BeMetals Series: Building the Future with Metals (Ep.5)

0:08 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the fifth episode of B Metals Monthly Series hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce our speaker for today, Derek Iwanaka, their Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development at B Metals. Derek's going to be walking us through our company presentation and after we're going to be taking questions live. So remember that you can submit your questions on the Q&A panel on the right hand side of your screen at any point during today's presentation. And if you'd like to get in contact with B Metals team, feel free to fill the survey linked in the chat at any time. As this is a part of the B-Metals monthly series with your registration and attendance of today's event, you're going to be automatically notified of the next upcoming episode. As always, this event is going to be recorded and it's going to be available on Six.com in the coming days, So take a look for that when you want to get a refresher. Without further ado, Derek, I want to pass things over to you so you can get started. Thanks Cam, and thanks to everybody for joining today. It's just a Monday morning here in Vancouver.

1:00 So thanks for getting your week started off with us and I'll go through a pretty quick overview today of kind of some of the marketing activities that we've been up to in the last month and a bit and

1:13 also going to go through what we're going to be doing in the upcoming months. And then just a very quick recap on our latest drilling results in Japan and what that all means. So without further ado, I'll get started. This is just some forward looking statements. I may make some forward looking statements. So just in case, have a read of that when you have a chance. So here's just a quick highlight or recap on what we've done since the last webinar. Actually we skipped the February webinar because we were on the road pretty extensively through February. John and I went to 2 conferences in February.

2:02 We went to the one-to-one conference, which was towards the beginning of February. And then we went to the mining and DABA, both conferences in Cape Town, South Africa. We had a very full slate of meetings, mostly I would say with family offices, but there were some funds in there, some private equities and quite a number of major corporate companies. So, you know, like the majors like a 1st Quantum, for example, Barrick and so on. We met with a number of them because it is an African focused conference. I would say most of them were pretty keen on learning more about what we were doing at our Pangeni property, which is copper exploration in Zambia.

2:48 But Japan is something that we are very much focused on. That is our priority for B Metals. And we did see some keen interest on that as well. So pretty good interest from both sides. I would say since last webinar, January 11th, that day we put out a press release that we extended the Seda vein, also the Kamitake vein at the Kato project in Hokkaido. The drilling has gone well last year. We started up again just last month and we have 1 rig turning at the moment. I'll get into a little bit more on that later on.

3:34 But we have been doing well with both fronts on the exploration side. We'll have some more results coming out from Pangeni as well, probably later on this month. And then not listed on here, but I will let you know that we've ordered a second rig, which is on its way to Japan as we speak. That should be arriving, I believe, late next month. So we should have that operational by about May sometime. And then we completed the Minds of money conference in February. That was kind of late in February. Again, we had a full slate of meetings.

4:22 The timing was actually pretty good, I think, in that we haven't been down to the US in quite some time. And a lot of the investors there at least seem to be looking at ways they can leverage their exposure to gold. Gold has been well, actually, today is a good example. Today it's up. Just look at my screen. It looks like gold is up over $40 as we speak. Most of that's probably because of what's going on with the Silicone Bank and signature banks collapsing. So, you know, The fight to safety, the market sees that there is some turmoil in the banking sector in the U.S. And Gold's having a nice pop. Now, whether that sticks or not remains to be seen, but that's a good example of where Gold is an important part of anybody's portfolio. And so, you know, some of the investors that we met down in Miami, also down at Cape Town, were looking for ways that they could get into Gold.

5:29 Gold has not been a very loved sector for the last year and a half or so. And it has pretty much decimated a lot of the juniors. And so they're looking at this sector as something to rotate into after getting out of some of the other sectors that have done better in the last year and a bit. So interesting to see. We did see some of those people coming into our market kind of second half of January. We started to see our stock rise up, which was nice to see. It has for the most part, I think we're still holding up, but not quite as high as we reached late kind of last month. But it just goes to show that if you do see a little bit of demand, you know, we can easily get this share price back up again.

