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On Wednesday, 19 March 2025, United States Antimony Corporation (NYSE: UAMY) presented at the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference. The company emphasized its strategic shift towards becoming a major player in the antimony market, driven by rising demand and prices. While the outlook is positive, challenges such as supply chain complexities and international trade policies remain.
Key Takeaways
- United States Antimony is the only antimony smelter in the US and Mexico, positioning itself to benefit from supply constraints due to China’s export policies.
- The company is expanding its operations and diversifying into other critical minerals, including cobalt and tungsten.
- Financially, UAMY is optimistic about 2025, projecting significant revenue growth fueled by higher antimony prices and increased production.
- Government initiatives, like Executive Order 14017, are expected to positively impact the company by mandating US sourcing of antimony by 2027.
- Challenges include navigating permitting processes and managing international trade policy risks.
Financial Results
- 2024 Financials (to be reported): Revenue is expected to be composed of 30% from zeolite and 70% from antimony.
- 2025 Revenue Projections: Anticipated revenue ranges from $30 million to $60 million, with zeolite contributing 10-15% of total revenue.
- Cash Position: Approximately $18 million in cash on the balance sheet, with virtually no long-term debt.
- Capital Availability: $100 million universal shelf registration statement and a $25 million ATM with Alliance Global.
- Antimony Price Increase: Prices have increased nearly fivefold in the past eight months, currently over $25 per pound.
Operational Updates
- Antimony Smelters: The Thompson Falls, Montana smelter is operational, receiving material from Canada and approved for munitions grade material. The Madero, Mexico smelter is restarting, with improvements made to handle up to 200 tons a month.
- Material Sources: Madero, Mexico is receiving material from Australia and Mexico, with contracts in progress with two other countries.
- Alaskan Mining Operations: Leased acreage with plans to start mining in the second quarter and deliver material to Montana by the third quarter.
- Zeolite Mine: Operating at 98% efficiency in Preston, Idaho, with new salespeople hired for water treatment and cattle applications.
Future Outlook
- Government Grants: Applied to the Department of Defense for grants, currently in a quiet period.
- Operational Expansion: Plans to expand operations in Montana, Mexico, and Idaho.
- Critical Mineral Diversification: Exploring other critical minerals, including tungsten.
- Acquisitions: Evaluating potential acquisitions, focusing on non-dilutive opportunities.
- 2025 Drivers: Growth in revenues, cash flow, and EBITDA driven by new material sources, expanded operations, and higher prices.
Q&A Highlights
- Stock Price Increase: Attributed to increased marketing efforts and exposure.
- Strategic Benefits of Smelters: Mexico offers more lenient EPA rules, while Alaska’s pro-mining stance ensures a faster permitting process.
- Canada-US Trade Tensions: Currently unaffected by tariffs, with lobbying efforts for waivers underway.
- Competition in North America: UAMY focuses on cleaning up existing antimony deposits, a unique approach compared to typical mining operations.
For a more detailed insight, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.
Full transcript - Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference:
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the day one of the Sidoti Small Cap Conference. My name is Ashish Shah, and I’m an analyst here at Sidoti. With me today, I have United States Antimoney Corp.
It trades under the ticker UAMY. I’m happy to welcome Gary Evans, the CEO of the company, and Jonathan, the head of IR. We have about thirty minutes today, including the q and a. If you have any questions, please submit them at the bottom at the q and a section at the bottom of your screen. With that, I will let you take over, Gary.
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Thank you very much, and thank everyone for joining the presentation today. We are a New York Stock Exchange listed company, traded since 2012. This is an old company. They’ve been around since February actually, 1968 is when the company was founded. This screen here, that we put together just kinda shows you in red all the changes we’ve made since new management, new board, new direction of the company occurred, beginning really about a year ago, year and a half ago.
So, we have got, I don’t know how many different new management members. Most of our board is changed. And with the antimony changes that have occurred in the market, we have made a lot of changes within the company. So we’ll talk about that today. Next slide.
So what is antimony? It’s a critical mineral, actually number one in the DoD list, that’s used in lots of different businesses. In fact, we have 16 industrial customers that use antimony and about over half of those supply products to our military. But it’s also in in the military, it’s used as a hardy material for lead. It’s used in armor piercing bullets.
