BeMetals Drilling for Gold in Japan

0:08 Hello, everyone, and welcome to B Metals Live Summit today hosted by 6. I'm very pleased to introduce John Wilton, President and CEO of B Metals, and Derek Iwanaka, Vice President Investor Relations and Corporate Development at B-Metals. Our presenters are gonna walk us through a company presentation and after we will be taking questions live. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions at any time on the Q&A panel on the right-hand side of your screen, and we'll get to them after the presentation is done. And as always this is being recorded and available to watch afterwards on SIX.com. But without any further ado I'll hand it

0:40 over to you John to kick it off. Great thanks very much Dasha. Thank you for the opportunity. We're looking to just give a brief update today to investors and prospective investors on where we are with B Metals. That will likely become sort of a monthly update as to progress on our various projects across the world. Disclaimer slide. So as many of you will be aware, we've got 3 main projects in progress at the moment. Our Pangeni project in exploring for copper in looking for extensions of the prolific Zambian copper belt in Zambia in southern Africa, our high-grade South Mountain project in Idaho in the USA.

1:34 And the focus of today's talk are Kazan Gold Projects in Japan. So a major event, as we mentioned on our last webinar, is that after almost 2 years of being largely closed to foreign travel, Japan has really started easing its border measures, still special approvals needed for business travel. But the good news is I'm actually doing this webinar today from Japan, coming towards the end of a three-week business trip here in Japan itself. Just to refresh everyone and give a little bit of an update. We have 5 really high quality gold exploration properties throughout Japan, 3 being on the northeastern island of Hokkaido, and 2 down on the southwestern most island of Kushu.

2:35 I'm logged in today from very near to our Hokusatsu license. And in fact, where we're staying this evening is some 15 minutes drive from the Hishikari gold mine, which is one of the big drivers of interest in exploring for gold in Japan as being commonly recognized as one of the world's highest grade gold mines that's produced in excess of 8 million ounces over the last decades. Today, in fact, I was out in the field at our Hokusatsu license, some really interesting outcrops that we worked on during the day, doing a field reconnaissance with Dan Maus, who's been a B2 geologist, a specialist in epithermal deposits, and has actually been responsible for guiding the exploration in Japan for Kazan resources over the last years.

3:39 But the main focus of today's webinar is really to give investors an update on our Kato project on the island of Akaido in the northeastern part of Japan, where we have now started our drilling operations.

4:02 In line with local culture and really to show the importance of our ESG commitment, we've completed our visit to the local Keto shrine near the project area. There's the real project team. We met with the local monk. We got a blessing. Jane Tevez, our project geologist, in the central bottom picture there. And David, our country manager, who has been with Kazan for a number of years and really been responsible for acquiring these licenses originally, and a very important member of our team out here in Japan.

4:52 Interestingly enough, we were taken to an outcrop there, a boulder, which has part of the shrine gardens in that area, which is known by the as referred to by the by the local monk as the the gold rock. And on closer inspection it is actually a cinta unit and those of you have maybe logged into our webinars before will know that we do find sinters developed at the top of the mineralized system at Kato, which shows that the top of the system hasn't been eroded, as is sometimes the case in these high-grade epithermal systems, but is in fact preserved.

5:42 So interesting that we're finding those rocks in the local environment there. Another important aspect of this project, as is the case with all our projects, really, on Akaidu, is that access to the project area is actually really very good. Only a few kilometers of what are sealed roads to get into close to the project area and then well-maintained dirt road from the sort of staging point here where we now have our project office, only less than 1 kilometer from the first drill collar.

6:30 You can see on the left, that was the transportation of the new rig that we purchased with Energold Drilling that was made by SDS in Turkey, shipped to site. And now we're obviously up at site drilling on the first drill hole. And this is a good lay down area where we have a lot of our support equipment for the drilling operations. So important starting a project like this, where we know drilling has been a challenge in the past, being able to get through the extensive clay alteration surrounding this high-grade mineralization.

7:17 We are well stocked with drilling equipment. We have been pretty conservative with our drill hole design for that reason. So we're starting with large diameter casing. We're drilling PQ, which is about 85 millimeters in diameter, so really large-sized core, which gives us the ability, if required, to reduce to HQ and ultimately NQ should we find areas which are difficult to penetrate during the drilling. And that's an idealized layout of the current drill hole location, KT22-11, looking to penetrate through the high-grade core zone and target of these high-grade low-sulfuration epithermal deposits, as they referred to. We're drilling approximately to the northeast.