6:21 Just last week, we went to the PDAC. Nice to see the conference back in person again. There were about 24,000 people in attendance from what I understand. And that in comparison to last year, which was only 17,000 was good to see that the numbers are improving. And I think it's probably very close to where attendance numbers were kind of pre-pandemic in 2020, just when things were starting with the pandemic. So good to see that there is a revival of interest in the mining sector. At the last 3 conferences, I have to admit that most of the focus or optimism has been around some of the battery metals and critical metals.

7:15 But you can see Gold in the background also gaining a little bit of momentum with some of the investors there. So still, I would say Lithium is one of the hotter metals. You do see kind of crowds of people around some of the Lithium booths and at the Lithium talks, but a fair number of people looking at the Gold space as well.

7:41 And going forward, we're not stopping. We have picked up on the marketing this year and we don't intend to stop that. You can see that we're going to be doing the Scottsdale Capital Events Conference. It's coming up in April. And we're doing, well, most likely we are going to do a roadshow in Germany and Switzerland coming up in May. The one-to-one conference, which is going to be in New York in June. Okanagan coming up in July. And then we have not got confirmation yet, but I believe we're going to be doing the Precious Metals Summit, which is in Beaver Creek in September. So We do have a pretty good lineup for conferences. We do intend to continue the marketing. We were pretty light on marketing through 2021-2022, obvious reasons for some of that because of the COVID pandemic, but also coming out of that, like I said, we are starting to see more interest in the metal sector and in Gold. So we do intend to pick up on that and hopefully capitalize on some of that interest.

8:48 And a few people were asking me, you know, what does it look like to attend some of these conferences? So I just put together a few photos of the one-to-one and mining at Dava conferences. Top left hand photo here, that would be of one of the talks that was ongoing there. And you can't really see but there's a whole, I think there's at least 5 or 6 rows of seats behind these people here so you can't actually see the full scope of how big that room is. But it was not quite a standing room only, but it was pretty close. A lot of people in attendance there looking to see what was going on in the mining scene in Africa. The photo just below that is a drone and then that drone actually, from my understanding anyways, can go much further than most drones that you most of the personal drones that you might see, it's supposed to go 500 meters underground. So this thing would go into a mine shaft, for example, up to 500 meters without line of sight.

9:57 So in other words, you don't need to actually see the drone. It would actually just be going underground and apparently the signal is so strong that it can go pretty far and what it would do is it actually takes 3D imaging of the entire underground. So pretty cool to see some of the tech that's out there. The photo on the top right-hand side, that's just the Canada pavilion. That's Canada representing at the Mining and Dama Conference. It's just good to see a familiar flag there because most of the pavilions obviously are going to be pretty African focused, but Canada was represented there. Of course, B2 Gold being a pretty major sponsor and a player in the African mining sector.

10:47 And then the bottom right hand 1, that's just kind of like a lounge where it's like a meeting area that you can meet with people. So suffice to say, the mining DABA was quite well attended, as was the one-to-one conference. We had a totally full slate of meetings and we practically lost our voice by the end of it. So, a lot of meetings, like I said, not seeing it exactly in the market at the moment, but suffice to say that I think that there are a lot of eyeballs watching this sector. And if we can just get some momentum in the gold sector, I think that we're gonna be in a pretty good place. And then this is just the PDAC. Anybody who's seen the PDAC would know this far left-hand side scene. That's as you go down the escalators going down to the conference hall. And I've seen that I think maybe 18 times now over the years.

11:46 I've gone down this escalator many times. And yeah, that's that's kind of the entrance towards the conference. And then while we are there, I didn't take any pictures of myself, but I did manage to take a few photos of our CEO, John Wilton. The top or middle 1 there was him doing an interview with an Austrian fund manager. He's actually Quebec co-op, but he's living in Austria now. And so he was doing an interview there for some of their German speaking listeners and viewers. And then we had a Korshak, which is kind of the bottom photo there. That's John speaking with an investor there. And we had some drill core from Kato.

