McEwen Mining at Nordic Funds Conference: Strategic Expansion Insights

On Wednesday, 08 October 2025, McEwen Mining Inc. (NYSE:MUX) presented at the Nordic Funds & Mines Conference 2025, offering a strategic overview of its operations and future plans. The company highlighted its diversified asset base in gold, copper, and silver, while acknowledging the challenges of underinvestment in the mining sector. McEwen Mining emphasized its growth strategy and financial health, despite facing fluctuating commodity prices.

Key Takeaways

• McEwen Mining aims for a 73% organic production growth by 2030, focusing on gold, copper, and silver.
• The Los Azules copper project in Argentina targets first production by 2030, with a focus on sustainability.
• The company holds $54 million in cash and is considering strategic acquisitions to enhance production.
• Environmental benefits and partnerships, including those with Stellantis and Rio Tinto, are key to McEwen Copper’s strategy.
• Rob McEwen remains optimistic about the sector’s future, leveraging his extensive experience.

Financial Results

• McEwen Mining reported cash costs of approximately $1,600 per ounce and all-in costs around $1,800 per ounce.
• The company boasts a royalty portfolio with a potential $400 million valuation on its copper project.
• Preliminary financing proposals for the Los Azules project exceed $1.1 billion.

Operational Updates

• McEwen Copper’s Los Azules project increased its Measured and Indicated resources to 2 billion tons, with a contained metal increase to 15.7 billion pounds.
• Initial capital costs for Los Azules rose to $3.2 billion, while sustaining capital decreased slightly to $2.1 billion.
• The project aims for carbon neutrality by 2038, emphasizing low carbon intensity and water use.

Future Outlook

• McEwen Mining is exploring opportunities in Nevada and Canada, with promising results in gold exploration.
• In Argentina, the company received an environmental permit and identified seven exploration targets.
• The company is optimistic about increased gold production and the potential for higher gold prices.

Q&A Highlights

• Rob McEwen projected silver prices could rise significantly, following gold’s trend.
• He emphasized his alignment with shareholders, citing his $1 salary and large personal investment.
• The increasing global price of gold is attracting new investors to the sector.

In conclusion, McEwen Mining’s presentation at the Nordic Funds & Mines Conference 2025 highlighted its strategic initiatives and future growth prospects. For further details, readers are invited to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Nordic Funds & Mines Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: Now it’s time for our next two speakers, actually, from McEwen Inc. and McEwen Copper. It’s a great pleasure to welcome Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman and indeed owner of McEwen Inc., and Michael Meding. Please enter the stage. The floor is yours.

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: All right, thank you very much. I’d like to introduce you to McEwen Mining, and I think it has an interesting combination of gold, copper, and silver, and it can offer you quite a bit of upside. Cautionary statement, you’ve seen all of those. Just a little bit of macro background. This is commodities relative to the S&P 500. As you can see, over a 55-year period, there’s a cyclical nature to it. Right now, we’re at the lowest point in the last 55 years, suggesting that this isn’t a bad time. This is a good time to be thinking about buying commodities. Mining is not well owned globally. This is a company called Crescap that put it out, but about 1% of the global portfolios are in mining today. Looking at copper, it’s climbing, and you all have heard about the uses in data centers, electrification.

It’s integral to modern civilization. This is a chart I’ve always looked at, and here we’re looking at 129 years where the gold price has, on three occasions, been one or two ounces above the Dow Jones. If you were to do that today, if two ounces bought the Dow, you’d be over $20,000 an ounce. There’s a real disparity right now. Gold’s running well ahead of the Dow, and I think we’ll continue to do so. If you look at the gold space, gold is ahead of the juniors and the seniors. The juniors are still in negative territory relative to gold, and the seniors, measured by the GDX, the ETF, still have quite a bit to climb, almost 4x, better than 4x, to catch up to gold. McEwen Mining is listed in New York and Toronto. We trade about $1,003,000 a day.

That’s a three-month trading average, so about $28 million a day. We have a very large copper option that you’ll hear about from Michael, and increasing through exploration of our resources, our production, and good leverage. My personal investment, my cost base, is over $200 million. I take $1 a year in salary, and I own 15% of the company of McEwen Mining and another 13% of McEwen Copper. You can see our institutions on the right-hand side, 55 million fully diluted shares outstanding, and you can see the ownership structure. This is how we’ve performed. We had 100% of a copper asset that you’ll be hearing about, and in the late summer of 2022, we financed that, put it into a separate sub looking to attract capital. We’ve raised $450 million privately for the subsidiary, and we attracted global players.

