UAMY - United States Antimony Corporation (UAMY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2023-07-18 19:01:02 ET
United States Antimony Corporation (UAMY)
Q4 2023 Results Conference Call
July 18, 2023 04:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Gary C. Evans - Lead Director
John Gustavsen - Chairman and CEO
Joe Bardswich - P.E., Director
Conference Call Participants
Mark Menzel - Sunrise Wealth Partners
Presentation
Operator
Greetings. Welcome to the U.S. Antimony Corporation Company Update and Investor Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded.
I will now turn the conference over to your host, Gary C. Evans, Lead Director of U.S. Antimony. Gary, please go ahead.
Gary C. Evans
Thank you, Paul, and thank all of your for dialing in to actually our first call for calendar year 2023. On the call with me today is our Chairman and CEO, John Gustavsen follows another Board member Joe Bardswich. These fellows obviously have been around and Gus is up at our headquarters in Montana and Joe’s calling from Arizona and I’m actually calling from Florida.
So, we’re all here today to give you a brief overview. There has been a lot of changes with respect to our Board composition beginning last Friday. We filed an 8-K concerning Dr. Corby Anderson. We determined that the Articles of Incorporation of our company set out the maximum number of directors at seven. So, the Company’s determined that Dr. Anderson was not effective, his election and the appointment has been rescinded. So, that was our first change that occurred on Friday. Our second change occurred on Friday as well, which was our President and Board member, Russell Lawrence resigned from the Company, both as the President and as a director. And then our third director change occurred, yesterday, Hart Baitis, who has been a long time director of the Company, resigned. So that reduced to what we thought last week was eight directors down to five. So, we have five Board members today, two of which are relatively new, being Tim Hasara who came on last year about two or three months before I did. I came on in November. So, we have three established directors that have been on for a while and two new ones.
We definitely want to talk a little bit about Russ and Hart. Those two fellows had made some significant contributions to the Company. I think, Russ had been involved with the Company since he was in high school and actually was hired I think in 2005. So, his tenure was long and Gus knows him much better than I do. And I would like to turn the call over to Gus to talk a little bit about Russ and Hart and give them our thanks for serving on the Company’s Board and in management positions as well.
John Gustavsen
Okay. Thanks Gary. Russ Lawrence did start working full time in about 2005. Prior to that, he worked off and on as his education allowed. But anyway, he worked mainly in the Mexican operation. He built the flotation plant at Puerto Blanco, and then he built the smelter at Madero. Russ managed the operations at Madero, built a strong management team and a strong office staff there. In 2020, Russ became the President of USAC and worked tirelessly to reduce costs, renegotiate supply contracts, and improve operations company-wide. We thank Russ for his service and his contributions and wish him all the best in his future endeavors.
As for Hart, Hart joined the Board in 2013. He has a doctorate in geology and many other certifications. Hart Baitis and John Lawrence were the best of friends. He and John visited many antimony and precious metal properties together. And Hart oversaw the geological work done on the Los Juarez property. Hart also investigated other properties on his own, on behalf of the Company. Upon John’s death, Hart became an important resource to Russ Lawrence and Russ valued Hart’s advice very much. We also thank Hart for his services and wish him a bright future.
Gary C. Evans
Thank you, Gus. And as most of you know, Russ was the -- Russ is the son of John Lawrence who passed away three years ago, who was the founder of the Company. So, obviously, a lot of tenure there. And again, we want to thank both Russ and Hart for their tireless contributions.
I thought I would try to give just a quick overview of the Company, for some new callers that may be on today and to remind everybody what we’re all about. We have material properties in the Company, the antimony smelter and precious metals plant we have up in Sanders County, Montana, which is where Gus is right now. That’s where our corporate headquarters is. We obviously also have the Los Juarez antimony property that’s down and -- that’s associated with Madero smelter and the Puerto Blanco flotation mill in Mexico. And then our zeolite is at the Bear River mining property that’s there in Idaho. So, that’s kind of a summary of the primary assets of the Company.
