No problem, Matthias, always a pleasure. We go from growing into salt, maybe complementary or not. We have Nolan that is just joining us. Hi, Nolan. How are you doing today? Hi. Good, Julien. How are you? Very good, thank you. Nolan is the CEO and Director of Atlas Salt. We will be looking forward to hear your presentation. First, would you be able to share your screen or your presentation? Or you are just doing it no presentation? No, I will do it. All right. Let me full screen this here. Good. 25 minutes, you present. Okay. Then five minutes Q&A, and yeah, it's all started now. Okay. Thank you, Julien. Thank you, everybody. I'll get right into it. We've got a lot to cover. I'm Nolan Peterson, CEO of Atlas Salt. By way of background, I am an engineer. Also have an MBA and a CFA. I've been involved in the mining industry for over 20 years now, primarily in the gold space and primarily for larger companies. In my career, I've been involved hands-on on building three major projects as well as numerous studies of projects as well, and executive management and financial management. I joined Atlas Salt as CEO last year in June, in 2025, and really was attracted by the fundamentals of the company, which I hope you will be attracted to as well. So we are Atlas Salt. We are developing the Great Atlantic Salt project. It's on the west coast of Newfoundland. This is salt, sodium chloride, the same type of salt that you would find on your dinner table, but our purpose of discussion today is its use as de-icing road salt. Primary markets for that that we're looking to address are the Northeast U.S., the Midwest, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces in North America. This is the largest de-icing road salt market in the world. I know in Europe that it's quite common to use de-icing road salt as well, but obviously we have a lot more people and roads in the areas that get snow in North America, so we need more of it. It is a road safety issue. It's an infrastructure security issue. The primary buyers and customers are cities, governments, and municipalities. It's a recession-proof commodity. It doesn't care about interest rates. It doesn't care about what's going on in the world. Cities need it. They are legally obligated, in many cases, or mandated to purchase salt and keep the roads clear, so it's a perfect market for this. Despite this fact, North America is at a deficit of de-icing road salt production to the tune of about 30%-40% of our salt needs, not just in de-icing salt, I should be clear, but across the entire salt market. Despite this fact, North America has not built a new salt mine in 25 years. What we do is we supplement salt from foreign imports, primarily from Chile and Egypt, which we will get to in a second. Now, it might surprise some people that it sounds like a great market. Nolan, you've told us it's spectacular. It's a good market to invest in. Why has there not been a new mine built in North America? Why is North America happy to rely on imports? Let me first start by saying salt is not hard to find. It's everywhere around us. It's in the oceans and it's quite common. Even geologically, we know where to look for it. The problem is, as with many things in life, is can you make money doing it? That's the crux of the matter. Most of the salt mines that exist in North America today were built many, many decades ago. Well, all of them. I mean, the last one was built 25 years ago, right? Every other mine was built in the 1960s and 1970s or earlier than that. They were built in a time when you could build those types of mines. What makes them different? They are deeper mines. They're about 500 m- 600 m deep underground, and many of them sit under bodies of water as well. When you sit that deep, it's very expensive to access, it's very expensive to operate from, and when you sit under a body of water, especially if you're a salt mine, you have to deal with environmental issues, permitting challenges, and operational issues as well. In 2022, a mine owned by Cargill, a major company that many people might be familiar with, in Louisiana breached the underside of a lake that their mine, literally under the lake that their mine sat under, drained that lake into the mine, shut the mine down, and also led to loss of life as well. This is an environment where we know where to find salt deposits, but we expect them to be very deep, very expensive, and salt is, for the most part, a bulk commodity that has pretty low margins. Nobody is looking for salt deposits of a good nature. Ours was discovered by accident, as many good deposits that are not gold or oil and gas are discovered. Our Chairman and Founder was looking for oil and gas. He found a salt deposit, and what he found was a shallow deposit. Instead of being 500m- 600 m deep, it's only 200 m deep. That means instead of a vertical shaft, we're talking about a horizontal drift, and it's not under a body of water as well. It's a dry deposit. That means we don't have the water issues, we don't have the permitting challenges, and these cost advantages start to add up. I did mention that salt is a bulk commodity, very expensive to move. People are the users of it, and the people live in the major cities on the East Coast of the U.S. and up and down the St. Lawrence in Canada and the U.S. We are on the west coast of Newfoundland, so we must have a way to get our product to market, and that is Turf Point. This