I am Jason Jessup. I'm the CEO of Magna Mining. Magna is a Sudbury-focused exploration development company, and with a soon-to-close acquisition, become a producing copper company here in Sudbury. Good to see you, Jason. Been a while. Difficult markets out there for nickel, difficult markets out there for explorers, difficult market for equities more broadly, and I guess you've got to be flexible and adaptive to those conditions. You seem to have been spinning a lot of plates this year. I don't even know where to begin. Should we look at where you started the year and maybe sort of, and we'll sort of get to where you ended up? We started 2024 working on our Crean Hill project here in Sudbury, working towards getting ore selling agreements in place, all of our permits in place so that we can actually start underground advanced exploration and essentially start producing ore and shipping it to Vale's mill. We were successful in March announcing that we received our permits and our approved closure plan. Then we announced that we had signed an agreement with Vale to sell ore to them, which was a big step. It was a lot of work on both sides of the table, but we got that done. We announced our permit to take water in April, and then we announced an ore selling agreement for a bulk sample from surface with Glencore. We went and executed a 20,000-ton surface bulk sample from our 109 Footwall Zone at Crean Hill and did that successfully on time, which was great. I got to say, being with Magna for over eight years now, seeing the haulage trucks and the excavators and the drillers working out at Crean Hill put a big smile on my face. It was great to see it move so quickly and get it permitted and actually drilling, blasting, and shipping rock. That was processed in September at Glencore Strathcona Mill. Great, great project. In September, we also announced a really transformational acquisition for us. This is something that we have been working on for many years. It is the acquisition of eight properties in the Sudbury Basin from KGHM International. And that includes the producing McCreedy West Copper Mine, the Levack and Podolsky Mines, which are in care and maintenance, and five exploration properties around the basin. So very complementary to our team, which formerly many of us worked at FNX and had operational and exploration experience at these properties. So that was huge for us. We also came out in September with a preliminary economic assessment on our Crean Hill project, which is very positive. And then we, in November, closed at CAD 21.8 million financing. So busy year, lots going on. We haven't closed the transaction yet. We expect to close it in Q1. But yeah, it's been great. Yeah, it has. It has. It has. From difficult markets, to be able to kind of pull this off is great news. When you just, something you just said, I want to pick up on, you said you've been planning this acquisition for years. What do you mean by that? It surely hasn't taken that long to negotiate. Explain. Back in 2015, I recognized, and I live in Sudbury, had worked for Quadra FNX and then Quadra FNX up until 2011, just prior to KGHM buying Quadra FNX. By 2015, I had recognized that the Podolsky mine was put on care and maintenance. I could kind of see the writing on the wall that the Levack mine wasn't a priority to KGHM. McCreedy West was chugging along, but at a lower production rate and just sort of minimal amount of investment. I recognized these are non-core assets. To put it in perspective, in 2002, FNX acquired these five past producing operations, so the Levack, McCreedy, Podolsky, the Kirkwood, and the Victoria project from Inco. These were non-core assets to a major mining company like Inco. And then FNX has this tiny little junior, invested into exploration, restarted McCreedy West mine, made a big discovery at Levack, restarted Levack mine, made a discovery at Podolsky, restarted Podolsky. It was called Whistle back then. And became a company that in 2010 was acquired for $1.5 billion. And we thought there was just, it was a great business model. And then Quadra was acquired by KGHM. So these assets, which were non-core to a major, created so much value within FNX in a junior company that was much more entrepreneurial, were back in the hands of a major. And again, were non-core. So they'd come full circle. And that's when I realized in 2015, there's an opportunity here for another entrepreneurial junior company to come in and buy some of these non-core assets and create a new, we'll call it FNX 2.0. Some people think that that's a little cheesy. Really, essentially, we took what we learned from FNX and applied it in Magna. When I founded Magna in 2016, the goal was to work on acquiring these assets from KGHM. Now, it's taken a long time. I got to say, there's been a number of changes internally within management at KGHM, different governments in Poland, and it's a very political company. It's taken us a lot of time from the first time we approached them, actually in 2015, to get this deal signed. There was two years of, almost two years of negotiations and work to get that definitive agreement signed. It's taken a lot of time, but this is what we've been focused on since inception. Interesting. Okay, so a couple of things there. One, you know the assets. Obviously, you worked at FNX, right? So you knew what you were getting, and the hypothesis that they would