Deutsche Rohstoff Aktie

Good morning. Well, good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to the second day of the first Deutsche Boerse Scale Summit. My name is [ Ingmar Gartenprader ], and I'm very pleased to welcome you on behalf of Deutsche Boerse. This new format brings together investors and high-growth scale issuers to enable a direct exchange on strategies, positioning and investment stories.

Each presentation will last 20 minutes and will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A session. And as a participant, we warmly encourage you to actively participate in this discussion. With that, I'm pleased to welcome the CEO of Deutsche Rohstoff AG, Jan-Philipp Weitz, who will guide us through the company's presentation. And with no further ado, I hand over to you, Mr. Weitz.

Perfect. Thank you very much for the warm welcome and the introduction. And thank you very much, everybody, for attending today's Deutsche Boerse Scale Summit here and our short presentation on Deutsche Rohstoff in general and our outlook here for the coming months and years and our future plans. Some of you may already know Deutsche Rohstoff well and others may be new to our story. So I will try to balance the information here to give everybody the chance to understand what we are doing. And the disclaimer, obviously, as you know, everything that we say in terms of forward-looking statements has to be viewed with caution.

So Deutsche Rohstoff AG, we are based in Germany. We're listed, obviously, in Germany in the Scale Segment here, have a market cap of roughly EUR 400 million today. And we are active in the natural resources space, oil and gas as well as metals. Oil and gas is what we call our bread-and-butter business. That's where 100% of our revenue comes from and a significant amount of our profitability, while at the same time, we do have a metals exposure, which stems from our historic activity where we were actually owner and operator of several mines.

And these days, it is more an investment portfolio in which there is one particular investment in a U.S. company called Almonty Industries that has been extremely successful in developing tungsten mines over the past decade or so and has grown very significantly in value and, therefore, making up roughly EUR 230 million value of our company. At the same time, our oil and gas business is going to generate close to EUR 300 million of revenue for us this year and roughly EUR 200 million EBITDA, based on our current guidance at $75 oil prices.

And the development in the oil and gas space, even the tailwinds -- with the tailwinds that we have had of higher oil prices here and some very positive operational development has helped us -- have helped the company. Our share price has gone up significantly over the past 5 years here, especially over the past 12 months. And the reason for that is that we have been very profitable on the oil and gas side, but now also with our investment in Almonty Industries have been able to already generate EUR 100 million net income in the first quarter of 2026.

At the same time, we have a very healthy balance sheet and leverage ratio. I think this slide here shows you a little bit of the history of where our numbers come from. We've grown revenue from EUR 73 million in 2021 to, yes, close to EUR 300 million this year and according to our guidance also in the coming year. And that correlates strongly with the production growth from 7,000 barrels of oil equivalent of production up to 17,000 barrels of oil equivalent that we are aiming to produce this year. At the same time, we have always remained relatively modest leverage. So our net debt to EBITDA has always hovered around 0.5 to 1x, which obviously is a healthy leverage ratio even for an oil and gas company.

I think if we look at what we have to offer in terms of assets and look at them versus our liability figures, we have a total debt amount, financial debt of EUR 229 million in the group. Our assets, from right to left, the reserves of our oil and gas reserves, just proved reserves that we are publishing once a year have a present value of EUR 430 million or [ EUR 760 million ], if you look at those numbers, either at $60 oil price or $80 oil price. And that means we have a very significant and strong reserve base. Those reserves reflect what we still have in the ground, what we can still produce and what the discounted-to-today value of those future cash flows is.

So depending on whether you look at oil more as a $60 pricing commodity or an $80 pricing commodity, it is either EUR 430 million of proved reserves or EUR 770 million of proved reserves. And on the cash side, with roughly EUR 150 million in cash and then our Almonty shareholding, with today's market value around EUR 230 million, our combined asset base can certainly be viewed as potentially valuable or having a value of more than EUR 1 billion. Therefore, I think our financial debt to asset basis is extremely comfortable and gives us a lot of comfort and positive outlook for the future of our company.

And I think the capital market understands that, obviously also, and that's why I said the share price has appreciated significantly here. And I think we have been able to outperform our peer group quite strongly. At the same time, we are a growth company. We are only, at this point, a EUR 400 million market cap company. And obviously, our goal is to grow that. But at the same time, we have always been a dividend payer other than years around the COVID pandemic. But in the last 10 years, we have been a very continuous dividend payer.

As you can see, that dividend has continuously grown at yesterday's AGM, we got the approval from the shareholders to pay EUR 2.25 dividend for the year 2025 that will be paid out shortly. And we have always been buying back shares in the last 3 years here. So this year, we are in our largest share buyback program so far, where we are going to buy back shares for up to EUR 7.5 million under a currently ongoing share buyback program. And those are things that we are also doing to show the market that we do care about our shareholders, and we do have the idea to buy back shares here and to distribute dividends.

And as you can see here, nonetheless, I mean, there is certainly a slight discrepancy maybe in the way the capital market is valuing our oil and gas business versus our U.S. peer group, and it's always hard to select a peer group. But at the same time, it is certainly, definitely obvious that our small cap peer group, if you look at it here, is trading at a significantly higher EV to EBITDA multiple despite us doing an adjustment here in our EV/EBITDA multiple, excluding the Almonty investment, which shows that our EV currently is at EUR 250 million if we exclude the value of our Almonty investment as of today.

And our EBITDA, excluding the profits from the Almonty investment at EUR 200 million gives us an EV/EBITDA of 1.3x, showing that this is significantly below the peer group and obviously also significantly below much larger companies like, for example, Occidental Petroleum. But in that case, I mean, it is also fair to say that those companies have a lot broader -- a significantly broader production base and a production that would remain much more stable if they stopped investing additional capital. So it is not surprising that very large major oil and gas companies would have a higher EV/EBITDA multiple. But the much smaller ones for those, that statement does not necessarily hold true.

So if we look at our U.S. business, we're active in 3 basins in the U.S., the Powder River Basin, the DJ Basin and the Appalachian/Utica Basin in Ohio. We are only currently producing in Wyoming and in Colorado, and the majority of our production with around 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent for this year guided will come from Wyoming, where we are one of the largest or most active operators. We are currently operating 3 drilling rigs out of -- out of 16 drilling rigs in the Powder River Basin. That makes us certainly one of the most active operators here. And we have an acreage position of 70,000 acres, which you can see on this slide here, it is a position that is really giving us significant running room to further develop our reserves to add additional wells over the coming years.

And even at this significantly accelerated development pace, and that we are showing this year, it is possible for us to drill here for many years going forward. And that significantly accelerated development pace is important because at the beginning of this year, we were originally planning to only drill wells with one drilling rig and potentially drill up to 10 wells or somewhere around that number. And when oil prices increased drastically in March, we were really quick to react. And over the course of March and April, we added 2 additional drilling rigs. And yes, basically ramped up what is by far the largest development program in the history of our company here.

Like I said, currently running 3 rigs. We are guiding to invest roughly EUR 230 million this year into our own oil and gas developments. And obviously, developments that we are doing with partners. The majority of our production comes from oil wells that we have drilled ourselves, that we are operating ourselves and that are what you would call operated by Deutsche Rohstoff subsidiaries.

Yes, roughly 1/3 of our production comes from different nonoperated wells. One significant part of that is a joint venture that we have had with Occidental Petroleum here in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming for many, many years. And you can see, I mean, on this map, there's a lot of well-known names in the oil and gas space, oil companies, significant market caps, usually between $20 billion and $40 billion for those that are public.