It’s these are an example of all the different things that antimony can be used for. We also sell into the flop flame retardant market. It’s used as a in solar panels and lots of ceramics and and glasses. So, we’ve been approved by the Department of Defense to make munitions grade material. And we have the only antimony smelter in The United States as well as the only antimony smelter in Mexico.
We have a small portion of domestic market that is growing rapidly and we’ll talk a little bit more about that today. Antimony has typically been controlled by China and they actually control over 85% of the end market. Countries like Mexico, Russia and Serbia have been big contributors of antimony, and there is no antimony being mined today in The United States. All the antimony mines have been shut down. Let’s go to the next slide.
So there was a critical minerals initiative by our government that says it’s executive order 14017 that says basically all the companies that are buying antimony need to start getting it from US sources by 2027. So that has created an additional demand on products that we make and is obviously, assisting our company. Next slide. This is our smelter up in Thompson Falls, Montana. It’s been operational about twenty years.
The only, again, the only operating smelter in The United States. We currently receive material, mostly from Canada into this smelter. And, we again are approved here for making munitions grade material, can handle, you know, a couple hundred tons a month. Next slide. This is our smelter in Madero, Mexico, and we actually shut it down about a year ago because of, we were using mines that we owned in Mexico that were not economic.
And, we are firing this thing back up next week. We did over the last forty five days about $500,000 of improvements. We fixed seven furnaces, which is basically, we redid the inside of those furnaces. And that material coming into Madero today is coming from Australia. Also, we have some material coming from the country of Mexico, and we’re working on some new contracts with two other countries as well.
So, another piece of the element for a midstream downstream operation in antimony is having the ability to float. This is a contact mill located also in Montana that we have leased that can take, all kinds of oh, I missed that. I’m I’m off a slide. So this is the Madero facility I mentioned down in Mexico. This just gives you some further information about it.
We can handle up to 200 tons a month and we hope to be doing that over the next few months here. Our first container load of material arrived about a week ago in Mexico and, again, we will start processing that material next week. So why is antimony so tight? That’s China, China, China, China. They cut off all supply to any country in the world, including The United States, including our Department of Defense, and that’s created a significant shortage in the material.
So that is caused our phone to ring off the hooks from companies trying to bring raw antimony or to us, and that’s why, again, we fired up the Madero facility. So this is the average price of antimony. It’s actually a little higher than that today. It’s over $25 a pound, and has seen basically almost a five times increase in price over the last eight months. So, it’s a best performing critical mineral of all critical minerals.
And we believe that this, we see no really end in sight. We actually hope it doesn’t go up much more, but, it keeps going up almost every day. These are all the different types of antimony, end products that we make, oxide, metal, trioxide, trichloride, trisulfide, and nanocrystals. So, we have the billing both our Madero and Thompson Falls to do these various products. Okay.
This is the flotation facility I got off track on a minute ago. This is the one that’s located in also in Montana. And so what what does a a mill like this do? It takes the lower grade concentrate, that might be five, ten, 20 percent and brings it up to a higher grade concentrate that we can process in Thompson Falls, Montana. And so what does that mean?
We have to have a basically 70% antimony concentrate to make munitions grade material. And so what that flotation mill does is help us achieve that goal. So we made a decision about a year ago that we didn’t want to just completely depend on other countries for our supply. As I mentioned, we’re getting supply from Canada and Mexico and Australia and two other countries that we’re gonna be announcing soon. And we decided, you know, there was a lot of antimony in the state of Alaska.
So we went up there last summer, spent some time with the geological society, asked them, hey, where should we go lease? They showed us all the stockpiles of antimony that were left by other miners in the in the state. We’ve leased those that acreage, and we have operations ongoing. We have permits being filed, and we anticipate mining up there in the second quarter and bringing material to our facility in Montana in the third quarter of this year. And this will obviously give us some significant improvements to our cash flow because instead of buying the antimony, it may be 40% to 50% of Rotterdam will be processing our own antimony.
This is a reflection of our claims. We have other critical minerals other than antimony involved here, as you can see. And, this is areas really between Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska. Next slide. We also have some claims up in Canada we took last year.
This is a cobalt play. We are doing some work on this play, some geological work. We’ll probably do some test drilling there soon. And, we will likely find a partner at some point once we kind of prove up what we believe is there. The beauty of this location is it’s in an area where there’s a ton of infrastructure already in place.
