Kuya Silver Corporation

Kuya Silver Corporation

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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptApril 28, 2026

Kyle Nagarkar

Before we get started, just a quick note that the replay of today's webinar will be available after the event, don't worry if you need to step away. Without further ado, I'll hand things over to David.

David, the floor is yours.

David Stein

Thanks, Kyle. As we ramp up production and start to report meaningful financial results, the idea is that we want to start doing these earnings calls regularly, well, quarterly.

This is the first one. We are still working out the kinks, and there'll be many more in the future.

I'm very pleased to do this one and sort of get the ball rolling, to speak. We put out two press releases last week.

One was our Q1 operations update, and the second one was the quarterly earnings from Q4. Because we're doing the year-end audited financials, that takes a bit longer, so that's why the Q4 ends up being in April for us.

In about a month, we'll be doing this again, which will be our Q1, and that will be towards the end of May. We're going to be jumping right back on this in the next few weeks to do another update for you.

We will be making many forward-looking statements, please review our important notices either now or you can go onto the website and look at our presentation at your leisure. Just a couple of quick introduction slides just in case there are any new investors on the line today.

We're a silver mining company with our flagship project, Bethania in Peru. That's mostly what we're going to be talking about today.

We do have a couple of other silver projects: the Silver Kings project in Northern Ontario, and the JV with Sumow Holding, which is in Saudi Arabia, which is called Umm Hadid, which is also a silver project with gold. In Northern Ontario, we've got silver with cobalt.

In Bethania, we have silver, lead, zinc, gold, but mostly silver. In actually all of our projects, but especially at Bethania, we're heavily weighted to silver.

We love silver. In terms of some of the, I think, key highlights about Kuya and what makes us different from our peers—well, we don't have very many peers, first of all.

There are very few silver mining companies that exist publicly traded today. Of them, most of them are sort of around 50%, 60% silver by revenue, which is okay, but we've got 90%, and that makes Kuya up there among the top silver mining companies in terms of our exposure to silver.

The Bethania mine, we're very blessed, it's high-grade. The byproducts do not form a significant part of our overall revenue, although they are worth recovering, so that is why we get so much of our revenue from silver.

De-risked profile, I think your biggest risk with junior mining especially is the time value of money, the fact that we're already producing, we've already done most of the heavy lifting for you, and now it's a matter of ramping up. We've got a fully permitted mine in a mining-friendly jurisdiction.

We also have a very, very healthy cash balance, which we said in our last press release, $27 million US, it's actually more than $30 [million?] Canadian, and no debt.

We're low risk on the operating side, we're also low risk on the financial side. The multi-year growth plan, even though we're talking about short-term quarters here on this call, focusing on that, the long term is really what's exciting, and I think the reason why you're investing in Kuya, the reason why I invest in Kuya is the long-term growth plan and the fact that we have such a long runway ahead of us to grow the Bethania asset is very, very exciting.

Capital discipline, no near-term need for financing. Certainly for the plans for Bethania, it's now fully funded for pretty much anything we can think of doing with that project going forward, especially these silver prices.

Then the valuation upside: we're still not getting really any value for future cash flow for this company, and I'm not going to talk much about that on the call, but feel free to ask me about it later. I have lots of views about it.

I'm a former analyst myself, and I think that there's huge, huge upside when the market recognizes our cash flow. Last intro slide is our 100-100 growth plan.

I think when you really look at junior mining companies, there's a sweet spot out there that does exist. It's very difficult to achieve, but when you've got a company that can grow production and resources at the same time, that is the sweet spot where you have companies that do good or okay to companies that do exceptionally well and outperform their peers.

I was lucky to find a few of those companies early on in my career, and I feel like Kuya is in that position today. We're growing the Bethania mine right now, ramping it up.

We're going to talk about that with the quarter. Then we're going to continue to grow it.

