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Thank you very much and thank you all for attending. Pleased to provide an update today on the progress that we’re making in Heliostar. A note that we’ll be making forward-looking statements and that you’ll be able to find a copy of the presentation on the website. Our long-stated goal of the company has been to grow to be a 500,000 ounce a year producer at the end of the decade, and right now we’re taking significant steps forward on that timeline. We have two operating mines at La Colorada and San Agustin mine, and a high-quality development pipeline of 100,000 ounce plus potential producers. Most significantly, the Ana Paula project, which we’re in the middle of a feasibility study on, and we’re pleased to provide a further update on today.
We operate across Mexico with a deep pipeline of over 7 million ounces of gold in the M and A category and over 100 million ounces of silver. A portfolio we were able to put together for very cheaply in times that weren’t as good from a gold price perspective because we had a vision to create this company when being a gold producer, a growing gold producer, wasn’t the flavor of the month. I think this slide shows how we’re growing and our pipeline potential, and I think it also presents our business proposition very efficiently. We’ve grown year over year from just over 30,000 ounces of gold to this year’s guidance of over 50,000 ounces of gold. We’re doing that at very low cost, just over $2,000 an ounce, all-in sustaining cost. If you look at the sub 100,000 ounce a year peer group, I think we’re one of the highest margin of that group. They’re not large mines, but we’re operating very profitable gold mines that set up our future.
The big step change comes when we pour our first gold in late ’28 at Ana Paula. That’ll take us to a run rate of approximately 200,000 ounces a year. And if you look at first quartile cost 200,000 ounce a year producers, you’re talking in that $2.5 to $5 billion market cap range, which is well over five X what we are today. And the kicker is, we can get there on our plan without needing to go to equity. Our operating mines are gonna make $150 million before the Ana Paula build. We’re up to 43 million of that on our balance sheet today, and we’re gonna project finance the Stig-Ap. We’ve just hired Hanneman Partners to lead that work. And so then we think we can deliver that market cap growth as per share growth, and we’re confident that no other group in our peer group has that ability ahead of them. We reserve the right to issue equity should we see production growth, but it’s unique that we have a pipeline of three new mines to bring on that we can fund organically.
We’ve stepped up our operating performance in ’26 from ’25. We restarted La Colorada in the dark blue in ’25. We’ve re-expanded San Agustin at the beginning of this year and a notable step up, and I’ll also refer here to that low all-in sustaining guidance of just over 2,100. We’re tracking around the top end of that range this year. We’ve got a really strong shareholder base led by Eric Sprott and Franklin Templeton. Very clean cap structure. The last of the warrants from financing eighteen months ago are about to roll off. We don’t envisage an equity raise in the near future for our underlying business. We just picked up coverage from National. We just received GDXJ inclusion about ten days ago, and we’re targeting an uplist to the full board TSX in the coming weeks and months. So there’s a natural maturation of our business.
The team has operating experience, mine-building experience throughout Mexico. Today, I think it’s relevant as we build Ana Paula, I’ll touch on our COO, Greg Bush. Greg built the Dolores mine for mine finders that became a Pan American mine and was the COO of Capstone for nine years. We’re very confident that we’ve got the team in place that can deliver on the promises we make as a management team in conferences such as this.
One of the things we’re particularly proud of is the way that we’re growing with our communities. I love that as a growing company, we were still able to sponsor over 600 scholarships. Beyond the statistics, we’ve drilled water bores around San Agustin for the local community. When the town of La Colorada had issues with their pump and ran out of water this year, we were able to step in and help there. It’s lovely as Heliostar grows that we can contribute to the communities that we’re in.
If I pivot to Ana Paula, that’s the biggest value growth step in the company today. We put out a PEA late last year with exceptional economics. Just over three hundred, sorry, a $300 million CapEx with just over a $1,000 all-in sustaining cost. A mine doing over 100,000 ounces for nine years. A 100,000 ounces at $3,000 margin is one of the most profitable mines that’ll come online in the next couple of years. We’re about a billion dollar NPV at close to spot gold today, and we think there’s further improvement that we can bring in in our feasibility study.
What drives the exceptional nature of Ana Paula is the grades and widths of the ore body. If you look at some of those holes there from our resource conversion drilling, 99 meters at 10 grams per ton gold, 126 meters at 4 grams per ton, or 87 meters at 16 grams per ton gold. The width and the grade of Ana Paula is what drives the very low OpEx, which drives the margin.
