Western Copper and Gold

Thank you. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. It’s good to be here. It’s always a productive few days here in Colorado Springs. As mentioned, my name is Sandeep Singh. I’m the CEO of Western Copper and Gold, advancing the copper-gold Casino Project in the Yukon in northern Canada. As I provide this update, I will be making forward-looking statements, so please be mindful of that.

Just at a high level, to set the stage, this is the Casino Project. It’s one of the largest copper-gold projects globally. In Canada, we describe it as the largest critical minerals project when we combine the other metals. It is quite advanced. We have a recent feasibility study on the project, which at the time showed very good economics in 2022. Those economics are now fantastic with the movements in our key commodity prices.

It’s also been endorsed, if you will, by some of the smarter names in the copper sector. Rio Tinto is our largest shareholder at about 8.5%. Mitsubishi Materials owns five. Both have been very active on our technical committee, lending us some of the best minds in the business since their entrance in the company, and have been a real benefit to the advancement of the project.

The fundamentals, suffice it to say, for both copper and gold, as well as moly and silver, have been phenomenal. I love our commodity mix. It’s kinda half at the moment, depending on how you draw the lines, half precious, half base. It’s a phenomenal mix as we look forward into what the outlook for those metals looks like. And we’re now advancing through the permitting stage, if you will, with a lowercase B, the environmental assessment phase, major de-risking step for our company.

Just a little bit corporately, the ticker symbol, if you wanna follow us, is WRN, traded in Toronto and New York. We’re more liquid, excuse me, on the New York Exchange if you wanna pick that one up. Today on a bad day, gold typically tends to fall [chuckles] at the start of this conference. But it’s about a US$500 million market cap, just shy of $100 million US in the till at the end of the last quarter, so well-funded for the next milestones, the next meaningful milestones for this company. A good shareholder base, as you can tell, some really strong names that we are continuing to expand. And then well-covered with severed research analysts covering the stock, and you can see the research targets there, but everyone quite bullish.

Just maybe finishing up the point I made earlier on two of our largest shareholders, Rio Tinto has invested five separate times since first entering the stock in 2021. As I mentioned, great partner to have. Mitsubishi Materials as well, this is the first and only time, to our knowledge, that they’ve invested in the equity of a mining company. They typically look for offtake investments and minority stakes. In this instance, they came in quite early and have followed their investment in the market as well, which is not something typical for them.

A little bit more on the resource itself. It’s almost 11 billion pounds of copper in all categories, 21 million ounces of gold. The silver and the moly in their own right, I would argue, are company-making. They’re our third and fourth metals by revenue. Beyond the scale, which is significant, it’s quite well-drilled. So as you can tell, two-thirds of it is in the M&I category. We’ve gone even further and delineated the first 27 years in reserve. That’s what underpins our feasibility study. So large, well-drilled, and then again, the mix is quite interesting.

We’ve shown the commodity prices we’re using as a long-term guide. In the center of that donut, feels quite conservative at the moment. If you use those commodity prices, you end up with that kind of 50-50 split that I mentioned from a precious and base perspective. I love the exposure we have to copper and gold. Very bullish, both of those in long term. But in the near term, they provide quite the buffer because they aren’t always correlated to each other. And so that provides quite a lot of baseline strength for this project as we move forward. That said, I think the outlook for them is phenomenal as we move on.

This slide, or the next couple slides with a little bit of narration, I think explain well why we’re so excited about this project. If you look at the white outline there, that’s the 27 years one single open pit that’s in our feasibility study. The crux of the value that underpins that is the mill reserve, 1.2 billion tons at 0.4 copper equivalent on a recovered basis. That is only, as I mentioned earlier, about a third of our current drilled-out resource. We believe in the fullness of time upon positive execution, more of that will find its way into a mine plan in the future, and there’s still more to find on this land package.

Beyond the scale, the two things that really aid the economics or drive the economics, I should say, are one, the strip ratio, and two, the core zone, and I’ll explain each. The strip ratio on this 27-year pit is 0.43. That is the lowest and best of any kind of similar copper or copper gold porphyry we can find anywhere in the world. And what it means is for every ton of rock that we care about that is revenue-generating, we have to move 0.4 tons of waste that isn’t. And in a big earth-moving operation, which is what that is, that is a fantastic benefit, and I’ll show it to you a little bit later graphically.

And then the core zone, as you can see, the best grades, the hottest colors come to surface. That too is a huge aid. In the first years, we’re just taking out the hillside, mining better than 50% higher grade at almost no strip, which leads to a sub-two-year payback, even using conservative pricing. And that combination of very quick payback, long mine life, more potential from an extension perspective already on the books. All of this is at low elevation. Exceptionally clean metallurgy that all smelters will covet. So just a lot of positive factors stacked up on each other.

