ATEX Resources

Good morning. My name is Chris Beer. I’m the interim CEO and president of ATEX Resources. This morning I want to just share the rapid exploration success that ATEX has had over the last three years really. And if you look at just this slide, what’s really interesting is this porphyry signature, and so far in three years we’ve discovered two billion tons of mineralization. We’ve had two mineral resource estimates put out. So right now it looks like we have about 34 billion tons of copper equivalent, and we’re just getting started. And importantly, I want to highlight that we are just getting started. It’s open in every direction. The resource is very, very unique. It’s already world-class, and it’s open in every direction.

So in this presentation, I just want to show you what we’re planning on doing next. Basically four points. The Valeriano project we own is 100% owned. It’s a world-class sized deposit. It’s open in all directions and the metallurgy is fantastic and we’re just getting started, and we have strong shareholder support. This is our forward-looking statement.

So, as I mentioned, from an investment thesis perspective, there’s three main points. We have the scale, high grade, and there’s optionality associated with that. So a few years from now as being associated with this project, I’d like to look back and say we have this two billion ton high grade, great metallurgy project. But more importantly, it is a new emerging district and you’ll be familiar with the Vicuña district to the north. And, as I mentioned, we have a really strong shareholder support. We’re financed for at least the next 18 months, and looking forward to getting started in the next few weeks with the phase seven drill program.

Simplistically, last year just after this Denver forum, ATEX put out its second mineral resource estimate, two billion tons close to 0.8%, half a billion tons at close to 0.9%, and a billion and a half tons a bit deeper, but also at 0.8%. In this diagram, cartoon if you like, you can see the size of it. It’s a high grade resource and from a gold perspective, 25% of the mineralization is associated with the precious metals. We have great metallurgy. We’ve done two rounds of metallurgy. We’re getting like a 33% copper concentrate, up to 15 grams gold in the copper in the porphyry composite, and eight to 10 grams in the higher grade breccia.

So what’s really important here at the top is the purple breccia unit. The B2B is what we’re calling it. And right now in the MRE, we had 30 million tons of 1.4%. It was defined by six drill holes. We’ve put another 10 into it last season, so we’re looking forward to an MRE coming up basically this time next year. And if you look at the B2B, just above it you see the contour line. So we have a sea of 0.35 copper that just surrounds the breccia and the porphyry system at depth. And the B2B itself, it’s basically a Lorand, 400 meters, starts 400 meters below surface or a four ran, 30 to 50 million tons.

So we think if we can demonstrate firstly, it’s open particularly to the south, and I’ll show you we’ve had some great success to the east in this past season. So it’s a brand-new mineralization to the east. So we wanna highlight that we sit at 3,800 meters in the valley and this breccia, this B2B looks like it could be the starter mine. We haven’t done any of the economic analysis on that yet. We’d probably do that next year because at this point in time, as I say, there’s a lot of exploration potential, particularly to the south, and as you’ll see in the next couple of slides, we might have Valeriano two and three.

And maybe I’d just add, so we have a Loran at the top. In the high grade core, we have a half billion tons. So if we can get 300 million tons of north of 1%, we basically have a Red Chris or Carrapateena right underneath. Clearly a block cave solution or opportunity down the road.

I mentioned this district. We have great infrastructure. It’s three hours to site. We have the Vicuña district. If you follow the Filo and the NGX, you understand that basically in the last eight, 10 years it got started. ATEX really in the last three or four years, it was an oxide half a million ounce curiosity. We drilled deeper and had that porphyry success that I already spoke to. So very easy to get to site. And what’s interesting, it’s a two-hour on paved road, an hour and a half on a gravel road, and then the last 20 minutes...

I was a former institutional investor, hadn’t been to site. So when I got to site two years ago, what was really interesting, those cream-colored rocks that you see, that are always associated with porphyry systems generally below, you come in from the east, and then you go basically 20 kilometers south. You hit Codelco has a system, Antofagasta has a big system, then we have one system at Valeriano, and in the next few slides you’ll see why we might have Valeriano two and three.

This slide just shows our land package. We’ve consolidated the district. As I mentioned, the Vicuña District to the north is a great roadmap of what you do, both to explore and how you bring in partners. Currently you’ll see in some of our slides we have a 16% shareholder in Agnico, 10% owned by Pierre Lassonde, and then probably another seven investors. We get up to 70% of our shareholders we can talk to in an afternoon.

