U.S. Antimony at Q1 Virtual Investor Summit: Strategic Expansion Plans

On Tuesday, 11 March 2025, U.S. Antimony Corporation (NYSE: UAMY) participated in the Q1 Virtual Investor Summit Event, led by Chairman and CEO Gary Evans. The company provided a strategic overview of its operations in the antimony and zeolite markets. While emphasizing its unique position as the only domestic producer of finished antimony products, U.S. Antimony outlined plans for significant operational expansion and revenue growth. However, challenges such as securing raw materials and obtaining permits for new smelters were also discussed.

Key Takeaways

• U.S. Antimony is the only domestic producer of finished antimony products, vital for military suppliers.
• The company anticipates record revenue growth in 2024, nearly doubling from 2023.
• Expansion plans include restarting the Madero, Mexico smelter and increasing operations in Thompson Falls, Montana.
• U.S. Antimony is exploring mining opportunities in Alaska, with production expected by Q3 2025.
• The company maintains a strong financial position with $18 million in cash and minimal debt.

Financial Results

• 2023 Revenue: $8.7 million
• Anticipated 2024 Revenue: $14 million to $15.5 million
• Projected Q1 2025 Performance: Expected to mirror full-year 2024 revenues
• Cash Balance: Approximately $18 million
• Debt: $229,000

Operational Updates

• Antimony Operations:

- Smelters in North America: Thompson Falls, Montana, and Madero, Mexico

- Madero Smelter: Restarting operations soon, with materials sourced from Australia

- Thompson Falls: Plans for expansion

- Alaskan Antimony Mining: Production expected by Q3 2025

• Zeolite Operations:

- Location: Preston, Idaho

- Efficiency: Facility running at 90% runtime

- New Product: "Cattle Prime" zeolite for cattle feed

Future Outlook

• Strategic Goals:

- Expand antimony processing and secure new supply sources

- Grow the zeolite business

- Explore strategic acquisitions while avoiding shareholder dilution

- Focus on profitability in 2025

• Alaskan Operations:

- Revenue from antimony production expected in Q3 2025

• Potential Expansion:

- DoD funding could support expansion in Thompson Falls and Alaska

Q&A Highlights

• Alaska Antimony Production:

- Timeline: By the end of Q2 or early Q3 2025

- Logistics: Focus on trucking logistics from Alaska to Montana

• Antimony Supply:

- Confidence in securing sufficient raw materials for U.S. and Mexico facilities

- Potential expansion at Thompson Falls due to space constraints

• DoD Funding:

- Currently in a quiet period but optimistic about discussions

- Funding could enhance operations in Thompson Falls and Alaska

• Mexican Operations:

- No impact from cartel activity on Madero smelter operations

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - Q1 Virtual Investor Summit Event:

Operator: Good day and welcome to Q1 Virtual Investor Summit. We appreciate your participation in today’s virtual event. Up next, we are pleased to introduce U. S. Antimony Corporation.

At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Gary Evans, Chairman and CEO at U. S. Antimoney, who will lead the presentation. Sir, the floor is yours.

Gary Evans, Chairman and CEO, U. S. Antimony Corporation: Thank you very much, and thank all of you listeners for dialing in today for this investor virtual presentation. Our company is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. We have been around for a long time, 1968, have been publicly traded on the NYSE since 2012. We are basically a antimony smelter, which is a midstream downstream business and we’re also in the process of upstream being a minor of antimony and we’ll talk about that today. We also have another business called Sealight and that is located up in Idaho and we’ll discuss that.

So I’m going to next give you just our forward looking statements. I’m likely going to say some things that’s a bit of a forecast today. This is a our mission here is described. Everything in red are the new items that we are doing with respect to changes within the company. As I said, the company has been around since 1968 and we’ve made a lot of management changes, which we will discuss today.