As a reminder, reminder to everybody, antimony mining and milling operations in the U.S. were pretty much curtailed back in 1983 due to a continued decline in the price of antimony. So, we are currently purchasing foreign raw -- antimony materials and extracting our own raw materials from our properties in Mexico. And we have a number of properties down there. And we will continue to produce antimony, metal and oxide, sodium antimonite and antimony, trisulfide and precious metals from our processing facility that’s located there in Thompson Falls, Montana.
So, as everybody, I think on the call knows, today we filed our Form 10-K. It was filed this morning before the market opens. It was obviously late by about 3 months -- 3.5 months and I’ll go into some of those reasons here in a bit. But what I thought I would do is just give you some quick highlights of the financial numbers that were indicated in the Form 10-K. It was an excellent year, probably the best year that I’m aware of for the Company.
The Company reported revenues of a little over $11 million, which is up 43% from 2021 of $7.7 million. The cost of revenues only went up 31% to a little over $9 million versus $6.9 million in the prior year. So that enabled the Company to generate a much better gross profit. Gross profit was just a hair under $2 million versus $838,000 in 2021, and that’s 138% increase. And total operating expenses only went up 10% from $1.5 million in 2021 to $1.6 million in 2022.
So, when you take all of that into account, being higher revenues, less expenses, both on operating side and on other expense side, we had a net income of $429,000 versus a loss of $60,000 in 2021. And that all occurred with just a very small increase in weighted shares outstanding, which only went up 3.3%.
So, all in all, I think everybody can say that for -- when you look at U.S. Antimony’s history, this was a stellar year.
The other thing that obviously is quite important is our working capital. At year-end, it was $19.4 million, slightly down from the $21.5 million in 2021. So, that’s another healthy benefit. And by the way, our auditors, when we filed our 10-K this morning, gave us a completely clean opinion, there’s no going concern qualifications.
So, let’s talk just a little bit about antimony and then talk a little about zeolite, and I’ll give you some specific numbers related to those. So, one of the big factors for the increase in revenues in 2022 was the sale of antimony. We sold right at 1.4 million pounds versus 911,000 pounds in 2021, and that’s an increase of 53%. So, if you want to peel back the onion and look at, well, what really caused the Company’s numbers to look so good last year, it was the sale of antimony.
And when we start looking at the prices for antimony, they were -- they weren’t up that much, only a 3.5% increase. So, 2021, price per pound was $5.29; 2022 was $5.47. I will tell you the price per pound in 2023, even though I’m not going to give you any financial numbers for first or second quarter, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But the price per pound is slightly down. It’s down to $4.957 in 2023. So, that is one reason that we had such a stellar year in antimony.
Now, let’s jump over to zeolite. Zeolite had a increase of 11.1% in tonnage. That’s tons of zeolite compared to 2021. But the gross profit in 2022 was equal to 2021, even though we sold 11% more tonnage. So what does that mean? It means that our costs were outpacing the growth in revenues. And that’s one of the things that your management, your Board is very focused on. And I’ll talk about that here in a bit.
So, we do know that if we could increase sales of zeolite, we believe we have the market to sell that product. And we’re trying to do our best to increase those sales. There’s changes that Russ made actually earlier this year. And as we enter the second and third quarter that we hope will be realized, and in fact, we’ll be talking about that here in a bit.
So, the -- zeolite, we believe is a real opportunity for the Company. And we think there’s a lot of new products that can possibly be brought to bear and we’re working on that very hard, and we’ll talk about that. So let’s just break down real quick on antimony sales and zeolite sales, and then I’ll kind of be done with the financial overview.
If you looked at sales of antimony in 2022, as I said, they were up 56% at 7.5 million versus 4.8 million. And again, that’s really related to poundage sold, not necessarily price.
With respect to zeolite, our sales were 3.1 million versus 2.6 million. It’s up 21%. And again, that is predominantly related to tonnage sold, up 11%. The average price was only up 9%. So, because we have such a high demand for zeolite, from a number of different companies, we are going to slowly begin increasing prices. We did that with one customer here recently. And so, I think that is one of the objectives. Another is, we know that we need to streamline the operations at BRZ, especially as it relates to the packaging and boxing of orders for one of our customers especially. And so, we actually have a trip planned to Idaho next week. Four of us are going, being the three people on this call and our largest customer. And the purpose of that meeting is to look at the plant, what can we do differently and look at how we can automate things.