12:31 And You can't really tell from these 2 photos, but we were pretty busy. John was speaking to investors and geologists and other corporates kind of non-stop throughout the conference. So, PDAC, nice to see it was back in full effect and it was great to see the investors and colleagues from the mining sector. So that's kind of what it looks like at the PDAC. And I'll just give you a really quick update on what's going on with the projects. Most importantly, I'd say the Kazan portfolio in Japan. So let's focus on that.

13:15 As most of you hopefully know, or some of you at least know, that we've been drilling in Japan for the past year now. And over the course of last year, we basically outlined about almost 600m of strike length of a gold mineralized vein, which we've now called the set of vein. That set of vein, I will try to do a little bit of drawing here. So the set of vein here runs about 600 meters. This is kind of the furthest, this K2-22-15 hole. That's the furthest southeast that we've drilled to date. That is going to be followed up by a hole that we're actually drilling now. That's going down about 500 meters. You can see here, which is K2 2317.

14:09 So that hole has actually been finished now. And we do anticipate doing at least one more hole further down to the southeast as well. The idea here is if we can outline a resource that goes approximately a kilometer from the Northwest to the southeast and looking at say very ballpark numbers, let's just say that we're at about 10 grounds per ton. You could say that we have the scope or potential for about 1 million ounce deposit in this section of the property. So the idea here is hopefully to get somewhere close to an internal resource number based on the drilling that we get done this year. We are planning to do about 2000 meters at least in the kind of the first half of this year.

15:04 And then if we do end up doing a top-up on financing, then we would likely do even more drilling throughout the rest of the year and see if we can put together at least an internal resource that we can start to use in the coming year. So this is just a look at some of the results that we've had so far. I'd say KT2211, we probably saw the best results to date. Here's just a couple of examples. We at interval 2, we had 11.5 meters of 6.42 grounds per ton. Then we also had another interval of, sorry, in the next hole, KT 2212, we hit 26 meters of 3.06 grounds per tonne.

15:55 And that included 10 meters, 10.2 meters of 4.88 grounds per tonne. So we are hitting gold mineralization along the strike length of this vein. And we intend to continue that this year and into hopefully next year, assuming that drilling results continue to go well. And then this is just a cross-section of that first hole KT-2211. I mean, basically what you can see here is the kind of pinkish color. This is the middle of the vein here. That's what we call the steam heated zone. So it's basically lower grade, but still mineralized with gold. And then when you're able to penetrate into the darker red area, that's actually what the vein or the higher grade vein portion is.

16:49 When we've been able to get into that zone, we've been able to get much better grades. As I think we've noted in at least the last 2 or 3 news releases, it has been challenging to penetrate into this zone, but once you get into it, the grades tend to be quite good. So interesting to see if we can continue to drill into these veins. I think Out of the 5 holes we did last year, we intersected on 4 of them. So pretty good hit percentage out of last year. As I said, some of this core here on the right hand side, we brought to Toronto with us for the PDAC and it got a lot of attention. A lot of people are really keen to see what we're doing in Japan. It's one of those kind of frontiers that really hasn't seen modern exploration.

17:41 Well, certainly in the last 30 years, but you could probably say even since World War II, there really hasn't been very much exploration in Japan. So really good potential there. Obviously the Hishikari Gold mine that is in Kyushu kind of drives a lot of that attention. We haven't started drilling down in the South near the Hishikari mine yet because we have been getting good results out of Kato so far in Hokkaido. So for now, we're going to continue to drill at the Kato project. This is just a second cross section. Again, you can see kind of the shallower zone here is the same heated zone. And then once you get into further into the, or sorry, further down at depth, we are getting better grades down at depth. And these, that hole particularly kind of glanced off, I think kind of outside of the page. So if it was coming towards you, it didn't quite hit into the guts of the vein, but we are still hitting a decent renovation and we are gonna continue to do there as well.