8:21 We have good control on the geology from existing boreholes. Please bear in mind that a number of these boreholes on this section are projected from the north and south, just to provide a little bit more information. And you can see the extensive areas of gold mineralization that were intersected in the past by MMAJ, the Japanese state agency in the early 1990s. We've allocated approximately $2M for the current exploration activities in Japan, which includes our core drilling, around about a 1,500m planned exploration program at this point in time.

9:15 We'll also complete some more surface exploration at our Todoroki project, which is looking really very interesting. And I visited there for the first time last week. And also a drone magnetic survey on our Toshiro property here down on the island of Kushu. So some pictures here on the left of our site team, establishing the drill rig, getting it set up on the new collar, getting it properly orientated. And on the right, the first drilling operations as per our news release of the 12th of April.

10:04 We're in a forested area. Access is really good through forested roads. And what we're targeting really is these initially are some of these quite wide and high-grade intersections that were part of that drilling campaign from MMAJ in the early 1990s. The second batch of samples that you can see there, intersections from KT19 and KT20, were completed by the private company Kazan Resources in 2020 and 2021 that we subsequently acquired.

10:52 And you can see that those holes intersected the relatively low grade clay alteration zones surrounding the high grade mineralization, but weren't possible to pass through the high-grade core to the mineralization. So really a very exciting time now. We had to wait and be patient for some time to get our drilling operations going here in Japan due to the pandemic. But we're really excited to be up and running.

11:30 And given expected drilling success, we could be looking at delivering results, initial results coming in by mid-year this year. I think Dash will just play a short video for us, which really shows an important aspect that we're now able to do with this larger machine that we've imported into Japan. So this is really inserting large diameter what we call PW casing which is about 150 millimeters in diameter and that should also allow us to stabilize the upper portion of the hull and currently that casing has been inserted to around about 60 meters in depth. 60 meters in depth.

12:35 So that shows the inserting of that large diameter casing. It takes a little bit of time to insert that casing. It's a relatively slow process. But as I mentioned earlier, especially on this first hole, we're being relatively conservative with our hole design. And I think that will pay dividends as we move forward with the drilling project. We've got a good partnership with Energold, working with a local Japanese drilling company called Tone Engineering, who actually manufactures certain types of drill rigs here in Japan. And that relationship is working well and gives us a Japanese dimension to our drilling operations in Japan.

13:30 So I'll pass over now to Derek to give you a brief update on our corporate profile and where we are in that regard at this point in time. Thanks, John. Just saw a question come in that was asking about our insider ownership. So insider ownership on this page would be this orange section of the pie chart and it's at 20% right now and actually growing because John, myself, Clive and others have been buying stock in the open market. So we think this is a good time. And I think it's interesting if you look at this little chart here in the bottom here, you can see this big spike up in volume. That is when some of the funds were coming in when we just closed the acquisition of the Kazan project. So that was we were trading around 40 cents at that time.

14:26 You know, we did think that we were going to be able to start drilling in Japan by kind of the summertime or early fall. At that point, that was before Omicron and the Delta variant came along. But at that point, we were trading at 40 cents. The funds were coming in with large volumes of trading. And then unfortunately, we have slipped down to

14:46 below 20 cents right now. So it's a great time to be accumulating, at least in our opinion, because the stock is so cheap now and we are finally drilling. So we actually have some catalysts on the horizon. And the market cap is sitting at 33 million right now. This cash value will change. That was as of September 30th. We had $8.3 million. That will be dropping down a bit as we come into the last quarter, which should be reported here later this week. Probably drop down to about $6 million, but we still are well cashed up to do the drilling here in Japan. And those are probably the main points, unless there's any questions towards the end.

15:30 Back to you, John. Thanks, Derek. I can hear a big storm rolling in here in Japan at the moment. So we hope the power holds up, but I'm sure it will. So just to summarize, really, in terms of value proposition, as Derek just mentioned, we're still well-funded to deliver on the near-term catalyst, which a lot of the focus is getting some good drill results out of our Kato project that we see as really being one of the top pedigree gold exploration properties in Japan at this point in time.

