Americas Gold and Silver Aktie

Hello, and welcome to the Americas Gold and Silver Second Quarter 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. I will now turn the conference over to Paul Huet, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Americas Gold and Silver's Second Quarter 2026 Conference Call. As always, this call is being recorded and will be available on our website's Events page later today. We will also be referencing a slide deck during today's webcast presentation.

Joining me on the call today are Warren Varga, our Chief Financial Officer, who will walk us through the main financial takeaways for the quarter; and Oliver Turner, our Executive Vice President of Corporate Development.

I'll begin with a few housekeeping items and then walk through the key operational and strategic highlights from the second quarter before turning the call over to Warren.

Over to Slide 3. Before I begin, I'd like to remind you to review our cautionary statements regarding forward-looking information and non-GAAP measures contained in our second quarter MD&A news release and our presentation. Please also note that unless otherwise stated, all dollars are U.S. dollars.

Over to Slide 5. Safety remains the foundation of a strong operating culture, and I really want to congratulate all of our employees on their continued commitment and performance with 0 lost time accidents, now extending well over a 1-year period across both our operations in U.S. and in Mexico. Well done to all of them.

During Q2, our team made significant progress across the company with a 26% year-over-year improvement in production at our Cosala mine, continued with major infrastructure upgrades at Galena complex and obviously, the massive removal of the variable gold and silver price-linked debt obligations, which we'll talk to a little later.

Consolidated silver production was approximately 665,000 ounces during the quarter or approximately 80 -- a little over 800,000 silver equivalent ounces. These results reflected ongoing strong operational performance at Cosala. At Galena, the extended shutdown associated with Phase 2 of the shaft and the upgrades are now well behind us. We're actually now enjoying those improved infrastructures, which we desperately needed.

More importantly, we remain on track to achieve our full year 2026 production guidance of 3.2 million to 3.6 million ounces of silver. As we have previously emphasized, production has always been more weighted to the second half of the year as infrastructure is -- as dollars are spent for the infrastructure.

Financially, we delivered yet another strong quarter with consolidated revenue increasing 71% year-over-year to $46.3 million. For the first half of 2026, revenue reached $114 million. That's up 126% from the same period last year. And what amazes me is as we continue to spend money, as we continue to devote efforts, we look at the first 6 months of the year, that's almost equivalent to what we had in the last 12 months of 2025. So these are big steps that we're taking, major modifications to improve revenues and continue to improve profit.

As I previously mentioned, we also completed Phase 2 of #3 shaft modernization at Galena. We settled our remaining variable future silver and gold delivery obligations, and we continue to see encouraging high-grade drilling results throughout the entire company. Together, these accomplishments, they position us well for the next phase of our growth program.

Over to Slide 6. Operationally, Cosala had another strong quarter. Silver production increased 26% year-over-year to approximately 337,000 ounces. It was supported by higher grades and more importantly, improved recoveries. I'm quite happy about the team and all the works we've done on the metallurgy and improving those recoveries. It also included commercial production from EC120. Cash costs at Cosala decreased down to $16.91 per ounce. That was primarily due to obviously higher grades and copper byproduct credits.

With regards to our efforts with the drill bit, resource conversion drilling continues to deliver very strong encouraging results at San Rafael Upper zones and the 120 zones. Our drilling is consistently returning silver grades averaging approximately 2 to 3x previously reported inferred mineral resource grades. Allow me to give you just one example. One -- I cherry picked this one, but it was so impressive. But one of the examples is one of our holes SR568. We had an intersection of 14 meters grading 600 grams per tonne. I'm going to say it again because there's such great results, 14 meters of 600 grams per tonne.

The actual mineral resource actually predicted 110 grams. So we're talking about a 5x increase from the model grade in that same area. Importantly, these intercepts are immediately adjacent to existing mine infrastructure, which gives us the opportunity to incorporate these results into our mine plan in maybe Q4, but certainly without doubt into 2027. So we're quite excited about it.

Our very strong operating performance in Mexico was a result of finally entering the heart of the ore body at the EC120. And it's a great example of why we're so excited about this mine over the next coming years. Having a diversified production base like we do, along with tremendous exploration potential across all our assets provides us with both operational and financial strength as we continue to scale the company. And I just want to give a quick shout out to our team in Mexico on a job well done and a strong quarter.

Now let me walk you through the upgrade that we completed at the Galena complex. Phase 2 upgrades that I mentioned in the #3 shaft are behind us. And a lot of people say, well, what does that mean? Well, let me talk about it. The upgrades have increased the hoisting throughput from roughly around 42 tonnes per hour. This is what we had inherited to a sustained rate of we're sustaining day in, day out at 85 tonnes per hour. We've actually hit peak performance in a number of times at 105 tonnes per hour.

As a gentle reminder, the upgrades included increasing the hoist motor from 1,750 horsepower to 2,250 horsepower, adding a second 2,250 horsepower motor as a critical spare. That was the first time in the company's history that had a critical spare. We improved the load system. We completed mechanical work, electrical work and more importantly, the braking and control system enhancements also so that we can sustain this new production rate.

We have also continued to invest in the underground fleet and communications infrastructure, including more than 10 new mobile equipment units and a fiber optic system and communications that will support real-time equipment tracking, future automation and improved mine connectivity. I think some of you have been at our mine. And when I first went at our mine and I looked at those FEMCO phones, I hadn't seen FEMCO phones since probably about 1988 in Timmins. So we desperately needed this communication. It will help us tremendously as we continue to grow our operations.

These upgrades are a critical part of our derisking and growth plan in creating the infrastructure required to support the higher mining rates and scalable production growth at Galena.

Over to Slide 8. Before I turn the call over to Warren, I would also like to recognize all the people behind the progress we're making at Galena, and there's been a tremendous amount of group, including everyone on site, our team in Toronto, our team in Reno, who are putting in tirelessly efforts and hours to making sure that we are spending the dollars to do the capital improvements at Galena, so it's sustainable forever for the next 30, 50 years.

Quite often, I don't talk about some of these things, and we don't celebrate some of these other things, but I just want to give a quick shout out that this year at Galena, we've added 7 new members that were inducted to the Galena's 20-plus year all things. I've been working in the mine 39 years underground. It's pretty rare where we see people working 20 years at one operation. And I want to just give all those people a shout out. Their experience, their commitment and hard work have helped build the foundation of Galena Complex and they continue to shape its future for all the future generations.

I want to take a moment and thank all of them, all our employees for their dedication and hard work to the operations and the communities.

With that, I'm just going to turn the call over to Warren for some financial updates.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. This morning, we released our unaudited condensed interim consolidated financial statements and MD&A for the 3 and 6 months ended June 30, 2026. These documents are available on our website as well as under the company's profile on both SEDAR+ and EDGAR.

Revenue for the quarter was approximately $46 million, an increase of 71% compared with $27 million in Q2 2025, primarily due to higher realized silver prices. For the first half of 2026, revenue totaled $114 million. Paul has already referenced this, but this was as much as -- almost as much as our entire year last year, which is an increase of 126% compared to $50.5 million in the first half of 2025.

The average realized silver price for Q2 2026 was $67 per ounce compared with $34 per ounce in Q2 2025. Our net loss for the quarter was approximately $5 million or $0.02 per share compared with a net loss of approximately $15 million or $0.06 per share in Q2 2025. The year-over-year improvement primarily reflects the higher net revenue previously referenced, partially offset by foreign exchange losses, a derivative loss related to the Royal Gold settlement and higher income tax expenses.

Adjusted earnings for Q2 were a loss of approximately $0.9 million or essentially $0 per share compared with adjusted loss of $12.1 million in Q2 2025. The adjusted EBITDA was approximately $12 million or $0.04 per share compared with an adjusted EBITDA loss last year of 41 -- sorry, $4.1 million in Q2 2025.

Consolidated cost of sales per silver equivalent ounce sold was $32. Cash costs averaged $25.68 per silver ounce sold and all-in sustaining costs averaged $40.63 per silver ounce sold during the quarter. For the first half of 2026, AISC averaged $37 per ounce sold. We ended the quarter with approximately $89 million in cash and cash equivalents and $49 million in working capital, in line with expectations as we continue to deploy capital into our growth plans and completed the settlement of the Sprott and Royal Gold obligations.

I will now turn the call over to Oliver.

Thank you, Warren, and good morning, everyone. One of the most important strategic developments during the quarter was the settlement of our remaining precious metals delivery obligations. During the second quarter, we settled the remaining silver delivery obligation with Sprott Mining, Inc. and the remaining gold delivery obligation with Royal Gold. These transactions simplify and strengthen our capital structure, reduce future cash debt service requirements, remove future mark-to-market volatility associated with these instruments and increase our exposure to future silver prices.

As shown on the slide, the transactions removed more than $76 million of future variable metal price-linked obligations and more than $28 million of annual debt servicing obligations. All this for just 3.3% in combined dilution to shareholders. This represents a meaningful improvement in the financial foundation of the company and allows more value from operational execution and silver price performance to flow directly to shareholders.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to Paul for some closing remarks.

Thanks, both Oliver and Warren. Look, overall, Q2 represented another quarter of meaningful progress and demonstrated the momentum we are building across our business. We delivered strong revenue growth, advanced the next phase of our Galena growth plan with the completion of the #3 shaft modernization, strengthened our balance sheet through the settlement of our remaining precious metals delivery obligations and continue to deliver strong operating and drilling results at Cosala.

As we move through the second half of 2026, our focus remains squarely on safety and executing our growth strategy, increasing production as the Idaho operations ramp up and continuing to unlock the long-term value of our asset base.

Silver is also becoming increasingly important to the technologies driving the modern economy, including artificial infrastructure, data centers, electrification and advanced manufacturing. As these technologies scale, we believe silver's unique electrical and thermal properties will continue to reinforce its strategic importance.

At the same time, we continue to advance the largest drilling campaign in the company's history and progress our antimony strategy alongside our joint venture partners. U.S. antimony positioning Americas Gold to play an increasingly important role in the U.S.'s critical mineral supply chain.

We believe the combination of high-grade silver exposure, growing domestic antimony production and significant operational growth potential positions us, Americas Gold and Silver as one of the more unique precious metals growth stories in the sector today.

With that, I'm going to turn it over for some questions over back to the operator.

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Dalton Baretto of Canaccord.

I'm looking at the production profile for Galena here. You reiterated guidance. I understand Q2 is a trough quarter. If I look at H1, it's about 35% at the low end of guidance. So big H2 coming up and I think some of that's throughput related, some of that's grade related, some of that's coming from Crescent maybe. Can you unpack that for us and give us a sense of comfort around the back half of this year?

Dalton, thanks for the question. Obviously, Q2 was always designed to be a quarter in which we were going to invest in infrastructure in Idaho, specifically, as you're pointing out, we needed to get that shaft work done, so that we can sustain that 85 tonnes per hour. So as we continue as that is behind us and we're skipping days now, we're seeing days 1,000, 1200 tonnes a day, which is the first time our mine has ever seen that. And we continue to advance our long-haul system.

Look, we have just blasted our 13th long-hole stope as the equipment starts to being delivered and is being received at -- by the way, Dalton, both operations. And look, guidance is for the company. It's not for Galena. Guidance remains as a company, and that's one of the great things we have as a company is we have optionality. So you said some really important things at the beginning. Obviously, grade matters.

Grade is helping us significantly, specifically at Cosala and recoveries at Galena, the Galena complex. We don't differentiate between Crescent and Galena. Crescent, we've always said, look, we bought it. It was a great investment. We certainly believe in that investment. Crescent is part of a longer-term vision. It's going to have some ounces, not many. It's really about setting ourselves up for the future at Crescent.

And now with the shaft upgrades and the actual communication and the equipment, we're seeing ourselves more consistently delivering at Galena complex. So when I look at Q2, as a company, we're sitting right around 40%. So 60% for the last half of the year. It's pretty -- we're very comfortable that we will achieve that guidance that we had set out. So thank you for the question. Hopefully, I got it.

Really appreciate it. And then maybe just as a follow-up, maybe a bit of a housekeeping item here. But when I look at the production versus the sales over H1, it's about a 9% lag or so. Is that going to be made up in H2 as well?

Are you asking specifically about the production versus sold?

Correct.

Yes, yes. So yes, those ounces are already being processed through the first half -- first month of Q3. And that typically just relates to making sure that the production gets from our mill through to the smelter. So there's nothing more than that here.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Chan of SCP Resource Finance.

Just I was wondering if you could give us a sense of at Galena and then Crescent, what's happening on the ground now? So for example, at Galena, you've got more shaft capacity. I'd imagine at least initially, you can hoist a lot of waste out of the mine that you've got there and then stoping and mining will ramp up to fill that capacity.

And then Crescent, you're developing. But I was just wondering if you could kind of zoom in on those 2 for a second, just give us maybe a bit more color of what's happening at the mine.

No problem, Justin. And look, I just want to remind people that I believe it's as early as next week where we're going to have a site analyst visit where I think many of you are going to be able to come to our site to actually physically see a lot of things we're doing. And I will say you will walk away with some exciting views, and there's a lot of work going on at the mine.

So specifically at I'll talk about the Galena complex. First, we're doing quite a bit of waste development, and you're correct. Moving -- now that the shaft work is done, we're seeing many days consistently of moving a lot more tonnes. We need to get ahead in the waste development. Our mine, when we took this thing over, hadn't had a lot of capital for a number of years in drilling. There was no exploration for a decade.

In waste development, we were behind. So we're catching up on waste development at Crescent and Galena, both we're putting in now that the Phase 2 of the shaft is done, we're squarely focused on that paste fill plant that we desperately need. We've been filling with Sandfill. It's much slower. It's not quite as competent. It's a lot older style. So once that paste fill plant is done, commissioned, we'll be filling stopes in around, call it, 36 hours versus 10 days.

