate to our shareholders and create value. So in October of 2025, we ended the alliance in that Barrick was moving in a different direction with their business plan to focus on major production. And we were looking at a partner or partners going forward that could provide significant capital to lead us to the discoveries that we were looking for. So that's why it's been quiet for the last year or so. But let me just move into our presentation just a little bit here and we can start talking about some of the details. So forward-looking statements, as Ron mentioned, please review those at your leisure. So we formed a strategic alliance with SolidCore Resources. And a little Bit of background on SolidCORE Resources. Formerly, they were listed on the London Stock Exchange. They were a FTSE 100 company, and their name was Polymetal International. Now, Polymetal was very, very well known on the London Stock exchange. It was over $10 billion market cap at the time, and they were producing about 1.1 million ounces of gold per year. Unfortunately, with the events that happened in Ukraine, Polymetal had to reorganize their business. They had a number of assets that were in Russia, which they sold. They had a number of Russian shareholders, which were acquired by or replaced by their now largest shareholder, which is the Oman Investment Authority. So the OMAN Investment Authority owns approximately 30% of Polymetal and is a very significant anchor shareholder. In addition to that, they left the London Stock Exchange and they moved to Kazakhstan because that's where their two mines are located. And they listed on the AIX, which is the Astana International Exchange, which has an affiliation with NASDAQ. Their current market capitalization just approaching $6 billion US on the exchange. They currently, and this is their 2025 figures, they had approximately $350 million US of free cash flow in 2025 from their two operating gold mines. They produced 400,000 ounces in 2025, and I think their production profile is to move up towards 600 000 ounces they also have a another element to their business which is they are building something called a pressure oxidization plant or a pox plant this is a big um facility that treats or that is somewhat complex it's called double refractory or from one of their mines um in order to liberate the gold and so they need a very complex production facility and that's something that they're building in kazakhstan right now and they're currently doing a 1.2 billion us dollar share buyback of their of their shares on that exchange as well so they're in a very very strong financial position now for some time now they've been looking at diversifying outside Kazakhstan. And they've been looking at a number of jurisdictions, but very carefully following Japan. And so when on the day that we announced the Barrack Alliance had ended, they reached out to us. They were the first group in the world out of about 15 companies that reached out and they reached to us on the first day. They're very focused on moving towards a partnership or a relationship in a new jurisdiction, and this will become an important focus for their business. So unlike other large international mining companies that may have a myriad of projects around the world, this will be a single focus. So we get a lot of attention from them. Their CEO is a visionary. He's very smart. He is very focused. And so when they reviewed our technical details across our 27 projects in Japan, he said, look, I'm going to focus on five because I think we can put in significant dollars that will fully evaluate those projects for discovery or kill them. And that's the type of intensity that we need to truly make discoveries in Japan. So they're a very strong technical partner as well because they have over 100 geologists at SolidCore, and many of them are very familiar with the geology in Japan, because it's very similar to the Kuril Islands, which are north of Japan, and in the eastern Russia areas as well. They've got a very long-term commitment to accelerate gold exploration and discovery in Japan. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a moment. So to break down what we've announced on the 23rd, it had several different components. The sum of all that was that we have $50 million of committed new capital coming into the company. The first part is the strategic alliance with Solidcore, where they have committed $35 million on five of our projects. So $35 million on five of our products that will be spent over a three-year period. In addition to that, we have actually two private placements that were completed for a total of just over $10.5 million, with SolidCore being the primary investor, moving up to a 19% stake in the business on a partially diluted basis. And Equinox Partners, our largest shareholder, maintaining their position at approximately 30% of the company. In addition to that, our royalty partner OR Royalties was delighted with this new relationship and this new committed capital coming into the company, and so they exercised an option to increase their royalty position by half a percent by injecting a further $4.2 million. So those are the various components in our strategic alliance that has been announced. So just to dig into the solid core alliance. And this is something that if you take one thing away from our conversation today, it's how unique our alliance is compared to almost anything you see across the market. And we've looked back for the last couple of years that ours is very unique, and I would say superior to almost any other types of announcements that are out there. Typically, when there's an alliance agreement that's announced, generally, they're what are called option