And so, the Board has made a decision to hire a new divisional manager for the zeolite division. We’ve got an executive search firm that we’re negotiating with to begin that exercise. So, we are serious from the standpoint of letting U.S. shareholders know that we think there’s a great opportunity here and we want to do everything we can to capitalize on it. And hiring new personnel is one of the things that we need. And we -- this is a rock crushing operation and having someone with that expertise is very important.
So, let’s talk a little bit about the first quarter timing and the second quarter timing. We do believe that we can get these first quarter numbers, which again are unaudited, the first and second quarter. They have to be reviewed by our third-party accounting firm, but they do not have to be audited. I would say safely, we’re within 30 days of the first quarter, hopefully less and then I would say safely, we’re within 30 days of the first quarter being filed or the second quarter being filed. So, now that we got the 10-K out of the way, and so let’s talk a little bit about why that took so long and why we were late.
We had some people in our accounting department that weren’t basically doing their jobs, and we had to make some changes that occurred in late January, because we just weren’t getting ready for the audit as we should have. So, our CFO, our contract CFO, who we’ve had on board for better part of a year had to basically redo the numbers for 2022 and that slowed down the audit process. Because of -- a lot number of irregularities that were occurred during that audit and during that review, that’s what delayed things. I think it’s very, very important to note though, not any financial numbers had to be changed from the first, second, and third quarter filings. So, whatever changes we found were so minor or so insignificant that no changes had to be made. So, you should feel very comfortable as a shareholder that our financial numbers are in order. Again, we have a clean opinion. And while we were late, it’s -- everything is copacetic. And so, once we get this second -- this first and second quarter numbers done, which again should all occur in the next 60 days, and we’ll be off to the races and hopefully we’ll never have to go down this path again.
One of the things that the Company has been weak on in the past has been internal controls. There’s two of us now on the Board being Tim Hasara and myself that are deemed financial experts. We’re very keen on internal controls. We’ve already begun making changes in that area. One of the things you’ve probably noticed is our new website that’s up -- been up and running about a month, but we’ve got a whistleblower call on there. We’ve got -- we’ve made a lot of changes internally with respect to bookkeeping and wire transfers and banks and what have you, trying to meet the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley as an NYSE listed company to be sure that we meet those. Our goal by the end of 2023 is to have most, if not all of those internal controls fixed. And that is a high priority of the Company. And that’s one of the reasons we are late on this 10-K is that we didn’t have the proper internal controls in place. And so, we couldn’t catch when there was irregularities going on. We’re going to fix that. And that should be alleviated before too long.
I know I get a lot of questions, I know other Board members do as well about our stock buyback program that is spelled out explicitly in the 10-K that was filed this morning. But to summarize that real quickly, we spent $203,000 last year buying 419,000 shares. The average cost of that stock was $0.48 per share. So, we have not bought any stock since then. We obviously could not with a late filing, and we still cannot with late filings on our Qs. But that is all the stock has been bought back at this point in time.
I would also like to say that we, in an effort to improve further our internal controls and financial reporting, one of the things that many Board members have mentioned in our meetings is that we don’t have sufficient numbers by property, by asset, by mine, what have you. And so, we have hired a new permanent Chief Financial Officer. He has given his notice. We cut that deal early this week. He signed a letter agreement with us. He had to give 30 days’ notice for his current job. And he’s been vetted by most of the Board and the management of the Company and will be starting here, like I say, within two to three weeks -- or three to four weeks.
He has a very strong background in delving into cost -- cost accounting. And that’s something that we sorely need, especially as it relates to our operations down in Mexico, because there’s a lot of interlap between mines and cost and people and what have you. So understanding that process and understanding that business down to a penny is what our goal is. And so, in order for us to manage this company properly, we got to have numbers that we can rely on. And that’s one of the most important things that we need. So, I think that that will be a great new help.