So a lot of the work that you're going to see when you guys come here next week, you'll see at Crescent, you're going to see drilling. You're going to see waste development being conducted so that we could get ourselves into a point where we have a secondary egress. We don't have a secondary egress at Crescent. We need to establish that before we could take out any of the ore as we know to follow with MSHA rules. And then again, I'm going to repeat it, but the best thing we're doing here at Galena is setting ourselves up for the rest of the year and putting in waste development, so we can continue to -- quarter after quarter, we've got to get more long-hole stopes. We've got to get away from the jackleg.

In order to do that, we need the waste development in front of ourselves. We need to carve out the top cuts and the bottom cuts and then bring in the long-haul drills. Again, I'd say I'm quite proud that we've done 13 long-hole stopes already. Remember, this mine has been here for 100 years. Always everything done underhand cut-and-fill with jackleg.

What we're doing is modernizing something that's been around for a long time and changing a mining method with our team, and that's going quite well. So those are the big things that are occurring throughout Galena over to Mexico, I'd say it's steady as it goes. I talked about us hitting the heart of EC120. Most of you know Mike Doolin, he's been with us for years. He's had a tremendous hand with our team there on getting recoveries up.

Those recovery rates are a big, big factor in what we saw $16.91 costs on our cost per ounce versus $30.61 grade and recoveries. Recoveries matter a lot to us. So very focused, lots of projects going on, but we're doing them safely and on time and on budget.

Okay. Got you. That's great color. Just a housekeeping one. I have in my notes from previous you were planning to do an internal study at Relief Canyon. Is that still in the plan? And will we see any details of that in the market? Or is that going to stay internal?

Yes. So look, we're going -- the answer is yes. We are still -- we've always been pretty adamant that last year, we didn't do -- we just -- Relief Canyon, there was no work done. This year, we are completing an external study on Relief Canyon, at which point -- I'm not exactly sure the month it comes out. But I'll tell you this, Justin. When you're here next week, I'll tell you the exact month it's going to come out. But the question being asked is, are we continuing to do it? The answer is yes.

Okay. Perfect. And then maybe just the last one is, in terms of capital for Q3 and Q4, is there any notable kind of -- I guess, between the 2, should we just assume pretty similar deployment? Or would it be pretty Q3 heavy just given the base plan timing?

No, I'd say that the guidance and the plans that we put forward to you guys earlier in the year are still -- look, we just had our Board meeting. We're pretty much on track to deliver capital as we had originally intended. I think we're shifting maybe $1 million here or there, but nothing -- there's no $30 million, $40 million, this is changing, this is changing. There's no big buckets being moved around.

Got you. I guess, between Q3 and Q4, is it lumpy? Or is it pretty even between the 2 of them?

It's probably -- I'm trying to look at -- I'm trying to remember them at the top of my head here, Dalton, (sic) [ Justin]. I think some of it is more towards Q4 as some of the -- like I'll give you an example, the paste fill plant is ending or nearing towards its end. So some of the invoices will come in towards the back end. So we'll see a little more spending towards Q4 on some of the bigger projects.

And then that shaft relining we're doing that we've always talked about, which you're going to see firsthand next week. I think after you come here next week, Justin, you'll see the progress we're doing. I'd say it might be a little higher Q4. It might not be -- it won't be Q3, Q4 divided by 2.

Your next question comes from the line of Jamie Spratt of Haywood Securities.

Well done on the continued progress at both Galena and Cosala. I just want to start with a couple of questions on Galena. I want to pick up on Justin's question there and just chat about long haul. So I guess the paste plant really, Paul, is the major driver of allowing you guys to crank up the long haul along with the capital development catch-up. But I guess as we think about this, so kind of how does the mix of cut and fill versus long haul change in the second half of '26 and into '27?

Yes. So look, Jamie, great question, but you almost answered it right out of the gate. You were right. Look, in order to establish long haul, we need to have waste development, which we're currently doing. In order to cycle the stopes at a rate where we want ourselves to be, we need the paste fill plant. So the 2 things you opened up with are very, very critical.

We have always said, look, we could end this year at a range, 30% to 40% long haul by the end of 2026. And we've made some big shifts here. This is not something that's going to -- nobody could ever come into this mine after 100 years, flip the switch and go, it's all long haul. There's equipment, and we've got 10 new pieces. All the stopes are remote capable. So the only thing you hadn't touched on, Jamie, and you touched on everything else was the equipment and the remote controls that we -- given that it's a shaft, it's a little more work to get things done.

We've got to take pieces apart, swing them down, not the end of the world, people do it everywhere else on the planet who have shafts like us. But I don't get to -- we don't just get to drive it down to decline. So there's a little more effort alongside that. But otherwise, the drilling is going well. When you will get to see the stopes, you will get to see that we're not adding a lot of dilution. Our widths are really -- we're surgically removing these areas through long haul very successfully.

So that range of 30% to 40% this year, our target for next year was always getting towards that 50% to 60% and year after year, continuing a 20% to 30% increase on more long haul, less jackleg.

The mine will never be 100% long haul. There are some areas in our mine that are more flat line, a little flat dipping and long haul won't be as conducive, and we won't dilute our grades down to -- like we won't cut our grades down by 40%, 50% in the areas that are a little more flatlined. And those might represent 15% to 16% of some of our veins.

That's really helpful. Yes. And then I guess second question on Galena. So I guess you guys ended up having to defer some high-grade production in Q2 given the fire in that area. And I guess, how should we be expecting grade to trend in Q3 and Q4? I mean Q2 obviously is not representative, but is it going to be close to Q1? Or will it be higher? I guess if you could just give us some direction on that.

Yes. Let me talk to you about that. The first thing I want to say about that -- and it was a minor fire. I'm actually going to take a moment here, Jamie, and just talk about it briefly. I want to remind everyone that -- nobody was injured in that fire. And the speed in which we got our miners out was unbelievable.

We were complemented even by local agencies, state and federal on how quickly our team reacted, how quickly we evacuated our mine. And the reason we were able to do that so quickly, and I think it's important to shareholders here that we always think, well, we're spending capital here or spending capital there. The capital that we spent on the shaft, having a secondary redundant motor was so beneficial in us getting our people out.

In the past, people would not have gotten out. In fact, there was an incident a number of years ago, 3 years ago or something where people were underground for more than 24 hours. And so I just -- before I answer the question, I just want to say to people, look, that fire was a minor fire. It did displace things. It's one of our better grades. So if it's not going to mean that the grade in the second half is going to be better, it means that our -- we're going to be able to achieve our guidance. So those areas, as we mine all the other parts of the mine, they are better grade in that specific stope. We'll be having those as part of the second half production. But that area is now completely settled. We're back in it.

And look, I want to give it -- Jamie, you opened up the door for me to really brag about even our mine rescue team. Our mine rescue team, the month before had just won the nationals, a huge event. So the fact that we have such a strong mine rescue team, such a responsive team, such a good emergency and rapid response team goes without saying that this came off without a hitch, no incident. We're talking a quarter later, we're back into the same area. And the ounces are going to flow into the second half of the year, allowing us to make our second half easier.

That's great. So just one question on Cosala. So I guess as we look at this, I think Q1 and Q2 seem to have been ahead of plan. I mean, kind of what's driving the strong performance at Cosala? And I guess we're in the heart of EC120 now, so the grades is helping. But what's -- sort of what's driving the outperformance? And how sustainable do you see these improvements?

Yes. Look, Jamie, those are -- honestly, those are great questions. The reality is we've been talking even when I did the due diligence, myself and our team, we've been talking about this EC120 zone for a year now. We're actually in it. We're actually mining it. We're drilling areas alongside it. I think I cherry picked a hole, and it's hard not to be pretty proud of something that's 14 meters wide at 600 grams, that's in the heart of it right near us. We're not mining it today. You see the cash cost. Our costs are going from $30 an ounce to $16.91 an ounce from some of the copper credits we're getting.

We absolutely do believe it is very sustainable. We believe that Cosala -- and I should have opened up this way with your response first, and actually, I apologize to my team in Mexico. I should have opened up by saying one of the biggest advantages we have is our team in Mexico. We have no expats there. We have all a team there that are experts led by Gabriel Soto, who does an amazing job, who leads our team there very strongly supported by the executive team here.

But the efforts we have accomplished, the drilling that we have seen, the new areas that we are mining, and I would say, grade, but also the efforts on the metallurgy. There was a tremendous amount of work done on looking at how do we get 4% to 10% increased recoveries. And we're getting about 10% better recoveries than we were in the past. Some of these efforts and focus are technically driven on recoveries have been big wins for us.

And we certainly believe that this cost structure, the ounce profile, the grade, the recoveries are something that is sustainable, and we'll see more of it in EC120 and you're getting to enjoy some of it as we demonstrate some of the drill results as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle of H.C. Wainwright.

This is Case Bongirne filling in for Heiko. Congrats on a successful quarter.

Sorry, was that Heiko. I didn't. I apologies. Was that -- my line cut out for a second. Was it Heiko. Was it?

Case, filling in for Heiko.

Oh, my bad. Sorry, Case, Yes, it cut out for a second on our end. So my apologies, Case. Go ahead, Case.

No worries. I guess, first, you mentioned it earlier, but can you give us an update on how the transition to long-hole stoping is going as well as any color potentially on how those stopes are performing so far?

Yes, absolutely. Look, I'll just repeat something. We've just done our 13th stope. We're -- and I often like to remind people that people -- our neighbors are doing an outstanding job at mining long haul right next door to us who are doing phenomenal. So it's not a surprise to me when I see that we are able to do it. And when you come to the mine and you see some of the results, we're mining some of these stopes that are about 1.2 to 1.3 meters wide. You're talking 3.5 feet wide. This is so narrow. We could not have done any better had we mined that with jacklegs.

If we were to mine that exact same stope, using jacklegs, the way it was done in the past, we could not have been any narrower. So what that means for us and our shareholders is that we're able to mine at a rate instead of around, call it, 50 tonnes a day in each blast, long-haul stoping will generate around 200 tonnes per day, even sometimes in some cases, per shift, depending on where we're mucking from and how long the trend is.

But when we look at the reconciliation of the long-haul stopes to our model, we are seeing a flat line that it's exactly as if we had mined it jacklegs. The difference is when we're mining long haul, we can carve out a stope in, call it, 28 days. That same stope would have taken us with handheld drills 12 to 14 months. So there's where the difference is. And we know we're going to improve on that still yet by installing the new paste fill plant.

When that is completed, and we're using that in 2027, we always said we're going to start using it in 2027. That changes -- that just improves things for us. It allows us to become more effective. In fact, thanks for the question on the longwall. I did want to give a quick welcome to our new General Manager, Brian Banta, who's doing a great job with our teams there at leading them as we continue to make this a more modernized mine. So Brian, Peter, welcome to our team. So go ahead, Case.

That concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn it back to Paul Huet for closing remarks.

Great. Thanks. Look, first, I want to just say thank you to all of you for joining the call. We all understand how busy each and every one of you are. I want to shout out to all our teams, Mexico, the U.S. who are unwavering in their commitments at making our company a better place, a safer place and a great place for shareholders.

What we're doing is setting ourselves up with the capital we're spending, coupled by the reduction in almost $90 million of debt, like these things are monumental steps that position our company for where we need to get to. So we're quite proud of it. And I want to obviously thank all the analysts that are alongside us and all our shareholders and have a wonderful Friday, and we're looking forward to the site visit that we're going to see most of you here soon. All the best.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, everyone. The meeting will now come to order. Welcome to this Annual Meeting of Americas Gold and Silver Corporation. My name is Peter McRae. I'm the Executive Vice President, Corporate and Legal Affairs of Americas Gold and Silver. I'll be attending as Chairman of today's meeting.

For security purposes, this annual meeting is being held with physical in-person access and participation limited to registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders. The company has provided a conference line in order for shareholders who are unable to attend the meeting in person to be able to listen to the meeting proceedings by phone. Please note that the phone lines will be muted for the duration of the meeting.

With your approval, I will ask Rob Buchanan to act as Secretary of the meeting and Computershare Investor Services through its representatives to act as scrutineer for this meeting to report on the number of shareholders present in person and the number of shares represented in person or by proxy at the meeting and to report on the votes cast in connection with the business of the meeting. In order that we have a complete record of those present, shareholders present in person or by proxy have been recorded and all participants by phone have been registered upon entry into the meeting.

In view to attend a number of formal matters, certain shareholders have volunteered to move and second resolutions where required in order to facilitate the handling of formal matters. Each holder of common shares or their proxy is entitled to 1 vote per share held.

We're advised by the scrutineer that all ballots have already been submitted by duly appointed proxy holders and any registered shareholders who are entitled to vote at the meeting. Based on the preliminary report from the scrutineer, all items of business today have received their requisite approval. Accordingly, for expediency, we will take all resolutions by a show of hands in order to move through matters quickly.

I will now ask Rob Buchanan as Secretary of the meeting to deal with certain formal matters concerning the meeting.

The notice calling this meeting accompanying management information circular dated May 14, 2026, and the form of proxy were distributed to shareholders of Americas Gold and Silver Corporation in accordance with applicable law. The Board of Directors adopted resolutions, which provided that this meeting be held today, which fixed the close of business on May 11, 2026, as the record date for the determination of shareholders entitled to notice and -- notice of and to vote at this meeting and any postponements thereof.

The management information circular was posted online under the company's SEDAR+ profile at sedarplus.ca, the company's EDGAR profile at sec.gov and on the company's website. Additional copies are available at this meeting. Proof of proper service of these documents has been filed with me, and I direct that a copy of each of these documents together with proof of service be retained with the records of this meeting.

Thank you, Rob. I will now ask for a motion that the reading of the notice of this meeting be dispensed with and the reading of the proof of service of such notice, the management information circular and the form of proxy also be dispensed with.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

I declare the resolution carried -- sorry. You seconded the motion. All those in favor, please so signify.

[Voting]

Contrary, if any?

[Voting]

I declare the resolution carried. I would now ask the Secretary to please advise the meeting as to the results of the scrutineers' report on attendance.