We have basically a new board, a new management team and a new direction for this company. Antimony is a name that many people are not familiar with. It is on the Critical Minerals list. In fact, it’s number one on the DoD’s list. It is a hard rock material typically found many times with gold.

It is a material that in the past has really been deemed kind of a junk metal in the stance that the price was so low and it was just a bit of a pain for the gold mine plasters as well as the miners. And but that has changed and we’ll talk about why that’s changed so much. This is a listing of all the uses of antimony. You can see in the military side it’s about 32% of the overall antimony use, but industrial side is much greater at around 70%. And that’s really important because there are so many industrial needs for antimony that many people don’t realize.

Every car battery, a lead based battery has antimony in it, solar panels, roofing materials, ceramics and glass, it goes on and on. But on the military side, it’s a very necessary ingredient and it’s a hardy material for lead. It’s used as ignition system and primers, laser guided missiles, any kind of heat or armor piercing, bullets, night vision cameras, binoculars, on and on. So we continue to find more and more uses of antimony used in drones as well. So let’s go to our next slide, which gives a little more detail as to the antimony uses.

We are the only domestic producer of finished products. And what that means is not only are we the only smelter in The United States and the only smelter in Mexico, We’re the only two smelters in North America. We’re the only two smelters in the Western Hemisphere. So we do have a bit of a monopoly right now and we’re trying to grow this business significantly. We’ll talk about that here in a bit.

So this next slide outlines the various markets. Antimony historically has been found in foreign sources. China was the biggest producer of antimony along with Russia, Mexico, Bolivia and Montenegro. So we think that with the changes that have occurred over the past six months, we’re in a very, very unique position to capitalize on what we have strategically. Let’s jump now to Page eight, which is our an executive order that came out called 14017.

And what this order means is that any company that’s securing critical minerals of which antimony obviously is one, must begin by 2017 sourcing those minerals, I’m sorry, 2027, sourcing those minerals from U. S. Companies. A lot of domestic companies are getting their antimony from Europe or for other areas of the world. And by 2027, if you’re supplying the U.

S. Military in any form or fashion, you got to be sourcing it from us. So that’s created an additional demand for our product that we did not anticipate. This is our next slide is our actual smelter located up in Thompson Falls, Montana. It is a been there for twenty five years, has capacity well over 300 tons a month.

It’s located up in the hills of Thompson Falls and is an area that we plan on expanding here in the near future and we’ll talk about that. This is our smelter down in Madero, Mexico. It has been around about over ten years. It has a capacity about 200 tons a month. This smelter is actually firing back up here in about a week.

We have material coming to this smelter from Australia and we anticipate, we just hired I think a total of 15 new people that are getting ready to start. We just relined seven different furnaces on this facility, it has 17 total And looking forward anxiously forward to firing this back up. This is a little better description of the Madero facility. We’re trying to, with some of the changes we’re making, actually automize certain items that were previously done by hand and just do some sprucing up with this facility. Our next slide is on Page 12.

And this is a really important slide from the standpoint is why is antimony so tight? And there’s no question that China is the answer. China made an announcement in the September that they were cutting off all supplies of antimony to any country in the world, including United States, and that has caused the price of antimony to dramatically increase, which is reflected here on Page 13. Today, that number is more closer to 24 per pound. So you can imagine that a product has been around $5 to less than $5 per pound for twenty plus years, all of a sudden jumping to $24 a pound has created quite an excitement in the business.

Let’s jump to Page 14. These are the various products that we make with antimony. We make antimony oxide, metal trioxide, trichloride, trisulfide and nanocrystals. So we can do this at both different segments of our two plants, the one in Thompson Falls and the one in Madero. Now another necessary ingredient for us to be able to do all the things we have planned is to be able to float material.