We’ve also begun executive search, as I already mentioned, the divisional manager for BRZ, but we’re also beginning an executive search for a new Chief Executive Officer of the Company that has the mining experience and the background to run this company to the next level where we want it to be.
So, a lot of changes have occurred in the last four or five days, a lot more changes are coming. We think they’re all for the betterment of the Company. We have a strong cohesive Board that is working very well together. We only have one objective in mind, and that is to improve our operations in a manner that increases the share price. And we’re all shareholders and we, like you, want to see this stock at a much higher level than where it presently is trading, and we’re going to do everything in our power to do so. And so, you see the changes we’ve made, changes we’re going to make, and we hope to be able to report positive results from those changes in the near future.
So, I would ask if Gus or John has any -- Joe has any comments to make, and then if they do or don’t, well then we can open up the floor to Q&A session. It’s -- we’re on this call for about 21 minutes and we’re definitely going to cut it off probably in about 30 minutes. So, one of the goals is to keep these calls a lot shorter than in the past. So, Gus or Joe, do you have anything you’d like to say?
John Gustavsen
No. This is Gus. No, I don’t have anything.
Joe Bardswich
No, I’d just like to comment on Gus’ comments and both Russ and Hart were good friends of mine and remain good friends of mine. And certainly, they’re men of integrity. They did a great job. My thanks as a shareholder goes out to them.
Gary C. Evans
Great. Thank you. Okay, Paul, I think we’re ready for our first question.
Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Certainly. At this time, we’ll be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And the first question today is coming from Thomas Rustling [ph] from Crystal Investor. Thomas, your line is live.
Unidentified Analyst
Thank you. I don’t know what Crystal Investor is. I just announced that I was a personal investor and a personal friend of John Lawrence. He was my brother’s roommate at college. We have become significant investors in the Company, and I know it’s been a very checkered career and a very challenging one. I would love to have conversations with individuals on a one-to-one basis rather than my asking some questions that might be considered unanswerable within this public forum. But I am just bubbling over with questions regarding the Company. I think that the asset situation is incredible. I would -- just a simple question upfront. The proven reserves situation, now my brother who is deceased, but, he was a geologist and he did some back of the envelope sulfuring and the antimony reserves and came up with incredible numbers of what U.S. antimony might come up with.
So, I’d be interested as to whether the Company had any plans for doing proven reserves, which have not to my knowledge been done in the past. And the second question is, I thought that the gold and silver extraction was going to be on a huge acceleration upward. And I was looking at your 10-K and saw that those are actually significantly down year-over-year. Thank you.
Gary C. Evans
Okay. I’ll try to answer a little bit, but, Gus and Joe will be in better position to answer most of it. With respect to the gold and silver, I know that that has not been a focal point for the Company and Gus, I’m sure can respond to that.
With respect to the reserves, those of you that do or do not know me, I was in the oil and gas business for 35 years, and we had to do reserve reports every year. It cost us a ton of money, but it was required as an oil and gas production company. And so, that was one of my first questions is why don’t we have reserve reports? And so, one of our directors that just left, Hart was involved in -- he’s a geologist, was involved in doing some work there and I believe that’s going to continue. But it is one of our goals to begin doing some third-party evaluations of our reserves to better report our future, because as you know, reserve reports talk about the proven, the probable and the possible, and then they talk about expected cash flows and future revenues and the capital costs associated with getting those reserves out of the ground. So, that is something that we are weak on and something that we’re hoping to change. And so, Gus or Joe, I’ll let you guys jump in.
Joe Bardswich
I’ll jump in.
John Gustavsen
Yes, go ahead.
Joe Bardswich
Okay. The SEC has specific rules about announcing reserves, and just recently they included the category of resource. But to get a proven reserve is -- there’s an extensive amount of drilling, bulk sampling and assaying, et cetera, that is very, very expensive and that has to be followed by a feasibility report. We’re a long ways from that and at the present time, under the SEC definitions, we do not have any proven and probable reserves.
The zeolite is a little bit easier situation, but even there we don’t have a drill program that has calculated -- ended up calculated a reserve there. We have figures from the U.S. geological survey of estimates and that estimate is quite large, but that -- any influence I have on the Board of Directors will be towards that as being a first step is defining a reserve at the Bear River. Back to you, Gus.