Scrutineers' report reads as follows: 2 shareholders present, representing 2 shares; 124 proxy holders present, representing 224,051,049 shares; 126 management proxies received, representing 224,051,051 shares. Based on the preliminary report from the scrutineer of proxies and ballots received, all items of business today have received a majority of votes in favor. Accordingly, for expediency, we will move through the motions, resolutions and questions quickly.

Thank you. As a result, I declare the requisite quorum is present, and I declare that the meeting be properly constituted for the transaction of business for which it has been called. I direct that the confirmation of mailing the notice of meeting and the scrutineers' final report be annexed to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule.

I would now like to present to the meeting the audited financial statements of the company for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, together with the auditor's report thereon, both of which were made available to shareholders upon request and on SEDAR+. Additional copies are also available at this meeting and on the company's website. I now place before the meeting the audited financial statements of the company for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, together with the auditor's report thereon. We will dispense with the reading of the auditor's report.

We will now proceed to the next item of business, the election of 7 individuals to serve as directors of the company unless the office -- their office is earlier vacated in accordance with the general bylaw of the company and the Canada Business Corporations Act. Canada Business Corporations Act requires that for elections at which there is only one candidate nominated for each position available on the Board, shareholders vote for or against individual directors and each candidate is elected only if they receive a majority of votes cast in their favor.

The management information circular lists 7 nominees for election as directors of the company. If elected, these nominees will hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed in accordance with the articles and bylaws of the company. May I now have a motion for the nomination of the 7 nominees?

Mr. Chairman, I move that those persons specified in the management information circular, namely Joseph Andre Paul Huet, Peter Goudie, Tara Hassan, Shirley In't Veld, Bradley R. Kipp, Gordon E. Pridham and Meri Verli be nominated as directors of the company to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed in accordance with the articles and bylaws of the company.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

In accordance with the advanced notice provisions of our bylaws, no further nominations may be made at this time. Therefore, I declare the nominations closed. May I request a motion that the 7 individuals nominated as directors of the corporation be so elected.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

I second.

If there are no comments, it is now in order to vote on the motion. The vote for this resolution will take place by a show of hands. All those in favor, please so signify by raising your hand.

[Voting]

Contrary, if any?

[Voting]

Motion carried. The next item of business is the appointment of the auditors. I will now ask for a motion that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants, Toronto, Ontario, be appointed auditors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until the auditor is removed from office or resigns and their successor is appointed and that authority be granted to the Board of Directors to fix the remuneration of the auditors.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

If there are no comments, it is now in order to vote on the motion. The vote for this resolution will take place by a show of hands. All those in favor, please signify by raising your hand.

[Voting]

Contrary, if any?

[Voting]

Motion is carried. This brings us to the conclusion of the formal business of this meeting. There being no further business, I now declare this meeting to be formally terminated.

Thank you for your attention and your attendance at this AGM. Should anyone attending in person or listening on the phone have questions or comments on the company, please reach out to management or our Investor Relations team at any time. Contact information is available on our website at americas-gold.com. Thank you again for your attention and support. Enjoy the rest of your day and summer.

Well, good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you to the Americas Gold and Silver First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Just a reminder that today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Warren Varga, CFO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Americas Gold and Silver's First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. This call is being recorded and available on our website's Events page later today. We will also be referencing a slide deck during today's webcast presentation. Joining me today is Oliver Turner, our Executive Vice President of Corporate Development. Paul Huet is on a plane and our CEO and Chairman is on a plane and unable to attend today, but I'm sure he'll listen to us later.

I'll begin with a few housekeeping items and then walk through key operational and strategic highlights from our first quarter before turning the call over to Oliver later on. Before we begin, I would like to remind you to review our cautionary statements regarding forward-looking information and non-GAAP measures contained in our second quarter MD&A, news release and presentation slides.

Please also note that unless otherwise stated, all dollar figures will be expressed in U.S. dollars throughout this call. Before discussing our operational results, I would like to recognize continued commitment to safety across our operations. On our year-end conference call, I mentioned that our Galena team had achieved a major safety milestone with 1 full year in over 500,000 hours worked without a single lost time accident. I'm very pleased to report that as of April 14, our Cosalá team achieved 1 full year without a single lost time accident as well.

Just a great success for both of our teams, and we're very proud of all their efforts at sites. Safety remains a foundation of strong operating culture, and I want to congratulate all of our employees on their commitment and performance. Q1 demonstrated continuing momentum across Americas. Operationally, we delivered a record consolidated silver production of 787,000 ounces and recorded consolidated sales of 830,000 ounces for Q1.

Importantly, this production growth was accompanied by solid cost performance in Q1 with cash costs of approximately $24 per ounce sold and all-in sustaining costs of $34 per ounce sold. In addition to strong silver production, we also continue to increase exposure to antimony, a critical metal and with growing strategic importance in North America. We believe Galena remains uniquely positioned as one of the few active domestic sources of antimony production in the United States.

The strong start to the year positions us in an excellent position to achieve our 2026 consolidated production guidance of 3.2 million to 3.6 million silver ounces at an average all-in sustaining cost of $30 to $35 per ounce sold. As a reminder, consolidated total capital expenditures for 2026 are targeted to be between $90 million to $120 million, including $30 million to $40 million to be deployed at the Crescent Mine.

Over the past year, our team has made four major new high-grade discoveries at Galena, highlighting the significance of untapped potential across the district. Our most recent discovery, the 43L-TJ Vein Complex was announced just 2 weeks ago and includes six new high-grade silver, copper antimony veins located close to existing infrastructure. Several of the high-grade intercepts are shown on the slide, including 1,392 grams per tonne silver, 1.5% copper and 1.5% antimony over 1.9 meters.

We continue to see antimony associated with many of these high-grade silver systems, further reinforcing the strategic importance of the Galena complex as both a high-grade silver asset and a growing domestic source of antimony for the U.S. and for the world. At Cosalá, our exploration teams have also delivered encouraging results with the new El Alacrán discovery located just 600 meters north of San Rafael. The discovery, which was announced 6 weeks ago, intersected multiple silver, gold, copper intercepts, including 69 grams per tonne silver, 0.2 grams per tonne gold and 0.2% copper over 28 meters.

Follow-up drilling is already underway. The recent discoveries across our operations highlight the significant untapped potential within our asset base. To capitalize the opportunity in front of us, we've allocated the largest exploration budget of $15 million to $20 million and the largest exploration drilling campaign in the company's history with over 64,000 meters to be drilled across our properties. The recent exploration success also becomes even more meaningful when viewed alongside our recently announced updated silver M&I resource announced earlier this year.

At Galena, measured and indicated silver resources increased 19% year-over-year to 88 million ounces, while grades improved by 21% to 501 grams per tonne silver. On a consolidated basis, silver M&I mineral resources increased by 10% to 116 million ounces with grades increasing by 30% to -- sorry, 240 grams per tonne silver. We believe this growing high-grade resource base provides a strong foundation to support our long-term growth plans.

For more details, please refer to the America's March 30, 2026 news release and the NI 43-101 technical reports supporting the mineral resource and reserve estimates for Galena Complex and coastal operations, which were filed on the company's profile on SEDAR+ yesterday, May 14, 2026. Let me now walk you through some of the major growth initiatives currently underway across the Galena complex. Starting with the paste backfill plant, progress continues to advance well. Major equipment is currently in fabrication with delivery starting in June 2026.

Site preparation is nearly complete and commissioning remains targeted for the fourth quarter 2026. Once operational, the pace plant is expected to increase backfill cycle times by approximately 250% and support increased long-haul stopes productivity with output being of about 93 tons per hour. Another critical project is the #3 Shaft, which has been recently completed. Phase 1 is now completed -- sorry, both phases are now completed, both Phase 1 and Phase 2. These upgrades are expected to increase hoisting through -- by approximately 150% to roughly 105 tonnes per hour and increase total capacity to roughly 1,350 tonnes per day, a significant step forward for the operations.

This is a critical step in derisking our growth and enabling higher ore production into 2026 and beyond. We are also making strong progress on digital infrastructure investments. Fiber optic communications are currently being installed down the #3 shaft, enabling real-time equipment tracking, improved automation and full mine connectivity. Full coverage is targeted by the fourth quarter of 2026. At the same time, engineering and minor fabrication is underway to repurpose the Galena Shaft into a long-term infrastructure corridor supporting paste, power, air, water and electrical systems, all important for supporting larger scale mining operations in the future.

On the processing side, Galena mill upgrades are progressing. Crusher upgrades have now been completed. Flotation cells have been ordered, and we continue progressing toward restarting the third mill. The goal is to increase total milling capacity from 750 tonnes per day to roughly 1,200 tonnes per day by the end of 2026. At the recently acquired Crescent Mine, we also continue to make strong progress following the acquisition.

All critical systems have been restored. More than 650 feet of development was completed in the first quarter and drilling activities have begun. An additional 2,000 feet of development is planned during the second quarter to support resource expansion and future mining. Overall, we are beginning to see tangible results from our growth capital projects that are positioning the Galena complex for a meaningful step change in production for -- by the end of 2026.

These advancements, combined with our strong balance sheet and growing resource base, position Galena as a key long-term driver of value creation for the company. Now going to the financial results. Following the market close yesterday, we released our unaudited condensed interim consolidated financial statements and MD&A for the 3 months ended March 31, 2026.

These documents are available on our website as well as under the company's profile on SEDAR+ and EDGAR. Revenue for the quarter was $68 million, an increase of 84% compared to the prior quarter and an increase of 189% over Q1 2025, primarily due to the silver production -- the higher silver production discussed earlier and higher realized silver prices during the quarter.

Our average realized silver price increased by 148% from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026. The average realized silver price was approximately $80 per ounce for Q1 2026 compared to approximately $32 per ounce in Q1 2025. This is largely comparable to the average London silver price with the difference being the timing of our concentrate sales during the quarter. Our net income was $10 million or $0.03 per share for Q1 2026, an increase from a net loss of $20 million or $0.08 per share for Q1 2025.

This is primarily attributed to the higher net revenue that I mentioned earlier and a higher gain on derivatives, offset in part by higher cost of sales and the impact of higher forward gold and silver curve prices, which increased the unrealized present value of the company's metals contract liabilities on our balance sheet. Adjusted earnings for the quarter were $20 million or $0.06 per share, which represents an increase of over 260% over the Q1 2025 loss of approximately $12 million or $0.05 per share.

Adjusted EBITDA was $34 million or $0.10 per share, also a significant improvement over the Q1 2025 loss of $5.5 million or $0.02 per share. Our liquidity is in a very strong position to address our capital plans with cash balance of approximately $122 million and working capital of $67 million at the end of the quarter. Capital expenditures were approximately $23 million during Q1, mainly due to the development initiatives at the Galena Complex that have already been discussed in support of our aggressive growth plans.

I will now turn the call over to Oliver.

Thank you very much, Warren, and good morning, everyone. Over the past year, America has experienced a significant increase in both analyst coverage and trading activity, reflecting the growing interest in the company and the progress being made across the business. Today, the company is now covered by eight analysts compared to just two analysts a little over a year ago, marking a substantial increase in both market visibility and institutional awareness.

When we take the trading liquidity, the numbers are truly staggering. From January 1 to May 8, 2026, Americas traded at an average of approximately CAD 32.8 million per day, comparing to approximately CAD 1.9 million per day during the same period in 2025. This represents an over 1,600% increase in daily traded volume.

On the U.S. NYSE Exchange, we're now trading over USD 48 million worth of volume, which is a 1,300% improvement compared to the same period last year. So combined, we're now trading north of CAD 100 million per day. And what does this mean? This now allows us to be owned by some of the largest mining investors in the world.

And I'm very pleased to say that we now have most of them on our register. It's a big step forward for Americas Gold and Silver as we continue to build our case as a premier silver and antimony investment vehicle for institutions globally. And lastly, we're now trading with a significant beta to silver price of over 1.5x, which is one of the strongest in the entire silver sector.

This means that for investors searching for a way to invest into a silver vehicle with strong outperformance of the underlying metal, USA shares are a terrific place to be. With that, I'll turn the call back to Warren for closing remarks.

Thank you, Oliver. Overall, Q1 represented a very strong start to 2026 and continue to demonstrate the momentum we are building across the business. We delivered record silver production and sales, advanced several key growth initiatives at the Galena Complex, strengthened our balance sheet and continue to generate strong exploration across our operations. As we move through the remainder of 2026, our focus remains on safely executing our growth strategy, increasing production capacity and continuing to unlock the long-term value of our asset base.

We believe the combination of high-grade silver exposure, increasing domestic antimony production and significant operational growth potential positions Americas as one of the more unique precious metal stories in the sector today. Thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your continued interest and support in Americas Gold and Silver.

All right. Operator, I think we're ready to open up to some questions here.

[Operator Instructions]

First up is Dalton Baretto from Canaccord.

My first one is on the Galena Complex. So it sounds like you're setting this operation up to be running at 1,200 short tons per day, I think, by the end of this year. And I just want to clarify, first of all, are you permitted to go at that level? And then secondly, what needs to happen to get you to that rate? And what sort of time frame are you thinking?

Yes. Thanks, Dalton. I'll take that one. So yes, in terms of where we plan to exit the year, it's always easier to talk about ore tonnes because yes, we are moving -- waste out of the mine, debottlenecking some areas and of course, moving waste around to get back into CRF stopes until we have the paste fill plant up and running. But on an ore tonne basis, we're looking to exit this year at around 650 short tonnes per day.

That's the number that we've been striving towards over the course of the year. Of course, we started the year just over 400 tonnes per day, and that's up from about 270 tonnes per day towards the end of 2024. So big step-ups year-over-year. The most important aspect of getting there, of course, is the hoisting, -- the upgrades that we've now completed to the #3 shaft, the Phase 1 upgrades are complete.