Next year, we have plans to double production again to 700 tonnes per day from 350, which we expect to exit this year at. Then we can potentially grow it even further down 2029 or 2030.

I think we're going to have continual growth probably for the next 5 years or so in terms of silver production from this flagship asset of ours. Then what goes along beside that at the same pace is the exploration.

Now we've really put forth an aggressive exploration program: 20,000 meters this year, mostly in the second half of the year. There's going to be a lot of drilling, a lot of news, especially in Q3, Q4.

That's going to be very, very exciting because as we build our ounces, that further accentuates the value of the company as we grow production at the same time. That's very exciting.

Let's get into the quarter now. In Q1, we reported our Q1 operational update as well as our Q4 financials.

With the Q1 update, we had again another record quarter of production. We should have a record pretty much every quarter as we're ramping up.

Most importantly, we did exit the quarter at 100 tonnes per day. We have been able to maintain that so far in April and so far in Q2.

That'll be the platform for us to grow again to do the next jump in production. We're very, very happy about that.

That's a really nice amount of production that generates quite a lot of revenue for us. We'll be able to speak more towards the cash flow when we report our Q1 in a little less than a month.

In terms of how our production stats all break out, we presented this table in the press release. Some of the highlights include the revenue we're generating.

Just remember that that's offsetting all of our expenses and even some of our corporate G&A as well. That puts us in a really, really nice position.

Of course, that number should grow every quarter. We don't even need silver prices to go up because we should be producing more silver next quarter and the following quarter and then in Q4 again.

That's something that should become more and more meaningful as the year goes on. That's coming from just under 20,000 oz sold.

$82 selling price was our average for the quarter. We got 90% 91% of our revenue from silver.

One error we did find on this chart after we published it was the metal processed there says 14,000. We were missing one of our batches of silver-lead concentrate in that number, it was actually over 20 a little over 20,000.

That matches up then with the other numbers. We're not going to update this time until maybe at the end of the month when we put our financials out.

It's not really material. We did have somebody point that out, and I wanted to recognize that.

All right, the year-end financial summary. This seems like ancient history now, but things were going well at the end of the quarter, at the end of 2025, and then they got even better in January.

This is exciting. We did get some revenue in Q4.

Obviously, we had way more in Q1. We ended the year with $9.3 million in cash, and almost $10 million in working capital.

We then did the financing, which was really predicated on the mill acquisition. That went really well, and now we're sitting with around $27 million of cash.

That's a really, really strong position to be in. Given what's happened with the share price recently, the volatility, which I think is largely related to the Iran war, I think the valuation of the stock, especially when you consider how much cash we have, has gotten pretty low.

That to me looks like something that needs to turn around. That's to some degree up to us as well to deliver the results, and we're planning on doing that.

The financial strength and the outlook: cash position already mentioned, that's in US dollars, don't forget. The Camilla acquisition, we are expecting to close that soon.

We're in the final throes of the due diligence there. It's taken a little bit longer than I hoped, but it is well, well in progress, and there's no significant concern there on our end.

We've increased our land package and also increased the drilling program. You may recall that we talked about 4,500 hectare land package.

We've added to that in 2025 and early 2026. We now have over 5,600 hectares around the Bethania mine.

We will be doing a lot of drilling this year starting basically in Q2 and then throughout the rest of the year. The 350 tonnes by the year-end, that's our phase 1.

We are still on track to complete that by the end of the year, which is not that far away now. It's almost May 1st, we're looking at 7 more months, and we should be there.

The ramp is the new ramp that we have talked about in the past, and we had a press release about it in the second half of 2025. That is going to be a key part of our ramp-up to 350 tonnes per day, and we'll again talk more about that and give more details about that in the coming quarters.

In terms of upcoming news and catalysts, we've got our Q1 financial results, which will come out in late May, so that gets back on sort of the regular quarterly cadence of financial reporting. We are planning on issuing more detailed guidance at that point in time.