agreements. So you might see small junior company says, we've just announced a $20 million deal with a major, and we all get pretty enthusiastic. And then we go to page two of the news release, and it says, well, the major is really committed to investing two million dollars. And then at their option, they could put more money in later, depending on a whole variety of factors. That's an option agreement. And that's not what we have. And I would say option agreements are 95 plus percent of the agreements that are out there. Ours is a committed agreement. So that means that Solidcore has committed $35 million to be spent on five projects over three years. So there's no option involved. It's a contract, it's a commitment. And so we can carefully plan our work programs to really make them efficient and effective. And we can look out for that three years to make sure that we're delivering results immediately and through that full period. So it's, it'S a very exciting position for a public company to be in and a junior public company to be. And I will say that that $35 million is approximately the same or even greater than the market cap of our company today. So again, just letting that set in. So the committed dollars, 35 million is equal to or greater than the market. Cap of our business today. So these are committed expenditures. The second piece that's really unique about our alliance is that I designed it to be in very fixed three-year increments because often alliances have kind of a variability in terms of timing and it seems to get kind of confusing in the future. Ours is not confusing. Three years our alliance lasts for and $35 million is going to be spent. And at any time, SolidCore can select one of those five projects and we can pluck it out of the alliance and put it into a fresh joint venture. And when that joint venture is formed, a brand new three-year term starts. And that joint venture has to be fully funded by SolidCorp. And within that three- year period, they have the option to complete a pre-feasibility study and graduate from a 49% stake when we start the joint venture. So at the starting of the joint venture, it's 49% solid core, 51% Japan gold, and they have the ability to graduate up to a 70% stake by completing a pre feasibility study at their cost within that three year period. Moving on from there, they have another three year period to complete a bankable feasibility study at their cost. And once that's been completed, they would graduate to an 80% stake. So at that point, we'll be 80% solid core, 20% Japan gold. Now, as my mother used to say to me, you are rich when you have options. And we are rich at that point, because we have an 80-20 split. And we have three options. Japan Gold has three options then. Number one is we can continue to fund our 20% and go into production with solid core resources. We negotiated with solidcore that the capital that's required for our 20 percent will be a debt and equity mix. And it's usually a dominant debt mixture. Solidcore is responsible for organizing all the debt for the whole project, including our 20% piece. So we don't have to organize any of the debt. We're only responsible for the 20% stake of the equity that would be required at that time. And fortunately, as many of you know, our shareholder base is over 50% institutional with large funds and institutions from around the world that are shareholders in japan gold just for that specific purpose where they want to put the equity forward when we go into production so they wantto put up the large dollars when wego into production in a scenario as we were discussing here today so we're very fortunate that we've already got the foundation for our financing not only now and for the years to come but also in the future when we're building mines as well. So that's option number one. Option number two is if for some reason we get to that 80-20 space and we decide we want some liquidity, we want to perhaps return some capital back to our shareholders, or we have some other opportunities, we can sell 10% of our 20%. So we can still have half of our, our 20% to solid core based on the bankable feasibility study valuation as adjudicated by an independent third party. So we'll get cash. And then the other 10%, we would convert to a 1% royalty. That's the second option. The third is we decided we want to move on to something else completely different. We can sell all 20% to them for cash on the same metrics of the bankable feasibility, study and the independent third party. So we have great optionality at that point. And this is really, really relevant to our shareholders and creating value across our portfolio of projects here. So from an equity standpoint, so that's the $35 million we've just talked about. Now, from an equities standpoint, including the equity coming in from SolidCore, as I've mentioned, We've got the equity coming in from Equinox partners. But one other point that's really relevant is that some of you may have seen that we had previously put in place two convertible to ventures with Equinoct partners for a total of $2.7 million. And as part of this whole transaction, Equinoxt agreed to convert those convertible ventures to shares at a premium to market at the same premium as the private placements. So the company is absolutely debt free. So debt free with equity placements to allow us to move forward. Now, what are we going to do with the equity placaments? Well, we're going to add to the equity placements, the royalty sale that I mentioned to you before. So that's another $4.2 million dollars coming in to join us. And so we'll have a total of $15 million. Those dollars are now designed to look at the 22 projects that we've got outside the Alliance. Those