Phase 2 is also just recently being completed, which are big step-ups in hoisting capacity. In terms of moving material underground, obviously, we've got a lot more equipment underground and then the ramp-up of long-hole stoping, of which we've now taken 10 panels are all critical. But the most important step towards ramping up El long-haul stoping even further, of course, is that paste fill plant, which we're on track to have commissioning in the fourth quarter of this year.

Regarding permitting, fully permitted for everything we have in our growth plan, so no problems there whatsoever.

And then just maybe switching gears to the antimony side of things. Just frame that for me from a strategic as well as an economic perspective, how relevant is it really to the broader silver story? And then I guess part B of that question that you can maybe answer at the same time is presumably some of your peers and neighbors in the region are also mining tetrahedrite. Is there an opportunity to expand that JV to be sort of a much bigger regional effort?

Yes. Thanks, Dalton. Good questions. And I start off with Cosalá. Look, last year, Cosalá delivered a record 1.2 million ounces of silver there, and that was during a transition out of San Rafael into the EC120 mine, which we're now fully underway with declaring commercial production earlier this year. Really strong performance by the team down there last year. We're very proud of them. And of course, this year, we're going to be producing somewhere in the region of 1.1 million to 1.3 million ounces of silver there.

One of the most exciting things about Cosalá, going forward, of course, is not only EC120 and that delivering year after year, but of course, is the exploration upside that we have. Warren talked about it earlier, the discovery that we announced at El Alacrán, which is about 600 meters north of San Rafael. That's just one of several outcropping areas across the property, which we're really excited about. There's about five outcropping areas that have been identified, which we're very eager to get drilling into.

Just to take a little step back in history, there's been three major outcropping areas at Cosalá that have been drilled off and those have actually turned into mines. So some pretty strong returns right there. So we'll continue drilling out at El Alacrán, getting some real exploration dollars put into the ground there, and it's certainly an important part of the story for sure.

When it comes to switching back up to Idaho here and talking about tetrahedrite in the Silver Valley and beyond in Idaho, our approach to that, of course, we've announced the JV with U.S. antimony. There is a lot of flexibility in that facility.

So the facility that we're going to be building, which we're targeting to commission by midway through next year, about 18 months from our original announcement date on track right there. that facility is going to have flexibility in terms of the scale of feed that accepts. We'll certainly obviously have feed or capabilities of putting enough of our own capacity through rather, but we'll also be flexing that facility with the ability to add an additional line if we find other sources of feed.

We want to be collaborative with everybody in Idaho and certainly others in the United States. We'd love to have all this consolidated in just a few facilities rather than everybody building their own.

So that's something we're in active discussions with. We'll see how all of that goes. Of course, our primary focus is going to be putting our own feed through there. And these are not large facilities. These facilities are measured in single-digit tons per hour, not talking about 1,000-plus tonne per day. So a very small facility, but we'll be open to collaboration with others.

Your next question is from Allison Carson, Desjardins.

So my question is just a little bit more on the paste fill plant. It sounds like everything is progressing well. And I know you touched on it, but I was wondering if you could give us just a little bit more color on how you expect it to play into improving mining flexibility, cycle times and just overall productivity at Galena.

Yes, for sure. I'll start off there. And I know we also have Evan Pelletier of course, who's at the helmet both operations and driving this forward. So I'll ask him to step in just afterwards to add some more color here. But starting off, everything is on track, as I said, for commissioning in the fourth quarter.

We've got all of our specific pieces of equipment that are required on order that's expected to be delivered around midyear. Of course, we'll have to get that commission and get the reticulation system underground. We do it to have a significant impact on times. We've talked a couple of times about it being north of 250% there in terms of cycle time improvement.

There will also be improvements in primary and secondary panel mining as well. So a lot of areas where that's going to help us. It's going to help us reduce costs. It's going to allow us to move more tonnes underground. So it will be a very significant step forward for us. Evan, I don't know if you have any more specifics you'd like to touch on there.

No, I think that was great. And that was it. Congrats on the quarter.

[Operator Instructions] We'll go next to Omeet Singh from SCP Resource Finance.

My question was around Galena grades. So obviously, you printed 284 grams per tonne for this quarter. I'm trying to understand how much of that is driven by the shift towards long-haul stoping or that mix between Galena and tetrahedrite ore. So could you speak to that maybe so I could just model it better going forward?

Yes. Thanks for your question, Omeet. Evan, would you like to answer that question on the grades at Galena and what we can expect going forward?

Yes. Sure, absolutely. Thanks for the question, Omeet. The grades overall are going to keep on climbing over here. The decline in grade was not due to the dilution in long-haul stopes. It was mostly mining more Galena as we were in those areas for the quarter. But the tetrahedrite is definitely around and the grades are there, and we're still going to see some higher grades coming out of Galena.

That's helpful, thank you very much.

Omeet, one of the things to -- as we transition and move forward as well, just like what Evan said, it depends on which area that we're mining in. This mine has been set up to focus on silver lead for a considerable period of time. And we all know that, that is where the slightly lower grades are. So phenomenal silver grades, but slightly lower in comparison to that tetrahedrite or the silver copper material.

One of the objectives this year and moving into next year, as we put more of the waste development in, that's what a significant component of what our capital spend is this year and next year. We're setting up more and more of those silver copper stopes.

So as we transition to long-haul stoping, we're also transitioning into more of a focus on the silver copper. So just like Evan said, we can expect to see continued strong grade performance and increases from here.

That's helpful. Appreciate it. And then I guess another question here. This would be regarding payabilities of your antimony. Could you speak to that a little bit? Because I'm seeing that your realized price is actually quite close to spot. Maybe share with me a bit about how payabilities are at Galena for antimony.

Yes. So Omeet, we're happy to have a conversation offline with you about that. There are certain things we're able under the contract to discuss and other ones that were not. So I think it's best if we have a follow-up call on that one, and we can get on a conversation with Warren as well.

Your next question is from Dalton Baretto, Canaccord.

Where are we at with Crescent? Do you still see that mine ramping up midyear? What sort of mining rates do you think you can get to this year as well as on a steady-state basis?

Thanks, Dalton. Evan, I might ask you to jump in there. I know you've been there very recently, obviously.

Yes. Yes. Thanks, Dalton, for the question. Crescent is progressing very, very well. We're averaging -- on average, we've done [Technical Difficulty] feet of development as of now the [Technical Difficulty] strides. We've got a bunch of new gear on site. We've also eliminated the use of generators.

So the diesel generator and compressors were on site. We ran power lines. We have fiber ops. The plan is to connect the two ramps this year, which is the [ Countus ] and the BC4. As soon as that's done, then we can start falling into production as we'll have a second means of egress.

We see early in the next year in '27, pulling some muck -- some ore, sorry, out of Crescent. The most exciting thing about the Crescent is the historic mining that was done at depths. We've seen some grades down there that was mined at 300 ounces to the tonne. So we're setting up doing drilling, finding these areas and doing some engineering on pushing another decline potentially to getting even deeper in the future.

That's great. And then maybe I can just ask very quickly around the situation in Sinaloa. It seems to be deteriorating pretty rapidly. Any impact to operations or shipments, that sort of thing?

Thanks, Dalton. Yes. No, in terms of our operations, everything has been okay. Obviously, we're aware of the situation in the state and have been since the beginning of this, which has been going for quite a period of time right now.

So we have our own protocols in place there in terms of how we respond to things. And otherwise, we've got our heads down. We're mining, we're producing a concentrate and get the trucks to the coast when they can.

[Operator Instructions] And once again, everyone, that is all the time we have for questions today. I'd like to hand the conference back over to Oliver Turner for any additional or closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you very much, operator. And I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who's listening on the call, no matter which time zone you're in, we appreciate the support. It's obviously been quite the transformation so far at Galena.

And what I would say is we are only getting started here. There's a lot more to come. This is an extremely large system, which we're in the process of unlocking step by step, quarter-by-quarter, and we're excited to demonstrate what we think we can do with these assets. So thanks again for your support. Great silver market to be an investor in, and we're looking forward for many positive quarters to come. Thank you.

Once again, everyone, that does conclude today's conference. We would like to thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and welcome to the Americas Gold and Silver Fourth Quarter 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. I will now turn the conference over to Paul Huet, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to our fourth quarter year-end 2025 conference call. This call will be recorded and available to watch on our website event page later today. Please note that all dollar figures will be expressed in U.S. dollars throughout this call, unless otherwise noted. We will also be referencing a slide deck that will be shared during the webcast for this call.

Joining me today are Warren Varga, our Chief Financial Officer, who will walk through our fourth quarter and full year financials; and Oliver Turner, our Executive Vice President of Corporate Development. I'll start off with a few key updates before turning it over to Warren.

Before I begin, I would like to remind you to review our cautionary statements regarding forward-looking information and non-IFRS measures. These statements are included in our year-end MD&A, news release and in the presentation slides.

Let me start by saying how excited I am about the massive transformation we have delivered at Americas Gold and Silver throughout 2025 and into early 2026. But before I outline our progress at the mines, I would like to announce a very significant milestone for our company. Just a few weeks ago, our Galena team achieved a major safety milestone. We have completed one full year in over 550,000 man hours of work. During that year, we had no lost time accident. Nothing is more important than the safety of our miners. And I would like to congratulate the team on the culture around safety we are building at Galena and in Mexico as well, well done team.

2025 was a year of transformation for our business, and we delivered exactly that. In 2025, we achieved a massive 52% increase in attributable silver production, up to 2.65 million ounces. At Galena, this was accomplished despite a total of 20-plus days of planned shutdowns for significant upgrades to both #3 and core shafts in addition to many other derisking optimization projects that I will discuss later on this call. So a massive increase in production while we're shutting down and growing the operation is quite impressive.

2025 was also highlighted by a production record year of 1.2 million ounces set by Cosala, where our team delivered the highest annual and quarterly silver output in operation in history, while successfully ramping up the EC120 to commercial production. This is another remarkable milestone and a testament to the exceptional execution by our entire team at Cosala. Congratulations to everyone at the operation for achieving these record-breaking numbers while setting the table for a very strong future.

At Galena, consistent productivity gains came alongside our focus on major capital projects and the integration of the newly acquired Crescent Mine. I'm proud of our team for advancing key operational initiatives, including the introduction of long-hole stoping. The expansion of our underground mining fleet the upgrades to #3 and core shaft, all of which position us to support increased development and accelerate mining rates moving forward.

Over the course of 2025, we have made major progress in mining, infrastructure and in development at Galena, our transition to long-hole stoping is going exceptionally well. To date, we have mined 7 to 9 long-hole stope panels designed at specific width, while three new long-hole stopes are currently being developed at the moment.

I think it is very worthwhile noting that in 2024, we had 0 long-hole stopes, so this is an extremely exceptional step in the right direction and where we're wanting to head at Galena. In Q4 of 2025, we accelerated upgrades by installing the new 2,250 horsepower motor and a redundant motor at the core shaft, further derisking the operation and supporting our growth plans. Phase 2 of the #3 shaft upgrades remain on track for completion in Q2 of 2026.

With the arrival of all the parts coming in this month, in March and early April, needed to complete the upgrades on the braking systems and the lillies. This will bring the total hoisting capacity to over 100 tonnes per hour, representing a 160% increase compared to the 40 tonnes per hour achieved in 2024 and when we started this project. We have all seen major productivity improvement.

In '25, we had about a 200% improvement on mucking operations. We're now seeing around 200 tons of ore move per ship up from around 50 tonnes of ore when we were doing conventional mining. This is through the use of remote control mucking. Other significant achievements at Galena included a new Alimak ventilation rate, new declines in place that are debottlenecking mining areas. We made major investments into our underground mining fleet replacing and upgrading a large portion of our year with more expected in 2026.

Lastly, we are bringing Galena into the modern era of mining, we are currently installing a modern fiber optic communication that will allow us to remotely monitor and optimize pieces of equipment in the mine. In just 1 year, we have completed a large number of projects and upgrades to the mine, and we will continue this strong progress in 2026. At present, we're off to extremely fast start there as well with key infrastructure and equipment upgrades in place within a few short weeks of closing the acquisition in December.

Firstly, we added line power to all three audits and are actively setting up the operation to deliver ore to the Galena mill later this year after commissioning the secondary egress. Our updated mineral resource estimate has shown a larger and higher grade ore body at Galena, a tremendous result in our first year of drilling. Even when excluding the historical resource at present, our 2P is over 25 million ounces; M&I over 115 million ounces; and in third is over 133 million ounces of silver. And I just want to remind folks, this is not silver equivalent. This updated resource gives us even greater confidence in the quality and longevity of our assets.

I also want to note that our operations in the Silver Valley are still among some of the shallower and we know there is more silver to be found here. We are quite excited to continue drilling and exploring these previously underexplored properties, both in Mexico and in Idaho. As a company, we recently launched the largest exploration program in history, with approximately 64,000 meters of drilling planned across the Galena complex, including Crescent and Cosala.

This follows the discovery of 10 new high-grade silver, copper, antimony and silver lead veins at Galena. Highlighted by intercepts of approximately 4,900 grams per tonne of silver, 4% copper over with of 1.3 meters and 2,600 grams per tonne silver and 1.4% antimony, over 0.7 meters wide.

The continued discovery of these high-grade veins like 34 veins, 149 veins and the newly discovered 520 vein announced today are strong examples of the tremendous potential of Galena to continue to grow with high-grade discoveries. Something the mine has been doing consistently for well over 100 years. This February, we announced a landmark joint venture with United States antimony to build and operate a new antimony facility at the Galena Complex, creating the first fully U.S. mine to finish antimony solution and creating additional downstream value for our shareholders.

Our full year antimony and copper byproduct production from the Galena Complex further demonstrates the value potential of our unique position as the largest active U.S. antimony mine. Beginning January 1, '26, we finally started receiving revenue from these byproducts under the new offtake agreement negotiated with Ocean Partners at NTEC Resources as earlier announced in June of 2025.