And this is a zoom-in of that core zone. This is drilling that we did in 2021 to confirm that the core zone does what it’s supposed to do, which is get you that really quick payback. And what you’re looking at is almost 290 meters of 1% copper equivalent right from surface, very consistent, 66 meters of 2.5, same story. And if you look at the bottom row in that table, the core zone or the starter pit, if you will, is 430 million tons of M&I at almost 0.6 copper equivalent at an exceptionally low near zero strip. That in and of itself is company making, and it’s our starter pit. So can’t overstate the importance of that component of the project.

This is the graphical representation of what I was referring to earlier. So we show ourselves against all of our credible junior peers that we can find, as well as some projects in the hands of major companies. Maybe the first point to make is it’s not a super extensive long list. I would argue all of these projects will have their moment. They’re just not enough to meet the demand going forward. And then we show ourselves both from a life of mine perspective as well as in the early payback years. And what you see from a life of mine perspective is kind of right in the center of the pack from a grade perspective, but the strip ratio is the best in the world by far. And when you put those two things together, which is what you should do on a strip adjusted grade basis, right at the top of the curve, along with Barrick’s Riko Dik in Pakistan. That is a phenomenally important aspect of the company.

Now, I should point out as well that all of the copper equivalencies that we do in this deck, and I’ve mentioned to you to date, are done at our 2022 feasibility pricing, which was three sixty copper, $1,700 gold, $14 moly, $22 an ounce silver. If you recalculate those copper equivalencies today, the 0.44 is north of 0.5. The 0.66 is on its way to 0.8 copper equivalent. So again, the move in gold prices predominantly over the last few years has been a massive move and advantage for the project. Others will have similar advantages as you if they’re polymetallic. But because of our kind of almost 50/50 split, it’s meant much more to us and to the economics of the project.

And I believe you see that on this next slide. In blue is the output of that feasibility study that we did in 2022. And again, I’ll let those commodity prices sink in. It wasn’t that long ago, but they’ve certainly gotten quite dated. So three sixty copper a pound, $1,700 an ounce gold, et cetera. Also done at a Canadian 80 cent dollar, which is no longer the world that we live in. And at the time, an NPV of 2.3 billion Canadian, really good IRRs and payback years. And the project was, as I said, very good in 2022. It’s now fantastic.

You can put yourself where you want to on that sensitivity chart on the right. I personally don’t believe you will see any copper mines built for less than five fifty a pound. And the longer the gold price stays elevated, you’re seeing long-term consensus averages continue to drift forward. But to us, it certainly feels like a $10 billion NPV project, and continuing to drift towards the bottom right is phenomenally valuable.

It’s worth pointing out that NPV is almost the wrong metric for these long life assets. In that NPV at an 8% discount rate, we’re really only benefiting from the first 12 years of mine life. Those other years, they all matter. They just get melted away from a discounting perspective. So this is a hugely valuable asset, and you see that in the IRR and payback metrics. You never really see numbers that high for big mining projects, big copper projects. There is a large capital slug that you have to get over on the front end. But given that core zone that we have and that exceptionally quick payback, not only do we get over that CapEx hurdle, we then amass a tremendous amount of cash flow in those early years.

This is, again, given the limitations that I mentioned from an NPV perspective, perhaps a better way to look at it. It’s just a cash flow chart year by year. The shorter bars and, I can’t quite see it, but the shorter line are that feasibility price deck from 2022. The higher bars and the higher lines are run at a new kind of consensus that we formed. And what you can see is in those early years now, we’re talking about almost $2 billion Canadian of after-tax cash flow, and then it’s $1.2 billion a year thereafter. It’s a hugely valuable cash engine.

I’ll touch on a little bit of the infrastructure picture. It’s an important piece to talk about. We don’t have very long in these sessions, but I’ll try to do it justice. If you think back to this project kind of last decade, there were certain things that needed to improve for it to really hit its stride. One is last decade, there were better things in the world to do than 0.4, 0.45 copper equivalent mines. Now they’re the best of what’s left. Certainly commodity prices have been an engine for that. And second, the infrastructure picture in the Yukon needed to improve. And whilst every i is not dotted and every t is not crossed, there’s been significant movement and benefit on some of those aspects.

Excuse me. For us, infrastructure means a few things, road, port, and then power. The road, as you can see, if you can see our logo there, it’s about 200 kilometers to get to the highway in Carmacks. Some of that road exists today as a public road, and then the rest of it is kind of in trail format. It needs to be extended, flattened, improved and finished. So that’s part of our environmental assessment and ultimately part of our CapEx estimate that’s already in there.

The Port of Skagway is where concentrate has been shipped out historically from the Yukon until a couple of years ago when the Minto mine was producing, and it’s on its way hopefully to producing again in the near term, and that’s where we would truck our concentrate out to any smelter we choose going forward. And I guess one point I would make, again, infrastructure, the remoteness of the Yukon does get brought up from time to time fairly, but we’re talking about trucks on a road, on a highway system, access to port not that far away. Ultimately, I would take our infrastructure challenges over a lot of the projects that are out there in the world of a similar scale.

