Americas Gold & Silver

Well, I gotta say, Benoit’s a tough guy to follow. Those of you who know him, that little Frenchman. I’m a Frenchman as well, but he’s a tough one to follow. So good job, Benoit. I’m really happy to be here up in Denver once again. It’s been an exciting fourteen days starting off with a site visit for us. We had a bunch of analysts on our site, so those of you looking for fresh reports, please ask Miranda over here in the audience. There are a bunch of them coming out after this show, was followed by Beaver Creek and then this wonderful Denver show, so I’m happy to be here.

In the middle of this show, we attended something that I’ve never done before, and I just wanna talk about it real quickly. I know we’re at the Denver Gold Show, but I gotta talk about this AI show that I went to at Reuters in Texas. It was quite astonishing for me ’cause there’s trillions of dollars there. We were the only miner in that room. There had to be an audience of about eight to ten times this, 400 people. I watched the CEOs get up one at a time, talk about their AI, how much they’re exploding, how much it’s growing. One of the things that blew my mind out of every CEO got up front, they were talking about the long lead times, Don, on semiconductors. The one guy said, “You know, it’s taking us a year and a half to order a semiconductor, and then we get it, and then finally things have changed.” Not one of them spoke about metals.

So I got up at the very end, the only miner there, there are at least 400. We got bombarded with about 50 people, and one of the things I’d say to other miners is we should be at these things. I stood up and I said, the first thing I said, “Look, AI is not in the cloud. It’s actually in a mine. Without miners, you don’t exist.” People in that industry had no idea that silver is at such a shortage. For six years in a row as a planet, we’re not producing enough silver. Copper is gonna be short in the very near future as well. At the rate that these things are building, AI, EVs, anything else, your cell phone, everyone has a cell phone, there’s eight million ounces of silver.

These things that we’re doing at Americas Gold & Silver, we’re producing silver, we’re producing copper, we’re producing antimony, we have got lead and we’ve got gold. But none of those companies, it blew my mind how none of them were really paying attention to it. We had so much inbound calls since that. It’s interesting when we step outside of our own world. I’ve been doing this fifteen years as a CEO of Klondex, CEO of Karora, and now here. But stepping into someone else’s world was quite fascinating for me, and I’d encourage others to start looking at it because it is going to impact that industry, and there are a lot of dollars in that industry.

So let me jump into my company here that I’m very proud of. Obviously, I’m Chairman and CEO. I’ve been here for around sixteen months. Personally, I’ve been mining thirty-nine years. This is my wife and I, our single largest investment next to Eric Sprott. I think we are the largest shareholder, at least retail, owning 80% of my net worth into one stock. So I’m very much committed into what we’re doing and believe in what we’re building here at Americas Gold & Silver.

Where are we located? Obviously, we’ve got assets in Idaho, predominantly in Idaho here, but you can see up on the screen. Idaho and Mexico. We’ve been very focused in the last year and a half at revitalizing the Galena Complex and we’ve consolidated that district. We started off with 60% ownership of it. We bought Eric Sprott’s 40%. We consolidated three shafts in a row, which I’ll talk about right over here afterwards. And then we bought the Crescent Mine.

What’s our objective? It’s simple. Americas Gold & Silver at Galena in 2002, it produced five million ounces of silver. We know it’s been done before. It’s twenty years ago. We’ve gotta go back to that stage. We just gotta build the plan, build the infrastructure, but the thing we’re gonna do that’s very different is sustain it. It can’t be a flash in the pan like it was back in 2002. So that record in 2002, it’s a great objective and goal for us ’cause we know it’s been done before. And those of you who followed me at Klondex and Karora know that there’s never been a target in an underground mine that someone else has been able to do that my team hasn’t been able to repeat or do even better.