And so, that’s a combination of flotation and as well as smeltering capabilities. So we’re pretty excited about this place looking real well. This is just a map showing you where the Sudbury District is and where our Ontario Canada play exists. These are the various critical minerals on the left hand side of this chart that the Department of Defense has identified. That’s something that’s on the right hand side, the 17 different ones.
On the left hand side is our critical minerals, and then the ones we’re involved in that are noncritical at the very bottom. So we’re beginning to expand our portfolio from just antimony, in cobalt. We have a Tungsten play we’re working on as well. So we do want to diversify the company a bit, but antimony is our main focus. This is just a chart showing you what has happened with critical minerals, over the last number of years.
And you can see that, you know, the whole, gamut of critical minerals around the world, the prices have continued to increase because demand is there, and it’s been difficult to mine these products. We basically are running out to some extent. I keep asked being asked all the time about synthetic antimony, so we put this slide together to show that we’re really not too worried about it. It’s unreliable and ineffective. And, most of it comes from India.
And we know from our discussion with the Department of Defense that they are not very happy with it at all. It’s very expensive, much more expensive than antimony ore and just does not perform nearly like antimony. So I we’re asked all the time, well, what’s gonna replace antimony? And we don’t have an answer. We don’t know what can replace antimony.
It’s not a big ingredient, but it’s a necessary ingredient for a lot of different industries. Next slide. This is another part of our business called Zeolyte. This is a mine that we control up in Preston, Idaho. Zeolyte is a material you may have never heard of, but it’s used in lots of different products.
And it’s a very human and family or animal friendly material. It’s used in all these different areas of water treatment and agricultural, gas purification, and of course, we I think over 25% of our business goes into cattle. This is what the mine looks like over there. This is a nuclear reactors. The 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima all use Zeolite in their cleanup of those.
So we’ve been talking to the federal government and the EPA about possibly stockpiling zeolite. We know that we have the highest quality zeolite of any mine in the world, based on our analysis of other zeolite deposits. And we’d also know we have a huge supply, probably a one hundred, two hundred year supply. So, we’re very excited about this business, and we continue to grow it annually. This is just kind of a map of the state of Idaho.
You can see the up in the hills, our our mining operation. We have about 25 employees up there. And we we had a 2024 was a turnaround year for us here and ended the year running about 98% efficiency. We continue to expand our position in this business. We just hired two salespeople here in the last couple months, one in water treatment and one in cattle.
These are kind of accomplishments we’ve made, and I’ll be updating this with our numbers that we’ll be reporting tomorrow and they continue to look better and better. This is a new product line. We decided to establish some of our own retail product lines rather than just use intermediaries or middlemen. And this is a direct to consumer line for cattle called Cattle Prime. And this is you ask what does a Zeolyte do for a cow?
And it has a number of nice qualities. So for one, zeolite will take out the ammonia that’s in the feedlots and the cattle yards you’ve probably smelled as you’ve driven by those in your life. It also takes out some of the greenhouse gases that a cow emits, which has been an issue with the EPA and then adds, protein in the second stomach of this cow. So a lot of feedlots like a mix zeolite into their cattle feed to improve the beef with respect to fryer slaughter. So accomplishments, there’s actually more than this now.
We’ve added more people. We’ve really built up the management team of this company to take this to the next level, and we’re experiencing that today. We’ve also had a number of board member changes and just really, taking a company that was a bit sleepy, tired, and really rejuvenated it at a time when its primary product has increased five times in in value. This is our last reported numbers. Again, we’ll be reporting our year end and form 10 k tomorrow, and we have a conference call tomorrow afternoon.
So if I would you to to listen in to that call, if you can. So what’s our forward strategy, our plan? We we have, actually applied to the DOD for some government grants. We’re in a kind of a quiet period on that, waiting on that to occur. We plan to continue expanding the operations of our properties both in Montana and Mexico, Antimony, as well as our zeolite mine up in Idaho.
So really, you know, three things. Prices have definitely improved our business. Volumes are improving our business. Supply of product from other countries as well as anticipated supply of our own antimony from Alaska. So lots of changes going on.