16:10 And that's really supported by a number of our technical directors, such as Tom Garrigan, Senior VP with B2Gold in exploration, who has a huge amount of experience in exploring this style of mineralization, and some of our really world-class external experts such as Dr. Richard Solito, who will be coming out on a visit with me to Japan in June this year. So over and above that we're also continuing with our exploration work at the High Grade South Mountain Project in Idaho in the USA. We hope to resume drilling there during the summer.

16:59 And we're currently preparing our exploration plan for the Pengeni Copper Project in Zambia, in which JOGMEC are a strong technical and funding partner. And for the first time, thankfully, I was able to have a face-to-face meeting with the senior JOGMEC personnel involved on our project 2 weeks ago

17:26 in Tokyo. So I think this you know short very short webinar today as was intended really shows that we do have a real golden opportunity in Japan. We're here now, we're active. And the more I see of our other properties in Japan, you know, I get more and more excited about the real potential here in Japan to make a significant Gold discovery in a terrain that really has world-class discovery and development potential. Sitting here at the moment, as I mentioned earlier, 15 minutes from the Hishikari Gold mine that's been producing gold over a number of decades at 30 to 40 grams per tonne.

18:16 So that's a real exciting proposition. And we're launching that now with our commencement of drilling at Kato. And as I mentioned, we'll be doing more and more of these webinars, brief ones, probably on a monthly basis to keep investors updated with our exploration advance in Japan and on our other copper, zinc and base metal projects around the world.

18:45 So thanks very much. Great, thank you both John and Derek for taking us through the presentation. We're going to open the floor up to some attending questions. So if you do have a question, feel free to submit them now. Do you expect to do any exploration on your other gold projects in Japan this year? The short answer is yes. We're certainly planning some surface sampling, which will likely be channel sampling of veins at our Todoroki property on the western side of Hokkaido. And we hope to complete an airborne high resolution drone magnetic survey on our Toshiro project down here at Kushu.

19:34 Great, thank you. Kevin's asking, when can we expect to see the SA results from this drilling campaign? SA results should start coming in round about mid-year, so we'll be looking at June-July time, you know, subject to the events of the drilling, laboratory turnaround times and etc. But we should have news flow coming out of that drilling mid-year. Great, thank you. And what do you think makes exploring in Japan attractive? I think one of the main things is that this is a terrain that actually over and above in a way Hishikari up until World War II there were a plethora of relatively high-grade producers throughout Japan.

20:30 So a terrain that's got a number of deposits. At the end of World War II, a lot of interest in gold in Japan ceased. Some of those properties did start production again, but that came to an end in the late 70s, early 80s. And it's been sort of a bit forgotten and off the radar for a number of decades and hasn't really been exposed to, you know, sort of first world exploration techniques and reincorporating geological thinking from this style of mineralization elsewhere in the world. Great, thank you.

21:17 I think, Derek, you answered John's question about ownership, but of course if you need further information, feel free to ask. Our next question is, are you still looking for additional projects? We are always looking for additional projects that add value to the company. We're most likely looking for an advanced stage development gold project, bearing in mind any acquisitions that we've brought in really have to be, obviously, value accretive to the company. We expect to see a lot more interest coming in from now on because of our starting and launching of our gold exploration in Japan. But we're always on the lookout for other opportunities and we'll keep investors updated as those come around.

22:08 Great, well I think those are all the questions for today. If anyone on the call does have any questions following this summit, feel free to reach out directly. There's contact information on the slide here, so you can reach out directly to B-Metals. I'm sure they'll be happy to follow up with you. Of course, you can also find more information on their website, bmetalscorp.com. But thank you so much for joining, and John, thank you for tuning in from Japan. Derek, thanks for the update. I'll pass it back to you just for the final word before we close out. Great. Thanks very much, Dasha. I mean, we're really excited that we're now active properly in Japan. We've got a good locally-based team here. We've been working hard to get us where we are now, and we're really starting to build on that foundation.

22:54 So good time for investors to accumulate some more shares ahead of those drilling results coming out in the next months and for new prospective investors to get involved in the B metal story with our backing of a group like B2Gold, common founders and directors.