projects we call our pipeline properties. So our pipeline property, we've now taken those 22 projects, and we've put them into sort of geographical buckets. And so we have five buckets of projects outside the alliance. We can use the $15 million to advance those projects or to enhance them to attract other third parties to come in and be partners with us as well. If other third parties want to come in and Be Partners with us, we're delighted to have them. But they have to recognize that whatever offer they provide to us, solid core has a right of first refusal. In many cases, rights of first refusal are months, you know, sometimes half a year, that sort of thing. Our right of First Refusal with solid core is 15 days. So if we have a third party offer, we show it to solid core resources, they have 15 days to decide whether to step into the shoes of that third party or not. And if not, then we can proceed with a third party independently of the alliance with Solid Core. So again, we've got great flexibility there to continue in our project, generate a role to advance new relationships as they come to the fore. So let's talk about Solid Core's 36-month plan. We talked about five projects, and a number of those will be familiar to you. The names are the Bajo Project, the Hakuryu Project, Mazove Project, Ibetsu Project and Rio Project. And we're going to go in and have a look at some of those details in a moment. The committed expenditures, the way we're rolling it out now are for the balance of 2026, $3 million. Then in 2027, and these are US dollars, by the way. Sorry, sorry, the Canadian dollar sum. And then in 2027, $14 million. 2028, $11 million. And then 2029, $7 million. At any time, if we need additional dollars, Solid Core will accelerate the dollars forward to allow us to build robust programs and deliver results as quickly as possible. So why is the alliance exceptional? We've got a very strong financial partner with a very long-term growth strategy where they understand what commitments mean and how that can truly develop value amongst our portfolio. Committed capital over option capital. This is committed capital. We have those fixed timelines that I referred to. We're concentrated on just five targets. So those five project areas that we're going to discuss a little bit more, that concentration of capital and effort is really going to generate results. and I'm going to talk in a moment about how quickly we're going to generate results because it may be surprising. We're focused on achieving meaningful results, not just little results from one or two drill holes. That's not our program here. We are focused on immediately accelerating our programs. So that's our plan. We re utilizing the database that we have in Japan and now we're drilling for discovery. And we're well funded to do that. Let's talk about our projects and where they're located. Many of you have seen this map of Japan, and you can see that the gold circles show the gold provinces or districts where we are the dominant players in Japan. And the little red uh marks show our project locations we're going to start in the north in hokkaido and this map this inset map shows you all of our project portfolio and the ones that are in yellow those projects are the ones part of the um the solid core alliance so in hukkaido we have three projects, the Hakuryu project, the Rio project, and the Ibetsu project that are part of the alliance. And those are the projects that are going to get an awful lot of attention coming up. A number of you may recall the Hakoryu project. It was the last project that Barrick put a couple of drill holes in just before the alliance ended and where we had an intersection that was quite significant and quite well publicized in Japan of 0.6 meters at 24 grams per ton. And so just to blow that slide up for you, this is the Hakuryu project in the slide to the right. And there's a little tiny box up in the top right-hand corner, which is where the three initial drill holes were drilled. These drill holes Were drilled by Barrick. They were very shallow holes they were less than 200 meters each and they were really drilled at a time when we'd seen some encouraging things that surface but we hadn't um we only had limited information in the area um but they were they were eager to drill a couple of holes which we did and that's where we had the the one drill hole which demonstrated that there was clearly a horizon here that had high-grade gold. The red areas that are highlighted here are the areas of interest, but following the departure of Barrick, we undertook ourselves to do a very significant CSAMT and AMT geophysical survey, and that's highlighted by the green lines that you can see across here. Now, noting that this area that we're talking about is five kilometers across, So this is a big, big area. And the results of that geophysical survey are highlighted in the sketch that you see at the bottom here, where this is across section, you've got the surface at the top, but it's highlighted the areas in red, which are areas that correspond with targets for us to drill. And you can see that there's a significant number of targets for us to drill. And they've also demonstrated the dip of the veins that we see in the area, which were a little bit different than what were originally thought of at the time that Barrick drilled their three holes. So we're very excited to get in here to do a very comprehensive drill program in 2027, starting in 2026, of over 7,500 meters on this one project alone. I'm not going to dwell a lot on the Rio project. I'll just go back to this. The Rio project is here. Some of you might remember the Rio Project. The real project is actually part of one called