We do have some other critical minerals we’re looking at hard and we plan on continuing to grow this enterprise. Next slide. We do look at acquisitions all the time. I’ve got a couple I’m looking at right now. We haven’t done any yet.
We’re very, very selected and we’re not gonna do anything to dilute our shareholders in a material matter because we believe that the upside is already existing inherent inside the company. So this is kind of a summary of our company today. We have a market cap right around 200,000,000. We have today about 18,000,000 of cash on the balance sheet. We have virtually no long term debt.
We do have a hundred million dollar universal shelf registration statement outstanding, as well as a $25,000,000 ATM with Alliance Global. So we’re not in the need to go raising any capital yet. We’re hopeful that the DOD will help us with some grants. We’re in a quiet period now. We’ll just wait to see what happens there.
And and we look forward to a real prosperous to to 2025. These are all the recent publications. We’ve been getting a lot of attention as you can imagine, because of the business we’re in. We did pick up a couple firms that own coverage, research coverage. Those are listed at the bottom being Alliance Global and AC Wainwright.
And I think there’ll be some other firms coming. And so, we are in the news quite a bit. I do an interview almost once a week.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Great. Thank you so much, Gary, for the presentation. I would request everybody in the audience, if you have any questions, please submit them at the q and a section at the bottom of your screen. Gary, I would like to start with one of my questions. The stock price has increased about 500% in the last one year.
Can you let just go over what are the major announcements that you made that has that happened?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Yeah. It’s it’s really not necessarily any major announcements. It’s been that we started marketing. Jonathan, who’s on the call, they will take some answer questions as well. Been with me about eight months.
And we we the company, even though it had been traded since 02/2012 on the NYC, had never really marketed. So we went to a lot of conferences last year, started telling the story. This year, we focused more on the institutional side of the business rather than retail, picking up research coverage, getting in all these, publications and news being on TV, what have you. So just exposure, it’s really nobody knew us. The governors of the states we operate in, in Montana, Alaska, and Idaho, knew didn’t hadn’t even know we existed.
The congressman didn’t know we existed. So it’s been an educational process of telling the world, this is who we are and this is what we’re doing.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Right. And are there any strategic benefits of having your smelter in Montana and similarly for Mexico as well? Like, do you have any benefits in operating those plants over there?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Well, Mexico, you know, as you know, our new president is trying to to change some of the, EPA rules because one of the things that’s restricted a lot of mining companies is, you know, very tough permitting environmental laws that don’t allow minors to do what they do. So Mexico has more lenient laws, allows us to do things we can’t do here in The United States. I think that will change. And Alaska is very pro mining. The permitting process is is much slower I mean, much faster than other areas.
We we we don’t tend to get involved in any kind of federal lands, BLM, forest for service, fishing game, tribal lands. We try to stay either on private lands or on state lands where we know we can get permits approved. So we tried to stay away from those long bureaucratic processes that have historically really slowed down a lot of mining companies.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Right. And do you think the tensions between Canada and The US due to tariffs and the precedent could affect your hopeful mining operations in Canada?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: And similarly involved in critical minerals is a big positive. And the fact that the material we get from Canada originates in Alaska is a very positive factor. So we’ve actually been to Washington over the last month doing some lobbying efforts with our congressmen and trying to see if we can get waivers. At this point, we we are not affected, but, we wanna be ahead of the game. So we’re all hopeful that these tariffs get resolved.
I do think they’ll be reduced substantially, and I we’re not anticipating any effect on us.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Okay. And, can you discuss your tungsten opportunity? Is tungsten more or less important than antimony to the DOD?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Yeah. Tungsten’s another one of the critical minerals we haven’t. We’ve got some tungsten activity up in Alaska and we have some in The US, you know, Continental US as well. We haven’t announced much of that yet because we’re still negotiating certain items, but we we see that as a great opportunity as another area to to grow into, this nice critical mineral. Hasn’t had the run up that Antimony’s had, but we anticipate that could possibly occur down the road.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Right. And if can you just give us the revenue mix between, Zillow Zeolite and antimony right now?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Yes. Today, when you look at the 20, 24 financials tomorrow, it’ll be about 30% zeolite, 70% antimony. That will probably reduce in 2025 because antimony has taken off so much. I would say it’d be more like a 10%, fifteen %, contributor of our revenue. We’re trying to grow the zeolite business as well.