We have said we with with our with our with our press releases last week that we're on track to get the 350 tonnes by the end of this year, but we'll provide more details on that in the next set of press releases or press release at the end of Q1, or with the at the end of May, I should say. Bethania exploration, that is going to be very, very exciting.

We can't wait to get results out into the market there. We're drilling very low-hanging fruit, extensions of the veins that we're already mining.

We're very confident we have good results coming there, although, we we've we're still in the early days of that drill program. The nice thing is once we get that first press release out, we should be able to put another one an update out every 2 to 3 months, probably for many, many years, cuz because I just because we've approved the 20,000 meters in 2026 doesn't mean we're going to stop drilling.

We're likely going to keep on at a similar pace, if not even greater, in 2027. Then all the other, kind of things that we have hanging out there that are frankly adding value, we do want to talk about them and report them to the market, are the Camilla plant closing, Silver Kings—we have been doing some work in the background there, we want to, update the market on that later this quarter—and also Umm Hadid.

We are starting a new drill program there in Saudi Arabia with our partners' support, and we'll have results on that probably in the next few months. That's kind of the presentation.

Before we go to the Q&A, though, I did want to answer one question that came to me by email from an analyst and, I believe, a shareholder in Germany about our energy exposure. This has been a question that I've been getting fairly regularly since the end of February when the Iran conflict/war started.

Let's talk about it. I think in Peru, we're in a very good position.

We're very fortunate that Peru has a diversified and relatively disconnected energy industry, disconnected from the global crude oil markets and especially the Middle Eastern crude markets. There's really no exposure there.

In terms of electricity, Peru is a self-sustaining electricity producer. They produce all of their electricity with domestic sources.

About 60% of that is hydro and renewables, and 40% is from their own domestic natural gas production. Power costs in Peru tend to be in line with global average, and it's not tied to the Middle East oil market.

Liquid fuel and crude imports are largely coming from the other South American oil producers like Ecuador next door, Brazil, and Colombia. In terms of our specific exposure, we have three different jobs in the value chain that need energy.

One is the plant. The biggest one is the plant, and that's serviced by the national power grid, which gives us lower costs and stable pricing.

Remember, that's not tied to global fuel prices whatsoever. Secondly is the truck fleet.

We do a lot of trucking because we're trucking between the mine and the mill, and then we truck concentrate as well, which is a smaller portion of our trucking costs. Haul trucks in Peru are either diesel or natural gas, and there's kind of that creates a local competition where essentially one can't raise their prices too much because then that becomes uncompetitive.

The vehicles can also be retrofitted to switch between diesel and natural gas as well. We have not seen a significant increase in truck costs so far.

That's something that we would expect to be controlled as well. There's going to be general inflation, we expect that in everything over periods of years, but we're not seeing significant exposure to the Iran conflict with the truck fleet, with Camilla.

Even with our mine power, the diesel price hasn't gone up that much. Again, that may be because Peru is buying oil from its neighbors, not from the Middle East, and they do have some of their own refining capacity in country as well.

In general, we're not seeing big increases. Even if the oil price went to $200, really our only direct exposure would be with the diesel at the mine, which is the smallest of the three uses.

We'll try and put some more numbers on that when we report results in future quarters. I wanted to answer that question qualitatively for now because I do get that question a lot.

With that, Kyle, I think we could open it up for questions.

Kyle Nagarkar

Great. Can you all hear me just fine?

David Stein

Yep.

Kyle Nagarkar

Perfect. Thank you so much for the update, David.

I think now I would like to invite Jake on for any questions, and then following Jake, we'll have Brian on. Jake, if you're in the room, please come back on stage, and we're ready for your questions.

Jake Sekelsky

Thanks, Kyle, and thanks, David, for taking the questions. Just starting on the Camilla plant and the planned expansion there post-closing, I'm curious, are there any long lead-time items that you still need either for refurbishment or to reach that higher 300 to 350 tonne per day rate post-closing, or are you pretty much ready to go from a procurement perspective?