Stellantis came in as a key shareholder, as did Rio Tinto through their technology arm of Newton. You can see our share performance, and if you look in the upper right-hand corner, you can see how much better we’ve done than most of the measures of the index we would index against. We still think there’s a lot more room. This is a management assessment. There are three parts to McEwen Mining. There’s our gold operations, there’s our copper, which is the largest right now, and we have a royalty portfolio. None of those are performing at the moment, but the largest one is on our copper projects. It’s 1.25%, and based on our PEA, that would generate more than $400 million, but we valued all those royalties at $35 million or $0.65 a share.

From where we are, we closed yesterday at $17.71, so it’s about a 22% to the low end and a 3.8x to the high end. In terms of our cash, we’re $54 million in cash, and we have debt, the convertible debt we did earlier this year. It’s called a cap call convertible, where you buy a call to synthetically raise the conversion price from $11 to $17.30 a share. We minimize dilution. At the current price, the debt holders are up 180%, and if we were to unwind it, which we can’t right now, we have to wait three years, but we’d be only issuing 3% of our stock. It’s a way of minimizing the dilution. We’re spread through the Americas. We have an underground gold mine in Canada, an open-pit one in Nevada. We’re reactivating one in Mexico, an open-pit mine.

We have a joint venture with Host Shield Mining of Peru in southern Argentina. We have our copper project, the most advanced, Los Azules. We just put out a press release this morning on the feasibility study. Mike will be telling you more about that, and a grassroots one in Nevada. Just looking at our resources, if you were to sum up all of the measured categories, we’d be 4.2 million ounces of gold, we’d be just over 37 million ounces of silver, and more than 13 billion pounds of copper attributable to our 46% interest. That would be equivalent, on a gold equivalent basis, to about 0.39 ounces per ton per share. We think we have a good base. Our production, we’re looking at a 73% increase between now and 2030, and that’s organically.

Our cash flow, the nice thing about being a relatively high-cost producer is that when the price of gold goes up, your margins expand a lot faster than if you were a low-cost producer. This is organic growth. We have a bid out on another company right now, which would add to our production, but there’s a significant increase, a 12x if you take the baseline and a 5x if you take the upper line between those two prices of $2,838, $3,900 per ounce. That was just showing you the leverage, like it’s only going up 39%, the price of gold, but we’re increasing our cash flow significantly. This is a production, as I said, our costs run, cash costs are around $1,600 an ounce all in, up around $1,800. I’d like to introduce Michael Meding. He is our Vice President and General Manager of Los Azules, our copper project.

Michael Meding, Vice President and General Manager of Los Azules, McEwen Copper: Thank you, Rob.

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: You’re welcome.

Michael Meding, Vice President and General Manager of Los Azules, McEwen Copper: Good day, everybody. I’m going to give you a very, very brief rundown of McEwen Copper, which I lead. McEwen Copper is owned 46% by McEwen Inc., slightly below, 13% by Rob, 18% by Stellantis, 17% by Rio Tinto through their Newton Venture, and the rest are other shareholders. What is McEwen Copper? McEwen Copper has two assets. One is an early exploration play in the U.S. The other is the Los Azules project in Argentina, in the province of San Juan. To give you an idea, I’m now about two decades in the Americas, and I spent significantly more than 10 years in the same province. I worked there for other mining companies on Tier 1 operations in the past. This is a world-class resource not in the hands of a major. Argentina is becoming a Tier 1 lithium and copper mining jurisdiction.

We have a robust economic stood at the price cycle. You can see our press release that came out, depending on the time zone you’re in, yesterday night, this morning, on the feasibility. We designed this mine from the ground up as a mine that is modern with regenerative principles, low carbon intensity, and automation. We have significant upside potential from new technologies and exploration. Newton is heap leaching for primary sulfides. As Rob said, we are backed by key strategic partners, Stellantis, car manufacturer, and Newton from Rio Tinto, and we have a very experienced board and management team, board because at some point we want to go public, and the management team is mostly Argentine. Just to give you a quick recap, Chile and Peru, 40% of the global copper production. Chile is about 5.6 million tons. Peru is about 1.4 million tons.

The world consumes about 25 million tons per year of copper, 5 million from recycling, 20 from mines. This year, we expect a shortage of copper production versus demand of about 300,000 to 500,000 tons, mainly driven by shortcomings from Grasberg, Kamoa-Kakula, QE2, and some others. There’s an outlook. You may have read the news on Nvidia, OpenAI building 10 gigawatts of data centers and so forth. Just this alone will add another 100,000 tons of demand per year. It can go up to about half a million tons of copper demand additionally per year. Outlook 2050 is somewhere between 50 and 68 million tons. We need one Escondida coming online every year to be able to meet those demands. That would be very, very difficult. What does this mean? Upside price scenario for copper. Here’s the summary of our feasibility versus the PEA.