Looking ahead, we're extremely excited about the opportunity in antimony production as we continue test work initiatives and evaluate numerous pathways to unlock the substantial byproduct value of antimony at the Galena complex. Moving forward, Americas remains squarely focused on playing a leading role in strengthening U.S. critical minerals supply chains.

Finally, we introduced our formal 2026 production, cost and capital guidance. For the full year, we expect consolidated silver to be 3.2 million to 3.6 million ounces at an ASIC of $30 to $35 per ounce sold. This is yet another 30% increased production over last year. The last year, 50%, another 30% as we continue along that trend that we're heading towards over that 5 minutes. It keeps us well on track and on course to return Galena back to those historical production and record levels. These are big, big step-ups year after year.

Our cost guidance reflects deliberate investments in advancing operational improvements at Galena and Crescent, including the completion and commissioning of the new surface past fill plant, as we've been discussing for some time, as well as the planned transition in our mining methods over the next few years to getting 60% to 70% long-hole stoping and a mixture of 30% under hand capital. These changes will drive higher productivity, lower cost over the medium and short-term time.

Consolidated capital expenditures are targeted between $90 million and $120 million, including Crescent development while exploration capital is targeted between $15 million to $20 million. 2026 will be another pivotal year for infrastructure upgrades that Galena and our complex so desperately needs, building directly on the strong foundation we've established in 2025.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the progress we have made over the last year, which has laid a strong foundation for a very -- for a continued growth of 2026 and beyond across both Idaho and Mexico. I'll now turn the call over to Warren for our financial highlights.

Thank you, Paul. This morning, we released our Q4 and full year 2025 financial results. Our audited financial statements and MD&A for the 12 months ended December 31, 2025, are available on our website and under Americas Gold and Silver profile on both SEDAR+ and EDGAR. For the full year, our consolidated revenue increased to $118 million, up 18% from $100 million in 2024, driven by higher silver production and strong realized prices.

We achieved consolidated attributable silver production of 2.65 million ounces with approximately 3.4 million ounces of silver equivalent, including 9.3 million pounds of lead and 2 million pounds of copper in addition to 561,000 pounds of antimony. As for our cost structure, cost of sales per silver equivalent ounce and cash costs and all-in sustaining cost per silver ounce produced averaged $25, $26 and $33 respectively.

On the earnings front, we reported a net loss of $87 million or $0.33 per share in 2025 compared to a net loss of $49 million or $0.46 per share in 2024. Our adjusted earnings loss for the year was $35 million or $0.13 per share compared to $34 million or $0.32 per share in 2024. Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 was a loss of $4 million or $0.02 per share compared to $1.5 million or $0.01 per share in 2024.

We remain optimistic about the future with silver production expected to grow as we advance the restart of the Crescent mine and continuing optimizing the EC120 mine at our Cosala operations. To support this growth, we closed a $133 million bought deal financing in December 2025, which also funded the cash portion of the Crescent acquisition.

With that, I'll now turn the call over to Oliver Turner.

Thank you, Warren, and good morning, everyone. The past year has been an incredibly active and productive period for the entire Americas team. From completing the Crescent acquisition, delivering strong exploration successes, announcing the U.S. antimony joint venture for the antimony processing facility in Idaho and delivering strong operational results across all sites, we've made significant progress in many different areas.

On the market side, we've continued to see strong institutional support and interest. The tightly held ownership of our shares has increased from just 7% in late 2024 to over 65% presently, certainly a strong signal of market support. This level of alignment continues to be a key differentiator for Americas. And over the past year alone, our team has conducted more than 400 institutional investor meetings.

We've also seen meaningful index inclusions with Americas being added to the VanEck's GDXJ and SIL ETFs, along with a significant increase in the SILJ ETF shareholding. Over the course of the year, we've also added five new analysts covering our name, and we greatly appreciate their support, bringing our total coverage universe to seven research analysts.

With increased generalist interest, we've also seen increased Tier 1 media interest as highlighted by recent interviews with both FOX Business and Bloomberg following our U.S. antimony joint venture announcement. Since the beginning of our transformation in late 2024, USA shares that significantly outperformed the Silver peer group, yet we still trade at a significant discount to NAV compared to our peers providing a rare combination of both silver growth and value in a single stock with nearly 80% of revenue exposed to silver, a growing antimony revenue stream, major new exploration discoveries and a strong growth profile ahead of us, we believe the market is up to fully recognize the value we are building, which makes an exciting opportunity for investors interested in investing in silver today.

Looking ahead, our 2026 calendar is filled with conferences, media engagements and meetings week to week. And we look forward to keeping the market and our shareholders updated as we execute on our strategy to scale a premier Americas-focused silver and critical metals producer.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Justin Chan of SCP Resource Finance.

Congrats on a transformational year. My first question is just on your production guidance for the year. Could you give us maybe a bit more breakdown between what you think the ranges are for Cosala and Galena? And then any guidance on sort of how to model that on a production ramping up basis as you commission the shaft, the past plan, et cetera?

Sorry, Justin. I think I heard the question here -- it's Paul here. I think the breakup between the guidance between Mexico and Idaho, and then the update on the shaft. Was that the question? I think that's it.

Yes, first the breakdown between the assets and then the cadence.

Yes. So look, we're going to be in the ranges, obviously. So this year is another huge step up for us, right, as we're transitioning into long haul, we did 9 stopes -- 7 to 9 stopes last year, depending on how you measure panels. We're going to be stepping that up again this year. So looking at 2026, we're looking at a range of $2.2 million to $2.6 million out of Galena and then the rest is coming out of Mexico, again, Mexico is going to have another big year as we step up about 1.2 to 1.4.

So bringing us into that guidance that we put out forward with the projects we've got for the shaft, those are big steps. We've got two big projects we've got to finish up this year. And that's in order to sustain the long haul and fill the stopes property. We've got to get that batch plant in place. And that's been one of our projects from day 1, and we're expecting to have that done this year, which is another big milestone.

With respect to the shaft, the parts are almost on site, actually, half of them are. Some of the parts are on site, we're going to be -- we have a -- we want to make sure everything is on site so we can make sure that we do a scheduled planned outage. We'll be planning to be down for 12 days as we upgrade the shaft. These are things that have to get done in order for us to maintain the new product, the new tipping rates that we want to do at that 100 tonnes per hour. So April, those -- those will be done.

Got you. So just to reiterate, so the shaft upgrade basically should be in April and model that into Q2?

Yes. So, the shaft upgrade done. And then the biggest -- our biggest thing is -- so that's about a 10-, 12-day shutdown. The biggest one that's the back plant in Q4. That's always been the biggest one because it allows us to fill the stopes much faster. It takes us maybe 6 to 8 days to fill a stope today. We'll be filling stopes in 24 to 36 hours once those new complexes are built. It become the site to all the construction going on for the new facilities, there's a lot of work going on at the moment to prepare for that new facility.

Absolutely. Another one is just with -- I guess for the balance sheet and all your CapEx plans, can you give us your capital allocation split for this year? I know 30 to 40 is at Crescent, but maybe there's more detail you can give.

Yes, I'm happy to just take that line, it's all over here. So on the growth side of things, total of -- so the $90 million to $120 million includes about $60 million to $80 million growth. That's growth across all assets. A significant portion of that is going into Crescent this year.

We also have about $30 million to $40 million in sustaining that includes some capitalized infill, but the majority of the exploration budget is going to be expensed and will be in that $15 million to $20 million number that we talked about.

Okay. Got you. And then maybe just one on some of your growth projects that are maybe less into people's models right now. Do you have an update on Relief Canyon in Nevada? Do you have any plans for that. And then maybe one on the antimony JV?

Yes. Look, when it comes to Relief Canyon this year, we're going to be doing a pretty internal study. At the moment, we're going to be squarely focused at making sure our silver district in Idaho is running where we needed to be. Relief Canyon is going to undergo more of a study this year that we're looking at.

Got you. Like a scoping level study something like that?

Yes, it's going to be an internal study. So last year, we didn't have any -- we didn't do any studies. We want to understand some of the ore, some of the resource and some of the freight grabbing stuff. Look, a lot of that stuff is almost identical to what I had me and Mike at Hollister. That material appears to be very, very similar to what we mined before. The grades different so we want to understand it. We're going to do an internal study led by our COO, Mike Dylan, and we're going to come back to the market.

And we're going to come back to our board first and decide what's the best thing to do. We're getting a lot of inbound calls on it. There's a lot of interest on it. It needs metal prices. I don't think we're ready to just give it away to anybody. It would be crazy to just give this away. There's opportunity here.

Got you. And then on the antimony JV, I guess are there any kind of updates or milestones that we should expect in the next, I guess, over the course of this year to account for.

Yes. So the team has developed. I'm actually here taking this call right now from Bolivia, and you visiting the new plant that was built, I'll be at the site in probably about 12 hours to go visit a new plant that is feeding the product already into Montana. We're building something identical to this thing.

So the purpose of us being here in Bolivia is to actually see the process, understand it and see what it is we're trying to replicate in Idaho. So it's moving out of speed that it was faster than I expected that for sure.

Your next question comes from the line of Nicolas Dion of ATB Cormark Capital Markets.

Congrats on the progress at both of your minds. Just 2 questions for me. I guess I'll start by following on the questions on the guidance. Does your 2026 guidance include anything from Crescent?

And then second to that, how should we think about the trajectory of production and costs at Galena looking beyond 2026?

Yes. I'll start a bit on the Crescent, and Oliver, you can go on the cost. So Crescent what just need to be reminded that we we're going to be drilling a lot of Crescent this year. Crescent will have some very small amount, by the way, a small amount because we have to put in secondary egress. The reason this thing can't go into production yet is because the ramp's got to be connected. There's got to be raises and those take us -- it's going to take us a bit of time.

At the moment, we're going to be looking at extending on all -- on the vein systems and doing like we did at Fire Creek, just extending the veins understanding the geology. But for now, this year, the tonnes are going to be low. We'll be mining just on vein, no stoping. We can't stope until the secondary gas are put in, and that's probably a third quarter thing. But we'll be getting tonnes for sure and ounces out of Crescent just smaller amounts.

And then on the costs, Oliver, you can talk a bit about the future.

Yes, happy to, Nick. And so just a couple of things in -- as we step into the years ahead. We've been out there talking about taking Galena back to its historical record production levels, which was, of course, in 2002, the mine did 5.2 million ounces and we said that would take us a couple of years to get there. That firmly remains in place, and that growth plan is still there, so nothing has changed there.

And as we do scale production, like a bunch of the things you talked about with respect to the transition to long hole stoping we're already talking about a 70-30 split that's progressing extremely well. We've got additional byproduct credits, obviously, that are now payable with the new contract in place from tax that will also being netted out against our all-in sustaining cost numbers.

So a steady decline from here onwards as we execute over these next couple of years at Galena is certainly expected in terms of where things can get, we'll put a guidance at the appropriate period of time for those numbers. But significant cost decreases as we ramp towards that historical production number. Crescent as well as Paul just talked about lots of work going on there. Once we're into full production there. We expect that to be contributing ore to the Galena mill. That historical PEA that's out there on Crescent, obviously, not RPEA the prior owner's PEA from 2015. However, that gives you a good indication of the potential of Crescent.

We think we can potentially do better than that, but we need to get in there and do more work. And then, of course, down at Cosala, we're fully into EC120 now. Last year, we had a record year despite some limitations geographically in the state, which the team navigated through excellently. We expect another strong year that's going to be in line with last year at Cosala, but then what we identified here with [ Alikrane ] just north of San Rafael, San Rafael is the mine that we "depleted" last year. Well, now we've got a new discovery just north of it, which looks extremely interesting.

We haven't really been able to drill to the extent that we would like to at Cosala. Obviously, we're allocating some meters there this year, and we're excited to get in there, but there's numerous targets, just similar to the Alikrane discovery that we'd like to get into at Cosala and then, of course, really get in there to evaluate the impact on optimizing mining activities. So Cosala will grow from here as well Galena. So we still expect that ramp up over the years to come.

Okay. That's helpful. And my second question was going to be on Alikrane at Cosala. Can you maybe elaborate on that discovery a bit more in terms of, I guess, the potential you see there? And how close it is maybe the San Rafael development, et cetera?

Yes. So it's like it's a brand-new discovery. One of the key things that we really enjoyed in our due diligence of this company was when we went down to Mexico in 2024 during our due diligence several times, obviously, prior to taking over management of the company. We are really impressed by the exploration potential at Cosala. There's been numerous outcrops that have been drilled there.

And I believe the last five of them turned into five mines at Cosala. Of course, that's not a poor projection on turning future outcrops into mines, but it certainly bodes well for the prospectivity of the region. There are 7 outcropping areas that have been identified that are just screaming to be drilled. And one of those areas in Alikrane has yielded the sort of first discovery under this team, which is a really strong start. It's only 600 meters north of San Rafael. Look at the whole district down there, it's not stretched out over a large area in terms of where these mines are, and they obviously all feed centralized milling. So that's an area as we continue to drill into it this year could potentially be feeding the milling center there in the years to come. This year we'll be focused entirely on EC 120 from a production standpoint. That's the higher grade silver copper. But other metals can come back into the mix there with exploration success like we've seen at Alikrane.

Okay. Very good. And last one, I don't know if it was mentioned, but what was the split of your exploration program between the two mines?

Yes. But 3/4 of that will be spent in Idaho and about 1/4 of it we said in Mexico. So give or take, the $5 million would be in Mexico and $15 million in Idaho. And that's across both at Crescent and at Galena will be drilling aggressively. We're going to have north of 10 drills drilling across both sites there, which is a huge step up. Those sites haven't seen more than a couple of drills turning at them for many, many years now.

So this is the largest exploration program in this company's history, 64,000 meters as a reminder for everyone listening. Those are all drilled from underground. So those are essentially short holes in Idaho. So you get a lot of peers points, a lot of data points for that meters there. And we've already seen some strong results with 34 Vein discovery, which went into the new resource, which helped to boost those grades. We saw a grade increase there. 149 is not yet in the resource, but we're looking to get it in there as well.