What that means is taking a lower concentrate level of hard rock and making it a higher concentrate level because in order for us to make munitions grade material, which we’re already pre qualified for by the Department of Defense out of our Thompson Falls facility, we must receive that material close to 70% concentrate. And so this flotation facility that we have leased also in Montana solar over in Phillipsburg allows us to take not only antimony rock but other kinds of critical minerals and float them to get them to higher concentrate levels. Now let’s jump over to Alaska. Alaska is, let’s see here if I get this wrong going right, okay, yes. Alaska is an area that we made a decision about probably a year ago what the State of Alaska met with the Geological Society and asked where are antimony deposits that were discovered by other companies and left behind.

And so we were given three kind of key areas. We’ve leased now close to 40,000 acres or over 50 square miles of mineral leases in Alaska that we’re in the process of permitting. And we anticipate bringing material from one of these sites to our Thompson Falls facility by the end of the second quarter of this year, that’s by the June. And that will enable our margins to significantly expand because instead of fine antimony, which we do today from third parties, we would be processing our own antimony product. So this next slide here, Slide 17, shows you the various critical minerals that we’re currently involved in up in Alaska.

Then I want to mention Ontario, Canada as well. This is an area that we’ve decided to lease for some cobalt opportunities. And this is not switching. And this area of Canada is really prime for this type of work. There’s lots of infrastructure in place.

We really are excited about this little play. We’ll probably bring in a partner at some point after we do some more geological work. And then this is a slide that shows the various critical minerals at this area at Sudbury District Of Ontario. And then why these slides are moving so slow, sorry about that. Okay.

Let’s go on to Slide 20. This is the list of the various critical minerals that are on the DoD’s critical mineral list. You can see on the left hand side of the slide the ones that actually relate to our company. So we’re involved not only in antimony, but magnesium and nickel and zinc and tungsten and other minerals here on this slide. Okay.

Jump to Page 21. This is just a chart that shows you the activity of critical minerals in total, which have been on a pretty big jump. Obviously, our President is very concerned about critical minerals having discussions with Ukraine as well as Greenland because of critical minerals. Let’s jump now to our second line of business, which is Zeolyte. Zeolyte is a very friendly material.

We have a mine up in Preston, Idaho, where we mine zeolite. It is used in a lot of different products. I don’t know why these slides are not moving. Sorry about that. This projector is not moving like it should be.

Anyway, so zeolite is a natural crystalline material that’s used in lots of different products. We’re very excited to be involved in this business. Just to give you an idea of the various businesses that buy our product, It’s used for water treatment, agriculture, catalytic cracking, all kinds of petroleum refining gas purification. And this mine is now running close to 97% efficiency based on changes we’ve made. A lot of people don’t realize that also Zeolyte was used in nuclear remediation.

It’s all three nuclear cleanups have Zeolyte involved. We also have at this location in Preston, we have 25 employees. We just signed a new ten year lease with the landowner. We drilled 82 test holes on this property at the beginning of last year to determine its reserves and reserve studies in the process of being completed. We know we have abundant reserves of the highest quality zeolite of any mine we believe in the world, and we’re trying to use that expertise to really expand this business.

Now that we know we have such a large reserve potential, we really want to grow our customer base. So we’ve actually hired two new salespeople, one in the water treatment area and one in the cattle area, and they are out marketing at various conferences and in shows and what have you. So let’s talk a little bit about our accomplishments in 2024. Ton sold were up 8% just from the third quarter, sales volumes are up 18%, only spent about $180,000 and but more importantly is our run time, well over 90% historically this facility is only run-in 70% range. I want to talk about a new product we’ve launched called Cattle Prime.

So, we’re beginning to instead of using middleman all the time to sell our products, we’re trying to develop our own and this is one of our first. We have others that are planned. And so what is Zeolyte used? I mean, a lot of cattlemen like this material. It really helps on the greenhouse gases in the first stomach.

It also adds protein in the second and it reduces significant smell of ammonia that’s in cattle yards. I’m sure you’ve all smelled as you’ve driven by them. So, cattlemen really like it and so that’s why 25% of our business is actually in the cattle feed area. So, Antimony and Zeolyte are two products of this company. These are the summary of the recent accomplishments of the company.