18:46 So as I said, we're bringing a second rig to site. It should be arriving here late next month and we're looking forward to speeding up the program. I know it's been relatively slow getting news flow out, but I think once we get that second rig working that we should be able to speed up the news flow. One other thing is we will be moving one of those drill rigs eventually in the second half of this year over to the Todoroki property. Todoroki is also in Hokkaido about, I believe it's about 150 kilometers to the west of Kato. And we plan to do at least 1000m of drilling there. That is a, Todoroki is a historic mine. It produced up to 200,000oz of Gold up until World War II.

19:32 And then there was some sporadic mining after that. So interesting to see because that mine was shut down because of Gold prices. It was not shut down because they ran out of ore. So I think that if we can extend the veins there at Todaoki, it could be a really interesting project to work on this year. And so we should have drew results coming out kind of throughout, I would say from next month onwards from Kato and then once we get into Todaoki probably in the second half of this year you'd see results coming out of there. So that's about it from the projects and marketing side. Just taking a look at our price chart here. Yeah, not pretty, but it has looked a little bit better, especially in January. We got a little bit of a pop up there after we had the last

20:29 results from Kato. And it's just been a little bit challenging to sustain it. So hopefully, as I said, once we get the second break down there in Japan, we should be able to pick up on the drilling and pick up on the news flow. And hopefully if we can continue to come up with good results, you know, we can get those pops, but hopefully sustain them a little bit better. And we are still fairly well cashed up. We got about US$6M in the bank. So this needs to be updated. But that's as of last quarter, sorry, the September quarter. So that gives us enough cash to continue drilling right into Q3 of this year. Market cap is probably still around $24M. We basically are well cashed up to continue with the drilling for this year, at least for the first half of this year.

21:16 And as I said, hopefully have some more results and more frequent results coming in the second half of this year. So I think that's all I want to kind of touch on today. I'd love to hear anybody's feedback. Some people have said that they like to see these monthly updates just so that they're on top of what's going on with B Metals. But some people said that they don't really need to see this. They'd prefer to see more meaningful ones when we actually have a big news release. But in my opinion, we don't always have big news releases every month. So I think it's nice that we try to at least keep investors up to date with what we're doing. But yeah, I'd be very keen to hear any feedback that you have. And of course, I'm here to answer any questions that you might have as well.

22:10 So with that, I'll pass it back to you, Cam. Absolutely, thank you so much, Derek. And just to your point about getting in touch with the BIMETAL team. You can always fill out the survey that we have linked in the chat if you'd like to get in touch or leave any feedback. But Derek, we do have some questions that have already come in so let's just dive right into them. Just a reminder to the audience that if you'd like to participate in today's Q&A period, feel free to submit those questions in the Q&A chat. But first question is, Brittany wants to know what's the cost per meter to drill in Japan look like? And she does have a follow-up, just have you found that your recent drilling is coming along easier than it was before?

22:45 Good questions, Thank you very much. So the drilling costs are relatively high just because the way that we're drilling it is we're going from a large diameter casing to narrower casings. So you're basically going from HQ, PQ to NQ, or sorry, HW then to NQ. So you're basically telescoping into the zone. And as you telescope down into the zone, you're basically redrilling it Almost like you're redrilling the same hole 3 times over again by doing it like that. So that has increased the cost. So it's about $250 per meter. That's everything assays, everything included. So it is on the higher side of things, but I would say that the drilling has been progressing better for sure.

23:39 We have been trying different methods to drill the holes and that seems to be improving. It has been a bit of a learning curve, but I think that the drillers have been catching on to every little kind of aspect that they can to kind of help improve the drilling and the recoveries of the core. So We're seeing, I think, improvements on all levels from the drilling. I wish the costs would

24:05 come down. They haven't. I don't think they're going to be able to as long as we have to use this telescoping drilling method. Fair enough. Eric wants to know if there are any royalty encumbrances on Kato. That's the beauty of working in Japan. Nobody has been operating in any of these projects. So no royalties on any of our properties. It's great. It's not like you're working in Nevada where a prospector on top of a prospector on top of a prospector has had these properties and you might have 2, 3 or 4 royalties on 1 property. Not the case in Japan. All these are basically free and clear because nobody's really been working on them since World War II. So that's pretty nice.