a Kudahara that we've talked about a lot in the past. There was a lot of historic mining here. There were over 30 mines in this area that were all closed in 1943. Rio was one that was sort of set apart on on its own and where we'd seen very high grade gold in some early drilling we did several years ago and so solid core was very intrigued with this area so we split this off as a separate project all onto its own had called it the Rio project and so we still have the Akutahara project next door to it but the Rio Project is one all to itself and so all I will say is that the real project and this is far too complicated for a presentation today we had put 20 drill holes into this project for over 7,000 meters we found ultra high grade of over half or approximately half a meter at over 1,300 grams gold per ton we had another intersection of 20 meters at 6.3 grams we had some really startling results here and this is an area that we think could be quite expansive, but it needs some very focused work and the kind of attention that the Solid Core Alliance will provide it. So we're really looking forward to moving forward with that one. The Ibetsu Project. So again, just moving over to the west here, there's the Ibetsу Project. Now, at one time, this was BEREC's number one project in Japan. And then with a change in their technical team, they moved away from this project to the Hokuryu area. But we think the potential of the Barrick project is significant and the scale is enormous. And so if we go to the bottom right hand corner, there's a small inset map. And all I'm going to say is the Ibetsu project has actually three different areas that are these red ovals that are all targets that we want to get in and drill. And we're excited about that. We've got a 2028 drill program of four and a half thousand meters on this one project alone let's move south let's go down to the southern island of Kyushu here's the island of kyushu again many of you have seen this map before the light green areas highlight the two gold provinces in japan and we've got the middle kyusha epithermal gold province and we got the hokusatsu district which is the southern kyusho Epithermal Gold Province. We'll go to the Middle Kyushu Epithemal Gold Province first. And so I'm just going to move into that area. So this is the Middle Kyushus Epithelmal Gold Province, so here are the takeaways from this slide. This is really important for our audience. This is something that's going to come up very, very quickly and it's something that I'm delighted to tell you about in terms of the scale of the project that we've got here so just to orient you in this area in the the southwest area there was a historic mine called the taiyo mine it produced over 1.2 million ounces and closed in 1973 so it reopened after the second world war it was one of the few mines we really like this area we think it's got significant potential and this is one that we'll be using some of our 15 million dollars to advance this independently ourselves. Solidcore has selected the BAJO project, which I'll go on record as saying is my favorite project in the country. And this is the project that they've decided to advance first. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the BAjo project, but I will just say that, as I've mentioned in previous presentations, one opportunity that exists in japan is that if you are are mining silica rich ore so from veins which which all of our targets are vein uh potential uh low sulfidation epithermal targets that vein material if it's 85 silica can be directly shipped to a copper smelter because they use the silica as flux in their smelters so the waste from the gold mine is actually valuable in the smelter but they can stream out the gold just like the hishikari mine the largest gold mine and the only gold mine operating today in japan they ship their main material to their sumitomo metal mining smelTER the opportunity exists here as well and there is a red square that's highlighted here It's the Saganoseki smelter and refinery, and it is desperate for new supplies of silica. So if we make a discovery here and there's a mine built here, the Baggio opportunity has the potential to go a scant 35 kilometers or so to the Siganoseki Smelter. In the Hishikari case, that lowers their all-in sustaining cost. The cost that it takes to produce an ounce of gold at $4,200 today to about $500 an ounce by removing the need to have a dedicated facility on site. That same type of economics would be available to us if we could organize that arrangement. So I just wanted to point that out in the general map. Let's go look at the Baggio project so we can talk about it a little bit more. So the Bajo project is highlighted in the sketch on the right, and it's approximately eight kilometers east to west and about five kilometers north to south. The Bajo mine, the historic Bajo Mine, produced over 420,000 ounces, and the grade was up to 125 grams per ton out of one large vein that was organized there. it was a unique, which is incredibly high. I think it's one of the highest grade historic gold mines in Japan, and it's on our property. One of the unique features of the mine was that it had a very unique basement setting of a certain type of granite, which we've highlighted in this sketch in pink, which has sort of the granite basement that underlay that, which allowed the gold to accumulate above the granite basement in the andesites as we explored this area we found far above about six kilometers to the west windows of the same granite were poking through over the west and we also found 10 different bain systems that had gold in them over in the west as well very intriguing what we've done more recently is we completed