And they operate in other oil fields, too, such as we do in the Powder River Basin, EOG Resources and Anschutz are the largest operators with roughly 40,000 barrels of production, but you can see with our guided 15,000 barrels of production in the Powder River Basin for this year, we are definitely not far behind those much, much larger companies. So I think it's fair to say that we have a significant and very relevant footprint here in this basin.

And what is extremely positive is the fact that the oil wells that we have brought into production this year, they have already been very prolific. So you can see here the dotted line is what we call our type curve that is basically the production results that we say we are expecting based on the economics that we are running, based on the financials that we are using to determine whether we should drill an oil well or not.

And in a nutshell, you can see that even some of those wells that familiar shareholders will recognize what is called, for example, our Chinook pad that we drilled in 2025 and our Cottonwood pad that we drilled in 2024, those pads produced up slightly over 100,000 barrels of oil on average after 150 days. The pads that we have brought online this year, you can see here, they have already produced significantly more barrels in the first 40 to 50 days of their life. So it seems that we are going to be able this year to even create better production results, stronger wells.

The reason for that is that we have made some changes also to our completion design and the way we design those wells. And yes, if that will hold true for all of our 2026 development program, which we don't know as of yet, and we are not currently anticipating that because we need to see whether we can continue with these significantly above-expectation results, that would be very, very interesting and very appealing and would definitely enhance the value of our Wyoming assets significantly. So we will have to see whether that's the case.

There is also a price for that. I mean for some of these wells, we have used more expensive completion designs. And it is the question for us now, do we want to invest some additional capital around $1 million extra or so per well, increasing well costs from $9.5 million to $10.5 million per well for those wells in the Niobrara formation that we're talking about here, or do we not want to do that. But at this point, it looks like we are on a good path and are looking forward to see what we can do in the coming months.

Yes, I've talked about oil and gas now for quite a bit. Deutsche Rohstoff, as I mentioned in the beginning, is not only oil and gas. Deutsche Rohstoff is also the metals and mining space. We have this investment in Almonty Industries since 2014 and Almonty, like I said, has been an extremely successful company, having been listed on the ASX and TSX in Australia and Canada for many years, they have now progressed also to the NASDAQ last year in the summer. So they are a NASDAQ-listed entity with, as of today, roughly USD 5.5 billion market cap, of which we still hold roughly 4.9%. And that is something that has obviously been tremendously valuable for us and has created EUR 100 million of net income or specifically EUR 97 million of net income already this year. And our residual value of the investment here is still at EUR 230 million.

So that dwarfs other things in our metals portfolio quite a bit. But we have always maintained a portfolio of metals and mining investments over the past 7 years or so, where we have said we do like to have slightly more as part of our treasury also exposure to metals and mining investments with the idea and the vision to potentially find other companies that could be as successful as Almonty. And that is something that we are currently expanding a little bit. We are looking more actively at other metals companies. And just looking at the growth of our company size and our balance sheet size and our liquidity amount here over the last 12 months.

I think it is fair to also say if we only want to keep our metals and mining portfolio that is non-Almonty somewhat, yes, of the relative size compared to the rest of the company, we would have to make a few additional investments. So yes, oil and gas is definitely going to remain our bread-and-butter business. That's what we have always said. But certainly, especially in this very interesting up cycle in the natural resources industry, the metals and mining industry and specifically elements like copper, lithium and also gold, there is opportunities that we see and where we feel like it would make sense for us as a company to maintain some of that exposure and be focused on that.

Almonty, I've spoken about quite a bit. Just for those of you that don't know, Almonty is the most important western tungsten producer. They are producing in South Korea, in Portugal, potentially in the near term in Spain and the U.S. and have a portfolio of very strong assets, of which the strongest definitely is the Sangdong mine in South Korea, which is the largest tungsten mine in the world outside of China and makes it a strategically extremely important asset, like I said, with a $5.5 billion market cap. And tungsten is one of the fundamentally most seek metals in the world.

I mean we hear a lot from people that are craving to find tungsten supply, and that's also the reason why tungsten prices have increased massively over the last 24 months from roughly $300, $400 per metric ton unit up to currently around $3,000. So that fundamental demand has been driving that and is certainly a key feature here of the high relevance of Almonty in the capital market.

And last, I want to give you a quick outlook here and forecast for 2026 and 2027. As I mentioned earlier, we are guiding around close to EUR 300 million in revenue, specifically EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million in our base case, which assumes a $75 WTI oil price. At an $85 WTI oil price, it would be EUR 290 million to EUR 300 million. Our EBITDA midpoint guidance is around EUR 300 million for this year. For 2027, we are guiding close to EUR 300 million revenue again, EBITDA EUR 210 million, EUR 230 million, which is essentially 100% coming from our oil and gas business. So this year's EBITDA is significantly higher because of the EUR 97 million net profit we have generated in the first quarter due to the sale of Almonty stock.

And you can see here also on the right-hand side that in the first quarter here, we have had an EBITDA of EUR 126 million. That is obviously the highest EBITDA we were ever able to generate in one quarter. In the second half -- in the second quarter, the EBITDA is going to be significantly lower. And then as we are guiding to ramp up our production to north of 20,000 barrels of oil equivalent in the third and fourth quarter of this year or the second half of this year, we are expecting a very significant, yes, production uplift. And therefore, if prices of oil hold steady, also a very significant uplift in our EBITDA and revenue figures compared to the second quarter of 2026.

At the same time, we do maintain a strong hedge book. We have more than 1 million barrels of oil hedged currently at roughly $70 to $75 oil price, and that makes it quite compelling for us to be able to have some security layers in case oil prices go down further. On the other hand, we are never hedging 100% of our production because we do want to maintain upside.

And in general, also, our hedging philosophy has been and is to roughly hedge 50% of our production. But at the same time, we do have a high liquidity and are relatively modestly levered. So we definitely feel like we don't want to take away too much upside here from potential future oil price spikes. Even though obviously, right now, the last few weeks have been quite negative oil prices. But obviously, that is totally okay. We have a strong hedge book, like I said. And therefore, we can live with that.

Yes. And with that, I think I would like to close. And first of all, thank you very much for your attention. And hopefully, I've been able to give you some updates for those that know us already, and I have been able to introduce those that haven't heard much about Deutsche Rohstoff yet. And with that, I think we'll go over to the questions. I think maybe we'll start answering the questions that are on the line here, and then I'll try and answer some of the questions that have been posted into the chat.

That sounds perfectly great. And to all the participants, yes, now we move to the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] And I look at the line if someone has raised his hand. That's not the case by now. So we have questions. And Mr. Weitz, you already saw that there are some incoming and you might...

Yes. Maybe start to answer them. The sales proceeds from the sale of our Almonty shares, whether they are tax-free and would we be able to distribute those to shareholders without further Kapitalertragsteuer payment?

So when we sell shares of Almonty, for us, they are essentially tax-free. I mean there is roughly 5% of those proceeds or gains would be taxed. But effectively, it's simplistic, and this is not tax advice. The way to think about it is every $1 million of profit that we make, our effective taxation is at around 2% to 3% of those proceeds. So that goes for Deutsche Rohstoff as a company.

In terms of distributing those proceeds to shareholders tax-free, that is something that we have not looked into. But I think, in general, all dividends that we pay out are subject to the recipient personal tax situation, and that is generally the Kapitalertragsteuer here in Germany.

The next question is the market cap of Deutsche Rohstoff has increased significantly so that it might be possible to join the SDAX in the future? Do you plan a formal listing? If not, what are the reasons?

