Contango Silver & Gold Inc.

Awesome, so as people are filtering into the room, I will say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. I've got with me today, Rick Van Nuwenhuizen, CEO of Contango Ore and Mike Clark, the company's CFO, to discuss both 2025 year-end earnings and guidance for 26-27, among other things. Keep a broad list of topics today. Here's how today's going to work. For those of you in the room, I see at least, geez, looks like 40 who have never been in a sex webinar before. So this next part's mostly for you. I'll say that I've got some questions for the gentleman just to get us started. The chat is interactive. There's a button in the middle bottom of your screen. If you pop that up, you should be able to ask questions at any time during today's event. We'll try to get as many as we can, but we are trying to stick to about half an hour today. The recording, we believe, will be available about 4 p.m. Eastern time. It'll pop right into your inbox. It'll also be available on Six's YouTube channel at that time. Enough of the boring stuff out of me. I want to get right into the good stuff. And, Mike, that means I will start with you. So you are on mute before you start. The cash distributions from the Pico JV came in at $102 million. for 2025. So I'd love if you could walk us through how that flows down to Contango's balance sheet and what the unrestricted cash position looks like today versus where you started the year. You are on mute though, Mike. Sorry.

Sorry, on mute. Good morning, Romeo. Thanks for the question. So the way that we account for the peak gold JV is equity accounting because we own 30% of it. So what you see happening is we recognize 30% of the net income of the joint venture, which for 25 was 88.6 million. And so you see that go into our statement of operations with a corresponding increase to the investment in the peak JV on the balance sheet. The 102 million distributions actually gets a direct increase to our cash with a corresponding reduction to the investment in peak gold. So what you would have seen at the beginning of the year was a balance of 60 million in that investment on the balance sheet, and that's been reduced to 47 million at the end of the year, which is the difference between 102 and the 88. To answer your second question, it's the cash increase from 20 million to start the year to 65 at the end of the year. That was primarily driven by the equity investment, equity raise we did in September. That's really what drove that. The profits from Moncho effectively funded our pay down of the debt for 37 and a half million and that realized hedge losses of 63, which was coincidentally about 100. So those funds more or less took care of paying down our debt.

Great. I appreciate that very much. Rick, I got one question about ASICs. I know it came in at about $16.16 per ounce sold in 2025, which is, I believe, almost right on guidance, like almost exactly on guidance. Now, the 2026 number jumps to that $2,200 to $2,300 range. So what drives the increase and how much of that is just the math on lower ounces versus cost inflation? Just what are we looking at there?