John Gustavsen
I think you covered it, Joe.
Unidentified Analyst
And then maybe gold and silver, any comment on that?
Joe Bardswich
I think that’s just a byproduct at this stage. And Los Juarez has potential for gold and silver, but it’s even further behind in terms of definition of a resource.
John Gustavsen
That is correct. There is some gold and silver in the sodium antimonite raw material that we buy, and we concentrate that and sell it back to the supplier. That’s where our precious metal sales have come from this year -- well, 2022.
Gary C. Evans
Hopefully that helps with your questions.
Unidentified Analyst
Am I still live?
Operator
Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst
I calculated back of the envelope, pre-tax operating of roughly $0.18 per share. Does that equate with your results?
Gary C. Evans
Let’s see here. I have to pull the -- it should be in the 10-K on the financial statement.
Unidentified Analyst
It’s a big report. It’s a big report and I haven’t made my way through it yet.
Gary C. Evans
Yes. Let me see if I can tell you quickly. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Let’s go with the next question and I’ll be looking for it like you will. Okay?
Unidentified Analyst
Yes. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Next question is coming from Joe Velasco. [Ph] Joe is a private investor. Joe, your line is live.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. Thank you. Hi. I am a private investor. I’ve been with United States Antimony as an investor for about 2.5 years. And I was just concerned like about some of the updates that I’ve been reading, particularly with the Department of Defense and Ambri batteries. Do you have any new or anything possibly becoming an update as of more recent? Because I noticed like on MarketWatch where I look all in different areas, like I really see very, very limited information on a company here. And I’m just curious of what’s going on.
Gary C. Evans
Well, one of the things I think that we all recognize is that the Company has some very unique opportunities that haven’t been properly told to the government, the different agencies that are the ones that make awards and that make contracts with companies like ourselves. I think the fact that we are a U.S.-based company with sales of minerals that are non-China is a big plus. We’ve obviously -- the military’s been affected with respect to all the artillery shells we’ve given to Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine situation.
So, we think we’re in a unique position of being a U.S.-based company with the kind of mines that we have available to meet some of the demands that are required from the Department of Defense, U.S. Army, et cetera.
So, one of our goals is to better educate those government entities as to what we have and the opportunities we have. We have in the past received some awards. And I know Gus has attended some congressional hearings. I think he got one coming up. I’ll let him speak about that. But we’re trying our best to better educate our U.S. government as to what we have and the opportunity that lies with the U.S.-based company. Gus?
John Gustavsen
We do not have a congressional thing coming up. We do have a visit from the Montana Mining Association head. It’s not scheduled yet. We have agreed that it should be soon. I think that Joe has a conference that he’s going to attend in the next few weeks. Is that correct, Joe?
Joe Bardswich
Yes. On Friday, Gus, that’s the House Natural Resources Committee meeting in Goodyear a suburb of Phoenix. And basically the topic is critical minerals. And I will attend, and I’ve been asked to send in a statement ahead of time in regards to antimony.
John Gustavsen
Okay. And antimony is on the United States Critical Minerals list.
Gary C. Evans
Hopefully that helps to answer your question, sir.
Unidentified Analyst
No, I appreciate that. Is there any information about -- because I know I’ve heard for a while about Ambri and also I believe that they were utilizing your company also to refine a product to make it better for them. Is there any update with them, because that seems to be a very, very important aspect of the new technologies that are out there, especially with this liquid battery? Is there anything with UAMY going on now? Would you say any updates with that or is it still something that you guys are pursuing with them possibly in a long-term effect with them?