David Stein

Look, in general, the equipment that we're buying that's on our list, we have our shopping list, and the equipment is all relatively small stuff that can be sourced domestically. We do not expect any significantly long lead-time items.

Long lead-time items in mining and processing tend to be if you need something custom-made, and often that's overseas, and there's nothing that we need that would fall into that category.

Jake Sekelsky

That's helpful. Then just on the ramp of throughput at Bethania this year, can you just touch on a few development milestones we should look out for over the next few quarters as you ramp toward that 350 tonne a day target, and maybe the cadence of the throughput ramp over the next few quarters if possible?

David Stein

Sure. Again, let me emphasize that we do plan on giving more precise guidance about this at the end of May when we report our Q1.

We will provide more details about this. Again, I can answer your question qualitatively.

We have found as we are kind of updating our mine model and our ramp-up model that the ramp is becoming a real centerpiece of the mine expansion here, the mine growth to 350 tonnes per day, the new ramp. That's something that wasn't in our PEA of a few years ago.

The PEA had a design to ramp up essentially using the existing infrastructure. We've really taken a bit of a pivot to focusing on the ramp to get more tonnes out of the mine and really essentially allow us to decommission or maybe we won't formally decommission, but we won't need to use the other adits to move material out of the mine.

What that means is that we probably have less growth in Q2, Q3. It's going to be more related to opening up more working faces and getting more development done.

Then a bigger jump in Q4 once we complete the ramp. I'm sure people will want updates on the ramp and how that's going.

We plan on giving that. We're sort of in the process of just starting the ramp commissioning now, or in the next few weeks.

Jake Sekelsky

Makes sense. That's all on my end.

Thanks again.

David Stein

Yeah.

Kyle Nagarkar

Great. Thank you so much, Jake.

Brian, if you don't mind jumping on stage.

Brian Leni

Hi. I guess continuing on with Jake's question as far as the timing on the tonnes per day side, firstly, as it relates to the ramp, I thought that there's been some possibility that you might outsource or contract that work.

Can you kind of tell us where you are in that process, and if you're doing so, what kind of feedback or what have you learned at this point?

David Stein

That's a great question. We are looking to contract that job out, and we're in the final stages of awarding that work.

What that means is it'll allow our crews, our staff that we have hired that work for Kuya, or our subsidiary down there, Minera Toro de Plata, they can focus on production and development while the contractor focuses exclusively on the ramp. We're quite excited about that as a way to optimize our development here.

Of course, it's something that we can easily fund now with our strong cash position. Whereas maybe a year ago, we wouldn't have been able to do that.

That's very exciting. In terms of feedback, look, the Peruvian mining industry is busy.

There's lots of other gold and copper mines as well as silver who are all enjoying high prices and wanting to do jobs like extra development and drilling and all this stuff. We do have to compete with everyone else in the Peruvian mining sector.

That's probably slowed us down a little bit, but we are, as I said, in the final stages there, and we're confident that that job will get started very soon.

Brian Leni

How does that process work? Obviously, you're saying, \"We'd like this completed by the start of Q4.\" Do they give you pushback and say that's challenging, or have they given you feedback that says, \"We can accommodate that timeline\"?

David Stein

No, as long as we get it started pretty soon, there should be no issue there.

Brian Leni

Okay. Then I guess I think you spoke to this, and probably you spoke to it as clearly as you're going to, but I'm going to nonetheless see if I can nudge you further.

You talked about providing further guidance as far as the rate in which you are going to be increasing the tonnes per day, but I guess my understanding, and, as I say, I think you've already supported that, is that it's quite modest in Q2 and Q3, and then the slope steepens rather significantly in Q4. Just in a general, qualitative way, is that accurate?

David Stein

Yes. Look, part of the reason why I don't want to give anything more detailed than that right now is because we've got a bunch of new senior hires, and they're all in the room with our COO working on updating the mine plan, which is what we want them to do, and then we want them to buy into it.

That's a real positive process that's going on right now. Look, yeah, at a very, very top-level view, that's how I personally see the ramp-up going, but we'll be able to provide more details and more support on that, yeah, again, in a couple of weeks' time.

Brian Leni

Okay. Your grades have been a bit, I'll say volatile,

David Stein

and

Brian Leni

I know that there's been times where you did quite a bit of stockpiled material, other times where it was maybe more of a mixture. As we go through 2026, how would you kind of guide us to look at what we should see in terms of average grade?

David Stein

Sure. Let me explain the volatility in the last few quarters first because it is actually different reasons why the grade was lower in Q4 versus Q1.

In Q4, silver price started moving up, and we decided to process some of the historical stockpiles. This is material that was mined before we even acquired the Bethania mine.

It's been sitting outside for 10 years weathering and therefore is partially oxidized. There's some value there.

It's 3, 4, 5 oz per tonne, these various piles that we have. We decided to try processing some of those, and we did.

That was in the Q4 results. Lower recoveries, of course, because of the oxidized material and also because of the grade.

There's a strong correlation between grade and recovery. That'll be the same with pretty much any mine in the world.

Then on top of that, the oxidation hurts the recovery a little bit. Then in this quarter, we didn't process any of that historical oxidized material.

We did take some lower-grade development material and sort of that maybe 3, 4 years ago we might have thought of as waste, and we reclassified it as ore because the silver price is a lot higher, and it was worth processing. Essentially the grades in Q1 are sort of a blend between, let's call it, more of our resource-grade type material and then some other lower-grade material that we're picking up as we dig these tunnels underground, right?

That you go through might be 4, 5, 6 oz per tonne. It's worth processing that.

It's worth blending that in with your higher-grade material because you can make money at those grades. Of course, a lot of mines, what we consider to be low grade, that's their normal resource grade.

That's another factor. Anyway, that's what's happened in Q4, Q1.

In terms of going forward, Brian, I think there'll be also a combination, especially in the next couple quarters, of additional development material because we're still doing a lot of development. We have to do that to get all the working faces ready to produce 350 tonnes per day, there's still a lot of development going on.

That creates the potential for lower-grade material that we might want to mix in with our sort of stoping average-grade material that we have. That's what I would say is that we should evolve or we should trend upwards towards our resource grades by next year, but this year will continue to be volatile because of all the development that's going on.

We're not going to process stuff that we lose money on, let's just be clear about that. Anything we process, we're going to be making money on.

Brian Leni

Last question for me. The Camilla processing plant is 150 tonnes per day.

Can you walk me through what you need to do and, I guess, what your comfort level in your ability to execute on that plan to get it to 350 tonnes per day, or essentially to get it to match your increased production?

David Stein

Sure. We're we're very confident.

One thing to keep in mind is that the scale of the the scale of the processing and mining that we're working with is very small compared to a lot of other, mines in Peru and and around the world. The reason we can do things at such a small scale and make so much money is because of the high grades that we have, so it's not a bad thing, but that's just the reality.

Is to go from 150 to 350 is actually it sounds like a lot percentage-wise, but it's actually not a very big job. It's, it's still a very small plant in the grand scheme of things.

Specifically, what we need to do is we need to add some milling, one, I believe one new mill there, small one, that's easy easy to easy to procure, flotation tanks, and we also are adding drying equipment there to reduce the humidity of the concentrate. Those are the main things, and then you have to basically hook everything together with piping and pumps and electricity, it's honestly not that complex of a job, and we're very confident that, we can get it done pretty quickly.

Brian Leni

Okay. Very good.

Thanks. That's it for me.

Kyle Nagarkar

Perfect. Thank you so much, Jake and Brian.

There have been a few questions in the chat, David, if you still have some time, I'd love to ask you a few more.