eventually kind of be made available is good news. I guess the thing that I want to understand is, back then, were you looking at them from the perspective of nickel, or obviously, there's a big kind of copper component here. Did you always know that Magna was going to maybe a sort of multi-commodity setup? Yeah. And you know, Matt, you asked me back in September at Beaver Creek in 2022. You said, you know, is Magna a nickel company or a copper company or a PGM company? How would you describe yourself? And I remember saying to you, we're a Sudbury company. And we are going to mine all those commodities. And whatever makes sense and makes us the most money, that's what we're going to mine. And that's what Sudbury is. And that was one of the unique things. The advantage I think we had at FNX is that there are distinctly different deposits within the same mine. So for example, at McCreedy West, there's the Inter Main nickel deposit, which is primarily nickel, just a little bit of copper, a little bit of cobalt. Then there's the Footwall 700 Complex, which is copper dominated with a little bit of nickel and some PGMs. And then there's the PM Zone, which is primarily platinum, palladium, gold with a little bit of copper and a minor amount of nickel. So you can really focus on mining wherever it makes the most sense. So right now, we are going to be focused on copper. We'll be mining in the 700 Complex. I would estimate something in the range of 70% of our revenues in 2025 after we close this deal will come from copper with some significant precious metal byproducts. But when we do see a turn in the nickel market and it makes sense, it's very easy to turn on the nickel mining. And we did this at FNX. We ramped up in 2007. We really ramped up our nickel mining because nickel was at sort of all-time highs at that point. And then we turned it right back down after the financial crisis, again, focused on precious metals and copper. So there's that ability to be flexible. And our strategy is to continue over at least the next four or five years on selling ore to the two existing mills in Sudbury. So that allows us that flexibility. Okay, so I get, look, we've seen companies have to kind of flip-flop with their business plans and strategies from lithium to nickel, from nickel to gold, and so it goes on, and that kind of leaves a kind of bad taste in the mouth, I think, in the market, where people are not knowing quite what the company is or indeed that the management more broadly are out of control of their destiny, so do you think in terms of the value that you've seen attributed to the company recently, is because of that flexibility around sort of polymetallic portfolio approach, or is it the production component? Because you're talking about getting the production quite soon here and then a sequence of others coming online as well, so what are people buying into? Yeah, what I think is really resonating is two things. One is the ability to use, and again, forward-looking statement, but cash flows from McCreedy West to reinvest, to restart mines, and this bootstrapped approach is what FNX did really well and allowed them to not take on any debt, which is kind of remarkable to be starting mines and not taking on debt, but we have that kind of ability that we can bootstrap cash flow, reinvest that into mines. It also allows us to use cash flow in the future to do our exploration, so we're not going out and raising money necessarily to fund all of our exploration program, so that really resonates with a lot of people, is that we have a business plan. Upon closing this acquisition, we will have five permitted operations here in Sudbury, which is kind of remarkable as well. So you de-risk it that way. But the other side of it is also the exploration potential. And again, much like FNX, who made multiple very large deposit discoveries, there's that kind of potential. And we see that as well. And so we're very excited. And people always like that exploration upside. And I think they're seeing that in our story. Okay, for sure. And we'll come on an exploration, I promise you. Let's look at what this has done to your balance sheet. And I guess what it'll do for your share register as well. This acquisition, and that's not quite yet closed, but what does it look like on the financials? Yeah, so we are acquiring eight properties, including the producing McCreedy West Copper Mine, the Levack Podolsky Mines on care and maintenance, and five exploration properties for CAD 5.3 million cash on closing, CAD 2 million in Magna shares priced at closing, and a CAD 2 million cash deferred payment on December 31st, 2026. So that's the basis of what we're acquiring it for. Now, there's also CAD 24 million in total contingency payments based upon declaration of commercial production at the non-producing properties. So that CAD 24 million is divided among the other seven properties. And we're also going to be taking on CAD 10 million in closure liabilities. Now, the elegant solution we had to finance this is Desjardins, the Canadian Bank, where our financial advisors and their commercial banking team has provided us a CAD 10 million three-year term facility, as well as a CAD 10 million letter of credit. The term facility can be used to close the acquisition and the cash, as well as provide some working capital. And then the letter of credit, which is a permanent piece of capital, would