a 3d ip geophysical survey across the badger project starting over at the mine so identifying what the signature was from the the mine and its veins and workings so we could see how that translated going across the project and i'm pleased to say that our conclusion is that we can see the same basement under this project going all the way across to the west so this project is going to be our first project We expect to be starting in November, so about eight weeks or less from now, so less than eight weeks from now with two brand new diamond core drill rigs that we've had manufactured, which are about to be delivered to us in early November, that are a very small footprint. They're track-mounted. They're state-of-the-art. They are very environmentally friendly because they effectively recycle the water that you're using for drilling by circulating out or extracting the fine material that's created by the drilling so you can actually reuse the water. And you'd need a very small footprint for these new diamond core rigs. Just to give you an example, our current fleet of rigs, we need approximately 20 meters by 20 meters of a drill pad. For a drillpad, which has to be cleared, it has to prepared, we have to dig certain sumps for water recirculation, etc. And it's a large undertaking, then we bring the rig in, we assemble it, and then we start drilling. With our new rigs the footprint is about 4 meters by 4 meters, not 20 by 20. We can roll the rig up on its tracks. We don't disturb the ground. There's no sumps that are drilling or that are necessary for drilling. The rig can level itself. And then we literally put the mast up and we start drilling our holes. And when we're finished, we put the mast down, we move the rig out, and the ground is really undisturbed. So it's incredibly quick for our mobilization and our demobilization starting in november we're going to be drilling we say 12 to 16 000 meters of of drilling 35 drill holes across this whole project to clearly unlock the opportunity here we say twelve to sixteen thousand meters because we want to get the rigs in in the field and truly demonstrate their efficiency and their speed we think we might be able to exceed that and so this is something we're very excited for so we've just announced our alliance completing on the 23rd of September and by November we're doing the largest drill program in Japan that we've ever undertaken in our history and this one drill program is almost all of the meters drilled that we've ever drilled in Japan in our previous relationships with Barrick, etc. So this is a very exciting time. The level of news that we will be putting out regularly from this program alone will be significant, and I think it's going to be very regular with just general news starting, I'd say, in the next few weeks. So stay tuned on that. So I'm very excited about this. I can hardly wait to get our drill spinning here. Let's go to southern Japan. So in southern Japan, this is the Hokusatsu district that you see in the sketch on the right. The purple area is the area where the Hishikari mine is located, and it's the ground that's held by Sumitomo Metal Mining. All the outlines are our projects, and the one that the Solid Core Alliance has selected is the Mozove project. the sketch on the left-hand side is one that i just like to reflect on to to refresh you on the two search spaces that we have in japan so search spaces are where are we going to make a new discovery if you look at the sketch of the map you'll see that the left there is a number of of areas of of red and the red are vein systems that were poking out at the surface, and that turned into significant mines historically through this area. So if you added those all up, that's about three and a half million ounces of production at quite high grade from those veins historically. So one search space for us is to search around those mines and see if we can find, you know, vein systems that maybe just, or veins that just haven't come up to the surface, but maybe are parallel to the mine veins. The best grades that you see in the mines that are these vein systems that poked out at surface across Japan are a million ounces to two and a half million ounces. And there's six mines that have that profile. So that's what you could expect to see if we made a discovery in those areas. Now, then you take the Hishikari mine, so back to our sketch on the right, the Hishikari mine is very unique, A, because it's the only mine that's operating in Japan today, but B, because it's in a different setting. It wasn't poking out at surface. These areas have had an enormous amount of volcanic activity in the past, so volcanoes have spewed out ash, the ash has settled across the ground, the landscape, and has obscured the vein systems. So the Hishikari mine was discovered under the blanket of volcanic material, and it was the first discovery of its type. A little bit deeper, but it's 14 million ounces, not one to two and a half million, it's14 million ounces. Already 9 million ounces have been mined here in excess of 30 grams per ton. So this is a remarkable discovery, a blind or concealed ore body that's discovered. so much of the area that we have across Japan is under the same blanket so our vision and our plan going forward is to explore under the blanket and see where the next Hishikari's are solid cores identified the Mazove project which has already some initial drill indications of a large system under a blanket and so that's where they're going to be focusing their activity in this particular area. Pardon me, the Mazove project, just a little bit more detail to support that Mazove Project. We've now done a very significant CSAMT and AMT geophysical survey there as well, which is really lining up to give us very good definition for where we're going to be drilling for the new targets. Okay, so I'm going to move away from that discussion now. I'm really not going to highlight, just given the limited time that we've got today, to talk to you about the basics of Japan Gold. But suffice to say in the next slides, clearly we're an explorer, we're a project generator, we're the operator. Japan Gold is the operator for the Solid Core Alliance. When they go into joint ventures with us in the future, they have the ability to become the operator, and we're just fine with that. But they have confidence in us to go forward and be the full-on operator in Japan today. We have those capabilities clearly now. The Solid Core Alliance clearly understands Japan and the rationale for coming there, not only the high-grade history of gold mining in Japan, but also the geopolitical safety, etc. They recognize what we've been able to accomplish as the first mover in Japan and the portfolio we've put together, what's happened historically, and what the relevance of the Hishikari gold mine is to the potential for new discovery, especially in southern Japan. They recognize, again, what we've accomplished prior to them coming on board and how prepared we are for making new discoveries now. Again, we're project generators. We do have a very large portfolio of projects, as I've talked about, so we're going to move towards those here in just a moment. Again, compelling economics that we've talked about in terms of the all-in sustaining costs. And I'm going to move to our board of directors. So our board OF directors has now expanded to nine people. Many of you are familiar with myself, Murray Flanagan is our lead director, Takashi Kuriyama, our director, who has got just an incredible background being the former head of Sumitomo Metal Mining's Global Exploration Division, being prior to that the general manager and chief geologist at the Hishikari Mine. We've got Canada's past ambassador to Japan, one of Japan's top academics, Dr. Keiko Hattori, who was the first Japanese woman to get a PhD in economic geology from Tokyo University. Tanaka Hirsch, a leading international mining lawyer. Michael Carrick, who has been an outstanding mining entrepreneur. He's put seven mines into production in five different countries, including the formation of B2 Gold and significant assets there. And then we welcome our two new directors, Tanya Tachideva, who comes to us from Solid Core Resources as an executive VP there in charge of compliance and corporate governance. So very well versed in that space. and has history in junior exploration, as well as being part of a major production company as well. And Victor Flores, who's very well known to many people across the mining chain, well known as a previous director of Polymetal when it was listed on the London Stock Exchange, having a relationship in the past with Orion Mine Finance as well, and having a foot in both the technical camp and also in the financial and investment banking camp. Again, we have our very strong management team as well. Really, a lot of what we're doing now is all about execution. So Jason Leto has taken an enormous responsibility on his shoulder, guided by Takashi Kurama and Fraser McCorkadale, who, again, many of you know, came to us from Newcrest, where he was the head of global exploration there, a huge champion of Japan and very familiar with our activities there. Paul Harbridge, again, is an excellent advisor, along with Kaylee Barker, ex-BlackRock. Our structure today, you can focus just on the pie chart here. 52% of our shares are held by institutions and funds. 21% is our public float, fine. Solid core has 18% with the ability to move up to 19%. And again, Newmont holds a 6% passive stake in the company and management has 3% of the company going forward. Very quick views. We have a base up in Hokkaido. You can see our base here. Just some of our sheds were very well organized with drill core and incredible technical detail to study any of our assets up in the Hokkaida area. In Kyushu, we have our recently opened base there that has offices and actually has the technical ability to study all of Japan there. I mentioned our new drill rigs. These are our drill rig that are coming into Japan with the associated cyclonic separation units to recycle the water. There's a handful of our drilling team that are, you know, they're in the field here close to the Hishikari mine. mine. And you can see what benign settings were active in with rice patties in the background behind them. Again, our pipeline areas very quickly are situated across the country. Those pipeline areas really are broken down into the following. We have 22 projects, which cover 44 prospects and 51 sub prospects. So we have enormous potential in our pipeline projects outside the Solid Core Alliance. We've broken those down into five buckets, and the five buckets we just call J1 through J5. They're geographically organized, so we have a bucket for the balance of Hokkaido. We have a bucket for Honshu and a single project at its extension, one for Middle Kyushu, and then two for Southern Kyushу, one north of the Hishikari mine and one for south of the Hishikari mine. I think in the interest of our time, I'm going to move right forward to the conclusion of our presentation here, which is to basically say, if you've ever thought of investing in Japan Gold, if you're not an investor now, or you're considering what your options are, there's never been a better time. Our share price today is the same price as our institutions have just provided our new equity capital through solid core resources and Equinox partners. The same price has the conversion of the debentures to make us debt free. So that's our share price today. Our company has an incredibly solid base with the low geopolitical risk in Japan, backstopped with the incredible mining history and the Hishikari mine as the indication of things potentially to come. We've identified not only the old search space, but that new search space in the Hichikari type of designation or elevation. We've de-risked Japan by the diligence that all of our major institutional and funds have done, that BEREC has done, and our database that we've assembled, and now Solid Core Resources with its committed capital coming into Japan to set us up for committed programs for years to come. We put together a world-class team to undertake that and to now take those dollars and execute on that confidence that Solicor has with us. When we've got multiple drill projects ready to go, we're going to be starting to drill in November. So thank you very much for listening to my presentation, and I welcome any questions you might have. Thanks, John. That was a terrific recap of things, and certainly it looks pretty exciting to me. We've got a couple of questions come in through the course of the discussion. Just by way of history, could you sort of recap how you actually got this strategic alliance initiated? Who helped you or how did you actually get this thing started? Sure. I mean, the Solid Core Strategic Alliance, it's very clear. um again in october of 2025 that's when we put out a public news release that we had ended our alliance with barrack as it turned out solid war had been watching us for i think upwards of three years so they'd be watching our progress in japan they'd been considering new jurisdictions and they were looking for an opening to to be involved with us in some way as soon as they saw that i mean literally the same day they reached out to me and quite frankly um you know i wasn't familiar with the name solid core resources and so i had to do my homework and we did an awful lot of homework and the more we looked into it more we look into the polymetal history and we talked to people in europe and london and elsewhere um we just got such strong reviews about the quality of solid the Corps' leadership, their ethics, and their ability to commit to something new going forward. So that really gave us some great enthusiasm going forward, so that's how it initiated. We wanted to take some time. Most alliances and the Barrick Alliance were just about the first couple of years, you know, sort of what happens then, how are people going to spend their money, what are we hoping to achieve but what i wanted to bake in was a full um a full agenda right through from starting the alliance right through to producing gold from from from mines that we're creating and so it took some time to not only develop the alliance parameters but then also the joint venture parameters and to work through all sorts of detail that they were associated with that. Then to make sure that we got our other large shareholders on board in terms of our debt conversion and additional equity. And then also to get our royalty partner on board as well. So it took an awful lot of work. It took about six months of incredible work. So the cone of silence was down. Our share price was flatlining in the five or six cent range. And that's the kind of effort that it took to achieve this really unique and remarkable outcome. Can you, for the benefit of the listeners, can you recap what you see as your major challenges to working in Japan and doing the work that you're doing? Yeah, look, I mean, Japan, we're restarting. I mean we are the first mover. We've talked about that a lot. And we are restarting the gold mining industry in Japan. So with that comes education, not only education for the various government agencies, right, from the federal government, the prefectural government, to the local town councils, but significant community engagement as well. what's really helped us is we have now been there for 14 years and recently in the last six months or so um nhk which is the national broadcaster like the cbc in canada has um featured us in three significant um documentaries or or things that are after the evening news that sort of thing both japanese and in english and just recently about two weeks ago the japan times which is the affiliate of the new york times i did a feature piece on us as well so our notoriety our our visibility in japan and the standards that we've set and the engagement that we have across everything from local communities to the federal government um are really becoming well known in japan which is creating even more opportunities for us today so the challenges i would say have have been looking at a mining industry that had been effectively closed since 1943, bringing it back into present day, educating the general population about what it means and how it can be done safely and in a very environmentally friendly way and how It can benefit the communities. I think as a business, we're faced with that pretty much anywhere we go, quite frankly. Listen, I have a couple of questions, some simple questions. in terms of um all of these projects are they already permitted for drilling you must be in a position where you can you can basically just roll these drills out and start start going at it yeah so one of one of the the um the focuses of solid core was and again i just love the intensity of their ceo vitali nessus um is that you know i want to make a discovery as quickly as possible I go, okay, well, we have five great projects and they're ready to drill. So we've gone forward carefully to take these projects to make sure that we, again, with the Badger Project, we're ready to go forward and drill