David Stein

Sure.

Kyle Nagarkar

Have Christian on the line as well, just to let you know.

David Stein

Okay. Great.

Kyle Nagarkar

Mark has a question here: \"You've talked about 5,000 meters of drilling underground in the first half, 5,000 meters in the second half, and 10,000 meters of surface in the second half. Would you provide an update on the drilling program, and can we expect drilling results to roll out in Q2?\"

David Stein

Sure. Getting the drill rigs mobilized did take a little bit longer, but we now have them.

It's quite possible we will have results later in Q2. It depends on how quickly we can get some of the assays back and all that.

Certainly compared to 2021 when the last time we did a drill program in Peru, the industry is a bit busier. There's more drilling going on, the labs are going to be busier, but we're going to push very hard to get results out soon because we want to see them just as much as you do.

Then as I said in the intro, I think we'll have a press release out every 2 to 3 months after that with drilling updates both from underground and from the surface program, which will start in the second half. The results will be very much weighted towards the second half of the year, with probably at least 15,000 meters being drilled in the second half of the year.

We'd like to get that first batch of results out as quickly as possible.

Kyle Nagarkar

Thank you. Sergio's saying, \"Congratulations on the great quarter, and thank you for the updates.

How does it impact the plan if the Camilla plant acquisition doesn't go through as intended?\"

David Stein

Look, this whole time we've been processing at Camilla, and it's been great. We have a good working relationship with them, and we get good results.

They more or less listen to our advice, and sometimes we can make changes to improve the process even before we even own it. It's been going well, and I think our plan would be to continue to use Camilla regardless of whether we close the acquisition or not.

Again, we really do believe that we're going to close this pretty soon. With that being said, it is a locally competitive market to do processing in the area that we are.

There's quite a few other mills, and that's always an option if we need additional capacity.

Kyle Nagarkar

David, would you mind going back to the 100-100 plan slide, please?

David Stein

Sure.

Kyle Nagarkar

Mark's just wondering if you could please go back to the 100-100 and a high-level view of the path to matching resources with anticipated production.

David Stein

Sure. Just let that firetruck go by.

I think as we go through 2027, I think right now we have enough resources to to mine at 350 tonnes per day for many years. Our our PEA had a 7-year mine life to it, for an underground high-grade vein mine, that's a very actually a very long mine life, cuz normally it's shorter and you're you're kind of adding as you adding reserves as you go.

That's more that's usually how a underground vein mine works. Of course, we we we know we can do a lot better than that, and obviously we've got the the the money now and and and soon as well the cash flow to drill aggressively and to to expand resources.

Let's look at 2027. 2027, we're going to be we we've got a plan to expand Bethania to 700 tonnes per day.

If you work out our grades, silver mining or that we expect to mine, that would be something in the order of 3 million oz per year. We probably want to get the resource up to, somewhere between the total resources of which some of them are going to be, measured, indicated, and and inferred, some some category some division of the three categories.

I think the total resources we'd like to see is at least 30 million, and may may, maybe more. 30 million oz, and then, heading towards 50 and eventually 100 million oz, right?

I I think as long as we're seeing the signs that we're heading towards, 30 million plus, then we we should be able to we wouldn't worry too much about mining 700 tonnes per day. Beyond that, and can we get that by, the end of 2027?

Absolutely. We're going to do a lot of drilling this year, and as I said, we'll we'll be continuing into 2027.

It's just, likely it'll be more it'll be more driven by the cash flow of the mine, the budget, and maybe even we go more than 20,000 oz next year, we'll have to see. Based on our historical discovery rates and based on all the silver vein systems both at Bethania and also the the satellite vein systems, we're very, very confident that we can get get there in the next, year to 18 months by the time we need that resource for the expanded production of 3 million oz a year, which wouldn't be until early 2028 or beginning of 2028.