And then, of course, the new 520 discovery, which is over near the core mine, which is connected to Galena underground is another high-grade discovery. And this mine has been doing this for well over 100 years and certainly looking like it's going to continue for a long period of time.

Your next question comes from the line of Amanda Lewis of Desjardin.

So first, we saw a major increase in resources at Galena. Can you just walk us through what drove that change and what it applies to the long-term mine life at Galena, especially with the present integration? And then just also what drove the large grade increase at Galena.

Yes, happy to. Go ahead, Paul.

Go ahead, Oliver. Go ahead. You go ahead, Oliver. But the one thing that as we're talking about great, I just want to remind people, one of the things that about last year in the drilling and everything we had. When I think back of 2025, and I think while we actually mined 9 stopes last year. And almost every conference I go into or all that goes into people ask us about the grades, the grades and how the impact of those 9 stopes.

We're carving these things out surgically with long hole we have seen the best grade at Galena in 2 decades. The best grade this mine has seen in 20 years was last year, a record year, the best grade in 20 years while we're carving out long-hole stopes.

I'll go ahead and talk about the resource, but I think I just wanted to inject that because a lot of the questions we were asked throughout the year were about how will it impact the resource? How will it impact the grade? And will we see a tremendous drop in grade because of ad evolution. The opposite occurred for us, yes, the best grade in 20 years. So go ahead on the resource.

That's a very good point. I mean one of the key considerations here is as we're integrating more long-hole stopes in this mine plan, right? We're shifting from 100% underhand cut and fill or conventional mine to a blend of mechanized long-hole stoping, and there will always be some cut and fill in this mine, but about a 70-30 split. As we baked more of those long-hole stopes into the reserve, we haven't seen a major impact on grades there, right? So we're applying long-hole mining stopes there. and the grade is staying very high.

Reserve grade is over 500 grams, over 520 grams actually in the silver at Galena. So maintaining very high grade. And one of the key factors for that is the fact that we're able to mine extremely narrow with these long-hole stopes. That first stope we took was 1 meter live. We've taken numerous narrow long-haul stopes there with the same basically with that we'd be able to mine with cut and fill. So that means that plan dilution is exactly the same as what we're getting with cut and fill. So really strong performance by the team there. And the mine looks well positioned.

One other thing to mention here too is, Galena is in the top 5 highest grade silver mines in the world, and we're only increasing grades with these discoveries. So one of your questions there was what drove the grade increases. The 34 vein discovery, which we announced midway through last year, when we first drilled that off with that headline hold as 983 grams, well over 3 meters there and widths, triple or minimum mining width. We initially had a 1 million to 2 million-ounce target on that vein.

We put another update out about a month and a bit ago, and we ended up expanding that to 6 million to 7 million-ounce target across multiple different veins plays. That vein system continues to grow. And it's just an example of what's been happening with Galena for over 100 years here and will happen well into the future.

So we're quite excited about that inclusion that was included in the resource and helped drive grades up even net of depletion, even with incorporating those long-hole stopes there. We had the 149 vein, 25-kilogram hit, 20 centimeters wide, but you dilute that 5 times, you're down to a 5-kilogram intercept or cut there. That was not yet included in the resource. So there's still more great upsides to come there. And of course, the 600-gram plus hits that we've seen at 520 in the core also not included.

So the good news on grade improvements in drill it's being increased with intercepts with the drill bit. That's real data feeding that that's increasing those grades, not just in manipulation of cut-off grades in either direction. So very excited about that. Down at Cosala, you also saw reclassification resources. We moved some resources into inferred from M&I, not impacting the mine life whatsoever that we have at EC120.

We're going to be infill drilling those areas and bringing them back into M&I this year. We've applied very stringent controls, both in Mexico and in Idaho with this resource, and we've done this at multiple different companies before where we build our own resource. But of course, now we can build our mine plans around going forward.

So strong results across the board of both and feeding it with the drill bit and look, we're going to be doing a ton of drilling this year. So excited about what that can mean for the year-end resource a year from now.

Okay. Great. That's very helpful. And then just lastly, could you just provide a bit more color on how the long-hole stoping is going? I'm specifically wondering how the mining teams are performing and what areas do you still want to work on?

Yes. Oliver, I can talk about that. So as we've been talking about, we've taken out depending on how you look at a 7 or 9 panels already, we are changing up a bit of the way we're drilling to make sure that we're very consistent in our blast patterns. We're this mine hasn't seen a long-hole for us. So depending on where we are in the mine, we are quickly recognizing and this is not uncommon in any of the mines I've worked out in my life.

By domain, if the areas are very steep, 89, 90 degrees. We might need one less hole. So we're just improving or improving are optimizing our drill patterns, our blasting patterns, if we're down to 72 degrees, we need an extra hole. But what we're seeing is we're determining our stope height, our length. And the intent is that 70% of everything we do going forward will all be long-hole. All we're doing right now at the moment is optimizing it, though.

We just continue to get better and better and better. In the first couple of stopes we have done. And the more efficient we get, we'll just be moving more tons per day using remote controls instead of drilling and blasting jackwave, which has been done forever. So long-hole is like most people understand. It's not a complicated thing. It just needs to be done right. You've got to have your top that's good. You got to have your bottoms, that's good.

And we want to make sure that you can check in our case, we check our breakthroughs. So they're not in the footwall or hanging on and we don't have a lot of deviation and unnecessary additional dilution. So pretty simple game in our world, given we've done it all over the world.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Wayne Lam of TD Cowen.

Maybe just wondering on the new discoveries, obviously, some positive elements that could support a further increase in production. Maybe if you might be able to give us some color on the new 520 vein and the time line on that and whether the core Shack upgrades put the infrastructure and positioned to be ready for production and it's just a function of drilling and development. But no actual constraints on the processing infrastructure?

So that upgrade we did in the core motors at the very end of December 2025 was the first time that we ever have redundant motors. So we're preparing ourselves for using that shaft. There's still some work to do in the loading pockets and other areas that we have identified. But the new vein 520 has been part of a drill program at core. So given that it's a brand-new discovery or we've got quite a few holes into it already, we're going to drill it quite a bit and see. Can we access it from the #3 shaft? Or can we access it from core? One of the advantages we have in this district is that core and #3 shaft are connected. In fact, that's our secondary egress.

So we travel across to get out in the event that the #3 shaft is down. So we will be able to mine that 520 vein from the #3 shaft even when the upgrades come into the #3 shaft, this quarter in March and April as we're doing these upgrades. So once again, more drilling into it, we're going to start looking at it. How do we mine it from the best location? So it's very fresh. It's very new.

We're quite excited about it. It's not going to be the only discovery we have. There will be many more. We have 10 new veins here. There's no doubt there will be more discovery. One of the biggest things we always saw about these assets, they were underexplored, and we needed money and we're drilling them now. So 520 needs more drilling. We have optionality to mine it from either shaft or #3 shaft and skipping it up either one pause a bit out there because of the work that needs to be done.

Okay. Great. Yes. Sounds like a pretty big opportunity. And then maybe at San Rafael, just wondering with the higher silver price than as EC120 ramps up? Is there potential for continued mining there and to add incremental tonnage to the production profile?

Oliver, let you take that one, I believe.

Yes. So San Rafael particularly the higher-grade upper areas, which we were mining towards the end of last year. There are still some portions there that can come into the into the mill there down at Cosala. But the majority of mill feed this year is related to the EC120. Of course, all of this subject to improvement based on drilling and exploration results. And obviously, we're not going to be putting Alikrane into there within the next 6 months or anything like that, but continued positive drilling intercepts there in the upper portions of San Rafael can add some more feed and then also continued drilling success from underground at EC120 will allow us to get into some of the higher grade areas there as well.

So coastal the team executed excellently there last year with a record production for the asset. Looking for similar this year with upside pending drill success there this year? And then obviously, we'll be scaling it in the years to come.

Your next question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle of H.C. Wainwright.

Most of them have been answered, but just two quick ones. The 55 170 decline, obviously, should provide a decent amount of efficiencies. When should that fully -- I assume this is already in effect, but is there like a bit of a period over when we should see those impacts? And then also just from a cash point of view, given that there is less work now getting done, is there a -- should that impact cash costs at all?

Sorry, Oliver, you're going to take that I'm not sure I heard the question at all. Go ahead, Oliver.

No problem. Yes. So on the decline, that's currently under development. So we'd expect that to be getting those multiple access points here towards the end of the second quarter. So expect that to have an impact. I mean this is all part of our 2026 mine plan anyways. So it all based into the guidance that we have.

Certainly, when it comes to cash costs, I think your -- the way that you're thinking is right there, Heiko, we do expect cost to continue to decline as we go quarter-over-quarter this year. So you'd expect more of a back-end weighting to improvement in cash costs as we ramp up ounces, but also some of these projects that we've been working on start to impact the bottom line.

One of the things that we did see in the first -- what's it been 14, 15 months, that we've been at the helm here. We did highlight in the release there is on mucking efficiencies. The company was in 2024 and prior moving about 50 tonnes per shift with conventional methods. We're over 200 tonnes per shift now used employing the remote scoops that we have, haul trucks underground. This is all the new equipment that we put in place last year. And now we actually have a fiber optic system that's being laid down #3 and it's going to be developed on different levels there that will give us basically mesh WiFi and communications access all throughout the mine.

It seems like something that's sort of standard in mines these days, and it absolutely is if you're building a new mine. But this mine hasn't seen any of that modern technology installed in it. So that's another very easy target and low-hanging sort of area -- of low-hanging fruit that we can target there to improve efficiencies. That will then link in to the lot of the equipment we're using and it's not just mining equipment. It's fans, it's ventilators, it's automating all sorts of parts of the mine and monitoring it in real time.

We expect that to continue to improve dispatch efficiency cycle times and productivities across the board. All of that starts to be impacted once that system is in place, which again, is the second half of the year. So you're going to see steady improvements in efficiencies over the course of this year. You're going to see costs come down at the operating level. Over the course of this year, all of that kind of works in tandem as tonnes come up ounces come up costs go down, byproducts come up, efficiencies go up. So you'll see a positive trend this year, Heiko, as we execute quarter-by-quarter, and things will get even better next year, obviously, in '27.

Fair enough. And then just one quick clarification. How much do you -- would you say you spend on fuel at Galena or even across the company per month or per quarter? Just purely out of curiosity.

Warren, do you want to take a stab at that one?

No, I wouldn't even know at the top of my head. Heiko, I'll give you a number after the call. There's not off the top of my head.

Yes. I mean we just feel, given what prices have been doing, but I assume the impact is fairly small.

It is, Heiko. One of the things remember there, of course, is that Galena is integrated into the grid power system, of course, in Idaho. There's not a lot of diesel consumption at site. Obviously, some of our underground equipment runs on diesel. But broadly speaking, the mine is powered by grid power. So not the same impact that you'd expect to see in a large open pit in terms of diesel cost impact, but we can get you that number.

And remember, we have a lot of rail, right? Our rail transport a lot of our foreign waste in the mine.

With no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference back over to Paul for some closing remarks.

I just want to thank Oliver and Warren for helping me on the call today. And I really want to take a moment to thank you all, our shareholders. Our teams at both sites, look, we're coming up for 1 year without an LTA in Mexico as well. That doesn't happen by accident. So great job to both sites for outstanding safety commitments.

And I'm looking forward to 2026. It's a very exciting year, another big step-up again for us. we continue to deliver on our operational successes. So thank you, everyone. Have a great day, and we'll talk soon.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Abby, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Americas Gold and Silver Crescent Silver Acquisition Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the Americas Gold and Silver website later today. Our speakers for today will be America's CEO and Chairman, Paul Huet; and EVP of Corporate Development, Oliver Turner.

Without further ado, I will hand the call over to Paul.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Obviously, what an exciting day. We've been working on this for several months now, a number of months. We've been here already in Idaho or with Americas Gold and Silver for 11 months already. It's been a whirlwind exciting opportunity. But today, the company changes forever, and we're extremely excited for this opportunity. We won't find more accretive opportunities to fill our mill in stuff that's the exact same ore. So for us, we can't be more excited to get this deal across the finish line. If I'm a little tired, I apologize, we've been up all night trying to get this to our shareholders, and we finally got across the line. So very excited to talk about it.

We've got a deck here in front of us. We're going to walk through those slides and explain to you exactly what we saw. I do want to say, look, I personally was able to get underground there more than 15 times with a very elite team underground operators and narrow vein miners to review this asset. We spent hours and hours on this DD with external people. But the summary is, look, we're going to walk through it here right now. It's 9 miles away from our existing mill here. So we -- again, we won't find anything more accretive.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Oliver and Maxim to start going through the slides, and I'm going to be right here.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. Obviously, a very exciting time for Americas Gold and Silver shareholders, and we're happy to have everyone on this call listening in. Hopefully, by the end of this presentation, you're as excited as we are about what is a very accretive acquisition for us, and it provides immediate mill feed to our Galena mill right out of the gate, the kind of transaction that we really like to do as a management team.

So we'll guide your attention to the forward-looking statements to read at your own discretion here whenever you have time, and we'll jump right into the highlights of the transaction. So as Paul mentioned, this is a highly strategic acquisition of a key asset in Idaho Silver Valley. The Crescent Mine is located just 9 miles away from us from the Galena Complex. We also have in this mine a very high-grade silver copper resource. It's about 23 million ounces, grading about 655 grams per ton.

I'm going to run through some of the synergies that we can talk about a little bit later on the call, particularly when we talk about some of the mill -- spare mill capacity that we're going to be utilizing with this acquisition. But very importantly, this is on private land, fully permitted, able to restart it quickly, and we're talking about as soon as mid-2026, we'll be seeing tons from this operation. And then with all of our acquisitions, we're not buying it for what's on paper today, but what we think we can expand the asset into, and we see very significant potential for expanding the resource base at Crescent.