You can see all the changes. There’s actually more than is even mentioned here. We doubled our monthly production of Zeolyte last year. We’re just now starting up our Mexican Madero smelter here in about a week. We’ve leased a bunch of claims up in Alaska.

We’ve maintained a high cash balance that’s actually closer to $18,000,000 at year end and we’re turning the company to profitability. That’s going to be a big focus for us for 2025. So, this is the old financial statements. We’ll be reporting our new ones here in about ten days. I know we have an audit committee meeting this week and then we’ll be reporting them just probably the week after next.

I will tell you that I did a look back of the company going back to when it first started and the numbers we’ll be reporting for 2024 are record numbers. And so I’m proud to say that and I don’t anticipate that 2025 will have record numbers as well. Just to kind of give you a little bit of flavor to understand how fast this company is growing, In 2023, this company reported about $8,700,000 of total revenues. I’m anticipating that to be almost a double for 2024. I’m not going to give any specific numbers yet, but it’s between fourteen and fifteen point five.

So a nice jump and those are record numbers. But more importantly, when you start delving down into the cost of sales, the gross profit, the margins, you’ll see the dramatic change that has been made. And I can tell you, the first quarter is going to be off the charts. I’m anticipating first quarter numbers similar to full year numbers. So that’s how fast this company is growing from a revenue, cash flow, EBITDA and net income basis.

So we’re having an outstanding period, a lot of non believers out there, numbers always fix those problems and we’re looking forward to being in the position to report those numbers as soon as possible. So what is our strategy going forward? We want to expand our antimony processing footprint. So we’ve got, as I said, the only two smelters in North America. We’re going to grow the total output of both of those smelters beginning in 2025, this year.

We have new supplies coming and not only from Australia, from Canada, Mexico, we’re working on contracts with other countries around the world to bring as much supply as possible into these facilities. As we get that supply and then as we get our own product coming from Alaska, we’ll feel much more comfortable in the expansion plans that we have for this year. On the zeolite side, no doubt, we’re hitting records every week on sales as I start looking at them in the first two months of 2025. And we have new salesman and no question that business will grow nicely as well. We also have some acquisitions that we continue to look at.

We probably looked at three last year. None of those worked out. We’re very, very picky, and we’re not going to do anything to dilute our shareholders in any kind of meaningful manner. This is just a summary of what the company has done. Stock price is down a bit now, but that’s just a short aberration.

It’s important to note that we have virtually no debt, dollars 229,000 on one truck at two percent interest rate. We have $18,000,000 of cash approximately plus or minus. We have $100,000,000 universal shelf registration statement and we have a $25,000,000 ATM. So we’re very well positioned. I’m asked all the time by institutions, do I want to raise money?

The answer is no, I don’t need to raise any money. We’ve been marketing the company for about six, seven months now. You can see all the publications that have come out, both live interviews as well as publications you recognize. We do have two equity research report out on us from different firms being H. C.

Wainwright and Alliance Global, and anticipate more coming. I think a number of firms are waiting to see our year end numbers, which we’re anxious to report here again in about a week to ten days. So, that is the end of my presentation. I’d be happy to open up the floor to questions that may come. Okay, let me ask the first question here.

When do you expect to get antimony from Alaska and when will revenues be booked? I’m taking a little bit more conservative route than hire geologists. They’re telling me sometime in the second quarter, I’m saying the end of the second quarter, the first of the third quarter. So I would not anticipate any revenues from Alaska in the second quarter, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have some nice revenues to report in the third quarter of this year. We’re working right now on logistics for trucking.

As you know, all that material has to come from Alaska to Montana. So we’re going to be getting a lot of bids from various truck hauling companies. We do know that most trucks that come from Alaska to United States are in, so that should be a positive for us. We’re going to try to use that to our advantage obviously to get the most reduced trucking opportunities. Okay.

