United States Antimony Corporation

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen please remain on the line your conference will begin in just a few moments please remain on the line your conference will begin in just a few moments Greetings. Welcome to the United States Antimony Corporation third quarter and nine months ended September 30th, 2024 operating and financial results meeting webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the webcast, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this webcast is being recorded. I will now turn the webcast over to your host, Gary C. Evans. You may begin.

Thank you and thank all of you for listening to the company's third quarter and nine months ending 930 operational and financial conference call. I've got a number of other management members with me. today that will be speaking, Joe Barswitz, who's a director and a co-CEO with me, Rick Isaac, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Jonathan Miller, our Vice President of Investor Relations and Global Sales Manager. I think we'll start out by letting Rick go over the financials that were reported on our press release this morning, and I believe we just filed the Form 10-Q, which we'll present give you a lot more detailed information. Rick, you want to start out?

Sure. Sure. Thanks, Gary. I'm going to review our consolidated results and then a few metrics at each of our businesses and then a few key areas in our balance sheet and cash flow. So I'll start with the consolidated results of our continuing operations. Sales were 8.1 million for the first nine months of this year, which is an increase of 23% compared to last year. This increase was primarily related to higher antimony sales volume with higher demand, and to a lesser extent, higher zeolite sales volume and sales price. Last year's zeolite price increase became effective in stages towards the end of 2023. Gross profit was $2.2 million for the first nine months of this year, which is an increase of 107% over last year. This increase was primarily due to improved efficiencies with the higher volume, partially offset by more maintenance and other related costs with our ZOI business, which I'll talk more about later. Operating expenses were $3.3 million for the first nine months of 2024, an increase of $1.8 million compared to 2023. This increase was primarily related to about $454,000 of non-cash stock compensation expense, $46,000 of project costs, $482,000 of salary and board fee expenses, and $90,000 of SEC and annual meeting costs that were incurred earlier this year, but not until the fourth quarter of last year. The $446,000 of project expenses relate to the improvement initiatives that we've been discussing throughout this year, including purchasing mining claims in Alaska and Canada, the SEC technical report for BRZ, potential acquisitions, and government sales and funding efforts. Next, let's review a few metrics related to each of our businesses. First, our antimony business. Sales from our Antimony business for the first nine months of this year increased by 24% over the prior year, and gross profit more than doubled last year's gross profit. The gross profit and gross margins we're achieving this year are higher compared to last year due to efficiencies with the higher sales volume and a great, experienced team running our facility in Montana who have continued to efficiently produce high-quality products year after year. Our average antimony sales price per pound for the first nine months of this year was $4.73, which is low compared to the market price, primarily due to two factors. First, nearly a third of our sales this year relate to the processing of customer-owned ore into antimony metal, which is a process called tolling. This lowered our average sales price per pound, but still had a nice return, as you can see with our results. If you remove sales from tolling, our sales price per pound increased in line with the increase in the market price similar to prior years. In addition, our anemone supplier had a planned shutdown for two months from mid-May to mid-July of 2024, which lowered our anemone sales in the third quarter of 2024 and lowered our average sales price per pound with a higher concentration of tolling sales. We're now seeing some bump at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Next, our zeolite business. Sales from our zeolite business for the first nine months of this year increased by 17% over the prior year. Gross profit decreased by $255,000 compared to last year, and loss from operations was worse by $562,000. We continued to enhance the operations of our zeolite business during the third quarter of 2024. This included improvements in our production processes, safety, and equipment at the facility, which has led to higher product throughput, improved customer delivery timing, a safer working environment, and increased production reliability and runtime. These improvements are the result of the high-caliber team we have at our ZLI facility. However, this progress came with a cost, which can be seen in the zeolite segment results, with increased maintenance and other related costs and increased operational losses. These operational improvements and the related costs should begin to decrease in future quarters. During the third quarter, we also substantially increased our supply of material from our zeolite mine to continue timely delivery of product to our customers, and we saw some increased sales volume in the animal feed sector. Overall, these improvements at our Bear River Zeolite facility allow us to grow our zeolite business, which hasn't happened in prior years. Next, our subsidiary in Mexico. As we've discussed on prior calls, we closed and discontinued our operations in Mexico on March 11, 2024. During the first nine months of this year, we sold some of the antimony inventory in Mexico, which generated $1.2 million of revenue. However, even with these higher sales and the closure, our discontinued operations in Mexico still generated a loss of $195,000 for the first nine months of this year. All right. Next, let's go through a few balance sheet and cash flow items. We stabilized or improved our working capital levels comparatively, including in inventory, receivables, and payables. Our anti-money supplier had a planned shutdown, as I mentioned earlier. As a result, vendor payables increased with increased shipments from them later in the third quarter. Our cash and cash equivalents balance at September 30th, 2024 was 12.97 million, which is an increase of 1.1 million from December 31st, 2023. Overall, we accomplished a lot in the third quarter. We purchased mineral claims in Canada and Alaska. continued to make progress in our SEC technical report summary on our zeolite reserves in Idaho, sold our residential home in Idaho, continued to meet with government officials in various departments of the U.S. government regarding sales and funding of antimony zeolite and other minerals, contacted many international suppliers of antimony ore to purchase ore, and are starting to see some samples, and executed a lease for the operation and use of the metals concentration facility in Phillipsburg, Montana. We will continue to improve our great company with these and other initiatives under our mission of increasing shareholder value. I'll turn it back over to you, Gary.