I don't know whether I can get myself in trouble here now being on the Scale Summit and saying anything about leaving the Scale Summit. But in general, I mean, obviously, that is a very good question and has been asked before. The question is always, do we want to do an uplisting into the German Prime Standard. And that certainly is something that, yes, now where our market cap has grown significantly could make sense. It could make sense because maybe it reflects that the company is growing up further and it's becoming even more mature.

On the other hand, the question would always be why and what could benefits be? And generally, I think liquidity and access for other investors would be good reasons. But the question also is, yes, can we get that? I think one thing that we have seen is that our liquidity has increased significantly over the last 24 months. Our stock has been trading this year, I think, around 35,000 shares per day, which is roughly EUR 3 million. That probably already puts us into at least somewhere not in -- at the very bottom of the liquidity of some SDAX companies. So I think we are seeing some of that liquidity already.

Yes, maybe it could become more and maybe other investors could join our register. Maybe all of those that can do it in Germany are already there. We don't know. I mean, nonetheless, I mean, I think it is something that is on our radar that we are thinking about. We're not saying no. But on the other hand, right now, I mean, in the first half of this year, we had a lot to do with just building out the largest development program of the company of all times and growing the business. So we need to see where that will sit in the next 12 to 24 months.

At the same time, one other factor on this is also the U.S. investors. I mean we have been doing quite a bit of Investor Relations work in the U.S. And I think we have seen that may also be where some of the new liquidity comes from that we have a relatively strongly growing U.S. investor base at this point in time.

Then one next question is, what do you see as the most material risk to your business model over the next few years, particularly regarding commodity price volatility, regulatory developments in key U.S. states and the availability of drilling and service capacity?

So I think, yes, our most material business risk, I think, is always fair to classify as commodity price developments. So if oil prices collapse, that is the most material risk that we face. At the same time, yes, it is something we can hedge. It is something that especially with our U.S. business, we can react to very quickly. We have had the ability here to add rigs now very quickly when prices were high.

In the past, we have had the ability to drop rigs in development when prices are low. A very simplistic example is always if we decided right now that we would want to cancel all further drilling activities for this year, I think we could be stopping everything within the next 2 months or so, and we would maybe continue to spend some money on ongoing processes, but the penalties would probably be definitely [ sub ] -- in the low single-digit million range, meaning, yes, we can respond very quickly to those environments.

And in the past, I mean, even crashes in oil prices have created quite a bit of opportunity for us because our liquidity situation is strong, and it could give us a chance to buy additional assets. On the other hand, our competitors have been more levered in the past. So therefore, we would have to see how that could go.

Then another question is, could you please comment on the 2028 bond with a 7.5% coupon? Is there a likelihood of it being called before its scheduled maturity date?

At this point, I mean, we have this 7.5% bond outstanding that matures in 2028, as you said. We are currently looking obviously at our debt profile, we have a 6% bond outstanding. We have not made any decisions to do anything. There is certainly really good growth projects -- prospects for us, so we can use the capital and don't see an immediate need to call any bond.

On the other hand, it is always reasonable, I think, for a company to look at its financing structure and see could we reduce our cost of financing. If so, how and that would be potentially scenarios where we would call a bond, but that is nothing that is as of right now, specifically on our agenda. So we will also have to see in this extremely volatile environment here, how things go.

And another question is around the estimate of the longer-term sustainable production of BOE in our acreage in Wyoming after we are further ramping up? I mean I think right now, obviously, we are trying to get the Wyoming production or our general group production north of 20,000 BOE. Something that we have showed at our Annual General Meeting yesterday is if we continue to invest around EUR 200 million per year here, we should certainly be able with these well results, if they continue to hold strong to get over a couple of years or so to get closer to a 25,000 barrel of oil production range here in a few years.

And then I think the land in Wyoming definitely could allow us to get into the north of 25,000 barrels of oil production range. That always depends on development pace. So we can certainly get there. The question is how much more land do we then have to hold stable? I think 25,000 BOE certainly is a range that we can get to in not too many years. But then at some point, after 5 or 6 years, we will probably have to see whether we -- how many more wells can we develop. I think there's a lot of potential in formations like the Mowry Formation that is only, to a small extent, reflected right now in our results.

So that is not a super specific answer, but I think it could certainly be possible to be north of 25,000 BOE here and potentially hold that steady for quite a long time. And if we accelerate development, even to get potentially to higher ranges.

I think I'm out of time now, but I thank you very much for all of your questions. And I'm going to, yes, hand back over to [ Mr. Gartenprader ], and I think he'll take it from there.

Yes. Thank you very much. Due to the limited time, we come to the end of this event. Thank you to all the participants for your interest in Deutsche Rohstoff AG. And if there are any further questions, don't hesitate to contact Investor Relations. A big thank you to you, Mr. Weitz, for the presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. I wish you all a successful day and hand over to you, Mr. Weitz, for some closing remarks. Thank you, and bye-bye.

Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks for your attention. I'm glad to be on this call with everyone, and I'm looking forward to you following our story in the future. Thank you.

Good afternoon, and good morning, everybody, in case you're in North America. Thank you very much for dialing into our call. I think we'll give it another 10 seconds or so for every participant to join the room here.

Welcome, a warm regard also from my side.

All right. Yes. Thank you, everybody. And once again, welcome to our Deutsche Rohstoff 2025 earnings call. Thank you all for attending here today. I will skip the disclaimer. Yes, we're very happy to welcome you here and to inform you about what happened in 2025, walk through the financials for 2025 and give you an outlook for this year and the next year.

I think in summary, it's fair to say Deutsche Rohstoff is extremely well positioned for the next 12 and 24 months and also beyond that. I think we're in as good a position as we have been in since the starting of our company, we are in an extremely strong liquidity position. Operationally, on the oil and gas side, we are in full development mode. For the first time ever, we're running 3 rigs at the same time. Our non-op side of the business is also developing very well. And we have divested 1/3 -- roughly 1/3 of our position in Almonty Industries, which has been a tremendous success, one of the most successful junior mining companies on the planet, and we were able to realize an initial profit of roughly EUR 100 million, substantially strengthening our liquidity base, which currently sits at around EUR 150 million.

Nonetheless, our investment in Almonty still has a value of EUR 250 million market-wise. And at the same time, our oil and gas reserves have been growing. Our portfolio of minority investments on the mining side has also been developing very positively. And we're very much looking forward to shape the future of the company here and move things ahead as we are marching through this current year 2026. But nonetheless, I mean, the quick look back into '25. '25 was not the easiest year for oil and gas and natural resources companies. We've had a strong performance despite that, we're able to generate almost EUR 200 million in revenue, EUR 130 million in EBITDA and strong production at roughly 13,500 BOE.

At the same time, we placed another bond, increasing our total bond issue volume to EUR 193 million. I think that's another sign of trust of the capital market here in Germany. We could have placed significantly more capital if we had needed to, which was not the case, obviously. At a coupon of 6%, I think that's also quite competitive if you look into our maybe North American peer group. And yes, we were able to generate EUR 29 million of net income. So despite the big significant drop in oil prices in the first half of 2025 and the not easiest environment, I think we can look back and can say, even in those more difficult environments, we are capable of navigating those and continuing to build out our asset base.

And with that here, taking a look at our existing asset base, I think it is very, very strong and will help us shape the future of Deutsche Rohstoff on the debt side, roughly EUR 230 million in debt that primarily stem from the bond side here in Germany, the close to EUR 200 million of bonds that we have issued by now. On the asset side, there's obviously our stake in Almonty, which has a value of roughly EUR 250 million as of today. The cash we are holding roughly EUR 150 million. And in addition to that, our oil and gas reserves, just as a good kind of reflection of the asset value that is there. We're only looking at proved reserves here.

So the PDP, proved developed producing reserves and the proved undeveloped reserves. If you add those 2 together, that's roughly EUR 400 million. So a total asset base of around EUR 800 million. If we were looking at -- if we were to look at our oil and gas reserves at an $80 price deck instead of a $60 flat price deck, you can see here, we would probably add EUR 350 million. So that would take the potential value of our assets to north of EUR 1 billion. If you put that in relation to the EUR 220 million of debt. I think we are a, modestly levered; and b, we have a super strong asset base to continue to grow here going forward.

And with that, I'll hand over to Henning Doering for the financial side of things.

Thank you very much. Let's continue with a deep dive into the financials, starting here with a multiyear overview using 2021 as a reference. And as you can see in the upper left corner, revenue has increased since 2025 by more than 2.5 fold. EBITDA in the middle chart doubled since then. And you see in the lighter blue bars, this is our guidance, which we extended yesterday towards 2027. So we want to continue this past growth, profitable growth in sales revenues by towards EUR 300 million sales and regarding EBITDA beyond EUR 200 million with an extraordinary income in the current year in 2026 of EUR 100 million gains from the sale of around 9 million shares of Almonty.

We managed this growth mainly by using the internal financing capabilities of Deutsche Rohstoff. As you can see on the right-hand side, the strong operating cash flow and in the lower end that the leverage-related figures has either improved or increased disproportionately low like net debt, which came in at EUR 146 million at the end of 2025 and the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, which was 1x1 EBITDA end of 2025. Looking forward to end of Q1, we might here in the corner of 0.4x EBITDA. Equity increased by more than 175% despite the fact that we did dividends and share buyback programs in this period of around EUR 36 million.

If we now continue to the next slide and take a deeper look into the volumes and the realized prices, we, first of all, need to state that 2025 was not a year of maximum production for us, as Jan-Philipp Weitz already pointed out, but rather a year of targeted optimization. Following the Liberation Day last year and the decrease of oil prices, we have strongly reduced our CapEx by around 45%. We have reduced the number of new wells, which we brought online. So overall, kind of 50% of net new wells. But despite that fact, you can see that our volumes kept pretty much stable.

On a BOE basis, we had a decline by 8%, but which is more important because oil is the more valuable product still. And even more today, on an oil level, we produced 3.2 million barrels of oil, which is pretty much comparable to the same amount the year before. In the middle chart, we suffered from, of course, realized prices, which fell realized means after hedging effects by around 14% gas prices recovered decently by more than 50% towards $3 per Mcf.

On the right-hand side, you see the exchange rate impact. The average euro-USD rate decreased by 4%. This translated into P&L figures, just to give you an impression, this was EUR 7.5 million lower sales conversion by this effect. And from the closing rate basis, you see an even weaker dollar from [ 1.04 ] towards the [ 1.18 ], which had an impact on the equity by around EUR 35 million. And in the P&L, an additional losses from currency translation of around EUR 3.3 million.

If we now go over to our P&L and balance sheet. We, first of all, can state that the numbers published yesterday fully confirmed the prelim numbers published early March. Revenue came in 3% above the guidance range of EUR 170 million to EUR 190 million. EBITDA came in, in the upper end of the guidance range of EUR 115 million to EUR 135 million. So since 2020, we are continuously keeping or overachieving our guidances, thereby.

If we now look on the left-hand side, revenue declined by 17% towards EUR 195 million. The decline is 80% price driven, 20% FX driven. EBITDA compared to the prior year was at 21% decline. The reason for that is that we had roughly EUR 10 million of onetime effects driven by workovers. Every second well in the DJ Basin has been worked over last year. The FX effects I just mentioned, but also some upfront costs for the first bigger drilling program on our Western Powder River acreage, so -- which spreads pretty much by 50-50 between cost of material and other operating expense. After depletion, interest and taxes, we recorded a net income of EUR 28.9 million, representing earnings per share of EUR 6.03.

If you look on the right-hand side, total assets increased slightly, mainly driven by the issuance of the bond towards the end of the year towards EUR 578 million. Equity decreased by 70%, both by the reason I just mentioned, FX translation reserve effects. And last year, we had a dividend and the share buyback program by totaling EUR 13.6 million.

Equity ratio still was at EUR 38 million in a pretty solid area. Financial liabilities increased by the bond measures. Cash and cash equivalents more than tripled towards EUR 70 million. And net debt could be decreased by 70% -- 7% towards EUR 146 million. The operating cash flow already mentioned, investing cash flow in total by EUR 110 million, thereof EUR 97 million in new wells and the rest in additional acreage in Ohio and some infrastructure additions. And our free cash flow was strongly positive, close to EUR 24 million, which was contributing in the increase in cash and cash equivalents.

So for our deep dive, looking into the numbers, I'm handing back to JanPhilipp Weitz.

Thank you very much. With that, I'll switch over to the share price development here. Obviously, if we look at the time spent here that we've continued to look at in the pre-COVID year until today, our share price has developed very nicely. It's up almost 600% since then, including dividends from a total return standpoint. We are proposing a EUR 2.25 dividend to our Annual General Meeting assembly this year in June again. So that's another step-up in dividends by EUR 0.25 and kind of is in line with the continued increasing dividend that we have always tried to pay out here as our earnings allow.

On top of that, we are planning to engage in a EUR 7.5 million share buyback program. So that is a total investment of roughly EUR 17.5 million into shareholder returns, which would also be north of 60% of our net income in terms of distribution and shareholder return ratio. That's obviously quite high compared to the shareholder return. But I mean, with the current developments, I think higher oil prices and the prospects that we have here for the coming years, I think it's more than justified to have the shareholders benefit from that as well. And at the same time, obviously, reserve enough liquidity for future development.

Talking about liquidity, I think what's also been very positive is the liquidity in our stock trading here on many days, EUR 2 million to EUR 3 million per day or even more here over the course of last year, especially currently as well. So therefore, we are certainly ranking on one of the more liquid companies here in the German small and mid-cap space.

Looking over at the macro side of things, I mean, everything almost has been written and said and nobody knows where we will be in 2 months from now. But just very high level, I mean, obviously, currently, we are expecting roughly a supply disruptions of north of 9 million barrels of oil per day, which is very, very significant. I mean if you add up the total supply disruptions, many expect now that by late April, early March -- sorry, early May, we will be around 700 million barrels of oil that has been taken off the market. And this kind of amount of oil, even if production fully resumes is going to take a significant amount of time to come back into the market to restore the storage across the globe. And I think it's fair to assume that we will see elevated oil prices for quite a while.

At the same time, when you look at the U.S., which is obviously our core market when it comes to the oil and gas side of the business, it has been interesting that until, yes, last week, the rig count, which is an interesting indicator of activity was significantly lower, 8% lower than it was last year in April. I mean that basically tells us that at least there has not been an immediate extremely quick reaction to these higher oil prices. At the same time, it has only been roughly 8 weeks or so since the start of the Iran war. So I think we are expecting all to see an uptick in the rig count and development activity in the U.S. in general. But until right now, that has not really materialized and is something that obviously we'll touch on as we come to our development program here since we were quite quick, I think, to react to these higher prices.

But before that, I want to also take a look at Almonty Industries. Almonty will be the largest supplier of conflict-free tungsten to the free world here starting as of this year with the Sangdong mine in Korea taking on production and then over the next 12 months, ramping up completely also to its Phase 2 production profile. And as you can see on the pie chart here, I mean, conflict-free tungsten is an extremely scarce material. It's even scarcer than just tungsten itself. And that's also been one of the key things why the tungsten price has been rising so significantly over the past 12 months.

As we move to the next slide, you can see here on the red line on the chart that the APT tungsten price, which essentially is the price for 100 kilos of tungsten has gone up to $3,000 per MTU, which is -- I mean, that's an incredibly high price that equates to a tungsten price per tonne of roughly $300,000. So this massive uptick in pricing here is obviously in line with the performance of Almonty share price, and it has been an extremely successful story. The mine is ramping up at exactly the right time. There's a massive structural supply deficit on the tungsten side here. The Chinese export ban continues for now, and I think we expect it to continue for quite a while because China obviously wants to onshore all of the tungsten downstream businesses.

And yes, being a non-Chinese Western world tungsten producer with U.S. production also going to ramp up in the near term here. Almonty is perfectly well positioned and its performance on the NASDAQ, I think, has shown that our investment, even after the divestment of 9 million shares here with the 40 million shares that we have left from existing shares and potential shares that we will receive through the conversion of our existing convertible bonds has a value of EUR 240 million. So obviously, still an incredibly valuable position for us that we are happy to own and to continue to follow the story.

And switching gears again to the oil and gas side of the business. I mean, we are active in 3 basins by now in Wyoming, Colorado and Ohio. As you know, our main asset here is the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. At the same time, we're still a producer in the DJ Basin in Colorado. And in Ohio, we have -- until the end of last year, we had acquired roughly 4,000 acres. We're continuing to acquire additional acreage. We will not drill there in the next 3 to 6 months. But we are building a continuously growing position here and are reaching enough concentration at this point. And I think it's fair to assume that over the next 12 months, we will definitely be getting ready to do our first development here and Bright Rock is our subsidiary there is going to be the operator of that acreage in Ohio, while obviously, we will continue to grow our acreage position.

And not so much the acreage in Ohio until now, but the acreage that we own in Colorado and in Wyoming has also led to our reserve profile here growing quite substantially. I mean, over the last 6 years, we've grown from 30 million BOE up to currently roughly 79 million BOE. So we have grown our reserves significantly. At the same time, we've obviously produced oil. And that means we have always managed to replace the reserves that we have produced. Last year, we produced around 5 million BOE. At 80 million BOE, it's fair to say that our existing reserves, if we were to produce exactly those reserves would last another 10 to 15 years at that development pace, but we are obviously trying to develop more reserves to grow our reserve base while we also continue to grow our production profile.

And I think an important way to do that and especially obviously growing our production profile is going to be core this year, we should be north of 20,000 BOE of daily production in the second half of the year. And that also comes from the strategy shift that we have performed here in the last 2 months, basically going from last year's strategy, which was very value and discipline driven and had relatively limited capital with only drilling 10 wells ourselves and then a little bit of development on the non-op side. That shift has now gone to the opposite. I mean it's what we call growth and momentum. I mean we are targeting to, yes, increase our production as much as we can on the operated side, our subsidiary, 1876 is moving full steam ahead with 3 drilling rigs, as I mentioned.

At the same time on the nonoperated side, I mean, we had entered into another joint venture last year, but we are looking at additional growth potential here right now, too, buying acreage in Ohio and also looking at other places in the U.S. to purchase acreage right now. So really trying to capture the momentum that we have here from higher oil prices, but also from our very good financial and liquidity situation. Basically, yes, we are able to even expand beyond what we are drilling here right now if we wanted to.

So 1876 this year is planning to drill 26 wells initially. But beyond that, there is the potential to drill significantly more wells, obviously, if we were to continue maintaining or operating one or even more rigs throughout the year. I mean, as it sits right now, I think we would be finished with the majority of our development around the second or third quarter here from a drilling standpoint. But yes, there is obviously the option if prices remain elevated to change that and to keep the foot on the gas pedal. And for us, it is a very substantial drilling operation. I mean, 1876 operation alone is going to add roughly 180 kilometers of drilling, and that is even before the non-op development that we are facing over the course of this year here in the other entities.

Just again, some of the details here, Salt Creek, $40 million will have been spent through the end of June, and that production should also start ramping up in the summer. And then once again, I mean, Bright Rock looking to continue its development in Ohio. And what is obviously extremely beneficial is the potential for significantly increased well returns as we are seeing this higher price environment. I mean, many of you will know that last year, we have roughly guided WTI price at $60 and our high case is looking at $70 to $75. And at those prices, the potential rate of returns of development are obviously lower than in the price environment that we are facing right now. And despite the fact that today's oil price is $96, our base case is still looking at a $75 flat price deck, which if you look at the WTI strip is obviously not too far away from the strip, let's say, from next year onward here.

And if we manage to develop the wells and the initial production as we have forecasted here around our 500,000 barrel type curve, if we manage to continue to be above that or even on that type curve, the expected rate of return is roughly 45% on our average wells. This is looking at basically all formations. So the Niobrara formation, Turner, Teapot and Mowry formation. But in general, I mean, we are averaging this a little bit to 45% rate of return and a 2.5-year payback at an $85 oil price and improved well results around 600,000 barrels of oil per well, we would even see rates of return of north of 100% and potentially a 1.5-year payback here. I mean, in order for that to happen, we would obviously have to see $85 oil or higher for the next 16 to 18 months. But I think that is not completely impossible. And if we manage to improve our well results, that is something that we can potentially achieve.

Some of you will notice that the CapEx per well here are a little bit higher. Last year, we managed to drill our first Niobrara wells significantly at right around $9 million or slightly below that. We have increased the average cost per lateral foot of our wells again to roughly $950 in this year. That's not necessarily a function of increased service prices. It's more a function of improved completion designs, some more expensive equipment and a different completion setup that we are going to use here in this coming year. So I think -- we think there will be a very good rate of return on those extra $500,000 that we are spending here per well or the extra $500 per lateral foot, expecting potential performance improvements that could be very significant.

So we will see how the '26 development looks on that front here. But overall, we are very happy with the well results that we have been achieving last year, Chinook pad, obviously, with 4 wells having produced north of 150,000 barrels after 8 months already was very, very positive. Some of the wells on the Mowry -- in the Mowry formation that we drilled last year have not been as positive as of yet. But I think we have a good plan how to improve those well results. And at the same time, we will also see how the wells continue to perform here over the next 24 months. We have seen with other wells that sometimes the first 3 months are not everything. So we remain optimistic on that front also and the fact that we have a very deep inventory for our size of the company to develop our acreage in the coming years, and that's obviously before potential acquisitions of additional acreage in Wyoming or even in other states.

And with that, I'll turn over to our hedge book. We have received quite a few questions recently around where does our hedge book stand. Overall, in the group, we've hedged 1.6 million barrels of oil as of today. It's a bit of a complex chart here with swaps and colors. But I mean, in a very simplified way, I think it's fair to say the average hedge price is roughly around $72 to $73. So looking at today's price, that's obviously not too spectacular, but we have to remember that a lot of these hedges were -- I mean, some of these hedges were ended last year. And then also the strip for the futures curve of WTI has not been too attractive. I mean, if you hedge for '27 as of right now, you would probably be able to hedge around $70 to $72 and the second half of this year, maybe around the $80 mark.

So while oil prices feel like they are $100 today, they're much lower down the road on the strip curve here. So that's why we have also been relatively cautious. If you look at '26 total production, I think we are hedged below 30% on our total production, which obviously leaves a lot of room for us to either grow the hedge book here or to capture the upside that could be there with elevated oil prices. And in 2027, we're obviously significantly below 20% hedged. So still a lot of room here to capture potential high prices. At the same time, we want to be cautious, and we want to make sure that we do hedge sufficiently in order to be able to service our debt and our liabilities. But I think since we are in a very well and positive position from a liquidity and cash standpoint, yes, I think we're taking -- trying to take a measured approach here to not overhedge or underhedge and still capture the momentum that we are seeing as of right now.

And with that, I'll turn over to the last slide, which is the '26 guidance and the '27 guidance, which we have published yesterday for the first time. We had already published or adjusted our 2026 guidance to a revenue of EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million and EBITDA of EUR 300 million. As Henning Doering mentioned earlier, the EBITDA here is north of the revenue, which stems from the EUR 100 million profit of the Almonty shares divestiture. At the same time, I think what's very important also is you will see in '27 at a $75 or $85 oil price, we'll be in the range of EUR 300 million revenue. And in both scenarios, we will be north of EUR 200 million in EBITDA. I think that's a very important milestone. So we have kind of taken the step change now to becoming a EUR 300 million revenue, EUR 200 million EBITDA company from only having been north of EUR 100 million for not too many years.

So quite a significant step change, I think, in our overall financial profile. And obviously, this has been supported by the tailwinds from the high oil prices and the Almonty divestitures, as I mentioned. But now really kind of circling back to the beginning of our presentation here, I think we have almost perfect setup for our company for these coming years here. I think we're positioned for very, very strong growth on the asset base that we have. We can further continue to grow our portfolio on the oil and gas side, also on the metals and mining side. And with that, we're looking forward into the future. We appreciate you following us in our story, and we will turn over to the questions, which we are very happy to post into the chat.

All right. So yes, I'll maybe start with the first question here. Will the higher oil price positively improve the oil reserves of the company? Will there be a new reserve report this year if oil prices stay up?

So generally, we publish an annual reserve report always at the beginning of the next year. So that would be early 2027. I don't think we'll publish like another intra-year reserve report. Generally, the effect of higher oil prices on the reserves would be twofold. I think the main reserve effect is the effect on the net present value of proved and probable reserves that we are publishing. There could be an increased reserve also in terms of oil volumes with higher oil prices since potentially more locations could become either economic and also the tail and life of some of the oil wells could extend a little bit. So the short answer is, yes, that could be, but I think the major effect always from higher prices is what is -- what happens to the net present value of the reserves.

Another question is, can we expect a similar share of earnings to be distributed for '25 as for '24?

I think, I mean, for '25, it will be north of 60%. Maybe the question more intended to be '26 as for '25. I think we can't really comment on that right now, and we'll have to see where our earnings sit. Obviously, with the very high extraordinary income, it's the question of how do we deal with that, how much capital do we reinvest and where are we going to sit here at the end of 2026.

One other question is, can you elaborate on the premium that we are currently realizing, so the physical delivery compared to the monthly WTI futures?

In March, I think we have not realized any significant premium over WTI. It was pretty much at spot WTI prices, how our oil sales were compensated. But it is going to be the case that in May I think we will have roughly a $10 premium to WTI. And there's obviously a lot of fluctuation right now in that market and the spreads market. So we don't really know much further than that. But I think the short answer is there's going to be a little bit of a premium here, roughly 10% in May and how that develops in the month after that is probably also a function of how the Iran war situation is going to develop.

Can you give an idea about the size and investments in your opportunity fund, which is essentially our metals and mining fund?

So we do have outside of the Almonty investment, we obviously have other natural resources investments also in that specific opportunity fund, the investment side is on the minority junior mining site that we use that's hence the name to generate opportunities for additional future investments, that fund roughly has a current invested volume of EUR 25 million. And I think that's all that we have published on that front so far.

How will the Almonty sale impact the 2026 Q1 and full year tax rate?

As already mentioned, we sold with a profit of EUR 100 million. Due to German tax law, the German income tax law paragraph 8b, this is pretty much tax-free. So the overall tax rate on this gain will be more or less 1%. So this is actually a little present from our government in that respect.

I think there's a question around the 90,000 options given out in 2025. So I think that relates to stock options. Yes, so we had the stock option program 2022. And in 2025, the last stock options under those programs were issued. That's been to German employees and German management. And I think that stock option program has now been fully issued. And hence, there are no further options that could be issued.

Just maybe as a side on what we have done with our 2018 option program, the stock option program for the most part, meaning 95% plus, we have settled that with cash such that no results -- no dilution results from that. I think that has been an important factor also because the roughly 200,000 options that have been granted in 2018 and 2019, they have all been cash settled and therefore, no dilution to be expected or have resulted from that program.

And then could we please quantify the production or reserve increase by using different completion design?

Yes, we can't really speak to that. Obviously, the question is when you change your completion design, generally, you would want to have an overproportionate effect on your capital, meaning if you increase your well cost by 10%, you would expect to have at least 15% or 20% higher cash flow resulting from that in order for that investment to make sense. And I think that was also something that we are looking at here and hoping to achieve here, but we'll have to see how that continues.

And there's also been a question around just in general, higher service costs going forward. I mean we have not seen incredible huge increase or spike in service cost as of today. But obviously, I mean, similar to what I mentioned on the drilling rig side, I mean, there had not been an increase in the rig count in the first few weeks or until last week. But you are seeing more and more signs, obviously, of activity picking up. Even the larger companies are now starting to look at their budgets and potentially ramp up their activity, and that will trickle through into the service market.

I think to some extent, we have been very early movers here. We have been extremely flexible with adding drilling rigs. We went from 1 drilling rig to 3 drilling rigs. within roughly 8 weeks or 6 to 8 weeks of the Iran war start. That's a pace that maybe not many can match. But at the same time, I mean, yes, we expect, obviously, that if prices continue to remain at these elevated levels here that, that will trickle down into service costs. But we are trying to be ahead of the curve here. And if we can continue to do so, then we hope that we can still capture ideally as much as we can of last year's service cost and this year's pricing environment, that would also be obviously the ideal setup.

I think with that, we have covered all of the questions. And yes, I would once again like to thank you for your attention for dialing into our web call this morning and -- or this afternoon, depending on where you are on the globe. And with that, thank you very much once again, and we're looking forward to develop the company here with your support.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, we warmly welcome you to the roundtable of Deutsche Rohstoff AG. I'm pleased to welcome the CEO, Jan-Philipp Weitz, who will guide us through the presentation in a moment, after which we will move to the Q&A session, where you can ask your questions via audio line and chat.

And with that said, I'm handing over to you, Mr. Weitz.

Perfect. Thank you very much for the introduction, and thank you very much, everybody, for participating in today's Montega Critical Resources Day and especially listening to our presentation here on the latest updates of Deutsche Rohstoff. It will be a week with several updates. As some of you may know, we are going to publish our full financial year report for the year 2025 tomorrow, and we will also do an earnings call on that on Thursday.

So you can have Deutsche Rohstoff content every day this week, which I think is good because we have a lot of content to deliver. Deutsche Rohstoff, I think many of you know the company, but for those that don't, I'll give you a little bit of a high-level update. It does say at the top, we are very well positioned for 2026. There's a lot of reasons for that. Obviously, as an oil and gas producer, high oil prices certainly are a key feature of our positioning here and our ability to deliver very strong results in the year 2026 and beyond.

Very high level, I mean, we're a German company. We're listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. We have been active in the U.S. oil and gas space for the last 15 years. We are currently operating in 3 states in the U.S. and are, for the first time ever, running more than 1 drilling rig and not only 2, but actually 3 drilling rigs currently in the U.S. That means a lot of capital investment, EUR 220 million are planned for this year.

Our oil reserves have grown substantially over the last 15 years. I'll give you an overview of that in a minute here. And in a nutshell, it's fair to say we're a U.S. oil and gas producer listed in Germany. Our enterprise value as of today is EUR 470 million. But we don't only have oil and gas to offer. We also have a very significant exposure to the metals and mining industry, which stems from our past as a not only oil and gas but also mining company.

The most significant thing to mention here and the most significant asset to mention here is our ownership in a tungsten mining company called Almonty Industries that has been listed on NASDAQ since last year. The market share of that ownership alone as of today based on its market cap is roughly EUR 250 million to Deutsche Rohstoff AG. And that is after we have already received roughly EUR 100 million of proceeds in the year 2026, so several weeks ago, from divesting roughly 1/3 of our position in Almonty Industries.

So as I said, very well positioned as an oil and gas producer, very strong cash reserve, very high oil and gas reserves and ready to develop those in 2026. But we don't only want to look ahead, we want to take a quick look into the past, too, because I think it shows that in 2025, we did also have a very strong year, and that is despite a much more challenging price environment than what we are seeing as of today.

Today's oil prices are hovering around $90. Last year, they were more in the $60 to $65 range, which is a reasonable price, but not the most attractive price. And obviously, with the tariff implications last year and some months of steep oil prices drops, I think our results last year here with EUR 132 million of EBITDA, they do show that we were actually able to navigate this environment very well.

We generated EUR 29 million of net income and produced close to 14,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. When I say oil equivalent, that means we produce oil as well as gas. Oil makes up roughly 80% of our revenue. Gas and natural gas liquids make up roughly 20% of our revenue. And that revenue has strongly grown here in the last 6 years. We are looking at the 6-year time frame kind of coming out of the COVID pandemic as obviously revenues in those years were very low.

From '21 through our guidance of this year, our revenue has nearly gone up fourfold. So we're expecting EUR 270 million on average or as a midpoint of our guidance in 2026. The last 2 years, in line with oil prices, '25 was a little bit lower oil price, close to EUR 200 million of revenue. And as many of you know, the EBITDA in oil and gas is always a relatively high percentage of revenue because it's a strong cash flow business. At the same time, we obviously do have to reinvest a certain portion and a high portion of that EBITDA every year, roughly between 50% and 90% of our EBITDA for us in the last few years has been deemed for reinvestment, and reinvestment means CapEx, drilling and developing additional oil wells as well as building out infrastructure.

And you can already see, obviously, there's a massive step change in our EBITDA here anticipated in 2026. There's 2 reasons for that. The one is that we are executing the biggest capital program that Deutsche Rohstoff has ever seen with EUR 220 million of CapEx, like I said in the beginning, we are about to drill -- we have started to drill 26 oil wells, which is going to add a very tremendous amount of production and cash flow and is going to take us to significantly higher production levels here than what we have seen last year.

At the same time, obviously, our operating cash flow is going to grow to EUR 200 million here, and that does exclude the EUR 100 million divestment of Almonty stock that I have mentioned earlier. But in the EBITDA, you will see that. So if you were to adjust the EBITDA for purely oil and gas-related EBITDA, that would be roughly EUR 200 million to EUR 210 million here in the year 2026. But I think it's fair to say that '26 will be an absolute catalyst for us to take a step -- to take the next big step here and take Deutsche Rohstoff forward to an even larger oil and gas producer.

I mean, as compared to the oil and gas world, we're still a relatively small company. But I think, yes, we have shown that we are on a good track here to produce up to 20,000 barrels in the second half of the year, which definitely marks an absolute milestone for us as a company.

Our stock price, I think, does reflect that. I mean there's several factors that come into play here. Oil prices have obviously gone up massively, which is giving oil and gas companies a lot of tailwind in terms of their valuation and just future prospects. But obviously, I mean, what Almonty Industries has been able to achieve here as becoming the largest tungsten producer outside of China and also the most relevant Western player in the tungsten space is obviously something that has benefited us tremendously and is a, yes, very rewarding journey so far.

Switching gears briefly just to the macro situation. I think many things have been said and read, and nobody knows what's going to happen here in the next few weeks, months or years. But just to look at the fundamental picture, I think what's very material to us are obviously the oil prices and the question, what are oil prices going to do in the coming months here over the course of the year.

Like I said, nobody knows, but there is certain estimates around where supply is currently headed and how big the supply disruptions are. And I think what we can see here is that in April, the actual supply disruption seems to be hovering around 9 million barrels per day, which is an extraordinary large number. I mean as for comparison, during the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, there was maybe 1 million to 2 million barrels off the market. So this is very, very significant.

And in our view, it's going to take a very long time also to restock global warehouses and stocking. And I mean it should have a subdued impact on the oil price here for many, many months and probably should add a certain premium here beyond 12 months or so to come. So we are relatively optimistic, obviously, that on the one hand, the conflict gets resolved as soon as possible. But then on the other hand that prices below $70 oil don't seem like something that we should be seeing here in the near future given where the macro situation sits at this point.

And what is also interesting is that, obviously, activity in the U.S., especially, which is usually the market to react the fastest given that it's onshore, it's an ultra-developed market with the high availability of drilling rigs, equipment, et cetera. What is fascinating is that the rig count has -- despite the current situation, it is lower than it was last year, actually. So we had 573 oil rigs in the U.S. operating in April '25. As of today, we're hovering around 530 oil rigs. Yes, it will take some time and the drilling rigs are getting more efficient. But at the same time, it is fascinating how slow the U.S. industry has been responding initially. We are seeing signs of that now to change. There is more and more demand.

But I think what is a very interesting, yes, data point here is that we, as Deutsche Rohstoff AG, as a rather small company, we were able to pretty quickly secure an additional 2 drilling rigs here despite the fact that, obviously, oil prices have gone to north of $100 and had obviously taken us, yes, to these levels where it seemed everybody was still taking some time to digest before they were ready to respond to the situation.

Where we are at in the U.S., for those that don't know, as I said, we're active in 3 states. Those are Wyoming, Colorado and Ohio. They are all 3 very well-known oil and gas producing states. The Powder River Basin is an oil field in the state of Wyoming. That's by far the largest part of our activity in our footprint. You can see here that our footprint in the basin is roughly 70,000 acres, which is 280 square kilometers. That's just a very small part of that oil field.

The whole field has a size of circa 30,000 square kilometers. That is as big as roughly the state of Lower Saxony, Niedersachsen, in Germany. So -- and that's just one of many, many oil fields in the U.S. So definitely a very large field in which, yes, we hold probably around 1% or less of the acreage and are developing there, currently producing 11,000 -- 11,500 barrels of oil per day, which makes up a not completely insignificant amount of the field's production, roughly 3% to 4% here.

And this Powder River Basin in Wyoming is an oil field that is very much starting to see more and more activity here. I think it's actually one of the few basins that has seen an addition of 1 or 2 rigs, obviously, also due to our activity in the last few weeks and months. But also in Colorado, we still have significant production. We are not drilling there anymore.

And Ohio is kind of one of our new frontiers. So we are always trying to be active outside of the basins that we are -- have been in for a long time. And last year, we started to build an initial position in the Utica formation in Ohio.

Outside of the geographic location, obviously, what's also important is how much oil do we have. And with that, I mean, how much oil -- how big is our reserve? What is still left in the ground in the fields that we are operating. And I think in summary, we have grown our oil reserves significantly here in the last few years. Especially last year, we had a step change in reserves growing from 54 million barrels of oil equivalent of proved and probable reserves to 79 million barrels of oil equivalent. That's a very significant step change. That's another 46%.

And we are currently producing or have last year produced around 5 million barrels of oil equivalent. If we have an 80 million barrel of oil equivalent reserve, that means our reserve life at the current pace here, we'll probably be able to produce those kinds of volumes for another 14 years. But this is not really a static number. I mean as you can see, the reserves have grown every year, and that's not only by acquisitions of additional acreage, but mainly also by just continued development on the acreage that we have because by drilling more oil wells, we are able to demonstrate that there are existing reserves and thereby grow our reserves in the ground.

So in summary, this is important because it shows we have a lot of running room. We can continue what we are doing even if we're increasing CapEx for many, many years, and again, are very well positioned. Again, geographically speaking, if we zoom into Wyoming, the Powder River Basin, as I said, roughly the size of Lower Saxony, Niedersachsen. We can also zoom into our position here. The blue boxes here or the blue map, the blue prints on the map, they show where our oil wells are. The purple squares show you where the drilling rigs are. There's 3 pictures of the 3 drilling rigs that are running.

As of right now, they're obviously running 24/7, drilling oil wells here. We're planning to drill roughly 91 kilometers of oil well this year, which is a lot, like I said, EUR 220 million of net CapEx to us. Usually, in the past years, we have only had 1 oil rig drilling, and we were drilling maybe 10 wells on average per year. Now we've ramped up to 26, and we actually do have the ability if oil prices stay high or we see the conditions to be favorable to even increase that drilling program if we wanted to.

At the same time, though, we have not entered into any extreme long-term contracts or so with these drilling rigs. So we remain super flexible. That's always been a very important topic for us to be very flexible and to be very agile here. I think the fact that we were able, as I mentioned earlier, to bring 3 rigs onto our acreage and start drilling is a very clear sign of that.

I mean if you look at the graphic here on the left-hand side, you can see we had initially in February and March, we had 1 drilling rig under contract and had planned to use that drilling rig for probably an initial 10 wells. And then the red bar here shows you when the Iran conflict began, and we were able to add another drilling rig within 2 weeks and then another rig within 4 weeks.

So despite the fact that there's a lot of things to be done ahead of drilling, I think we were ready. We had a little bit of overcapacity in our staff, which was by design because we wanted to be ready. We did, obviously, not see this coming, but we've always learned that it is a core competitive advantage to be very agile and flexible. And I think that's something that we can capitalize on now.

And when I say capitalize, I think a very simple way to look at that is just the economics. I mean we have a scenario comparison here of our base case and our high case. What we're seeing here in the base case, I think that's very illustrative. At a $75 oil price, these 26 oil wells that we're planning to drill this year cost roughly $9.5 million. The oil reserves of 500,000 barrels per well is what we're expecting. I think in the last years, we have seen partially quite a bit higher reserves, but I think that's our base case.

And if we can do that, we will generate a 45% rate of return. If oil prices are higher at $85 and the reserve is more like 600,000 barrels of oil per well, then we would actually see returns north of 100% and the payback of our CapEx here within 1.4 years, which obviously is spectacular well economics that would help us to generate significant cash flow and also free cash flow here this year and next year.

And last but not least, as I mentioned in the beginning, what is very, very important for our portfolio as well is our investment in Almonty Industries. Almonty Industries is, like I said, a tungsten mining company that is bringing the largest tungsten mine in the world outside of China into production. Right now, they started commercial production in December 2025. And you can see in the picture here where the mining and the processing is being done in South Korea.

So it's been a spectacular story, not only for us, but the company in general, I mean, has developed massively, has a market cap of roughly USD 5 billion right now. And as I mentioned, listed on the NASDAQ. And you can see on the pie chart here that conflict-free tungsten is an absolutely scarce material, but at the same time, tungsten also is very scarce itself. So the conflict-free portion of the material here, just 13%. Almonty, as it fully ramps up the Sangdong mine here in South Korea, is going to deliver a very significant part of the conflict-free tungsten to the world and is therefore, a key strategic player in the Western supply chain.

They are producing not only in South Korea, but also in Portugal. They have additional assets in Spain and the U.S., where they recently made an acquisition. So there's still continued growth coming from Almonty. I mean the share price, as I mentioned, has developed quite spectacularly here as you can see in blue, but also what has developed massively, and I think representing a very tight fundamental market is the tungsten price.

So we have recently seen tungsten prices of roughly $300,000 per tonne of tungsten or $3,000 per MTU, which is the unit in which tungsten is measured. So a very significant development. And yes, that's why the value of the remaining stake that we hold in Almonty of 14 million shares roughly is hovering around EUR 215 million. So again, very, very significant for us as a company with EUR 470 million enterprise value.

And on the last slide here, just a look at our guidance for 2026. We have obviously recently brought out a guidance update here since we went from 1 drilling rig to 3 drilling rigs and from roughly EUR 100 million CapEx to EUR 220 million of CapEx and 17,000 to 18,000 barrels of oil expected production here for the year 2026. I think overall, that's obviously a massive step change in our guidance. And yes, revenue of EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million.

And I mean, in the high case, if oil prices remain at around $85 through the end of the year, we would even be able to generate an EBITDA close to EUR 350 million, which is, obviously, more than 1/3 of EUR 1 billion of EBITDA and could mark again another milestone in our company -- yes, in our company history.

And I think what's also interesting is the oil price increased by 25% has yielded a revenue step-up by 50% from EUR 180 million to EUR 270 million. That's obviously also a function of CapEx, but it does show, again, that we are very quick to react. We're very agile here as an organization and are trying to be as good and as positive and fruitful as we can in this very volatile market environment. And I hope that you will continue to follow us and yes, on our journey here and appreciate the attention.

And I think for the last 9 minutes, I'm ready to take questions, if there are any.

Yes. Thank you very much for your insights. [Operator Instructions] And so far, let me check, we have not received any questions, not in the chat and no risen hands so far. So I'll give you some more minutes. [Operator Instructions] But I guess...

I have answered all the questions.

Too good. And there are no open questions.

I think we can answer some other questions that people may have on their mind, but that we can't answer, we can answer them maybe, like I said, with our annual report that we're publishing tomorrow and then also our earnings call in 2 days from today. So questions around, for example, our guidance for 2027 is something, yes, that we have not published yet and also everything relating to potential dividend proposal for 2025 and potential thoughts around share buybacks. So I think that's where people still have to be, yes, a little bit patient and just follow us here, like I said, over the course of the week.

Yes. So I mean, no more questions, no risen hands whatsoever. So I would say, as we have not received anything, we come to the end of today's call. Thank you for your interest in Deutsche Rohstoff AG. And if there are any further questions, please feel free to contact Investor Relations.

A big thank you also to you, Mr. Weitz, for your presentation and your time. I wish you all a successful day and handing over to you, Mr. Weitz, once more, if you have any closing remarks.

Perfect. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you, everybody, for your attention. And I'm looking forward to see everybody soon again on our next call. Thank you.