John Gustavsen
I can take that. We are in frequent contact with the senior management at Ambri, and so far we have been their sole supplier of antimony. I can’t really talk about numbers or future numbers. We’re on a confidentiality basis with them. I will tell you though that we work very close and we speak frequently.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. No, I appreciate that. And also, I do have one last question in terms of information that gets out to various entities, Google Finance, like I said, MarketWatch balance, things of that nature that -- sometimes I get frustrated because I know how valuable UAMY is, but yet it just seems that we’re not getting the acknowledgement out there to other investors of what actually is going on as you people have described right now that there is much going on. And I’m just like concerned about it that other investors may look and say, you know what, I don’t hear anything from this company. I look at the charts, they look pretty flat for the past long-term. And, you know, I don’t even want -- I don’t know if I want to look at UAMY now. But on our end here, when we really dig deep into what’s actually going on, we see the uniqueness of UAMY and the prospects and the possibilities of this going really good in the long-term. Is there anything like on your end there that you’re possibly working with to get yourselves out of the shadows into, so that MarketWatch and other valuable resources that investors read will start noticing UAMY?
Gary C. Evans
Well, we’re certainly cognizant of the fact that we’re not being looked at really by most institutions. Part of the problem is having a sub $1 share price. The 10-K late filing is a black eye and we’re fixing all that. So, we recognize that this company has a lot more opportunity than the market is giving a credit for. And it’s our jobs to begin trying to fix that. And that’s a matter of IR and PR work. And we will be probably making some recommendations to our Board in that area over the next weeks and months.
So, we’re trying to get all our ducks in a row by getting our K, our Qs up-to-date, get our numbers out. And obviously any kind of award from any governmental agency would be significant and would be a newsworthy event. And we’re in a perfect catbird seat to do that. And so it’s incumbent upon us to be sure that the right agencies know what we do and what we have available and how we can deliver.
Operator
The next question is coming from Demetrios Matthews. [Ph] Demetrios is a private investor.
Unidentified Analyst
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Regarding Wadley, it was almost a year ago that [Technical Difficulty]. Can you hear me?
Gary C. Evans
Yes, we can hear you.
Unidentified Analyst
It was almost a year ago that the Company had an agreement with the Wadley mine, which -- and it’s had a long history with Wadley, some of it okay and some rougher times. The agreement was to basically use eight months to survey the mine, sort of find out what kind of grades of ore we could get, pay them 10 grand a month, I believe, and then try to purchase that mine in April of this year, eight months later. I know that’s been extended out via the 10-K. What have we learned from the surveying of Wadley and the material that the company has bought from Wadley thus far?
John Gustavsen
I can take that. We’ve bought a fair amount of ore from Wadley. The grade is not as high as has had been in years past, and we’re a little bit concerned that some of the people who are doing the mining aren’t cleaning the ore as well as they used to. We’ve taken some steps in that regard and that we’ve put what’s called a gravity table at our smelter, so we can put the ore on that table, about a half a ton per hour, and it’ll sort out the heavy antimony material from the lighter gang rock.
As far as the agreement is concerned, the management and owners at Wadley owe us some documentation, so that we can finish our due diligence on that property. They have not supplied that. Russell just met with them no more than three weeks ago, I guess. And they know that they’re tardy in getting the documentation to us. They say they will. Meanwhile the agreement with them has been extended. We are still paying 10 grand a month and still able to purchase ore.
Unidentified Analyst
In all due respect, Gus, they told us that six months ago that they knew that there were tardy in getting us the paperwork requested. So, if we can’t do due diligence, I don’t know how -- is this just going to keep get extended? It seems as Wadley is constantly playing games. I realize you need to get feedstock from somewhere. I’m just trying to understand and ascertain what this relationship will be in the future. And also regarding -- so a circuit has been added at Madero for upgrading low grade ore than you’re telling me, in 2023?
John Gustavsen
There will be a small circuit for sorting low grade oxide ores. The sulfide ores we send to the flotation plant in Puerto Bronco where we can concentrate them up to high-50s to high-60s percent antimony. The situation at Wadley is no more frustrating to you than it is to us. It’s been very difficult to deal with, and we’re trying to bring it to a head.
Gary C. Evans
You bring up a good point. It’s been a heated discussion with our Board. We can’t live in this complacency world forever. So, something’s going to happen one way or the other pretty soon.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. And I know it’s an outlier, but back in the 80s or when you guys closed down Montana mining operations and did all the reclamation work, it was due to the low price of antimony. Now, we’ve had two plus years of prices that are substantially higher. Am I crazy to think that there could be a possibility that you could do some mining in Montana, or do we just wait for perpetual to get permitted?
