Hey everyone, it's Chris from Resource Insider and I have the pleasure today of having the CEO of Meridian Mining, Gilbert Clark, who's joining us from France. And I'm excited to learn more about the company, some catalysts going forward, and recent news that's been in the markets regarding the stock. So, Gilbert, do you mind just introducing yourself and your history of your involvement in Meridian?
Sure, sure. So I'm the CEO of Meridian Mining. I first became involved in the project back in, gosh, June 2018. It was part of a portfolio of projects owned where a private equity fund was invested in it.
Okay. And then I left the private equity fund in, gosh, when did I leave it, January 2020, to kind of focus on this project, to be honest. Which was good. And then we restructured the company. We decided to focus on copper and gold. And then after that, we did our first raising in July. I think we closed it at the start of July in 2020. And then subsequent to that, we actually acquired a project called Cabasal, which is in Mato Grosso. And then in November of, I think some of the viewers will remember, in November of 2020, we did a capital raise with the subscribers to Resource Insider.
It was done at 20 cents a share. So I guess since then we've done an 850% increase in share price.
It's had a good run since then.
It's had a, we've had a reasonable run.
And now we've, so we took the project, we did a PA in 2023. We did a PFS in 2025. We've done resource upgrades as part of the work stream for the DFS. It will be publishing in Q4. And we just recently listed the company on the main board of the London Stock Exchange. We actually IPO'd that on Friday, which is...
Yeah, I was going to ask about that because you recently IPO'd and you raised some money on the London Stock Exchange as well. Was there a reason for targeting London in particular? Because I guess typically a lot of mining companies have been going on the NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange recently.
It's quite interesting. So last year, the latter part of 2024 and then into last year, 2025, we had robust share growth. But I think we went from, say, 30 cents up to $2. But for me, it was an okay performance, but there was something missing in the performance of the equities because I could look at comparative projects and the valuation assigned to a comparative project and it just wasn't matching up. There was an underperformance. And in the latter part of, just after June of last year, we'd been marketing in Australia for a while and I went out there, had a chat with the bankers out there and they said, 'Oh, we want you to, you've got to bring 60% of the equities or thereabouts, get them domiciled into Australia, so get indexation of the securities.' And the light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Ah, I bet you were not eligible for passive.' That was the miss, the passive buying by indexation. Spoke to a couple of the Canadian banks, they went, 'No, you're not eligible. You're a British company, you're a foreign issuer with a foreign asset.' And then we looked at NASDAQ US, but just the cost of insurance and legals for a non-cash flow company was too high. But then we thought, 'Well, why am I looking at other jurisdictions when really the second largest financial market in the world, I think second largest, second largest Western, we don't really know, it goes in China sometimes, is England.' And we actually are a British company. And even in the Canadian space of copper gold developers, we're one of the few, one of the real, the true copper gold developers. Not that there aren't companies out there developing, but from some of them maybe there's just a speculation. And I thought, 'Okay, we already got a good name in the TSX with strong liquidity there, but we could get greater cumulative liquidity by going into London.' So we approached the LSE. We had a sponsor, a full suite of British banks, Berenberg. It's almost a unique selling point in some ways because there's not as many mining companies on the London Stock Exchange compared to the TSX and now the New York Stock Exchange.
But in that copper gold developer space, we are one of the few worldwide on any exchange. So going on to one that had such robust and deep financials as the London investment or the United Kingdom investment community, what seemed just a natural thing to do.
Yeah. No, like you said, you're one of the few copper gold development projects. And I found it interesting when I was reviewing your presentation that you did your sensitivity studies based on the highest price you had was gold price at 4,000 and copper price $6 per pound, which is, you know, we're above that in the gold price and at that in the copper price, but you didn't go any higher. And then you have an NPV of 2.18 billion US and 107% internal rate of return. So I was definitely came away impressed by those numbers and perhaps the market is discounting, you know, your NPV at these current metal prices.
We've actually had this journey of valuation back from the PA. Nothing's really changed. Just for our commodity prices, we use CIBC long-term analyst consensus. For exchange rates, we use the Central Bank of Brazil.
And then we have independence. Now any company can generate fantastic IRRs and NPVs if they have an incomplete model and you put nonsense in, you get nonsense out. But what we've done at Meridian, and this goes back since Resource Insider first invested in us, we've always been pretty conservative. Really, we're using standard industry metrics. This is how it should be done. And when we were doing that sensitivity analysis, you know, there was some discussion then that gold was going to go above 4,000. We thought, you know, we're not even the high end of our valuation.
Current spot. So there's tremendous growth in our equities and more to come yet.
Yeah. And I think I saw you had around $260 million US capex. And another point I thought was relatively unique to Meridian was that you mentioned that your whole development team is in-house. So I take it you wouldn't use a contractor to build the mine and to run the mine, and you have a pretty extensive, like a lot of engineers, geos already employed.
We have all that in-house. The in-house team at the moment is focused on the feasibility studies. We have a whole team sitting in the office of our engineers, which is a SENAI Brazil group. And then for the construction EPCM, that's the only difference for that is that the procurement will be handled by us in-house by Meridian. The intent is for the mining, you know, drill and blast, haulage, that'll be from a third-party contractor.
But the engineering team, the mining engineering team, the mill team, the geo team, that's all in-house. We do that ourselves. As for how we're structuring the finance, we're not going to a financial group to advise us how to do project finance. We've built that team out internally.
Do you have a lot of people working at site already? Is your office at the site or at the nearest city? I can't remember what the nearest city is in this case.
The nearest city is a little town called São José do Xingu, which is about a four and a half hours drive west of the capital of Mato Grosso, Cuiabá. We have about 100 people there at the moment: technicians, environmental engineers, civil engineers, civil engineers actually they're based in Belo Horizonte, geologists, geophysics, administration. So we have a very, and as we finish the feasibility study, that engineering team then moves across. So all of our people will be housed in that town and the surrounding towns.
Yeah, it sounds like it'll be pretty streamlined. Do you know if it'll be like a camp operation or people will be commuting from the nearest town? In North America we have a lot of camp jobs.
No, our accommodation will be spread across the four towns. So you've got Rio Blanco, Arraial, Mirol and São José do Xingu.
Okay, great. And then also you have another deposit, St. Helena, which isn't too far away from Cabasal. I guess basically it would be a project you would develop later, and would you perhaps have synergies like using the same mill? Is that something you sort of see down the road or just...
What we're doing actually, how we're in the permitting sense, what we're doing is Cabasal is a fully independent mill operation and we got the preliminary license, so that's going down the way towards coming into production. St. Helena, we're also doing that now. We see tremendous exploration potential around St. Helena and you have to do an environmental impact assessment, social assessment, financial justification, etc. So what we're doing there is we're actually having St. Helena permit it. The intent is quite clear to permit as a second mine. But say it doesn't reach that economic mass so that it can finance the capex associated with building St. Helena, we just truck it up to Cabasal, then we have to put on a circuit. But we're very much building into the permitting of St. Helena the flexibility of success.
And even I guess your mill capacity might be a consideration. I think it mentioned that you have the option of upgrading your mill.