So starting off with the financials of the transaction, reviewing the purchase this morning. There's a press release out this morning summarizing the key points of this deal. The purchase price is approximately USD 65 million. The consideration to the vendor is USD 20 million in cash, and 11.1 million common shares of Americas Gold and Silver, which as of the close yesterday is about $45 million. We expect to close the transaction very quickly, which is great for everyone involved in early December. Targeting on or about December 3, we expect to close the deal and the financing concurrently.

Taking a look at Crescent on a page here. I mentioned some of these numbers previously. You've got a 23 million ounce resource, very, very high-grade resource at 655 grams per ton, as we said, located just 9 miles away from us. And most importantly, this asset is going to be amenable to the mining methods that we've been rolling out at Galena, particularly long-hole stoping, which is really turning around the Galena asset and helping us scale up to that 5 million ounce a year plus level that we've been targeting. So excited to get Crescent into the mill to contribute to that growth profile.

In terms of the location, there's a plan map on Slide 7, for those of you following along. Slide 7 shows a plan map of the Silver Valley, where we have the Galena Complex circled in the blue dash line there. The Crescent Mine is located just 9 miles by road away from the Galena Complex, situated between the Sunshine and Bunker Hill mines. Very strategically located, obviously, a short trucking distance away to get that feed into our mill. And very importantly, part of that entire belt through the Silver Valley where we're all mining various parts of the same system. So really happy to be tucking this in, and it's right in our neighborhood.

We'll be able to capitalize on a lot of the same workforce. Obviously, our excellent operating team at Galena as well as the workforce that's there in the Silver Valley, we'll be able to leverage them. Equipment purchasing, obviously, a variety of vendor strength. So really excited to take advantage of some of those synergies with an asset that's just so close away from where we're already operating and scaling.

On Slide 8, I mentioned the magnitude of the resource grade at Crescent. Look, 655 grams per ton. When you start to look at silver assets globally, it's hard to find a higher grade silver deposit than that. You see it's right up there on the left-hand side up there with the best of them. 655 grams per ton, that is hosted in a tetrahedrite ore. And to keep things simple, a tetrahedrite ore is a silver, copper, antimony ore. That is the exact same type of ore that we are currently mining at Galena, where we also have silver, copper and antimony. So this type of ore will be able to mix perfectly in with our Galena feed into the Galena mill, and will behave very similarly from a metallurgical perspective, which is fantastic.

Obviously, we'll have the added benefit of higher grades compared to the blended grade at Galena, where you see the blue column in the middle there, that's the current Galena Complex grade of 466 grams per ton. That is the blended grade of the two types of ore. We have two types of ore just on Slide 8 there, two types of ore at Galena. We have the silver copper ore, which grades around 200 grams per ton, and the -- sorry, the silver lead ore, which grades around 200 grams per ton silver, and the silver copper ore, which is north of 600 grams per ton. That's where you get that blended grade.

So adding more high-grade feed to the mill with the same type of ore. And then very importantly, like we've been quite vocal about our ambitions in the antimony space, this Crescent Mine will contribute to our antimony byproduct credit and growth plan that we've been out there talking about with investors and in the media as well. So we have ambitions to scale antimony concurrently with silver. Remember, it's all in the same rock at Galena. The same will happen with Crescent, and we're looking forward to contributing this antimony feed to help satisfy the U.S. domestic mine supply shortage that we're all very aware of. So it puts us in an even stronger position and aligns very well with the strategy that we have at Galena already.

Slide 9, in terms of the synergies we're looking at. I mentioned several of these earlier when we're talking about the workforce, we're talking about equipment, obviously, G&A synergies and vendor contracts. But I draw everyone's attention to the bottom right-hand part of this slide deck, where we have the milling capacity that is currently available and underutilized at our Galena Complex. The total capacity you see on the left-hand side there is around 1,500 short tons per day. That's comprised of the 750 ton per day mill at Galena, which has another ball mill that allows that to be expanded north of 1,000 tons per day in the future. We also have the 500 ton per day core mill. So that's where you get that combination of 1,500 short tons per day from.

Shifting over to the bar chart on the right-hand side, you see in the dark blue there, our current utilization is about just under 410 short tons per day of milling capacity. That's the actual number from the third quarter that we just reported earlier this week, and that accounts for the 10-day shutdown -- planned shutdown that we had for rehab -- sorry, for upgrading the #3 shaft as part of our expansion plans at Galena. So 408 tons, that's up from about 300 tons per day over the last several years. So we are expanding at Galena. And of course, the mine is going to be catching up to the hoisting and the mill over the next several years.

But we have all of this spare capacity, just over 1,000 tons per day of spare capacity and potential there that we want to be filling with ore as soon as we can, and that's what Crescent provides us. We're able to tuck feed from as early as halfway through 2026. We'll get some development ore into the Galena mill. And then obviously, as we've set up our mining at Crescent, we'll get more and more of that feed coming over. So just a tremendous way for us to capitalize on mill capacity that we're not currently using.

I mentioned earlier -- on Slide 10, I mentioned earlier that it's all part of the same belt that we have in the Silver Valley here. This is a very historic mining area, well over 130 years of mining history in this district. The first workings happened at Galena actually before the year 1900. So a long history of mining, and this long section here certainly shows the tremendous amount of our development that's already in place across the Silver Valley with just huge resources in all of these mines that will continue to be mined for many decades to come. So we're excited to tuck in a second portion of this belt in the Crescent Mine on the left-hand side of the page there. And you can see the scale of the Galena Complex on the right-hand side there. We own the Coeur, Galena and Caladay altogether.

One thing that is worth mentioning at the Crescent Mine, of course, is that this is not a new mine, this is another restart. Definitely the expertise that this management team is turning around existing operations and scaling up past producing operations. This mine has already produced over 25 million ounces at over 900 grams per ton silver. So again, a history of high-grade production, continued high-grade production with that strong resource that we mentioned earlier at 655 grams per ton. All of that will head over to the Galena Complex and complement our current operations there. So just a great nearby synergistic acquisition that we're very, very pleased about.

Slide 11 shows an asymmetric view of the underground workings that were already and currently in place at Galena -- sorry, at the Crescent Mine. You've got three adits accessing the Crescent Mine. On the top, you've got the Countess, you've got the Big Creek, and you've also got the Hooper level on the bottom there. You see the two primary veins shown in green and in red. Those are the South vein and the Alhambra vein. Those two veins are the primary host for that 23 million ounces at 650 grams that I talked about. But there is significant potential via the drill bit to expand these veins in several different directions, and we're extremely excited to do it. I'll talk a little bit more about that on the next page.

But lastly, on this page, what I do want to mention is part of our investment into Crescent in the first portion of this year is going to be putting drop raises in between these levels. We need secondary egress to commence mining activities, but we also want to put in drop raises. So we're able to get ore from the upper adit access in upper levels of the mine down to that Hooper level, trucking it out 9 miles down the road to Galena and be able to use gravity as our friend. As I mentioned, we are going to be implementing long-hole stoping at this mine, which we've had tremendous success with this year, and that is the future of Galena is transitioning to more and more long-hole stoping. So same mining method, same approach, same team and same strategy here at Galena, and we're excited to get those tons to the mill as soon as we can.

Lastly, on the exploration upside, I mentioned that there is the potential to expand these two veins. On Slide 12, you see a planned view of those two veins, the Alhambra vein and the Southern vein in the Turquoise area, that is the Crescent Mine property. We've also got some additional claims outlined in the yellow on Slide 12, that show the potential for extending these two veins beyond that Turquoise area. So to the west there, on the left-hand side, you see some dotted lines. There is over 2,100 feet of untested potential there, and we think there's strong potential for those veins to be extended alongside. So the same mining depth is what's currently set up at Crescent as well as at depth.

And then over to the right, of course, this is the potential that these are extensions from veins that are already on the Sunshine property. So all of this is part of the same system. We're going to be applying the same exploration approach that's driven some pretty phenomenal exploration success at Galena this year, particularly with the discovery of the 34 and 149 veins where we're hitting multi-kilogram silver hits. And we look forward to drilling out this system and seeing if we can extend it and potentially increase grades there.

So with that, the rest of the deck is summarizing our resources, and there's also a summary of the 2015 Tetra Tech report that I would advise investors to read at their own leisure. You've got a production profile there that was projected to be over 1 million ounces of silver per year, in fact, about 1.4 million to 1.5 million ounces of silver per year. Of course, as we did with Galena, this team is going to take away the work. We're going to devise our own mine plan and get mining right away. We'll be updating the market next year on what we think Crescent can contribute over the course of this year.

So with that, I think I'll turn the call back over to Paul for some comments, and then I believe we have a bit of time here for a few questions on the line.

Yes. So good job, Oliver. Thank you for the summary. So look, as I mentioned early on, our team have been working aggressively at getting Galena uptake into a pattern where we get it back to that 5 million ounces per year. What this does is it allows us to fill the mills quicker, much sooner alongside us as we continue that growth at Galena. And when you start looking at three adits, I think of some of the things we've done in the past in our own lives, we could be mining 500 tons from each of these adits. So to think what could it be, could this be 2 million ounces a year sustaining? Absolutely, it can be.

We're working on the heels of the former PEA. We did engage, obviously, some consultants to put together some mine plans. We're excited to get in there and drill and then reopen this mine early in 2026 right after this thing closes. So very exciting time for Americas Gold and Silver shareholders. The company is not standing still for the last 10, 11 months we've been here. We're quite excited to take this thing over. So we will take over a couple of questions and turn it over to the operator.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle with H.C. Wainwright.

With the financing, there's a decent amount of excess funds. I mean can you provide like a little bit of color on what exactly -- on dollar amounts, what do you expect to spend? How is the equipment at site? And any color on the value of this addition, please?

Yes. Heiko, look, at the moment, there is not a whole lot of equipment on site. We will be bringing in a contractor early on. There are two scoops and two jumbos and one truck. The reality is part of the plan that we have will be bringing in a contractor, but a lot of the dollars are going to be specifically for reopening the mine. There's not a lot of rehab to do. It will be about drilling immediately and then doing those raises that Oliver talked about. Putting in the secondary egress to allow us to be in full production because at the moment, without secondary egresses in the United States, you can't be in full production. You can be under exploration, which is what we will be doing.

But putting in those raises, we need a couple of Alimak raises to connect the Countess to the Big Creek, and then the Big Creek to the Hooper, and then we can truck right out of the rail. So there's not a whole lot of equipment, but we are going to be using a contractor out of the gate, and I gave you a summary of where we're going to be spending the dollars for...

Looks like you wouldn't be willing to quantify any of these, correct?

Yes. Look, we're not going to get into those details here on this call, Heiko. It's a little too granular for this call.

And our next question comes from the line of Justin Chan with SCP Resource Finance.

Congrats. Definitely exciting to see you guys expand your footprint. Just a couple of questions. One, in the long term, can you give us a sense of how you see the bottlenecks at Crescent? Is it moving material? Is it mining methods? Just maybe talk us through what you see the long-term potential as being there. I see you mentioned 250 tons a day. But just maybe is that a medium-term goal? Or is that the long-term potential?

Without doubt, it is connecting all these three adits. When -- you just think about some of the things we've done in our past, let's just talk about Klondex. We had the Midas portal. We had the Hollister portal. We had the Fire Creek portal. This is a very similar situation we have here, Justin. We've got the Countess portal. We've got the Big Creek portal. We have the Hooper portal, all separated right now. They were all mined at different points in time in history. And all of them are connected to the same vein, but they're not connected to each other. We put in Alimak raises connecting these all together, which will take us a bit of time, not much. We could start mining immediately on this ore, but we can't go into production and stoping.

So our immediate stuff is going to be putting in infrastructure so that we can mine these things for the next 20 years. Because we know with a high level of confidence and conviction from our geology team, as soon as we start drilling, there's going to be a lot of additions here. There is so much -- there's only 5% of our private land that's been drilled. You got to think about that 5% we've got, it's over 23 million ounces at this grade. There is plenty more to come from, but we really need to put in rehab the mine in some areas, get in the contractor, put the raises in so we can drop ore from the top of the counties from Big Creek all the way down to Hooper, where we have rail already.

There's complete track and we're going to do a site visit here in the new year, we're going to be excited to take people. People are going to be quite excited. It's different than Galena where we have the shaft bottleneck. We have a decline here. Most of us, most people are used to having a decline where we can have 20, 30-ton trucks into. We can have them in all of those adits. So very exciting for us. That's about the best summary I can give you on that, Justin.

For sure. And is it a long-term plan to use the rail? Or will you haul and not using vehicles? And is ventilation a long-term constraint or the three adits means that that's not really something you need to worry about too much?

Yes. Again, ventilation will not be a constraint. There'll be trucks in the top 2 portals. There'll be rail in the bottom portal. So this is, again -- what this does for us, the synergies and the optionality this provides us, we couldn't have designed it better. There's three adits into a mine. Somebody spent -- look, the NAV, I think -- the current NAV they have is over $300 million. We got this at a very good price. I'm very happy. We were able to negotiate this. But the ventilation is not a constraint. The bottom countess will remain track. It's got 80-pound rail already. We'll have nice ore cars, we'll have a shoot, and we'll drop everything down to that bottom level. And just have trucks from there directly on the flat ground to our mill.

Got you. And in the press release, it says the PEA envisaged 250 tons a day 10 years ago. Can you -- are you happy to give a number on what you think this could be in the medium, long term?

Yes. Look, you just look at any of the other portals we've been part of in any of our history. Look, I'm not uncomfortable saying we should be able to get 500 tons out of each of those -- the top 2 portals dropping down to the bottom quite easily. We just need a bit of time here. We're not doing it in 2026, but we're starting in '26. We will get ounces in 2026. We're buying ounces today that we will be mining as soon as the first half of 2026. That's fast. This isn't where people are saying, "Hey, it's going to be 2, 3, 4 years. We're going to be adding ounces to our feed next year. This is as quick as it can be here.

Okay. Perfect. And just one last one. With that much tetrahedrite ore, do you need to put in changes to the plant, which has currently been processing a lot of Galena? Or are you happy with where the recoveries would be?