is a deepwater port that exists right now, fully permitted, operating, ice-free year-round, and can load 50,000 ton vessels, and we are only 2 km away from it. By chance, this deposit was found near the perfect distribution infrastructure for the product. That means that we don't have to truck the product because we're going to connect it via a 2 km long electrified conveyor system. We will have the most efficient distribution of salt of any domestic producer, and we will be able to load the same size vessels as imported salt comes in on 50,000 ton bulk carriers. Every other mine in North America either uses trucks, barges, or rail, which are progressively more efficient, but all less efficient than open ocean vessels. We can land at the same ports as imported salt. Now you start to see that the economics start to make sense, and it was all almost by accident, by chance. What else do we have while I'm on this slide? We are 2 km away from a tie-in to the Newfoundland hydro grid. We are 10 km away from the Trans-Canada Highway, and within a 50-minute drive of us, we have about 50,000 people. We have people, power, access, and distribution, everything you need to build a modern mining operation already in place. We're not talking about building a 200 km long power line into the desert or chopping through the Amazon rainforest or anything like that. We're right here in the thick of it, and we'll talk about the permitting, because some people may ask that as well. While I'm on the topic, I'll point out because we are tied into hydro, this site will be 100% battery electric when it's in operation as well. That means it'll have no diesel, no drilling and blasting, and no explosives as well. Also, we will have effectively zero greenhouse gas emissions. The equivalent of four Newfoundland households a year will be emitted from this site. This is not a small operation. I'll show you the economics in a second. We have that going for us as well. Of course, one of the primary reasons we do that is not just to be green, although that is okay, it is to keep the costs low because we're moving one of the biggest cost drivers for any mining operation, which is energy, over to Newfoundland-regulated hydroelectricity. Let's start talking about the economics. We have a feasibility study completed to the 43-101 standard in Canada. We have two, actually. We put an updated one out last year in October, so we're coming up on a year on that. It indicated a 25-year mine life with close to CAD 200 million a year in after-tax free cash flow in Canadian dollar terms. So 25 years. Not first five years, not 10 years, not high grading, a consistent, steady stream of cash coming in. On top of that, we have another 50 years of salt in resource. We have a 25- 75-year mine life deposit here, in place, already defined by drilling, not looking for any more. Just to put that in perspective, if this was a gold mine, and we converted the value of that salt into gold, it would be the equivalent of a 20 million- 25-million ounce gold deposit. This is not a small operation. It will produce over CAD 400 million a year in revenue. What we also have is an environmental assessment completed on the project. Yes, I said that right. In the Canadian jurisdiction, we have an environmental assessment that took only 44 days to receive. That's six weeks, not six months, not six years, not six decades, as we know can sometimes seem like. It took 44 days. We have environmental assessment approval to proceed with this project. We are in active construction at the moment and building this asset because it is too valuable to wait around for the right moment. What has allowed us to do that is raising some money over the last year, which we'll talk about later. What is in front of us is raising CAD 589 million in initial capital. More important than the number is that we have a plan for that. We have over CAD 300 million already under LOI commitments led by our debt advisor, Endeavour Financial, and we are assembling the rest of that financing package and should have that in place in the near future as well. But nonetheless, we continue with construction right now. That's the project at a high level, but I'll talk a bit about the market because there are some exciting developments in a market that's usually not very exciting. Salt is a globally used commodity. It's a global commodity, but it's not necessarily traded globally. For example, salt produced in Germany is probably never going to end up in North America. Australian salt will never end up in North America. North American salt will never end up in India, et c. There are certain markets, because of the transportation costs, creates barriers to distribution. Certain markets are susceptible to importing salt. That is North America. But definitely, the trade is generally in a one-way direction and under isolated corridors. In North America, de-icing road salt is over 50% of the usage of all salt. We consume about 30 million- 36 million tons in an average year. As you can see here from this chart on the right, it's an indicative chart. We have about a 4% growth rate in rock salt prices in North America, in the U.S., consistently over the last 30 years. So boring and unexciting. But when you come in as one of the lowest cost producers like we will be, that's just fine. I do have some headlines to show you in a second. Now let's talk about this. This is our primary thesis. Domestic