In terms of going beyond that to, let's say, 5 million or or more, we will need to jump the resources up even more, I think, to kind of 50 to 100 million oz. I think anywhere in that range, we can probably comfortably be looking to produce 5 million oz a year.

Then that would be an expansion of the Bethania plant at that point, which, which we before we were going to acquire Camilla, remember we were going to do it all with Bethania. Now Camilla gives us a bit of a bridge where we can, do the first few years of production with Camilla, and then eventually move the production more towards Bethania, or maybe entirely towards Bethania.

That would be the idea there. Again, I think we've got plenty of time to do that exploration and and get those resources before we'll need it on the production on the on the processing side.

Kyle Nagarkar

Thank you for that, David. Could you discuss your operating costs and how you might expect those to improve, particularly on a per-unit basis, as you ramp production?

David Stein

Sure. One thing is we're not reporting all-in sustaining costs yet because we're not classified as being in commercial production.

That's something that will happen between now and the end of the ramp-up. Actually, we do plan on addressing that in the next update as well at the end of May.

That is something we do have our eye on as a management team is when do we declare commercial production, and at that point, then we start reporting all of our costs as we essentially write off the costs, and then that becomes our all-in sustaining costs, or AISC. That's something I wouldn't expect us to do in the next couple quarters, but definitely before the end of the year, we have our eye on that.

I can't really give any more guidance than that right now. When we come out with our Q1 financials, if you see on a cash flow basis that we roughly broke even, just hypothetically, then obviously that means our all-in sustaining costs was $80 an ounce, which is very high, right?

At least we're not losing money. The reason is that when you're starting up a mine, you have a lot of fixed costs, and of course there's variable costs, which the variable costs is what you use per tonne to produce each tonne of rock and each ounce of silver.

Then your fixed costs are just fixed no matter what happens. Your fixed costs are very high in the beginning, and your variable costs are low, and then what happens is as you produce more, your variable costs keep going up, your fixed costs stay more or less the same, and so your overall cost per ounce or cost per tonne go down.

That's what we expect. We know that our numbers from the PEA for 4 and 1/2 years ago now are going to be out of date.

I think our average all-in sustaining in the PEA at a $25 silver price was $12 an ounce over the life of mine. It's going to be higher than that, no question, but it's still I think going to be very low relative to the industry, and we'll be able to say more about that in the coming months.

Kyle Nagarkar

Great. We've discussed the drill program underway already, we've also discussed how exploration fits into the bigger picture beyond phase 1, but what are the results you're most eager to see come back this year?

David Stein

Look, I think I'm eager to see everything, honestly, cuz it's all good. It's all has the potential to add huge value.

I think, obviously drilling the veins at depth, the ones that we're mining right now, 12 de Mayo, Española, Victoria, that's kind of the low-hanging fruit, we're expecting them to be good, but at the same time, adding ounces and adding resource that we know we can mine very soon adds a lot of NPV to the project, because the time value of money. There's not a lot of time to wait before we could produce those.

Those are potentially very, very valuable. I think as we drill off to the east towards the Hilltop Zone, that, again, because it's on the Bethania property, the Santa Elena mining concession where the mine is, gives us huge, huge upside as we start to define potential resources on the eastern side, on the eastern flank of the mine.

Then all the regional drilling, very excited about as well because we know these veins are at surface, we know they've been mined in the past by various artisanal miners. Again, we're very, very confident that there's something special, something potentially big in at least a few of those targets.

Hopefully, all six of them are multitens of millions of ounces, but even if only two or three of them are, it's obviously huge for us. We're going to target what we think are the best ones first, and that gives us the highest chance of making a big, big splash with the surface drilling results.

I'm honestly excited about all of it. We'll obviously get the deep extension drilling, that'll come first, so that's obviously great.

Kyle Nagarkar

Mark's also wondering if you could elaborate on the maiden drilling at Umm Hadid and your plans there.

David Stein

Sure. Ourselves and our partner just approved a new drill program, which might have started already, if not very soon.