Next question. Will you be able to procure enough raw antimony to have your U. S. And Mexico facilities running at 100% capacity? And if you get DoD funding to expand your U.

S. Facility by four times, have enough raw antibody to run it 100% not only today, but when the facility expanded four times? Okay. Great question. One of our biggest jobs every day is finding antimony supply.

We have done that. We have actually three containers on the water coming from Australia right now. First arrives on the March 10. So, answer is yes. There’s no doubt we can fill our facilities within the next few months.

Then the next question is, well, can if you expand your facility in Thompson Falls by four times, I think you should be looking at that more of as a two times than a four times just because of the footprint we have. We’re going to have to find possibly a new location in town if we try to go much bigger. And we think that with our existing equipment, we can get probably double what we’re doing now and hopefully another doubling of that. The Madero side in Mexico is quite different. We have a much larger footprint there.

So depending on supplies and where they come from will help us determine how we’re going to do those expansion efforts. And we’re obviously still waiting to hear from the DoD. We’re in a quiet period with them. Hopefully, we’ll have something to report in the next month or two about the DoD grants requested. What is the timeline to mine your own raw antimony instead of purchasing as you do today?

Again, we are purchasing our antimony today. Just so everybody knows, there is no antimony being mined in The United States or Canada today that we’re aware of. And we’ve been all over The United States and Canada and Alaska looking at this. There’s a lot of talk about companies wanting to mine Antimony, but we’re not aware of any supply coming from Canada or United States State. So we believe that our mining in Alaska here in the next three months will be the very first antimony supply commercially mined in either The United States or Canada in the last number of years.

I mean, years ago that was not the case, but as of today that is the case. So, I think I’ve already explained our timeline is probably the second, third quarter of twenty twenty five to have our own material coming to Thompson Falls. We will not take that material to Mexico. Mexico will always likely be purchasing antimony from other parties. What are your expectations for DoD funding antimony operations?

And if UAMI receives this funding, what specifically would the company do Thompson Falls and Alaska? Well, we’ve made our two white papers, we’ve done all the work, TheOD has visited all our sites, both Thompson Falls and Alaska, and we’re in a quiet period. So I really can’t say I know more than I can say, but we’re very encouraged about the process that we’re under. Obviously, there’s been tons of changes by this administration in all kinds of funding and that may or may not affect us. We don’t know.

But we feel encouraged based on those conversations that something will be forthcoming. And then when that is officially announced, if it’s now, then we will give you some greater details. But as the discussions and the white papers outlined, we’re looking for funding both for Thompson Falls and Alaska. And that I don’t see that really changing in that regard. So anyway, when we can talk about it, we’ll be happy to talk about it.

Can you please repeat the projection numbers? Well, I didn’t really give you much, but I’ll give you a little boilerplate. As I said, the company in 2023 did about $8,700,000 of revenues. We anticipate the numbers that we’ll be reporting here in a week or so will be almost double that in the $14,000,000 to $15,500,000 range. So those are record numbers by the way, as I said, we’ll back and check.

Numbers with respect to 2025 are on explosive growth. I’ve only seen January, which I’m not going to give you, but I will tell you I was blown away. And And I know February is better than January and I know March will be better than February. So we’re on track to do in the first quarter numbers that would be similar to prior year’s full year numbers. So that gives you any kind of indication of the growth that we’re seeing.

It’s really exponential. And I just see that getting better and better as the year goes by because I’ll have more material in both facilities. We have higher price in both facilities and then we’ll be mining our own product by the second, third quarter of this year, which will give us greater margin. So all of those going together and then you start expanding those facilities and all of a sudden the numbers get pretty amazing. And so I’ve always been a big believer of under promising, over performing, so I’m not going to give you any specifics, but we will likely have numbers after the first quarter that we can maybe give you some projections for 2025, which we’ve never done before.