24:50 All right. Farin Elf, a question about Zambia. Could you please go into some more details about the, quote, time extension of certain obligations in its option agreement with Copper Cross Zambia for the Pangeni Copper Project, end quote. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, we did have some costs, or sorry, we had some payments that were coming up in February. We were able to extend those into mid this year. So we have some extra time that should give us some extra time to A, get some additional drill results from Pangetti, assess those drilling results and then plan for our next

25:28 program. So yeah, so we should have some more time to get the drilling done and go through all the data. I think that's only fair given that we just finished up the program kind of late last year. So it gives us a bit more time to go through everything. And It was nice of the Copper Cross Zambia partners to allow us that time extension. Oh, absolutely. David is assuming that you're going to be an underground mine in the future. And his question is, how is Japan's seismic activity going to impact this? Yeah, That's an interesting question. Really tough to say exactly how that's going to impact things. But in speaking with some of the guys at the Hishikari Gold Mine, which is an underground mine, and it's very extensive, it produces somewhere around 200,000oz of gold per year from underground mines. So from my understanding, there hasn't been any major impacts due to seismic activity.

26:29 Japan, of course, is very seismically active. I mean, I've spent enough time in Japan to know but most of the earthquakes tend to be quite small but very frequent so you do get well When I lived there for a year, I probably felt maybe a dozen earthquakes, but so subtly. I mean you might just see a light, you know, shake or you might hear some sort of glass tingling, but you generally don't feel anything big. Nothing like the March 2011 earthquake, which was huge. That is kind of the out of the ordinary, I would say.

27:15 So as far as I know, mining should not really be affected. Certainly underground, you would have the structure in place to ensure that it would be seismically safe. I mean, Japan In general, if you've ever been there, you would know that all the buildings are designed to withstand very significant seismic activity, say, conversely to say where Turkey was basically devastated from a relatively small earthquake compared to what Japan faced in 2011. So it is very well structured in Japan to kind of mitigate what happens with seismic activity. I mean, there's no guarantees, but I would say that If you're going to be anywhere, Japan's going to be pretty good once you have all the structure in place.

28:06 All right. Rock is wondering if Japan has declared any set of critical resources like the US has done and where does gold fit into their overall mining strategy? I actually that's a really good question because I don't know the answer with Japan with respect to what they've actually outlined as what they consider critical metals. I mean, I think at least the headlines I've seen recently, I've seen that some of the countries have been adding to their reserves of gold. China, for example, Russia, also another example. Japan, I would suspect that they would like to do something like that.

28:51 I haven't seen at least in the headlines that they've done so. But, you know, Gold has been something that's been very important in Japan for well since 1400 basically AD. So Gold mining has been ongoing in Japan. There is, I think, a strong liking for the metal itself. And I'd have to look, I'd have to do a bit of research to see where the stocks, stockpiles are for reserves in Japan. But yeah, it's a good question. I'll have to look into that a little bit further. All right. Well, Derek, that looks like all the questions we received for today. So I want to thank you. I, of course, want to thank everyone who's joined us, especially those who participated in the Q&A.

29:38 Like I mentioned earlier, if you'd like to follow up with the B Metals team, feel free to click on that survey link in the chat and follow up with them, try and get in touch. You can always of course find more information on bmetalscorp.com. But Derek, before we wrap up for the day, I want to pass things over to you for any closing remarks you might have. No, thank you, Cam. Thanks for all the great questions today. It's good to see a little bit more engagement. And if anybody ever has any questions, you're very much welcome to just give me a call. My number is 604-928-2797. And of course, you can reach me by email at theinfo at bmetalscorp.com. Email address or to my personal 1, which is just D, my first initial and last name, Iwanaka at Bmetalscorp.com. Very happy to speak to any of our stakeholders at any point. So thanks again for joining And hopefully seeing you on the next one.