John Gustavsen
Joe, do you want talk about the possibility of mining in Montana?
Joe Bardswich
I think slim to nil. You’ve still got a very narrow veins that are somewhat sporadic and high labor costs have gone up as quick or quicker than the price of antimony. So I think that’s a non-starter, Demetrios.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. No, no, I realize. I knew you guys haven’t talked about it before. I just wanted to do an outlier question there.
Gary C. Evans
And remember, one of the main reasons I think we’re in Mexico has to do with labor. I mean, obviously, mining is a labor intensive business. And having very cheap labor has been a key to why Mexico has been successful in the past.
Unidentified Analyst
No, I agree. Last question would be on trisulfide. I know six months ago we were awaiting the two extra furnaces. I saw about 37,000 pounds were produced in 2022. Have those two extra electric trisulfide furnaces been installed?
John Gustavsen
What we are doing with those is every hundred or so pores of trisulfide we make we have to exchange a crucible. So, instead of having the furnace down for a week or 10 days or two weeks while we change out the crucible, we take one of the new furnaces, slip it into the spot where the old one with the bad crucible is, and just keep going. So there’s not much downtime, maybe a day of downtime to switch out furnaces.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. And can we get enough feedstock from Guadalupe or Soyatal to produce as much trisulfide as the market? I mean, obviously, you guys probably have a lot of demand, as you’ve said you’re not -- people aren’t getting it from China. I would think that you would have a nice business there. Do you have enough feedstock to produce as much trisulfide as you’d like?
John Gustavsen
To this point, yes, we do. We’ve been recycling fines and oversize from the company that grinds the trisulfide and actually sorts it to the military spec. And we take that recycled material, resmelt it and recast it and send it back to the grinder. So we’re -- we were behind and he was behind late last year with the ammunition suppliers. Currently we have a surplus and we are ahead of the game for demand.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. So in essence, we’re using recycled fines that probably came from China, correct?
John Gustavsen
I’m sorry, from where?
Unidentified Analyst
From China that you’re…
John Gustavsen
That’s correct. Now, I will say, we had 18 tons of concentrates from Guadalupe here, and we are -- we are making those into trisulfide right now. We probably have 11, maybe 12 tons of that left. So, that’s virgin material.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. No, no, I just want to see the progress being made that we can get the material from Mexico because we all see what happened with germanium and gallium in recent weeks from China. If your partner can’t get material from China related to sulfide ore, then we might not have enough feedstock to run through our electric smelters.
John Gustavsen
Okay. Let me clarify, Demetrius. The stuff that we were recycling originally came from China. Right now, it’s coming from a United States company. The United States company grinds it up. We get the over and undersized from them, resmelt it again, and so it’s a recycling effort. But we are not dependent on China right now, at all.
Unidentified Analyst
Yes, but the partner gets it from China though, I believe.
John Gustavsen
No, he does not. There has been no antimony trisulfide shipped into this country from China since 2020.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. No, I stand corrected. Thank you guys for the question and I’ll let someone else ask.
Operator
And the next question is coming from Matthew Woods [ph]. Matthew is a private investor.
Unidentified Analyst
Hey guys. I’m not going to take near as long as everyone else. I would just want to point out a couple things. Like clearly you’re listening to a whole bunch of private investors and you’re on the right path because you don’t want to hear from us. You want to hear from other firms. You’ve set all the right things. We look forward to you delivering. Good work in the last few days on what a lot of us have been looking for. So, I’m going to ask like an investor question and I’d recommend in the future, like limit us private guys, like one, maximum of two questions because we’ve been on Turkey trails. So, can you clarify, do you have a target like this time next year for an EPS or share price?
Gary C. Evans
Well, I would say, we don’t have a target. We haven’t typically put out projections and it’s pretty hard for a small company that has so many different operations going on to do that. Obviously, share price has dictated on delivering. And so, we recognize that we have to deliver more revenues, more cash flow and more income and the share price will take care of itself.