be used for the closure liabilities. Essentially, we could buy these properties with McCreedy West in production without needing to use any cash in the treasury. That being said, we did have a very positive response. And upon marketing this deal, we had a lot of interest from new investors. So we did raise CAD 21.8 million that we closed in November. Yeah, we have cash in the bank, and we're all set to close this in Q1. Okay. Now, getting to production, producers are being rewarded in this market at the moment in a way that explorers aren't. No money's coming cascading down through the system for them. So however you can get financed is the right way to get financed at the moment and worry about the cost later. But that said, you're looking at McCreedy and say, look, if we can get this thing into production, it'll be cash generative. We can obviously use that on the other projects. We'll use that for exploration as a kind of non-dilutive way of advancing all of the assets. What does McCreedy West look like today? And are there any kind of economic studies or reports to give you a sense of what do you think this thing can generate? What will it contribute? Yeah, so because within KGHM International, there aren't any public technical reports other than a resource report that we had completed. We announced it when we announced the deal. It's filed on SEDAR now. So the global resource at the McCreedy West mine is 9.3 million tons. And that's between about 2.5 million tons in the Inter Main nickel deposit at about a 1.6% nickel grade, about 5.2 million tons in the 700 Complex, approximately 2% copper, and about 0.7 nickel and about 2.5, 3 grams, platinum, palladium, gold combined. And then about another 1.5 million tons in the PM Zone, which is, and this is between indicated and inferred, at about 5.5 grams, platinum, palladium, gold combined, 0.8 nickel, I believe, or 0.8 copper, I believe, and 0.2 nickel. So that's the total resource. Now, right now, they're producing about 300,000 tons a year. In 2023, they produced 317,000 tons at about 1.6% copper, plus some PGMs and nickel. Now, I don't have audited financials that I can quote the cash flow they made from that, but that's what they did. And this is sort of the range they've been producing in for the last few years at McCreedy West. Now, when I operated McCreedy West back in 2008, before I went to Levack mine in 2009, we produced about 720,000 tons between all three deposits. And I think our production rate for the year was around, well, it was 720,000 tons for the year. Most of that was coming from the PM Zone, the precious metal zone, and the Inter Main deposit. So I think that with the resource we have in the 700 Complex, we can increase production. And it's a shallow mine. It's ramp access. So again, we were producing over 2,200 tons a day back in 2008 from that ramp. They're producing about 900 tons a day right now. I would like to see us get back up to about 1,500 tons a day, primarily mining the 700 Complex. And again, our target, and we still need to finalize a lot of plans in our budget, but our target would be to try to get there by the end of 2025. At that level, I think it would be at a long-term sustainable sort of production level. And that's going to require a little bit of capital, not a lot, but a little bit of capital, probably a couple more pieces of equipment, some more people, a little bit more diamond drilling. But yeah, that's what we think we can do. Again, we'll have more, I'd say, forecasts in the future after we close the acquisition. Forecasts on the PEA. How do we get to, is there anywhere we can go or any numbers that we should be looking at which help us understand the sort of cash generative component there? Because as you say, cash gives you options. It gives you options with how quickly you move that asset and other assets along. Exploration is a big part of this. You've got underground, and I guess from surface as well, that you're going to want to do. Kind of like a sense of the ambition here. Is there any way that we can work out where the contribution could be there? I know you've raised some money, but. You know, I would say that, again, I can't give any kind of guidance on what we think we would have for cash costs and what we might produce from cash flow. But my hope, and based on our experience, is that at an optimized increased production level, we would have free cash flow. And again, forward-looking, this is just a sort of a target or a goal we have right now, is $20 million-$40 million in 2026. That's where we'd like to be. Now, again, we have to work out our plans. It may be more or less, and it's definitely going to have an impact on what metal prices look like. But we're primarily going to be generating revenue from copper. And we're pretty bullish on copper. We think it's got some really strong fundamentals going forward. So that's kind of the range. Again, we're still going to have to close the deal, put budgets together, and understand all of that. But that's kind of what I would hope to see. Okay. Okay. Well, I can't push you yet. The deal's going to close, and then maybe give some guidance once you're able to put some numbers together. Right. Okay. So we understand. There's also sort of a sequence there that I referenced earlier. So we know McCreedy will unlock the district for you. And clearly, you've been working with Shakespeare and