And then the potential game changer is on the power side. So right now, our base case scenario is LNG. It works. It works exceptionally well based on the economics I showed you earlier. There are trucks of LNG coming into the Yukon all the time. The concept, and I emphasize the word concept, a few years ago that is now taking major strides forward, is to connect the grid in the Yukon with the grid in British Columbia. Again, from concept several years ago, it’s taken major strides forward. The federal government has given the Yukon $40 million to take that to feasibility level. The Yukon government has contributed another 13, so there’s $53 million going to put real work into that initiative.

And in the fall of 2025, Prime Minister Carney referred it to his major projects office. There’s only 15 things countrywide in Canada that have been referred to that office across all sectors, and in essence called it a project of national significance in doing so. And then more recently, our Energy and Mines minister in Canada announced five priority transmission lines. This was one of the five, so there’s a lot of momentum building. And in my view, it’s the solution that the Yukon needs from a long-term perspective. They are struggling with their current power needs in the winter. I don’t see new mines tucking into that current infrastructure, so they need a long-term solution, and looks like this is the one they wanna pursue. So again, in the last two years, tremendous momentum. I think if we fast-forward another 18 to 24 months, we’ll see continued progress on this file. And I think, with all bias aside, we are a catalyst to helping that happen as a potential long-term offtaker of that power.

I mentioned earlier we’re going through the environmental assessment phase in the Yukon. This was a huge endeavor, 24,000 page submission to our regulator. Huge accomplishment for our team. I would argue that, if not the most, amongst the most amount of science that’s been put forth towards a project anywhere in the country, let alone the Yukon. And now we’re in the normal back and forth stages of engaging with our regulator, the early phases of answering follow-on questions, up until a panel gets struck. Well, once that panel is formed, we go into the technical analysis phase. So I guess the upshot of that is where we expect it to be at this point, and looking forward to presenting a project that I think can do a lot of good for the Yukon and for Yukoners, as well as Canadians. We have a material impact on the GDP of the Yukon, depending on the prices you use, forecasting going forward, it can almost be a doubling of the GDP of the Yukon. So it’s a very important project, and we look forward to advocating for it.

So that’s the pitch. As I said earlier, quite advanced. The project was good and very good in 2021 when Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi came in. It’s all that more advanced, and the commodity prices have been a massive boom. The backdrop for us in terms of advancing a project like this in Canada has never been better in my career. I legitimately believe we’ve gone from a federal government that was asking why about mining and now is asking why not. There’s definitely major hurdles we have to kinda clear in the next couple of years. But the value of the project on the other side is fantastic. And as we de-risk, there’s plenty of examples in Canada where once you get over that major social license, major permitting hurdle, you can trade at pretty fantastic multiples. And if you apply any of those multiples to the NPVs I showed you earlier, there’s a bright future for us going forward.

So that’s the overview. Appreciate your time and attention first thing in the morning, and have a great conference. Hopefully, I’ve left a couple minutes, looks like I have, for questions, so happy to field them.

Thanks, Sandeep. I think you’ve timed that very well. Looks like a fantastic project. We’ve got a couple of minutes, as Sandeep said, if anyone’s got any questions in the room.

Good morning, Sandeep. Morning. Good to see you. Are you allowed to talk about other suitors that have been up to the property to see you?

No. [laughs] Look, I think we’ve got a phenomenal project. It’s one that we share openly with folks that are interested in reviewing it. We believe it’s a project that can attract major support into the Yukon. Obviously, we’ve got some credible people on our shareholder roster right now. But no, we don’t get into specifics of any of that kind of nature. Suffice it to say, my career has been in that space. I know when we’ve got an important asset, and I feel like we’ve got one that fits. Right now, our focus is on de-risking that asset. We’ve taken the dilution hit. As I mentioned earlier, we have a strong treasury. We’ve taken the dilution hit as shareholders. I’m a large shareholder. We wanna put that value to work, that money to work, and get to the other side of our pretty major milestones. And we think that’s what’s in the best interest of shareholders for now.

Thank you. Any other questions? Just one at the back of the room.

Yeah. How long until the road’s done, and how long until you start building the mill?

Yeah, look, the questions were about timing to construction. Look, the road is part of our assessment. It’s a road to our project. What part of the road is called the Casino Road. So it makes sense to assess those, if you will, together. There’s no point building a road to a project until you know there’s license, if you will, for a project on the other side. So those things will get ironed out in the process that we’re in now. And then, yeah, construction is beyond that, obviously. So right now, our focus is on the major de-risking step. We know we have a very valuable asset. The market, I think, probably is waiting for that social license to develop before giving us credit for it. And so that’s the major step in front of us, and I think that’s the one that creates the most amount of value or amongst the most amount of value for our shareholders.

Great. I think that’s us out of time. Sandeep, thank you very much for an excellent presentation. Thank you. I’m sure others can catch up afterwards for questions if they need to.

Yeah, absolutely. We’re around for the next few days. Have a great conference. Thank you. [audience applauding]