I was a miner thirteen years of my life, a raised miner and a jackleg miner for a better part of my early career. And as we’re changing the mining method in this mine, the one question we are asked all the time is, “If you’re gonna go to long haul like you did at Klondex and Karora, Paul, what will happen to the grade?” And here’s a great example and a good slide here. In 2025, we had took out the first six stopes ever long hole at Galena. It was the first time it was ever done at this mine. We carved those out. That’s the best grade. Look at the grade up top. It’s circled in red. Best grade this mine has seen in twenty years. So as we’re making the mine much more efficient, just like we did in the previous companies, we’re also seeing a benefit in grade because we’re able to carve it out surgically with those long holes.

And this is exactly what we’re doing. We inherited a mine that’s been here for a hundred years. 100% of our mining was all done with air legs, everything jacklegs. While our neighbors are successfully six miles down the road, successfully mining five million ounces per year, they’re 100% long hole. So they’re enjoying long hole and doing it very successfully, I might add, doing a great job. We definitely seen an opportunity here as we started looking at our due diligence and said, “Look, if we can convert 70% of this mine, remove the jacklegs, adapt to long hole, and improve the infrastructure, we’re gonna be well on our way.” And in that first year, that’s what we were squarely focused on.

To date, we’ve taken out seventeen panels. Here’s a panel, a picture. We actually showed this to the analysts who were here two weeks ago at the mine site, which was great to show off. That stope is A meter wide, 3.3 feet. We couldn’t have done any better with jacklegs. Had we been drilling and blasting that with jacklegs, we couldn’t have mined that any narrower. What’s really impressive is the time. Look at how long we did that in. It took us a month to mine that stope. If we had done that with jacklegs, that’s twelve to fourteen months. Drilling and blasting it, resting it down, that’s how long it would have taken us. So when you start applying 70% of the mining method this way and overcome those challenges that are faced with jacklegs and the injuries and everything else, you start to recognize really quickly that we can cycle these things a lot faster. And that was the whole end game. Just repeat this long hole, make sure we’re doing long hole, and we’re not diluting the grade, but make sure we do it much more efficiently.

How do we do it? Well, equipment, obviously we’ve had twelve new pieces of equipment. We never even had remote controls in our mine. So those of you who’ve been mining for a long time understand that if you’re going to long hole in any deposit, you need remote controls. We had to bring them down. We had to buy all long hole drills. They’re on site now. We’ve taken out nineteen stopes so far. One of the things that we don’t have at Galena yet, but if you came to site recently or you come at the end of the year, is that pay spill plan. The other mines that are near us all have pay spill plans. We’re the only one who doesn’t have it. In order for us to cycle these stopes properly and make sure we fill them and avoid any geotechnical issues, we need a proper pay spill plan. That’s being constructed right now. It’s around $24 million to get it done. Q4, it’ll be done. It’s one of the final steps in order for us to make sure we can cycle the long hole. And then it’s going to be about pushing the waste development in front of ourselves.

And then this is a long section of our mine. In the middle of the slide there, you could see the Galena shaft. What’s important about this, on that first slide that I showed you where we had five million ounces in 2002, that record was done using one shaft. And at the time, that shaft, that Galena shaft, was constrained to about 600 to 650 tons per day. That’s total tons, ore and waste. We have upgraded that shaft and modernized it by putting in new skips, new motors, new communication system. That’s all done. We’ve done it. It’s behind us. We spent those dollars. We’re able to skip in that shaft today about 1,400 tons a day. We can’t consistently do it yet because we’re not all long hole yet. But that was one of the big bottlenecks is the fact that that shaft could only move 600 tons of waste, or sorry, of rock a day was a tremendous bottleneck. We needed to improve that. That is behind us. It’s done. We know we can get 1,400 tons a day.

But more importantly, what else do we have? That core shaft, that shaft to the right side of us, that thing hasn’t been operational for years. It was moving 700 tons of rock as well. We’ve recently put two motors on it. In fact, we’ve just put a scoop down there, avoiding downtime in the main shaft. All these things are helping us to become much more efficient in this mine. So the core shaft, we’re using it to lower men down in the west side of the mine. And we have diamond drillers in there. And that big red discovery, 520 vein, is a discovery made from that core shaft.

So the fact that we’re going to have the Galena shaft up and running double or triple the capacity, the core shaft, and those of you who know in January or February, we closed the deal at a mine six, seven miles away from us, the Crescent Mine. And the Crescent Mine has three adits. It doesn’t have a secondary egress yet, so we’re going to put in the secondary egress. For the time being, we’re doing a lot of drilling, and I’m going to share with you some of the drill results because all of our mines, our mine at Galena, our mine at Cosalá in Mexico, and the one at Crescent all suffered from lack of money. So as a result, there was no drilling done for ten years.

Most of you guys are all miners here. You know that to run a narrow vein underground mine or any mine for that matter, you need to be drilling. There was no drilling for ten years. That’s one of the opportunities I even saw. The reason I put so much money in in the beginning was because I thought, man, there are so many targets here. Nothing’s been drilled. All we got to do is change the management, put in money into the infrastructure, change the mining method, and by the way, that’s exactly what we did at Karora. It’s exactly what we did at Klondex. It’s the same recipe, and it just takes time. You’re not going to come into a district that’s been here for a hundred years and flip a switch and just do it. So we’ve been very diligent about this.

And here’s at Galena with the drill bit, we’ve had six brand new discoveries, six new discoveries from beginning to end. So I just want to talk about one vein, the 34 vein. You can see it in that circle. And the reason I want to bring it up is because that average width is about three times the average width of our normal veins here. Usually our veins are anywhere from 0.8 to 1.3 meters. That 34 vein was averaging 3.4 to 3.6 meters, but the grade was 938 gram per ton silver, not silver equivalent. We produce five metals at Galena, silver, copper, antimony, lead, and gold.

In fact, before I forget it, I just want to bring this up. One of the things I’ve been showing around is this bar. A lot of people, if you want to see it at the end, please grab it, feel the density of it. Most people say, “What is it, Paul? It looks...” Obviously, it’s our ticker, USAS. I may as well brag about American-made and be proud of it. This is 99.98% antimony. So those of you who want to see it, I welcome you to have a look at it. It’s sure gotten a lot of attention. 100% of this comes from our mine at Galena. This was smelted at the facility, US Antimony’s facility in Montana, but the feed all comes from our mine. We are one of the largest suppliers to the US military for antimony, and we’re still not getting credit for that. We will in the future as we build a new antimony facility up in Idaho, which we’re planning to do with our partners starting next year. In fact, we’ve got those bids out right now with eight different groups looking at the costing of that. That’s gonna be a game-changer for us once we start getting the right revenue for our antimony.

But let me bring it back to the silver story, which is what we are. 85% of our revenue is silver, and we boast some of the best grades in the world here. I know Benoit was talking about some great grades. He’s got great grades. These are even outstanding. You start looking at some of these are 2,500 gram per ton. This stuff here is repeatable. Five new discoveries we’ve had, and let me show you some of the ones at Crescent. We just bought Crescent. This is some of our drill hole success we’ve had at Crescent, 1,100 grams. They are narrow, but we are mining narrow.

But what I wanna bring your attention to is some of the drilling that we’ve had more recently in Mexico. So we haven’t spoke a lot about Mexico in the first year because we were a little concerned about Mexico. We didn’t know what the long-term plan was for us, and we’ve quickly identified that after being for a little over a year, Mexico is going to become a flagship operation and much more important to our story, and here’s why. The average grade that we’ve had in our Mexican operation was 100 to 110 gram. Last year in ’25, we had a record year producing about 1.1 million ounces. We’re gonna beat that record this year.

But more importantly, if you start looking at Mexico and what do we have, it was faced with the same problems we had at Galena and Crescent, no drilling. And we’ve had some amazing success all over. Look at the drill results we’ve got starting at the top, 14 meters of 598 gram. That’s 14 meters wide of 600 gram. 20 meters of 650 gram. And I know I’m reading them off, but they’re worth talking about. 10 meters of 500 gram, 16 meters of 300 gram, 10 meters of 560 gram. Those are four to five times the average grade of what we have been mining for the last eighteen months. None of these are in our resource. A lot of this is we’re stepping out drilling. Several of them are outside of the entire resource and reserve altogether.

So we’re quite excited about this, and now that we understand Mexico and been working there much, much longer for the last eighteen months, we know the risks, we know the benefits. There are some tremendous benefits. Mexico has always been a good cash generator. It will continue to climb up our portfolio and continue to deliver ounces. At the end of the day, what we care about is getting to five million ounces and a lot more, and getting them as cheap as we can. And our ounces in Mexico have actually been cheaper than the ones we’ve had otherwise.

I’ve talked really about all the metals we produce. What’s important about this slide is understanding where we came from. The silver that we talk about, the antimony, in the past, we were penalized for antimony. Most of you know how important it is. It’s such a critical metal. Obviously, we negotiated that with Teck Cominco. We’re now getting paid for our antimony. Our copper in the past, until we got here a year ago, we weren’t paid for our copper. We were sending our concentrate. So we’ll mine a ton of ore, we’ll turn it into concentrate, we ship it up to Canada, Teck Cominco, and we weren’t being paid for our copper, we weren’t being paid for our gold, and we were penalized for antimony. All that has changed. Since we’ve taken over, we’ve renegotiated those contracts. We’re being paid for silver. Antimony, we’re being paid for. There’s still a lot of opportunity for us on the antimony, hence why we know it makes sense to build that plant in Idaho with US Antimony. And then the copper, we’re now getting paid, and the gold, we’re getting paid.

So that plant for us is gonna be something very exciting. It’s gonna be a big part of our future. It will be open for business, as we say. And what I mean about that is because we own 51%, we’re not giving up 51% of our antimony to our partners. We’re charging ourselves and the JV a toll milling fee, but we’ll keep all our antimony, but there will be other sources coming in. Our partners obviously have a lot of sources. There are a lot of other domestic sources that we will welcome because in the end of the day, in the US, we need 50 million pounds. We’ll be producing four to five million. Others are welcome because we need it in the US. It’s such a critical element that we all need it here.

Along the way, everyone asked obviously of the balance sheet. Well, our balance sheet has been transformed. In Q2, we actually eliminated two big debt positions that we had, one with Royal Gold and the other one with Sprott Mining. And by eliminating that, that was around $76 million of debt that we eliminated, positioning us in the best financial position we’ve ever had. We ended Q2 with around 89 million in cash with about 50 million of undrawn. But to date, we’ve paid off about $160 million in debt since we’ve come here, taken over the company. So these debt payments that we were paying, they were about $28 million a year. So you think $7 million a quarter, those aren’t cheap for a company like us. So getting rid of it is a really important step for us as we continue to unlock the value at all our assets, Galena, Kosula, and Mexico. And I think that’s about the end of it, Don. I was opening up for one or two questions with one minute left to go. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you, Paul. No worries. We do have a little bit of time for questions from the audience. If everyone has a question, raise their hand. So Paul, maybe if you could just refresh us on the upcoming catalysts. Certainly with some of those intercepts I’ve been seeing, maybe talk about also the next Emory update that would incorporate some of those.

Yeah. So for us, look, those intercepts are so big, and the fact that they’re so close to us, what we’re going to do is we’re gonna be shifting our mine plans. So our number one catalyst right now is looking at the mine plan we have at both Kosula and in Galena. We’ve already got 250 million ounces at Galena. People are like, “Well, why do you wanna keep growing?” Well, we don’t necessarily wanna keep growing it, but what we wanna do is understand how much higher grades we’ve got or how much different widths we got. So in our case, Don, what we’re looking at is displacing some of the lower grade material, replacing with wider areas and better grades.

So for us, the number one catalyst is revitalizing a resource, mine plans, and targeting some of that better grades while sustaining a new... Every year, we’re gonna be breaking records just like we did at Karora, but we wanna sustain it. It can’t be something that we do one year where we get to five million and then we’re down to three. We wanna go five to six to seven. We wanna maintain that level. Revitalizing these mine plans with this new information is gonna be key and a lot more drilling ahead of us.

Thanks, Paul, and thanks again for joining us this afternoon. Thanks very much, Don. [audience applauding]