Crean Hill for some time as well. But have you got a plan in your head? Now, you've got these, well, for when you get these assets on board, how you come at it, what's priority, what's flagship, what's the time frame? Yeah. So again, I love to provide and give ownership to the team, our engineering team, our operations team, to tell me, "This is what we can do," and challenge themselves. So I don't want to be mandating from the top saying, "This is what we have to do." But we've had many discussions with the team at McCreedy West and internally with our team here on what we think is possible. So conceptually, the plan could be that we start investing in McCreedy West. First, let's call it the first half of the year. We very much focused on getting ourselves set up to start seeing increased production in the second half of 2025 at McCreedy West and kind of continuing that on to the end of the year. Maybe it takes a quarter longer or a quarter less, but that's kind of the idea. Where we get up to that, call it 1,250-1,500 tons a day, sort of steady state. Maybe we focus on a little bit higher grade, a little higher cutoff, and it's a little less tons, but increase that metal and what makes sense for the mine. So that is something that we want to do. Now, at the same time we're doing that, we're going to have a team working on the restart plan for the Levack mine. And when you talk about flagships, for FNX, while I was there up until 2011 or up until at least the Quadra acquisition, the Levack mine was the flagship. When I went there in 2009, we started developing what was called the Levack Footwall Deposit, later named the Morrison Deposit after Gord Morrison. And it was an incredibly high-grade copper footwall deposit. We were mining month after month, 8%-10% copper, 8-10 grams of platinum, palladium, gold combined, and about 1.5% nickel. Month after month, quarter after quarter, anywhere from 15-20,000 tons a month. So high-grade, narrower, more selective mining, but incredible grades, high-margin rock. That was our flagship. And that continued until 2019, and the mine went on care and maintenance. Now, there's still a historic resource of about 700,000 tons at about 4% copper, 1% nickel, and about four or five grams of PGMs still remaining there. But there's a lot more high-grade copper exploration. So understanding where we can restart the mine, knowing that it's accessible, people are going underground there every day. It's used as secondary egress for Glencore's Onaping Depth project. So it's in very good shape. So that's something we're going to focus on in 2025 with the goal of having a 2026 restart of the mine. Now, what that's going to look like, we'll have to figure that out. But we expect it to be a fairly low capital cost, gradually increasing production. And again, having the ability, and just like McCreedy West, Levack has ore selling agreements in place with Vale, there's that ability to, as you start incrementally producing, you can start generating revenues. So that's a great option to have. So that'll be 2026. Now, as we're doing this in 2025 as well, we're looking at doing a pre-feasibility study on our Crean Hill project. So now that we've done the bulk sample on surface, we have a lot more information. It's to take it to the next step to increase our confidence in engineering in a pre-feasibility study. We expect that to probably be completed sometime in the second half of 2025. Depending on where we're at with McCreedy West and the cash flow, we'll allocate capital where it makes the most sense. We are looking at ways to fund Crean Hill separately, potentially through a byproduct metal stream or royalty. All of that, 2026, restarting Levack, running at McCreedy West at a level we consider an optimal level, and potentially starting our advanced exploration either late in 2025 or sometime in 2026 that would get us underground and start accessing some of the deposit at the Crean Hill mine. By the end of 2026, we should have revenue coming from McCreedy West, Levack, Crean Hill. By the end of 2027, potentially, we would hope to have commercial production at McCreedy West, Levack, and getting close to commercial production at the Crean Hill mine. So pretty exciting. And then there's the fourth mine that's permitted, which is the Podolsky mine. And again, it has a ramp that was partially developed in 2008 to access a zone called the North Zone, which is a high-grade copper zone close to surface. It was shut down in 2008 just due to the financial crisis. But it's about 200 meters of development to get into the first part of the deposit. So it's a smaller deposit. It's high-grade. We don't see as great of an opportunity at this time as we do at Levack and Crean Hill. So it potentially could be the fourth mine to come online. So then if you really want to look out, so at the end of four years, we could be generating revenue from four operations in Sudbury, and then from that revenue, potentially, that's when we'd look at making a decision to build a mill at Shakespeare and restart the Shakespeare open pit and potentially ship some of our ores out to that mill and blend it with Shakespeare. But we would look at doing that when we're in a very strong financial position and have significant cash flows, so that's kind of a conceptual look, and things can change. We could make a big discovery, and it would change the order of that, but