We’ve just recently put out an update on the feasibility study. We’re about a third of the way through. We’ve completed all of the drilling to convert the inferred over to M&I. We’re confident that we can reach our target of ten years at 100,000 ounces. We’re gonna increase the scale of the mill from 1,800 to 2,000 tons a day, and we’re gonna build in the ability to expand that to 2,500 midway through the mine life. We’ve got a number of changes. We’re gonna put a second decline in and remove a vent shaft for very little additional CapEx, as we don’t need the vent shaft if we add the second decline. We’re gonna move the crushing unit underground. We’re gonna move to an NSR-based cutoff. And we think this is all gonna lead to an incremental improvement to our economics in the feasibility study. Our timeline is to deliver the feasibility study in Q2 next year, make the construction decision mid-next year, and pour our first gold in late ’28.
And the way we like to look at the Ana Paula as an ore body, in the upper zone, you can see where we’ve been de-risking the ore body for the feasibility study. We’ve drilled about 10,000 additional meters, a significant portion that won’t make the feasibility study, but we’ve done it because we’re having a lot of success in the expansion zone. We’ve recently drilled holes like 100 meters at 5 grams gold, 25 meters at 8 grams gold, that tell us the Ana Paula ore body is open at depth, and there’ll be mine life beyond the feasibility study that we present.
Lastly, if you look at mines in the district, and if I go back, you can see our proximity to Torex’s Morelos Complex in this picture. They are very large, 15, 20 million ounce ultimate endowment districts. And they all have their mineralization occurring in the red zone. You can see that’s the contact between the intrusive and the sediments. We think there’s potential for Ana Paula to be materially bigger than the feasibility study that we’re designing. We think we’re gonna have a ten-year, very profitable mine life with what we’ve defined to date, and we’re very excited about the growth potential of Ana Paula.
For time, I’ll keep moving through. I like this slide to show the phase that we’re about to enter. This is effectively the data that supports the back end of the Lassonde curve. This is major single asset producers going from their construction decision to declaring commercial production and their performance against the GDXJ. On average, they’ve returned about 100% outperformance to the industry over that period of time. And with us entering the financing aspect of Ana Paula, delivering the feasibility study and making FID, this is the journey ahead of us as a company.
Maybe the last metric that I’ll leave you with, if we’re doing 100,000 ounces a year at $3,000 margin, that’s 300 million top line. After taxes, exploration, G&A, that’s probably about $200 million. We’re trading at just under 500 million US, just over two times of our forward cash flow. We know that that’s gonna rerate in that six to eight range. So whether you’re looking at peers, whether you’re looking at the back end of the Lassonde curve, or whether you’re looking at cash flow multiples, we’re very confident in the rerate that we can deliver by building Ana Paula.
In terms of our operating assets, we’ve made significant progress at La Colorada, and I love this slide here to talk to. The La Colorada mine in Sonora is made up of three pits, and when we bought it, it was in care and maintenance going into closure. You see in the bottom left below the Gran Central pit, we found waste dumps that we were able to start mining at about 0.2 grams per ton, and we mined from those profitably last year. We’ve moved to injection leaching on the leach pad. And La Colorada’s slightly unique in the sense that there’s no clay in the leach pad, and there’s coarse gold grains in the leach pad.
So the way heap leaches work is you put a solution on the leach pad that trickles down, saturates the rock, dissolves the gold, hits a pool liner underneath that drains it out and takes it to a plant to recover the gold. What we found was that because there was very quick draining, you didn’t keep the solution in contact with the gold long enough to fully dissolve it through the history of this mine. So by drilling holes into that leach pad and injecting that solution in, you can keep the column saturated for longer and dissolve some residual gold. You can also get the active solution deeper and recover gold from deeper in that leach pad. It’s driven about three-quarters of our 20,000 ounce guidance this year. Something we’ve been doing now for about nine months and working very well as a company.
They’ve been very creative ways to create cash flow. They’ve held us back a little bit from valuation because they’re not long mine lives. They’re not generic ways of doing it, but we love the cash flow that they’ve given us as we’ve been able to build our business. Earlier this year, we drilled off the Veta Madre pit to what we call Veta Madre Plus. We haven’t put out an updated technical report, but we’re targeting 20,000 ounces above the reserve you see in that statement there. We got the permit to expand that pit earlier this year, and we had our first blast about a month ago. We’ve got an eight-month pre-strip, and we’ll be stacking new 0.7 gram oxide material on the leach pad from Q2 next year. It’s really gonna drive cash flow in our business as Veta Madre comes online, and then we’re gonna pivot to Creston.
We now have a six-year mine life averaging just under 50,000 ounces of gold at La Colorada. It’s been an incredible transformation of the asset from when we acquired it to what it provides our business today. And most excitingly, as we’ve locked down the production pathway, we can now look out to resource growth. We’re gonna step out and spend about $5 million in Q4 on exploration targets in a very attractive, very underexplored brownfield environment.
San Agustin mine is proving to be a real cash generator for us. It was the reason that a lot of people didn’t buy this portfolio because it looked like you were walking into a $20 million closure liability. What we were able to do was get the permit to expand that mine mid last year. As I said, we declared commercial production at the beginning of this year, and it’s only got a short mine life, but we’re generating at these gold prices about $70 million until April next year from that. We then committed to reinvest in growth at San Agustin. We’ve put out a number of results over 200 meters away from the pit edge with similar grades and similar widths. And we’re confident that we can add another twelve months to that mine life. There’s not huge step changes in that mine life. But if it’s another $50 million of cash flow, it really builds our profile as a company as we build towards Ana Paula.
And then to close out on what I think is a pipeline that’s the envy of anyone trying to build a mid-tier producer. We own the Cerro del Gallo project with just under 5 million ounces of gold. We put out an updated PFS for it that shows very low CapEx, billion-dollar NPV at today’s gold prices. But it’s only on a 2-million-ounce gold equivalent reserve. The reason for that is we were constrained in the footprint of where we were putting our waste dumps and our leach pads. Our team’s confident that we can grow Cerro del Gallo into the 8 to 10-million-ounce range. A huge uplift on where it is, and then proportionally, as we do the work and design a better representative mine around this, we think Cerro del Gallo can be a 100, 150,000 ounce long mine life producer that we can bring on after Ana Paula. A project that we’re getting no value for today, that I’m convinced in a couple of years will add many hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars of value to Heliostar’s market cap.
And then lastly, our Goldstrike project. It was a slightly opportunistic transaction from Liberty Gold in Utah. It’s a million-ounce deposit that we’re paying 70 million for, staged over five years. It fits our cash profile very well. Liberty was trying to demonstrate to the market that they didn’t need equity for their lead Blackpine project. So I think it worked well for Liberty. We think there’s a lot of upside in this project. We think it gives us a great development project to work on. It’s got some antimony upside that we’re drilling at the moment, that may help for standalone value creation or potentially permitting an economic pathway for the project.
And the way we think as a company is we’re moving Ana Paula through FS and construction. We’ll move Cerro del Gallo through PFS and FS, and we’ll move Goldstrike through PFS. We like to have an organic pipeline of high margin, low cost, increasing size gold mines that are gonna drive our re-rate to be a mid-tier gold producer. We’ve got a lot of big deliverables to deliver between now and next year at Ana Paula, and we think each one of those de-risking steps is gonna significantly drive a re-rate in the Heliostar share price. Thank you very much.
We do have a few minutes for questions. If anybody has a question, please raise your hand.
Charles, thank you. I think you said you’re gonna be doing 100,000 ounces a year out of Ana Paula, producing 2,000 tons a year, and that you plan to go then to 2,500 tons per year. Will that take you up to 125,000 ounces or somewhere like that?
Yeah. So the PEA has 100,000 ounces a year from an 1,800 ton per day plant. As I said, we envisage going up to 2,000 in the FS with ability to scale to 2,500. Early in the mine life, I think we’ve got in the PEA, we peak out about 130,000 ounces a year just driven by the grade. In the back end, that’ll come off a little bit in the PEA, in the FS. By expanding the mill, you will be able to keep those higher throughputs, as you said. We also have those exceptional deeper zones. So we think maybe they’ll come into the mine plan as well. So by building that extra capacity, you can very strongly produce from a lower grade cutoff, or we can add in higher grade, deeper material to keep the production rate high.
Do you have any kind of schedule? Thank you. That really is a gem, that property, I believe.
We’d like to think so too. [laughs]
The Utah property caught my eye. Do you have a schedule for that? Ballpark, if you’ve got a million ounces, will you do something with that before 2030, or is that realistic?
In terms of production, no, we don’t expect Goldstrike to come on before 2030. Where we think we’ve had success is we’re a strongly technical team who takes things back to, we’ve re-logged all the core across our deposits. We’ve built new geological models across all our deposits. We’ve done met work that we’re prepared to stand behind and engineering work that we think is the standard that these assets need to perform, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the Goldstrike project. We’re reassessing where there’s gaps in the data, where there’s areas that we need to do work, and the logical next step is an updated PFS for it, that is a Heliostar PFS, for lack of a better term. We haven’t guided when that would be. It’ll be somewhere around late next year that we would look to deliver that, and then obviously we’ll move through to FS from there.
Do you have any other questions from the audience? No? Thanks, Charles, for that presentation. You’re showing just rather incremental production growth in the year 2027. And I was just wondering, should we be looking out for some surprises either from La Colorada or San Antón?
I’m hoping you’re referring to positive surprises, Paul. We think Veta Madre Plus, as I touched on, can produce more ounces than we’ve got in the current technical report. The range encapsulates what we think we can deliver there. But with the expanded mine life at San Agustin, and the potential for more ounces in Veta Madre, I think we’re quite confident with that guidance and potentially being at the top end of that guidance, yes.
And that does take us to the end of time. Thank you very much, Charles. [clapping]