Do you anticipate any other smelting capacity coming online in North America? What is a barrier for others to come on board? I get asked that question all the time and wonder about it all the time. It’s very, very difficult to get a permit for one of these smelters. And it’s also very time consuming.

I keep telling people what our management team that has stuck with us during these management changes has proven is that there is a lot more art to making antimony products than there is science. And I’m really in awe of some of these guys expertise and how they know to tweak this and tweak that. Because you got to remember, when we receive samples of antimony material from all over the world, there’s all kinds of different meteorological aspects of that material. We have to is there too much lead, too much silver, too much gold even? I mean, is there high sulfur content?

And so there’s a lot of things that go into making a decision of whether we take somebody’s material or not. And of course, we learned a lot too about where the best material is around the world, being again the only guys around. I mean, why would we be receiving material from Australia if there was a smelter in Australia? There’s no way. And so, why would we be negotiating material from Bolivia halfway across the world or from Chad or from Turkey if there wasn’t capacity.

So the real bottleneck in the Antimony business today is what we’re filling. We truly have a bit of a monopoly right now. We want to grow that business. We anticipate that we can be a really formidable competitor in this business on a worldwide basis, not just North America. So that’s what got us excited.

Okay. I think that’s all the questions I have. Refreshing one more time. Oh, here we go. How does the cartel impact Mexican operations?

Absolutely zero. We’re in an area where there is no cartel activity. We’re near a nice sized town. We’re kind of out in the desert on our own and have had zero issues. The issues we had prior to this past year was when we were actually mining in Mexico and up in the mountains and the hills, that’s where we were having significant problems with the cartels, not anywhere near our operations at Madero.

Can you explain what the DoD wants to do with you guys? Well, they want to do a couple of things. They want additional antimony supply and they want additional antimony smelting capacity. Those are things the DoD wants because they were previously getting those materials from China. That’s what we’re in a position to provide.

Do you have plans to manufacture synthetic zeolites? Not at this time. We know that we have such a huge supply of zeolite, as I said over two hundred year supply, the highest quality and there’s really no reason to even look at synthetics when we have this kind of quality material that’s so low price. So we can beat the hands off synthetic zeolite pretty easily. Trump said, take historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals in rare earths here in USA.

Have you heard what this might be? Well, there’s a lot of critical minerals that we need. I mean, another one that we’re actively looking at strongly is tungsten. And I think there’s no doubt that we’re trying to bring lots of things back to The USA. We’re perfectly suited as we kept the smelter alive during the downturn to be able to reap the benefits we’re getting today.

And so I think there’s a different view. I was just at PDAC up in Toronto this past week and the excitement about the mining industry and the reluctance of mining, I think, has died down some. And so I think you’re going to see state agencies really picking up their permitting. I’ve been doing some lobbying efforts in D. C.

With senators and congressmen from Alaska, Montana, Idaho and the feedback has been extremely positive. They want us to be able to expand and meet the critical mineral needs of The U. S. And so we’re trying to do everything we can to accomplish that. So I think we’re in a very, very unique position.

When we talk to all these other antimony, one of the producers, they’re two, three, five, eight years away and we’re today, we’re doing this right now. It’s not six months from now, it’s not a year from now, it’s today. And so that’s what makes us so different and that’s what you’ll see as we’re able to report these increased numbers. Would you consider manufacturing synthetic zeolites? No, not this time.

We were too focused on selling our own zeolite. What is your comment on truck wanting to create a smelter on Pentagon basis? At this point, it’s talk. I’d like to know who’s going to build that smelter, hopefully it’s us. That’s all the questions I have.

Looks like I’m also kind of going over my time here. So, thank you very much for your participation and listening in today and look forward to some exciting times ahead. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you very much. That concludes the U. S. Antimony’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

For details on upcoming presentations, please refer to the conference agenda. Thank you for your participation and we look forward to welcoming you to the next session.

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