producers are very high cost to produce. They're aging mines. They have union contracts. They're deep. They're costly to operate. They can't expand either. They have a high cost of production, and then they truck it to their final destination, which is also very expensive, so they can satisfy a small region around them and make a little bit of money. Foreign production is obviously a lot cheaper than domestic production, but they have to put it onto a boat. Even before six months ago, that was an expensive proposition. With what we've seen in the shipping industry, diesel prices, fuel prices, shipping costs over the last six months have started to skyrocket as well, which has only put more pressure on the price, because that price gets passed directly on to the consumer in a low-margin product. Atlas Salt fits into this picture by being as cheap, roughly in line with foreign production, but also much cheaper structurally on distribution costs. It takes us two to three days to land a boat in Boston, for example, than it does two to three weeks for Chile and Egypt. Now, this is all our case before basically the last few months or so. These are some recent headlines. All of these are in the last month. First of all, I'll start with tariffs. Those who monitor the situation have been asking me about tariffs since I joined Atlas Salt. What is the U.S. administration going to do with tariffs? I said they would be silly to put tariffs on Canadian salt. That would cut off their import. People said, "Well, they'll just import more from around the world, or they'll just step up production domestically, so that will address that need." I was shown to be incorrect in August because the Trump administration put a 50% tariff on Canadian road salt. Three weeks later, they explicitly removed that tariff on Canadian road salt. Why would they do that if there were alternatives readily available in the market? The idea that there were alternatives was obviously completely proven incorrect. They immediately turned back and reversed the tariffs and the situation is there's a clear path for Canadian salt once again. Some recent headlines, just to show you exactly what is happening in the salt industry right now. Keep in mind that most contracts in the salt industry are done on a yearly basis by cities and municipalities buying from suppliers. They put out a tender and they get bids. Last year, the second point there, I think this is an area in Pennsylvania, they paid $88/ ton, U.S. dollars per short ton. The year before, $85, the year before, $83, steady progression. This year they received a bid for $160. This has never happened in the contract space for salt before. It may have happened in the spot market in the dead of winter when you're struggling in small loads. This is contract rates in September. West Virginia, point three here. Last year they paid $88, the year before, $77. This year they received no bids at all for their contract. No bids. They authorized their city government to seek up to $175 per short ton in the spot market. In Ohio, 18 counties received no offers in their first round of bids. Last year they received three. This year, none. They received a second-round bid for $155/ ton. This is unprecedented. What's happening? It's becoming more costly for local producers to distribute as diesel costs go up. They don't know what their costs are going to be tomorrow. They're restricting production. Many mines are on the verge of shutting down because of cost pressures. You have restrictions on shipping. Dry bulk shipping rates, this point four, have hit a two year high. Panama Canal has restricted transit capacity. This has all helped the salt market, and remember, if we were in operations today, our profits would be growing because we don't have the same cost pressures because we're not operating on diesel, we're not distributing through trucks as much, we're using large bulk carriers on short hauls. So that is all very, very optimistic for Atlas Salt. I'll cut right to the chase. How do you value a salt project? Most people are unfamiliar with that. We are the only publicly traded salt development company in North America. Our enterprise value is about CAD 175 million, CAD 180 million. You can see there on the right our EBITDA and free cash flow, forward-looking, converted into U.S. dollar terms. On the left is Compass Minerals. They are the largest publicly traded company in North America, the only salt-producing company in North America. They own the largest underground salt mine in the world, in Goderich, Ontario, U.S. company owning a Canadian mine, trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Their enterprise value is about $1.7 billion, and they trade at an 8x EV/EBITDA. It's very common in the salt industry to trade against cash flows. Why? Because they're very steady, very stable, and essentially endless. That's how you would value it, less so on an NPV basis. What I will point out is, and that EV/EBITDA ratio is depressed for Compass because of some corporate issues that has nothing to do with the salt industry. They had some ill-fated ventures into other business channels. Nonetheless, you can see our EBITDA and free cash flow, if we were in operations today, would be greater than the entirety of Compass Minerals with 1/4 of the revenue. That's our cost advantage. In the middle, many of you may be familiar with K+S. In 2022, they sold their American salt assets