that's a general sort of four to five years. Okay. You need that. You need something to work to and for, right? With the, obviously, what you learn with recent conversations between Glencore and Vale with their mills and smelters, etc., you understand the kind of cost parameters and therefore margins potentially available to you. With this increased production, does that change your negotiating power at all? Yeah, definitely. I think having two mills in Sudbury here that are both looking for feed gives us some real advantages. And having a permitted mill that we could build ourselves is always that credible threat of, you know, if we can't work with you, well, then we'll take another route. And but to be quite honest with you, both Vale and Glencore have been really cooperative and want to work with us. There's no one trying to, I'd say, get the upper hand. It's really collaborative. And how can we work together to make this work? And I think ultimately, both Vale and Glencore are looking for feed. They're looking for metal pounds to fill their own contracts and their own smelters. So I think Magna is that provider of feed that they need and they see a benefit in. And this leads to a much bigger conversation, Matt, where just like McCreedy and Levack were non-core to Inco back in 2002, there's other deposits that the majors own here in Sudbury that they've done their studies on, they've done their work on, and it just doesn't hit their hurdle rates at their cost structure. But for, again, a junior company that can do things differently, operate out of ATCO trailers on surface as opposed to building large complexes and perhaps having just a lower labor cost in general, there may be opportunity for us to work with them on some other projects in the future. And that's really the growth profile beyond what we've talked about already is other projects in Sudbury that perhaps we could go and help develop and mine and put additional ore into the mills here in Sudbury. Yeah. I guess you've got the credibility of having, well, this thing's got to get over the line, but a track record of M&A is helpful, access to capital in difficult markets like you seem to have been able to do. That's really, really helpful. I guess the other bit is the organic stuff. We haven't really kind of honed in on the potential of the organic. I don't know what data you've got. I don't know what historic data exists, why you feel that that could give up a lot more. How are you going to approach that? Great question. This has been a long process. We've been in with access to the KGHM data since 2023 when we first signed a CA with them and started reviewing that data. We'd had a very good familiarity with it prior to that with people like Dave King, who's our Senior Vice President, Exploration Geoscience, having worked with FNX, been involved in the big discoveries on those properties in the past. Gord Morrison, who was the Vice President of Exploration for FNX and is one of our key advisors and, I'd say, a mentor of Dave's, has made many discoveries in Sudbury. We've taken it, I'd say, a wholesome look from everything we know about Sudbury and looking at some of the trends. In Sudbury, it's really interesting. And then we're still. I'd say Sudbury in general, we're still understanding the controls on these footwall deposits. But the North Range, which is where Levack and McCreedy are located, it's about a five or six kilometer embankment, a big structure in the Sudbury Igneous Contact that hosts a number of mines and hundreds of millions of tons have been mined historically. And that entire footwall region, generally behind every mine is a footwall deposit, these high-grade PGM deposits. Now, we've got, I think, a better understanding than a lot of groups out there. And it's been demonstrated by the discoveries that have been made in the footwall by our team in the past. So that's how we look at things is understanding these structures, understanding these trends. There's still a lot of exploration. The contact has been drilled fairly well for nickel. But in the footwall, there's still a tremendous amount of upside. For example, that area between the McCreedy West mine and the Levack mine, it's about a two-kilometer trend there that has seen very little drilling in the footwall. Again, the contact's been drilled off looking for nickel, but the drill has to turn around and drill in the other direction to test deeper into the footwall. And sometimes these deposits can be a kilometer from the contact well back in the footwall. But you find the right rocks, those right structures, and there's potential for a deposit. So there's enough smoke, enough, I'd say, information that we've started to triangulate some of these areas. And we think there's great potential. And that's why we're excited about it. And I do believe in the next two years, we'll be able to announce a new discovery in the footwall. I'll be disappointed if we don't, put it that way. Well, you've got the money to be able to give it a good crack. So that's a great update from you. I just want to touch base because I'm seeing you since March. A lot going on there. And it's slightly different plan from when we last spoke because you've executed on a few things. So appreciate your time today, Jason. Please stay in touch. Let us know how you get on. It should be a super exciting 2025 for you guys. Absolutely, Matt. Thanks a lot.