So we’ve consolidated this district. The yellow and the red are clay anomalies, hyperspectral images. And as I mentioned, you can see 20 kilometers of these porphyry alteration systems. The two to the south have never really been drilled. There’s a former operator that drilled the yellow one, Nuevo Horizonte, on your left, on the west side. And so, as I mentioned, we have this sea of low grade around the porphyry, and back in 2015 former operators rumored to have drilled a low-grade core, but they just didn’t drill deep enough. And so, as you saw in our presentation so far, the system really starts to heat up, if you will, at 400 meters below surface.

And we know we’re consolidating a district because in these images, the porphyry system, Antofagasta, the top project there, El Arciero, it was a two billion ton resource, and they’ve carved off a half billion tons. Anto hasn’t been in for the last two years, and it looks like next year they’re gonna start drilling a little bit deeper. The white outline, just like the Italian boot, if you will, we bought the surface rights in the fall of ’25, and that’s allowed us to be in charge of our destiny. Whenever you can, it’s probably best practice to acquire the surface rights. So what that does, it gives us water rights. We surround some players here, as I mentioned, Codelco and Antofagasta. We wanna be in this emerging district. So if Anto has a two billion ton inventory, we have a two billion ton inventory.

In January of this year, we were able to pick up at auction the Nuevo Horizonte project just to the south. So these, the yellow and red, as I mentioned, they’ve never really been drilled. We now know that the system starts kinda deeper at 400 meters below surface. We’ve done a lot of geophysics, mag inversion, and particularly passive seismic has really allowed us to understand Valeriano because, I don’t wanna get too deep in the weeds, but the intrusive is really close to the surrounding rhyolite. So this passive seismic is very easy to do, cheap, and we wanna do that. As soon as we get in, in the next few weeks, we’ll be starting geophysics, geochemistry, and environmental characterization just to the south at Nuevo Horizonte East.

Now I’ll get a little bit into the weeds. So last season, phase six was our most successful. We drilled 2,800 meters or 28,000 meters. We were planning to do 25,000 meters. The company’s really been a pioneer in directional drilling. So we drill these deep mother holes, probably 800 meters, and then we do a bunch of laterals off the main, basically oil and gas type drilling. Been very successful. As I mentioned, near 30,000 meters drilled last year. We probably saved 10,000 meters just by using these laterals.

And in this plan view, what’s really important is to the south, as I mentioned, we’ve hit 19A, 19B. Hole 28 we’ve hit two years ago, and it really shows this B2B breccia is really open to the south. It’s open to the north. And then we look for B2B breccia targets just spatially around the B2B last year. And what we found is we’ve had success at 37 and 39, at the same depth. They have to be followed up. But the real priority is to the south and again to the east, in hole 34 and 35 at that B2B mineralized horizon at 2,400 to 2,900 to 3,400 meters. That seems to be the sweet spot, the fertile horizon, if you will, for the high grade. And we drilled it, and we hit 1,100 meters at 0.72 in rhyolite. So we’ve really expanded the boundaries of this intrusive system. And in phase seven, in the next few weeks, we really wanna get in and demonstrate where it’s open.

Maybe on the right, this Pierce point, those four drill holes all came in on the, it’s a north-south system. We drill from the east, but we just tagged the breccia system. 19B was our last hole of the year, just on the bottom of the blue, and it hit 37 meters of basically 1.75%. So next year the drill program is very easy. You can see here in hole 25 and some of the other holes, we’ve hit some of our highest grade intervals just last year, which haven’t been included in our MRE. But more importantly, what those holes really demonstrate is the need to get in and laterally come flatter into the breccia. So we’ve got some of our best holes in ’25 and ’23, and next year it’s just simply a matter of coming in from the east, drilling where those four drill holes were, and hitting the fertile horizon at that elevation.

As I mentioned, just in four short years, the company’s gone from a geological curiosity, an oxide heap leach target, that when ATEX came in, they recognized the porphyry potential, and in the subsequent phases, we’ve gone from three rigs to six rigs. We have a 180-man camp, so that generally allows us to have six rigs going. Looking forward to getting in there this year and expanding this breccia, this high-grade zone, demonstrating that that has the potential to be as... We haven’t done the numbers, but you can imagine a 10 to 15,000 ton a day scenario. That’s kind of what we’re targeting, as high a grade as possible.