those. Now, while we're doing that, we'RE also taking the $15 million of new investment and making sure that the other 22 projects that we've got we're advancing those ones to a drill ready stage as well again for ourselves or for other third parties that might want to come and be our partners too so so yeah we're ready to our drill rigs are not going to stop they're going to be are you the operator of all of these projects until they become joint ventures or get to a certain evolution we are a hundred we are the operator in japan of all the projects yes and again um that's why we brought in these two new drill rigs because we have our own drilling division and we have about 25 people in our drilling division today which may have to expand now uh with the kind of drilling intensity that we're going to do but we are well positioned to do that and it's interesting ron you know we all take risks in our business um and so about seven months ago I actually ordered these two new drill rigs when we didn't have a new alliance in place but I was really confident that with the type of attention that we were getting from multiple companies that we would be able to put something in place and I wanted to make sure we had a rig ready to go or rigs ready to do in this case when the alliance was announced and that's exactly what we've got and so no moss is growing under our feet. And can you very briefly John recap the amount of drilling that's planned. I wrote down 4,500 meters on one project and 12,000 to 16,000 meters on a second project. Did I miss any in that? Yeah, no, there's many. I mean, we've got five projects that we're talking about drilling already now. So I'm going to say 30,000 meters across those five projects. And really, that's going to, as we get into the first one with 12, to 16,000 meters, that's going to sort of tell the tale of how many more meters we'll want to drill. I fully expect it to expand, Ron, because we've tried to understate our meters because these new drill rigs, as I say, are faster, more efficient, and environmentally friendly and have very limited mobilization and demobilization timelines. So I'm hoping that we're going to get a lot more meters. So a lot of our projections were based on our old drilling rigs, which are the older generation, slower and not as efficient. Yeah, what I can emphasize is I've done a lot of drilling myself in the past on different projects. And to be able to say that you've got 30,000 meters in front of you on multiple projects suggests that you are target rich. It can become tricky on some projects to plan ahead on thousands of meters of drilling without knowing exactly where you are. So it speaks to the prospectivity of these projects. It does, Ron. And basically, that goes back to the fact that we have this incredible $23 million database that Barrick funded. that's our proprietary asset, which has helped us to underpin the targeting. And now we've done significant work over the last year since the Barrick Alliance ended, utilizing the dollars that Osisko Royalty provided to us originally for the royalty sale, using dollars that Equinox partners provided to uns in the convertible to ventures to really refine our targets across our projects. So we're ready to drill targets now. And I think one of the takeaways that our listeners might want to really focus on is over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, the news flow is going to be tremendous. You're going to have a breakthrough in terms of progress on these projects. It's going to Be a very exciting time for you. It is. And I mean, you know, I sort of smile a little bit because when I think of the last six to 12 months, you know, and especially the last 6, it's had to be so quiet. And I think it's really an indication for how carefully we can maintain confidence and confidentiality relative to putting such a significant set of transactions in place that's providing, you know, $50 million of committed capital. I mean again, just going back to something I said earlier, our market cap today is $35 million. we've got 50 million dollars of committed capital coming into the company now you know it's it's a really a remarkable mismatch relative to valuation of our company today and that's where i think it really it represents a significant investment opportunity for for investors today well i think everybody's going to be excited to hear the news that's coming out do you expect that you'll have the first round of results by the Vancouver Resource Conference in early next year? I think we will. Yeah, that's certainly what we're aiming for. And I'm looking forward to coming out and joining Red Cloud for the Fall Mining Showcase and being able to meet people in person and again, talk to people that have been really devoted followers of ours for some long time, really just waiting for this pivotal moment, this inflection point when you know i think if you here's the response that i get from a lot of people great marks for being first mover in japan great marks were assembling an incredible portfolio across the the country great marks we're getting a you know incredible database now assembled for the company uh and really the missing piece was getting significant capital significant committed capital at not too dilutive a rate to come in and really demonstrate discovery. And that's what we've got now. So it's all about discovery. John, listen, we really appreciate all of your time this afternoon, the remarks that you've made. Thank you everyone for joining us today on this call. I think it was really quite interesting. We look forward to hearing from you guys in the near future and best of luck. Thank You, Ron. We'll look forward to seeing you soon. Okay. Thank