United States Antimony Corporation

Greetings. Welcome to the United States Antimony Corporation first quarter 2026 financial and operating results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If you would like to ask a question, please use the ask question button on your webcast viewer window, type in your question, and hit submit. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference and webcast is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host, Gary C. Evans, Chairman and CEO. You may begin.

Thank you, Paul, and welcome to our listeners. The news release on our earnings should be out any moment now. It was taking a little bit longer to get out, but it should be out within a minute or two. First, I'd like to start by introducing other members of the company's management team who is joining me today on this call. We have seven speakers from management who will be talking about their respective divisions because we have a lot to say, quite frankly. So those parties are as follows. Rick Isaac, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Sean Winkler, our Interim Chief Financial Officer. Joe Bardsworth, our Director and Executive Vice President and our Chief Mining Engineer. Melissa Pagan, President and Chief Operating Officer of our Bear River Zeolite Division. Jeff Fink, Vice President of our Antimony Division up in Thompson Falls. Aaron Tenasch, who's Vice President of our Antimony Division, predominantly involved in procurements as well as Raidersburg. And then Jonathan Miller, who's Vice President of our Investor Relations. So before I turn over the conference call today to Rick and Sean, to discuss our financial report, I first want to say that I have never been more excited about where this company is going. If you as an investor knew only half as much as I do today, you'd also feel the excitement. This is no longer just an antimony company. Read the heading of our press release today. It says antimony, cobalt, gold, tungsten, and zeolite. We're making significant progress on all of these mental developments, as you will hear today from our seasoned management team as they go over what all we're up to. Rick, you're up, and let us hear about the first quarter earnings.

Thanks, Gary. As announced in a prior press release, I took a leave of absence a couple weeks ago to take care of some personal matters. It was fortunate that we've been working with a very talented financial person, Sean Winkler, who could step in as interim CFO. Sean's experience over the prior 20 plus years includes corporate finance, capital markets, and executive leadership. He recently served as CFO of a full service engineering procurement and construction firm in the energy industry and was an investment banker for over 15 years. Sean's been working on financial projects for the company since late last year and knows the management and finance teams well, so this was an easy transition. Okay, next I'll provide some comments on our consolidated results. Sales for the first quarter of 2026 were $6.8 million, nearly comparable to last year's sales of $7 million. Animony segment sales were down 2%. and zeolite segment sales were down 7%. Gross profit for the first quarter of 2026 decreased $1.3 million compared to last year's first quarter. The majority of this decrease was due to higher labor, factory, and important freight costs. These cost increases were needed, kind of like Gary was saying, to get the talent, factory, and inventory we need for the expected ramp-up in production for the remainder of this year. We expect these costs to improve with economies of scale as sales increase. Net loss for the first quarter of 2026 was $11.3 million, which was primarily due to non-cash stock compensation expense of $4.8 million and an unrealized loss on our investment in our Lovato equity securities of $4.1 million, along with the Higher cost of goods sold, I mentioned just earlier. Working capital and other balance sheet metrics remain strong. Our cash position, including our U.S. Treasury securities and equity securities, totaled $60.2 million at the end of the first quarter of 2026. In addition, subsequent to March 31st, 2026, we received $12.8 million of cash from our expansion grant from the U.S. government. and 48.6 million of gross proceeds from the sale of our stock. Also, inventory increased by 9.5 million to 22 million at the end of the first quarter of 2026, compared to 12.5 million at the end of 2025. In addition, we continue to maintain a very low amount of debt on our books, 162,000 at the end of the first quarter. On the operations side, We continue our strategy to, as Gary was mentioning, quickly develop our antimony supply infrastructure where little existed before. And this includes both internal and external infrastructure. First, on the internal infrastructure side, plans are in place to mine antimony in the U.S. in 2026. We mined antimony in 2025, and our expectations are much higher in 2026 for both Montana and Alaska. Second, on the external infrastructure side, contracts have been signed for monthly deliveries of antimony to our smelters in both Montana and Mexico. And our factories, our facilities are ready for this increased internal and external supply. Also, we continue to explore our mining sites in U.S. and Canada in 2026 for other critical minerals needed for the U.S. government and in industry, similar to what Gary again was mentioning at the beginning here. In addition, we saw an increase in zeolite sales of about 60% in March of 2026 compared to March of 2025 from our efforts to increase zeolite sales in the animal feed industry, predominantly cattle. This anemone and zeolite mining and processing infrastructure is being built quickly to support our growth plans, and we expect to see the results of our initiatives in the back half of this year. The U.S. government recognizes the significance of our initiatives and granted us $27 million to assist with these initiatives. As I previously mentioned, in April of 2026, we received $12.8 million of this $27 million grant. Overall, we aggressively continue to implement our strategy of growth, diversification, and sustainability in 2026 for our company, our investors, and our country. I'll pass it back over to you, Gary.