As you can see, we have significantly upgraded our resources from indicated to measured indicated from 1.2 billion tons to 2 billion tons. We had an average grade of 0.4. Now we have 0.36. We had contained metal in an indicator of 10.9 billion pounds. Now we’re at 15.7. Inferred 4.2 billion tons, 0.21%. 20 billion pounds of contained copper. Inferred, we had in the PEA 4.5 billion tons, 0.31% copper. 26 billion pounds of copper. This is the comparison of the PEA versus the feasibility. What we did is we upped a little bit the production rates, and we have a little bit lower grade due to geologic constraints that we found during our significant drilling campaigns, and we have a little bit higher strip ratio due to geotechnical adjustments. Initial capital cost, we had $2.5 billion. Now we have $3.2 billion.

We’ve seen lots of cost escalation in Argentina, but this is the most up-to-date information. Sustaining capital from $2.2 billion now to $2.1 billion. Average recovery is almost the same. What you see there is a mix because we had some more additional primary that has a little bit lower recovery, so we’re now sitting at about 71%. We’re going to produce about 3.3 million tons of copper. C1 at $1.71, all-in sustaining at $2.11. After-tax IRR of 19.8% with an after-tax NPV of $2.9 billion. After-tax payback of 3.9 years. First five years, 205,000 tons of copper. That means that would be a top 26 producer if it would be operational today. Annual copper production nominal over the life of the mine of 148,000 tons. Here we sit on the lowest 10% percentile in terms of CO2 emissions.

We have built a project that was focused from the beginning on renewable energy. We have an agreement with one of Argentina’s biggest energy suppliers to provide renewable energy to the project. They also offer the construction financing and operation of the line. We are very focused on a minimal environmental footprint. Here you see where we sit in terms of the S&P curve for operating and development projects. $1.71, we’re sitting on the upper part of the second cost quartile. In terms of all-in sustaining, we are better there. We’re sitting at $2.11, a little bit above the first quartile. Capital intensity, we have a definitive feasibility study out. We had $20,000 per kiloton of copper produced. I would say that’s pretty good in today’s world. I don’t go through that. You can look at the presentation.

What is interesting is we have already received, even before the feasibility, preliminary financing proposals worth more than $1.1 billion. Yeah. That is an expression of the increase in confidence in Argentina and the confidence in our project and the environmental credentials that we’ve been able to build. We have several from Tier 1 OEMs, Komatsu, Sandvik, and others. We have the potential offering from YPF. We just signed last week an agreement with the International Finance Corporation. The International Finance Corporation is a member of the World Bank Group, working with them on ESG performance standards, their standards, which are in today’s world pretty much required for large-scale project finance. They asked us in return for a ROFO, a right of first refusal, to become the lead arranger for debt financing going forward.

We had several conversations with the European, North American, and Asian ECAs, export credit agencies, to develop funding opportunities for Los Azules with pretty positive outcomes so far. Indicative proposals at the moment are worth about $1.1 billion. Environmental benefits, you can read the presentation online, but significantly lower than industry in terms of carbon intensity, significantly lower than other competing projects, than conventional milling in terms of water use. That’s very important. San Juan is a desert, so you want to have the lowest possible water consumption, even though mining is a very, very small part of the water consumption in San Juan, but it helps you with your social license to operate. We want to be carbon neutral by 2038. We have significantly lower electricity demand, 100% renewable, and no tailings required, which is very important if you’re operating in a seismically active area.

Not going through that, only saying that you see the actual document, the filing on SEDAR for the feasibility coming out in the next 45 days, and first copper, we aim for 2030. That is very soon. Key achievements, REGI approval, large infrastructure investment incentive regime from the Argentine government, significantly lowering overall tax burden by about 17 percentage points, 30-year tax stability, possibility for international arbitration baked in, and free access to the capital markets, which is very important in Argentina. We are very happy that we are the third project in Argentina to have received that approval stamp by the Argentine government. There you see the post from the Minister of Economy, Toto Caputo is his nickname, and from the President of Argentina, Javier Milei. Not going through that. We talked about the IFC.