We are growing it, but it’s not growing as fast as the antimony.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. And what is the difference between 500,000 per ton price versus $25 per pound. Can you just explain the difference?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the question.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: It’s a question from the audience which is asking, what is the $550,000 per ton price versus the 25 per pound. Can you explain the difference?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Divide pounds into tons. That’s it’s just a mathematical calculation.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Okay. Okay. And, can you talk a little bit about the competition you have in North America? And, yeah, there is another company listed, which is NOVA, which has a mine in Alaska and arranged for producing antimony and gifting getting DOD subsidy.
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Well, many of the other companies that are are competitors in Alaska for antimony, many of which are Australian junior miners, are either way too far from roads or in areas where actually mining the antimony is gonna take years. We are I call ourselves kind of the garbage dealers of Alaska. We’re actually out picking up, mining claims where we can get the antimony right off the ground. It’s already there. It’s already stored.
It was left by other mining companies that did not want it. You know, antimony years ago had very little value. It had sulfur or arsenic associated with it, and and that caused companies to try to stay away from it. So the state of Alaska is loving what we’re doing because we’re actually cleaning up the environment. We’re picking up antimony sitting on the ground.
Some areas we might have to use an excavator and go a foot under the ground to get the the the antimony deposits we’re looking for. But, it’s a total different type of mining operation than a typical gold miner that has antimony associated with it. Those are huge investments, lots of permitting, big time frames to get to. We’re in a total different sector of the antimony business. We’re cleaning up other miner’s antimony that’s been left.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Right. And do you anticipate making your current smelter larger with the DOD subsidy or making a new one in a central base?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: It just depends. We we know we can grow our footprint, in Mexico without a problem. We would probably fund that ourselves. The Montana facility, we’re getting much more efficient. In fact, we just, refitted a furnace that went live a week ago.
So we have four active furnaces there now, and we can we can grow our throughput to a certain extent. It just the problem we have in Montana is the footprint, of the land. In other words, it’s just not enough land to do what we wanna do. So we are looking at other locations around the country that have got permitting already where we can move quickly. So that might be another opportunity.
We have not made that decision yet. We know we can grow in Mexico and Montana enough in 2025 to meet the needs.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Right. And to for that, you do not need to add any capital. Right? Like, you don’t need to generate any more capital.
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: It does. Seven furnaces in Mexico, and we spent half a million bucks. It’s pretty cheap.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Okay. And one of the questions is, does that does the fact that those antimony deposits have been sitting on the surface affect the quality or purity of the ore specifically?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Actually, the quality of the ore was we’re finding to be some of the highest quality of ore we’ve seen from any of the international sources. So that gives us encouragement that we can move that to Montana. I mean, we’re talking, you know, 35, 40 percent antimony concentrate, which is, you know, a lot of the stuff we’re getting from other places is, you know, ten, fifteen, 20. So, it it’s a higher concentrate antimony that we’re finding in Alaska.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. And, yeah, just just as one of my final questions, what what are the things that you’re looking for in 2025, that are the investor should be looking at more like any near term milestones that you have?
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Well, I think the real the real, you know, highlight for 2025 will be our growth in revenues, cash flow, and EBITDA. And that’s coming from new material, expanded operations and prices. So we’re really hitting on all three fronts of getting more material from different countries, bringing our own material in from Alaska, the higher prices. Remember, these prices took off really November, December. We didn’t really see that much in 2024.
We’re seeing it big time in 2025. So, you know, just to give you an idea, when we report our revenues tomorrow, you know, we’re anticipating revenues in 2025 in the 30 to, you know, $60,000,000 range. It’s a big, big jump from where we were last year. And, if we can do the things we we’re gonna do, it’ll be even better than that. So we’re we’re we’re hopeful.
It’s it’s hard to to throw a dart at the wall and say, okay, this is where we’ll be. But because we have so many moving parts going on, but the all the parts are moving in the right direction.
Ashish Shah, Analyst, Sidoti: Got it. Got it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for taking the time and speaking with us, Gary, today. Thank you.
We really appreciate it. And for everybody in the audience, thank you for taking the time. Have a nice day.
Gary Evans, CEO, United States Antimoney Corp: Bye bye.
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