Mineral resource update, the phase three met work is coming out later in ’27, and as I mentioned, even at a coarse grind, we’re getting a 33% copper con, so no deleterious elements, so it’s looking good from that perspective. And then again, the exploration potential, trying to demonstrate this is not just a project, but a district, and we hope in the next 12 months to get into Nuevo Horizonte and drill the eastern side of it.

I was a bit reluctant to put this chart up, because it shows us, I have to explain we’re trading at a penny a pound, but clearly some of the companies have been successful on the right, or, sorry, on the left, as they demonstrate the economics of the project. They get closer to a production scenario. So where we are at a penny a pound, our challenge is to show next year that the economics surrounding a starter mine scenario is quite attractive. We’ll also have more exploration to the south, demonstrate that it’s a district, and so we do think that that will eliminate the penny a pound valuation.

This slide just really speaks to the high-grade component, and so far there’s a number of ways to carve that up, whether it’s the high-grade porphyry at depth in a block cave scenario, but the breccia is the real target in the near term. We put this slide up. It really just shows if you wanna go somewhere for greater than a billion tons of copper in a porphyry system, I know Lumina was up on the Kufur-Schieffer style of mineralization, but basically, it’s very hard to find anything over a billion tons, particularly in a great jurisdiction.

And this slide, I know it’s a bit busy, but what it shows is from a copper equivalent, we’re twice the global average. We have great met work. We’ve only done 70,000 meters of drilling. And interesting, if you look at key holders, all of these kind of projects have a key investor that’s been very supportive long term, so we have to earn that every day. But looking forward to the next 18 months to really demonstrate the potential in this district.

Just the capital structure slide. We’re 140 million in cash right now, so well advanced for the next 18 months of drilling. I mentioned some of our top shareholders, and we also have some financing in the form of warrants that can kick in in the near future at a $4 strike.

And so I just kinda wanna end with a few points that the Vilariño project is quite special. It’s 2 billion tons and open. It is high grade, has great metallurgy. There’s a number of ways to attack it. There’s a near surface breccia system, and in fact, the breccia system’s never been really traced to surface, so that’s something we’re looking at this season. A week ago, we put out our phase six drilling summary, some of the things we’ve learned last season, and we’ll put out our phase seven summary in the next couple of weeks. But basically, 70% of our drilling next year will be focused on advancing the B2B breccia, understanding the size and the grade of that. And also we’ll have some work on the met work coming up, and I think with two minutes left, I could potentially take some questions.

Any questions from the room? A quick one from me. It seems like the focus is on drilling as much as you can, defining the resource and the reserves, but when do you think you might be able to put some economics around it or a study?

Yeah. Thanks, Ross. So we are investigating that, but I think come this time next year, as I showed in the cross-section, it’s really open to the south. So if we have 40, 50 million tons right now, we wanna demonstrate what is the ultimate size of that. We also wanna understand the grade of it. We also wanna really drill to the south, because some of the infrastructure might come to the south, so we have, as I mentioned, Vilariño One, Two and Three. So we really have to put the first hole, this thing has been sitting there for 8 million years, never drilled, and we now know mineralization starts at 400 meters. So we wanna really tag into those two to understand the grade potential across this district. And then, yeah, so this time next year, economics in the form of a scoping study is likely.

And then there’s a couple of companies in this session that have looked at the number of takeouts in the copper space, and you’ve highlighted a couple there as well. Given who your neighbors are and the valuation slide where you’re relatively undervalued, is there a fear that someone comes along with an opportunistic bid, or do you think with Agnico and Mr. Lassonde there, you’ve got sufficient defensive, supportive shareholders?

No, thanks, Ross. A great question because if we can demonstrate as a district, as I mentioned, we have Agnico. We have to earn that ownership, sponsorship every day. But Antofagasta’s to the north, and basically, the way to do it is Vicuña, Filo, NGX. They’ve drilled, they’ve brought in a partner, and then they had multiple options. So I didn’t go into the infrastructure, but clearly the Nuevo Union is 30 kilometers to the north. There’s a lot of infrastructure that Barrick built to the south. So we just wanna create that competitive tension as we demonstrate that it’s not just one project of 2 billion tons but at least five to 8 billion ton district.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Chris. And thank you to all the presenters in this session and for everyone for your time and attention.