That is, in reality, I’m a little bit thinner than on that photo, but what can you do? On the right side is the Governor of the Province of San Juan, Marcelo Orrego. Argentina is built like the U.S. The Governor has an important say. I was giving him the first copper cathode produced lab scale during the event where I was the Honorary President in San Juan, where we had seven governors visiting. Here are a little bit of our activities. We had chances to talk with Milei in the past. We are very active with the European Union. We are very active when it comes to building alliances. On the upper right-hand side, you see a Country Officer from the IFC.

I just came back from the Latin America Day in Cologne because we’re targeting Europe as potential partners, both for off-take equipment supply as well as for investment. Here, we are very active with representatives from the different member states of the European Union. We had the German Ambassador there. We had conversations with the Swedish Ambassador. We had the European Ambassador at the project. We had the Canadian Ambassador. We are presenting at the European Union as part of the Critical Raw Materials Forum with the aim as being considered critical for the European Union going forward. Thank you so much. I hand over back to you, Rob, if you want to talk through the financing. You want to stop over?

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: Thank you, Mike.

Michael Meding, Vice President and General Manager of Los Azules, McEwen Copper: Sure.

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: Just the financing I mentioned right at the beginning of $450 million. We started at $10. The last financing was at $30. We’re looking, now that we have the feasibility and the REGI approval, to raise the capital for constructing the project. In the first five years, we’re looking at producing 451 million pounds of copper cathode. At today’s prices, that’s about $2.2 billion top line, and a gross margin of 65% or $1.4 billion. This is going to be a multigenerational project. In the feasibility, we’re going for 21 years. With the technologies that Rio Tinto has, we’re looking at going for another 30 years. That could either be by way of their technology or a mill. A very long-life asset. We have exploration targets on the property. We have a large property package of 32,000 hectares.

We’ve identified seven targets on that property, four of which are other porphyry targets that we’ll be drilling shortly. This is just looking at a Lundin project. It’s in the same province. They’ve been very successful outlining Jose Maria and Filo del Sol. Just contrasting, we’re in the same province. They’re at the north end of San Juan province on the border with Chile. We’re about halfway up, also on the border with Chile. We’re at a much lower altitude. The top end of Filo is base camp Everest. That brings certain operating issues. In terms of resources, we’re about a little less than half of theirs. We’re much closer to infrastructure, major power grids, and highways. Development stage, as Michael Meding just said, we brought out a feasibility study just to announce the results today.

Filo is a pre-feasibility, and Jose Maria came out with a feasibility, but they’ll have to come up with another one, I understand. Costs, about the same, or a little bit higher. In terms of the deal that Lundin did with BHP, they valued those properties at $4.5 billion. Based on our last financing, we’re just under $1 billion. I think we have some advantages. I would think when we do our IPO, there’s some room on the upside there. This is just a diagram, a cross-sectional view of the pit. The darker color shows what’s in the feasibility. The light gray is the total resource. You can see drill holes on either end. That’s the north and the south end. We find mineralization extending in both directions in addition to depth. You haven’t heard the end of this story. These are the exploration targets.

Just below center is an outline in blue. That’s the Los Azules pit design. The other rectangles around are showing the targets that we’ll be starting to drill with this fall. The environmental permit was given to us at the end of December of 2024. These are the positive developments that’ve been happening in Argentina to attract capital. As I said, BHP and Lundin was a $4.5 billion deal. Rio did a $2.5 billion deal picking up a lithium operation. Glencore is talking about developing El Pachon, which is about 70 kilometers from us, and that’s over $9 billion. There’s money coming to Argentina, whereas I’ve been involved with this project since 2007, and there was quite a long period where no one wanted to touch Argentina.

It had a big resource, and since I grew up in the gold business, I looked at it and said, look, this would be a massive gold deposit if you put it on a gold equivalent. This is not something you let go of. Just coming to gold for a moment. In Nevada, we’re in the Cortez trend, just below or above the Cortez project run by Nevada Gold Syndicate. We’re drilling there. On the property, the number of drill targets to extend the life of that property, we picked up a company earlier this year and getting some good results. It’s about 40, yeah, about 45 kilometers away from our mine, but we’d use the same process plant. Some of the grades we’re getting drilling on that property we acquired are quite attractive.

In yellow in the center is just an intercept we got that was running the equivalent of 1.8 ounces per ton, which sort of got me excited. This is good open-pit country, and the grades are quite attractive. We’re coming up with that will extend the life of Gold Bar. This is just a cross-sectional view of where that hit. It was in a new fault zone that hadn’t been anticipated. We have quite a few drills working there. We also picked up another property that was part of that purchase called Seven Troughs. It has a history of high-grade gold. In the early 1900s, it was one of the highest-grade gold mines in Nevada, averaging 1.2 ounces per ton. It went down to about 1,000 feet, hit water, and at the time, they couldn’t deal with the water.