If you recall from our last press release, I do have my other slides in here, I'll just go to that slide just to talk about that. Here we are.

This is from our corporate deck, which you can download, which you can go online and get anytime on kuyasilver.com. If you look at the rectangles there with all the dots, that's the area that we're going to focus in on, where we've found a cluster of these silver-gold veins that basically come right to surface.

The current drill program is focused on a few of the best zones where are the best veins where we see the potential for intersecting structures to blow out, and really we want to build up some tonnage and obviously we know the grades there because we can see it, hundreds of grams per tonne, and sometimes into the thousands, but we really want to build tonnage there to make a more meaty project. Our geologists have, I think, a great idea with the drill plan.

It's currently being implemented now, and we'll probably have results on that sometime in the second half or later in Q3.

Kyle Nagarkar

One more question for you, David. Thank you for addressing all these questions today.

We got one more. Take this as your closing remarks, and we can wrap things up here, and you can go on with your day.

You closed Q1 with roughly $27 million in cash, and the company has said no additional financing is expected to hit phase 1. How much flexibility does that give you if timelines shift, and how does the current silver price environment factor into your capital planning?

David Stein

If you take the $27 million that we have right now and you factor in what we are planning to spend on or allocate to the Camilla acquisition, and then you also can deduct some capital for the exploration and the ramp, sort of take that out of the mine operations for the time being, then we still should have something like $10 million left over. That's if the mine breaks even.

We expect the mine to do much better than break even, then you're sort of adding to that $10 million position with whatever cash flow we can get from the mine this year. Then obviously next year is a whole different story with the potential cash flow from 1.5 million oz a year.

I think that's the best way I can answer that right now. Look, that does assume a certain level of silver price.

Right now we've got $75-ish, and we don't need that high of a price in order for us to not draw down on our cash, cuz obviously while that might be kind of a break-even price right now, as we increase production, then the break-even price drops to $60, $50, $40, below $30 eventually. That's kind of where we're heading with that.

I think the balance of risks with what the silver price is, it's not going to matter too much. Obviously, if it goes way higher, then we've got a different problem, which is how to allocate excess capital, which is a good problem to have.

Do we buy back shares, or just build a war chest to do acquisitions or whatever? That's if the silver price goes significantly higher than $100 an ounce.

Where it is today, it's not going to significantly affect our plans, I don't think, for the next 6 to 9 months. Then after that, it's really a cash flow story from the mine anyway.

Kyle Nagarkar

I always appreciate your outlook on the prices of metals. Where do you see silver ending 2026?

David Stein

Unfortunately, I see silver and gold have been tied heavily to what's going on with Iran, and that's very difficult to predict. My guess is that it drags out longer than people think, and so we're kind of probably trading in this range.

I don't know if it'll still be that way at the end of the year, but definitely for the next 3 to 6 months, I think we'll be in this, call it $60 to $80 range for silver, and something kind of similar range-bound trading for gold. That's my best guess as to what happens.

Still very good for us. We don't need higher prices.

We've got a great project with high grades. Obviously then I think we set up for a bigger move once the market and governments kind of have to lick their wounds and print more money and kind of figure out all the implications of what's been going on this year.

I see more money printing and more inflation in the coming years, so that should be good for gold and silver.

Kyle Nagarkar

Definitely. Yes, nothing wrong with $60 to $80 silver.

David, thank you so much for this earnings call. Really appreciate it, as well as the analysts jumping on the call to ask your questions.

If you liked this format, please let us know. If you do want to request a meeting, I'll give it a few seconds here, but you can request a meeting with management with the Request Meeting button at the bottom of your screen.

The replay will be available here within the next couple of hours, keep an eye out for that if you joined a little late. Thank you so much for your time, David.

David Stein

Thank you.

Kyle Nagarkar

Have a good one, everyone. Bye.

David Stein

Bye.