to an American private equity group for $3.2 billion at a 13x EV/EBITDA ratio. If we had that ratio, if we were at operations today and we attracted a 13x multiplier on our EBITDA, this would be a CAD 4 billion market cap company. Of course, we have to spend CAD 500 million-CAD 600 million in debt or in equity to build it, but that leaves over CAD 3 billion of equity improvement for investors. Another precedent transaction just in December of last year, so it's only 10 months old, a private equity group paid $900 million and 17x EBITDA for salt assets. You're probably shocked to see these numbers because most people have no comprehension about how much money is being made in the salt industry that they have no opportunity to get exposure to because there's only one other publicly traded company, which is Compass Minerals, to invest in. That is what Atlas Salt offers to you today, the upside of building a mine, taking it to production, and progressing this asset. Last thing I'll leave you with is some of the corporate stuff. A little bit of a story here. We talked about financing or I alluded to it earlier. I joined in June of last year. In 2019, this company was worth about CAD 0.05 per share, and in 2022, it peaked at over CAD 4 a share. CAD 4 a share. Typical promotion story, pumping, dumping by the marketing team, not by the management team, and insiders who've never sold any shares of that nature. Then the stock started to deflate. The company said, "We want to get serious about this." Brought in a CEO who was a seasoned veteran, but unfortunately, he had no experience in the public markets. He didn't understand the need and nature of marketing, conference attendance, investors, reaching out, talking to shareholders, speaking to them, the banking community, cultivating those relationships. When I joined, after he was asked to leave, the share price was CAD 0.36. The company hadn't raised money in two and a half years. Prospects of raising money were grim. I took over, and now the share price has been steadily increasing. We have a lot of room still ahead of us as we seek strategic partnerships and obtain remaining permits, but we're up over CAD 1.40, maybe a little bit down today. The markets are tough at the moment. We're up tremendously since I started. Volumes are back, liquidity is back. People are starting to understand the value that this company has. The last things that I'll leave you with, we have about 125 million shares outstanding. We have over 30% insider ownership. Got about CAD 16 million of cash in the bank right now, so we're not running near the edge here. We have no warrants overhanging the company. We have a clean balance sheet, and at the moment, we have one analyst covering us, but I expect in the near future to have at least a couple more. I'll leave it there. A few extra minutes for questions now. All right. Perfect. Well, thank you very much for the presentation, Nolan. I think you've been very clear into the company, the project advantages, and so on. While people are still typing their Q&A questions, either in the Q&A box or in the chat, I will go back with you a few seconds to really emphasize, or a few minutes, to really emphasize on some of the things that you said, and then you can restate a bit of the investment idea here. Sure. First off, obviously, salt is not scarce. There's some in the ocean, there's some a bit everywhere, and so on and so forth. Scarce is not being the issue. I guess it's a bit like iron ore. You go into logistic and delivery, eh— Correct. —the issues. Yeah. So— And— Yeah, go ahead. I just want to point out, Julien, if I may. I was looking up the stats yesterday, and many people have probably heard this before. The entire world in the history of humanity has mined 200,000 tons of gold. There are 20 million tons of gold dissolved in the oceans. So by that value, gold is also not scarce, right? It all comes down to economics. Can you produce something to make money doing it? So while the salt may be there, we can't evaporate it in North America out of the ocean water or in salt flats. It just doesn't work economically, so we're forced to do it through other methods. Some people say, "Well, salt is everywhere. We'll just make more of it." Absolutely, but can you make money doing it is always the question. Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. Exactly. To make money making it, you need, A, evaporation, okay, we discussed that. Yeah. As I was saying, a lot of the logistic and delivery costs are basically the base of the investment thesis. Correct. I will ask you a rhetorical question, but what is the best thing that you guys have? The deposit, the cost of mining, the location, all of the above? I would say all of the above, but definitely the location. Listen, you could have the biggest, cheapest to produce salt mine. You could literally produce it for $0/ ton, but if it is sitting in the middle of Nebraska, you do not have a salt mine, right? Or landlocked location with nobody around it. Or in the middle of the Australian outback, it does not matter how good that mine is, at the mine site, you do not have a profitable operation. You would rather be near a major metropolitan area and have a small, high-cost mine because at least you could produce there. There is, in fact, an example of this. There is a mine within the city limits of Cleveland, owned by Cargill, that is a salt mine. It is under Lake