We have drills coming on the property shortly to look at it. Just a rendering, an epithermal deposit with a large clay cap on it that looks interesting. In Timmins, this is one of the prolific gold districts in Canada. We have two properties, Stock in the center and Fox East. We’re right now mining at the west. If you want to go on our website, you’ll see this. I’d like to give you more, but time’s running out. We’ve got very encouraging results. We’re looking at a 73% increase in our gold production, our organic production. This is just we’re driving a ramp under our mill right now to access the ore. Grey Fox is about 20 kilometers away, and we’re getting very good grades there. That will be the second area where we’re going to be expanding production.

Before McEwen Gold, I grew up in the investment industry, first 19 years running mutual funds, doing research, sales, and closed-end funds. It was all in the gold space, gold bullion and gold shares. I decided to jump into the mining industry, see if I can get into the jet stream, and built a company called Gold Corp. We went from $50 million to $8 billion before I stepped away from it. I’m a big believer in exploration. I’m very optimistic about the industry. Through that, I got an Order of Canada for philanthropy and business and Mining Hall of Fame, Ernest and Young Entrepreneur of the Year. We’re looking to build this into a much larger company. I’d like to thank you.

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: Thank you. I think we got some time for some questions here. Very exciting, Rob and Michael here. Do we have any questions on the floor? You need to speak in the mic, please.

In the coming years, silver $300, $500, is it realistic in your mind?

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: Silver follows gold, and then at one point near the end of the cycle, it will lead gold in terms of performance. If you were common, it’s gotten down to about 30 to 1 to gold. 50 would be the median range. At 50, you’re well over $300 right now. Yes, I can see it going higher.

Short-term scenario?

Depends if gold does. Did you expect gold at $4,000 today?

$50 today.

Today? Oh, yeah. You got your $50 already.

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: Any more for any more here?

During that time, I’d like just to, for those unfamiliar with the stock, as it were, could you just give us a yardstick or a feel for the leverage in your some other part of the valuation in relation to the gold and the copper price development? It always seems to be some sort of a discount. Would it be 25%? Would it be 10%? It’s an easy question, but it’s difficult to answer. You know, this is what markets love.

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: Sure. As I said, I have a large investment in here. It’s really, I wanted to be right beside my shareholders in the same spot. When the share price goes up, I’m in, but I’m not taking a large salary. $1 a year started about 10 years ago. Before that, it was $0. To get to the low end, there’d be an increase of not very much, 20%. To get to the high-end range in our estimates, a 3.8x, which isn’t a bad go. That’s at current prices. I’m optimistic we’re going to see much higher prices for gold. I have expectations of much more. I think if you’re looking at the junior space, where I have spent quite a bit of time investing, it’s been underinvested, and those areas take off when you get into a gold mania.

I can think of the last gold mania, a friend of mine in the brokerage industry, I’d call him up and I’d say, how was your day? He’d say, it was a 9/11 day. Another day, it’s a 450 day. I said, what do you mean? The commissions I made in the day, I could buy a 9/11 or a Mercedes 450. It was just incredible, the number of people coming into the market. As I showed you in one of the charts, this sector is terribly underinvested right now. People that I know that have known me, I’ve been in gold for quite a while, but they’ve never invested. They’re calling up and saying, Rob, what do you think about gold right now? Can you tell me something more about it? Why is it going up like this?

You’re going to see that level of investment starting to increase because it’s been taken away from the tech, which is quite heady right now. We’re talking about producing money, which is gold. Gold is money. I understand in this country, there’s no currency anymore. It’s all digital.

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: Yes.

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: I’m wondering, how many people in here own gold? Could you raise your hand? There’s a few. Why do you own gold? Is it because you don’t trust the money? OK.

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: Is the answer from the audience here? Yeah.

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: I think it’s really important to be looking at that. This is happening all around the world. Gold is going up in all currencies, and that’s attracting attention. It hasn’t been there for quite a while.

A gift for you, $0.5 million.

All right. Will it take me anywhere?

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: Half a million dollars there. Rob and Michael.

Rob McEwen, Executive Chairman, McEwen Inc. and McEwen Mining: Thank you very much.

Unidentified speaker, Speaker: It was an absolute pleasure. I’m sure there will be loads of questions here, so we can have them outside. With that, I think we give the speakers a warm applause.

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