Yes. As you know, we have been squarely laser-like focused at restoring Galena for the first 11 months and our Mexican assets getting into EC-120, which we're doing very good on both fronts. We have not been spending a lot of time on the tetrahedrite yet and the antimony. However, in the last 30 or 6 weeks just before the government shutdown, we've actually been very active at working -- speaking to our neighbors, speaking to the government. In fact, it's no secret. I'm going in to see the government next week, even into the White House, which is I've never been able to do that before.

So the tetrahedrite and the antimony are certainly something that are extremely important to us that will start showing up very, very quickly in 2026. As you know, we've already secured our offtake agreement allows us to finally get paid beginning of January. So more tetrahedrite we got, the more we can get paid. Our opportunity is to make sure we can get paid the most for that tetrahedrite so we can see AISC down to single digits here.

And ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the conference back over to Paul Huet for closing remarks.

Listen, all I want to do is just take a moment and thank everyone. And again, if I was a little tired, I apologize, we've been up 26 hours trying to get this to you guys. And I want to just take 30 seconds and thank the team, all of the group who have worked tirelessly to get this across the finish line. We're in one of the greatest silver markets we're ever going to see in our lives, coupled with the copper antimony, gold and lead that we're producing, hold on to your socks. Americas Gold and Silver is a very different company, it's changing today. We've got a lot of room for growth from this point in time. This is a trajectory where we've done quite a bit for 11 months. But from this point, we're scaling up quite faster than we ever had anticipated.

So thank you for being on the call. We appreciate all of you. We appreciate everyone and all our shareholders. Have a great day.

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call, and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jordan, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Americas Gold and Silver Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This event is being recorded and will be available on the America's website for playback later today.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Paul Huet, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to our third quarter conference call. With me on today's call is Warren Varga, our Chief Financial Officer, who will take us through the financial highlights for the quarter. Also with me on the call is Oliver Turner, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, who will walk us through some important corporate highlights.

I'll start out today by covering some key elements of our continued growth before turning the call over to Warren. Please note, we will be referencing a slide deck, which is being shared through the webcast on this call.

Before I begin the presentation, I'd like to remind you to please review our cautionary statements regarding forward-looking information and non-GAAP measures. I've got a different slide. I'm going to start over and talk about the work that we're doing over at [indiscernible] here. So the highlights, let me begin by expressing our continued confidence in the path we're forging as a company and the strides we're making to achieve the goals.

Throughout Q3 of '25, Americas team has tirelessly been focused on strengthening our foundation and building our incredible momentum. Our bolstered balance sheet allowed us to make some very strategic investments to continue implementing the operational enhancements we've identified to set ourselves up for sustained growth production. And I think I can't emphasize that -- more importantly, it is sustained growth production.

Our core mission remains clear to safety and responsibly maximize the value of our assets through disciplined execution and strategic investment. This quarter, we've prioritized equipment upgrades across all our sites, improving our main hoisting in the shaft at Galena, adding new ventilation and new infill drilling has continued to reveal high-grade opportunities near the workings at both sites.

At the corporate level, we have continued to make great steps. In Q3 2025, we engaged Lot 16, a DC-based government relations group to assist us in discussions with the U.S. government regarding support for our antimony production and to explore potential local antimony processing options. Oliver will elaborate a little more on this a little afterwards.

Separately, we are executing our multiyear growth plan at the Galena Complex, leveraging our strong balance sheet to increase development rate, boost tonnages mined and reduce costs. This plan includes a number of important key steps. And the first step is actually the introduction of the long-hole stoping. We have developed and mined the first 2 long-hole panels. This is the first time ever that any significant long-hole stoping has been done at Galena.

We've also mobilized a new long-hole drill at Galena, now actively drilling other long-hole stoping areas. This method offers improved safety, higher productivity, lower cost and increased backfill capacity to reduce waste hoisting compared to our previous underhand cut and fill approach. A second very important thing is the expansion of the equipment fleet underground. We've ordered 5 new underground loaders with 3 mine trucks, with initial units already deployed underground, including 2 remote capable Komatsu 4-yard loaders commissioned during the quarter, all supporting productivity gains and cost reductions as the long-hole stoping continues to ramp up.

The third is major infrastructure upgrades. We're advancing trade-off studies on materials handling to optimize underground productivity and hoisting schedules, alongside major upgrades like a new hoist motor for the #3 shaft, where the first phase was completed ahead of schedule during a 10-day shutdown, 4 days shorter than planned, delivering a 100% productivity improvement. These advancements supported by our strong balance sheet will sustain robust production growth over the coming years, positioning Galena as a key driver to our success.

Over to production, we achieved a standout performance in Q3 of '25. On a consolidated basis, we produced 765,000 silver ounces, a remarkable 98% increase year-over-year from the 386,000 attributable ounces in Q3 of 2024 and 11% quarter-over-quarter increase from 689,000 ounces last quarter. This increase reflects the dedication and skill of our teams across our operations, setting a strong foundation for the year ahead.

At Galena, silver production increased 36% year-over-year to 440,000 ounces in Q3, meeting our expectations, up from 323,000 ounces in Q3 of 2024, with attributable ounces rising 127% from that 194,000 ounces. This stems from operational enhancements like the time studies I was talking about, engineering work, increasing productivity projects. We've advanced the waste decline, widened access to new stopes and mined our first 2 long-hole panels, as I was suggesting in the summary, with more planned in Q4 of 2025 and obviously in Q1 of 2026.

New loaders and trucks are boosting productivity while long-hole stoping delivers safer, more efficient mining. Critical ventilation improvement include the first Alimak raise and ongoing second raise to enhance underground conditions. The #3 shaft hoist motor upgrade was completed ahead of schedule, increasing capacity to approximately 80 tonnes per hour with further plans to increase it to 118 tonnes per hour.

Remember, when we got here, we inherited, it was sitting at about 40 to 42 tonnes per hour, so significant increases in that shaft. The new underground core drilling highlighted 24,913 gram silver and 16.9% copper over 0.21 meters in the high-grade extension of the 149 vein, near existing infrastructure close to the #3 shaft. We're quite excited about that.

Our team's efforts are unlocking Galena's potential with further output increases on track once second phase shaft upgrades are completed. We are also pleased we have entered into a long-term 5-year collective bargaining agreement with our hourly staff, aligning incentives for safe, profitable production and sustained operations. I'm truly thankful to our hourly staff for demonstrating their belief in what we can accomplish together towards safe and profitable growth at the Galena Complex for all stakeholders.

Over to Cosalá, our operations in Mexico, our strong operating team led by General Manager, Gabriel Soto, has consistently demonstrated a high standard of safety and productivity, delivering a strong 70% production increase year-over-year with 325,000 ounces of silver in Q3, up from approximately 192,000 ounces in Q3 of 2024 and quarter-over-quarter, an increase of 21% from 269,000 ounces.

These results and growth reflect outstanding execution alongside reduced zinc and lead production as we continued our transition from San Rafael into EC120. It is important to note that higher lead and zinc base metal output of San Rafael will switch to higher silver and copper output as we move into EC120. We're accelerating EC120 development toward its high-grade silver, copper core with production increases expected through to the end of 2025, while San Rafael's remaining stopes continue to offset costs during this shift.

EC120's pre production contributed approximately $12.9 million to revenue with 314,000 ounces of silver produced. And we're on track for commercial production by the end of 2025, which is expected to significantly enhance our silver output and our free cash flow, reinforcing Cosalá's critical contribution to our production in Americas Gold and Silver. These strong production results paired with our fortified balance sheet position us exceptionally well to meet our 2025 goals. We're building momentum across our operations and look forward to sharing more as we advance our development and drill programs.

Let's now review the specifics of the Galena complex. Now moving over to our recent test work with metallurgical breakthroughs having the potential to add significant value at Galena. In Q3, we reported that test work by Allihies Engineering achieved over 99% antimony extractions from copper concentrate and reconfirming the 0.69:1 antimony to copper ratio of historical production at Galena. This means we are one of the only U.S. producers of antimony and will continue to be the largest producer of antimony for a while, even as some of the new mines come online.

Antimony is a critical mineral for the defense and energy sectors, especially after China's 2024 export halt. And now silver has entered the critical minerals list following more potential export controls that target antimony and silver. What's more is that we're not stopping here. The next step in enhancing our value creation potential from antimony is through the ongoing test work being conducted by Allihies Engineering, which is focused on treating our concentrates to produce multiple salable antimony products.

Historically, antimony was recovered from Galena Complex ore at the now decommissioned Sunshine antimony plant. So we have a strong technical precedent for the recovery test work currently underway.

Now with that, I'll turn it over to you, Warren, for some financial highlights.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone. This morning, we released our Q3 2025 financial results. Our unaudited condensed interim consolidated financial statements and MD&A for the 3 months ended September 30, 2025, are available on our website and under Americas Gold and Silver's profile on both SEDAR+ and EDGAR.

Revenue for the quarter was $30.6 million, an increase of 37% from Q3 2024 and a 13% increase over Q2 2025 due primarily to higher realized silver price of approximately $40 per ounce and higher silver production from both of our mines, as Paul has mentioned, despite lower zinc and lead production and prices.

Preproduction sales of EC120 silver copper ore contributed a strong $12.9 million to revenue as we continue our transition into the EC120 ore body, where we expect higher silver and copper output. As Paul has already stated, this quarter, we produced 765,000 silver ounces, a 98% increase over last year and 877,000 silver equivalent ounces, including 2.3 million pounds of lead and over 550,000 pounds of copper.

Cost per ounce metrics decreased materially across the board compared to last year -- or sorry, compared to last quarter with continued reductions expected as silver production increases at both of our mines. Cost of sales per silver equivalent ounce decreased 18% to approximately $23 per ounce. Cash cost per silver ounce decreased 10% to $24.11 and AISC per silver ounce decreased 9% to approximately $30 per ounce.

Our net loss of $15.7 million decreased slightly from approximately $16 million in Q3 2024, benefiting strongly from our increased revenue, though offset by a noncash impact of net movements in our metals-based liabilities. The adjusted loss for the quarter was $4.3 million, a significant improvement over both the Q3 2024 loss of approximately $12 million and the Q2 2025 loss of approximately $12 million.

Adjusted EBITDA was a positive $1.9 million, also a significant improvement over the Q3 2024 loss of $1.3 million and the Q2 2025 loss of $4.1 million. Our cash balance was approximately $39 million at the end of the quarter. The company has deployed approximately $29 million of its raised capital this year, investing in improving both of our mining operations, which Paul has elaborated earlier, including the hoist replacement, mining equipment and underground development at both of our operations. Working capital has improved significantly from the prior year-end and last quarter to a $6.2 million deficit.

I will now turn the call over to Oliver.

Thank you, Warren, and good afternoon or good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to share some significant developments in our corporate strategy that are enhancing America's visibility in the market and outperformance. First, I'd like to highlight our continued delivery of over 80% in silver revenue exposure, providing a terrific vehicle for silver-focused investors to gain exposure to the metal.

This quarter, silver as a percentage of revenue was 87%, demonstrating that we continue to be a leading North American silver producer. While this percentage may not remain stable every coming quarter as metal prices shift, it is a strong indicator of our progress and the effectiveness of our silver-focused strategy. With so few publicly listed silver-focused producers in North America following a couple of years of significant M&A in our concentrated sector, we're proud to be one of a select few with such strong exposure to silver.

Over to Slide 13. One of the more significant future revenue sources at America beyond silver is anticipated to be antimony. During the quarter, we put out several releases highlighting the steps we are taking to maximize our antimony byproduct contribution. On September 8, we announced the second phase of test work, which confirmed not only 99% recovery of antimony, but also, once again, solidified that very important ratio of antimony to copper in our ore of 0.7:1. This is a very important metric at Galena, which is based not only on the test work completed this year, but by decades of past production assays.

For investors looking for antimony exposure in a positive critical minerals environment, this ratio allows them to approximate the antimony endowment at Galena, which is very significant. Our efforts during the quarter extended from Idaho to Washington, D.C. with the announcement of the engagement of Lot 16, a leading D.C.-based government relations and communications firm to assist us in discussions with the U.S. government.

Lot 16 has a track record of delivering with a number of our peers, and we look forward to their government guidance regarding support for our growing antimony production and as we explore potential local antimony processing options. One of the tremendous aspects to our growth story at Galena is that while we are focused on materially scaling our silver production, antimony and copper scale concurrently as we execute. Each ton of tetrahedrite ore we mine for our high-grade silver also contains strong antimony and copper grades, a dual additional benefit for Americas Gold and Silver shareholders as we grow production in Idaho.

We do not need to focus on mining any different areas or developing into different areas. It all comes together in the same ton of rock. Moving forward, Americas is very proud to be a key player in helping address the shortage of U.S.-produced antimonies over the coming years. And finally, this quarter, we're very pleased to see Desjardins' Allison Carson and SCP's Justin Chan initiate coverage on Americas with buy ratings [ at ] CAD 750 and CAD 965 target prices, respectively.

We also continue to have over 60% of our shares tightly held by institutions and insiders and other long-term investors, including Eric Sprott's approximately 20% stake, which underscores the strong alignment between management, insiders and our shareholders.

And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Paul for closing remarks.

Thank you, Oliver and Warren. Look, I know we've given you guys a lot of numbers today. It's been an extremely, extremely exciting quarter. Typically, we would be asking questions, but today, we're over to a panel here on the U.S. defense minerals. So we're going to be leaving this quarterly call into U.S. panels. So hopefully, you guys can join us on that panel, which will be quite exciting.

But before we sign off, I just want to once again thank the teams at Galena, thank the teams in Mexico and most importantly, thank all our shareholders and all our analysts. We appreciate all your efforts and those of you who made the time to listen to us on the call today, have a great day, and we'll be talking to you guys soon. All the best. Thanks. Bye-bye.

This concludes the meeting. You may disconnect.