Erie. Yeah, they can produce salt at a high cost, but their major customer is right there. Logistics is the most important thing. Then on top of it, we are a low-cost producer, which allows us to get that salt further afield and make even more money by satisfying a larger area. That is quite clear. Following on that, there was an increased planned production from 2.5 million tons in 2023 in the feasibility study, into the updated one, 4 million tons in 2025. Two questions out of that. A, why was there the increase in planned production, maybe economics, but still. Then B, do you think that the market can absorb it? Yeah, so definitely. The first thing that we would say is that the project started at 2.5 million tons because there hasn't been a new salt mine built in 25 years, so the industry, including ourselves and our advisors, the engineer, we had a study done by SLR. They had to get up to speed on what the salt market is, how to mine it, what the throughputs and bottlenecks are. They said 2.5 million tons is what we are comfortable with understanding that we can mine and distribute. Over a two-year period, as we did the updated study, we continued to refine our thinking and understanding, and realized that really, it's not going to be the mining that's the problem. It's going to be, and I shouldn't say problem, but the bottleneck, it's going to be the port. The port is sized for 5 million, 5.5 million tons comfortably. Even then, the mining engineers and the designers and process engineers, they cut that back to 4 million and said, "This is what we're comfortable at, saying that this port and the whole surrounding operations can move." To answer your second question, yes, absolutely the market can bear our cost. As I like to point out to people, when you are the lowest cost producer, or actually any producer, you're not trying to beat the next highest cost after you're trying to beat the very highest cost producers. There are many producers in North America that are break even or probably losing money right now. Also imports come in with very low margins as well. They're happy to be making good money at the mine site in Egypt, so they're not really demanding a high premium for it. It's better than nothing in many cases. Even so, we can displace those costs because we have that structural shipping advantage. So, yeah, the market will definitely bear it and we've done internal models that are even more advanced than what we presented in the updated feasibility study that show we can probably satisfy at least 7 million tons in the market comfortably. With that in mind, you have announced about CAD 300 million, a little more, in LOIs of financing interest. The CapEx is roughly CAD 600 million, just under, CAD 500 million. Yep. Let's round it up for CAD 600 million, CAD 300 million on the other side. What do you see as the optimal capital structure? What would you like, once you guys go in production, that capital structure to look like? Well— With insider ownership at over 30%, you don't want to dilute the entire thing. So what are— Yes —the solutions around there? Yeah. For me, optimal, people always ask what's the best. For this project, the cash flow that it generates is tremendous, so it'll make, think CAD 100 million. Think about it, if we were to get full debt, which I know is not possible, but you asked me what I would love, I'd love it all to be debt. Let's say it was 10%, and it probably will be lower, but let's say it's 10%, CAD 600 million, CAD 60 million a year in interest carry cost. The project makes CAD 188 million- CAD 200 million a year, right? So think about that. If you got it all debt, you'd still have CAD 120 million- CAD 140 million of free cash flow for shareholders. With 125 million shares outstanding, that'd be over CAD 1 a share. For the investor, that would imply a share price with a dividend yield, probably about CAD 25 a share, right? If you're running the numbers on that, CAD 20 a share. Yeah, CAD 20, CAD 25 a share. You're asking me what's ideal, maximum debt, and we're aiming for that. We've got 60%-70% is our conservative target for senior secured lending. After we have that in place, remember, we have over CAD 300 million of that, so, CAD 300 million of the CAD 400 million, which would be about 60%, we'll layer on subordinated debt. We'll start those discussions or advance them, I should say. There's the opportunity for government contributions as well, and then royalty transactions, and everything we can do to minimize equity dilution along the way will maximize shareholder value. So that's what I would say is optimal for us. As much non-equity financing as possible. I would say for most mining companies, which a lot of people are probably familiar with, there's not a lot of opportunity to get those kind of debt levels that this project will have. Absolutely. Well, Nolan, not only is the capital structure optimized, it's also time optimized. It's 6:00 o'clock here, sitting in Vienna. So that's all the time we have. Thank you very much for presenting the project, Nolan. Very interesting. I think the numbers that you're showing up are going to have some eyes open here. I invite everyone who wants to follow the story, go on the website, follow up, write emails, and so on. Nolan, we'll be very happy to continue following your story. Thank you for presenting here today. Thank you, Julien. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.