I think there’s also tremendous option value in this company. With all the events we have going on around the world, having a company that is a U.S. based company in this business, all of a sudden one day you get a call and it’s a transformational change. So I think that option value is definitely not in the stock today, I mean, no question. So that’s what is incumbent upon us to try to get some further support from the government or from different agencies of the government, so that we can show you as an investor that this company does have a lot of value in that regard.
Unidentified Analyst
Great. So again, you guys -- you seem to be doing the right things, seem to be saying the right things. Please keep it up and can’t reiterate enough what a previous caller said is -- and what you said you were going to do is get that word out, because we all understand it, because we spend a lot of time and money on it. So continue to get the word out. Thank you.
Gary C. Evans
You’re welcome.
Operator
And the next question is coming from Mark Menzel from Sunrise Wealth Partners.
Mark Menzel
Very pleased with the recent changes, Company’s dealing with a lot of moving parts. To me, it seems that the low hanging fruit is zeolite, and very happy that several of you are going to visit the site. But everything I’ve been reading about PFASs, nuclear cleanup, watts up north, what they’re doing, utilizing zeolite. First, what kind of capacity could we look for? It seems like it is there. We just have to crush it to certain specifications. How can that be scaled up and what efforts is the Company making to product differentiation using this rather unknown resource that has many applications?
Gary C. Evans
I’ll just take a first shot and then Joe, you can probably jump in better than me. One of the things that we’ve been hounding on is that we know that that mine, BRZ, has a capacity to produce a lot more product, and that’s one of the things that Russ was working on prior to his departure. The Company’s Board had granted him capital to spend to do that, and he’s made capital changes in that regard. And we believe that we will see that shortly if we aren’t seeing it already. When I pull the actual numbers, I see a small increase, but nothing substantial, but…
Mark Menzel
Nothing that moves the needle to the bottom-line.
Gary C. Evans
No. But I will say this. The things that we’ve done were done in a manner to increase that volume of production 3 to 4 times of what it is today. And I don’t think it’s going to take very much more to get that there. And I’ll let Joe -- Joe’s been out there and knows this better than anybody on our call. So, let’s let Joe jump in.
Joe Bardswich
Joe doesn’t know it as well as Joe would like to. I’m not a specialist in crushing in terms of the mining end of it. It’s easy straightforward and we can get thousands of tons -- many thousands of tons a month instead of 1,000 or 1,500, et cetera. But the crushing to spec is the key item. That’s why we’re looking for someone outside the Company with that crushing experience, crushing and screening experience. Basically the main product is 14-40, which is minus 14 mesh plus, plus 40 mesh. Minus 14 mesh is about the 12th of an inch or actually a 14th of an inch. So you’re talking pretty fine material. Screening becomes the key on that. I really feel there are people in the aggregates business that are quite adept at that. I know that here in Arizona, I know a couple of guys that are gainfully employed and will not lead, but we’re looking for someone to go to Preston and…
Mark Menzel
Okay. What is the Company doing or plan to do to explore new markets for this really valuable resource that we’re just sitting on?
Gary C. Evans
Before we go to new markets, we got to be able to meet the demand from our current markets. And so, we think that by increasing the volumes, as I outlined earlier, we can meet the demands of our current customers and try to expand upon that. And one of our larger customers is actually going with us next week, has got a bundle of ideas. And so, we got to be able to deliver to be able to meet those demands. So that’s why it’s so paramount that we figure out, okay, how can we take this thing up, double, triple, quadruple, so that we can then go to those new customers and say, look what we have, we have the ability to meet your demand. So, we’re trying not to get the cart before the horse.
Mark Menzel
Okay. But I should assume that this is a work in progress and we possibly could see some interesting positive results in the next few quarters?
Gary C. Evans
That’s what we’re hopeful for. That’s why we’re spending the time and effort we’re doing. We see the opportunity that you see.
Mark Menzel
Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you. And there were no other questions at this time.
Gary C. Evans
Okay. Thank you all for dialing in. We kept this down to just five minutes under an hour. So, I appreciate your interest in the Company. We hope to be providing you many more updates as the year progresses. And have a good day and good evening. Goodbye.
Operator
Thank you. This does conclude today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
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United States Antimony Corporation (UAMY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript