Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Dolly Varden Silver (TSX-V: DV)(OTC: DOLLF) CEO Shawn Khunkhun on Win-Win Transaction, Pending Assays & Start of A New Silver Bull Market?

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Dolly Varden Silver, Mr. Shawn Khunkhun. Shawn, how are you today? It's great to catch up again.

Shawn Khunkhun: Great to be on, Gerardo. It was great seeing you in person at Beaver Creek. Happy to be back on.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, you have been busy, busy. We talked a bit off air. I don't think you'll mind me sharing that you did something like close to 100 meetings telling the Dolly Varden story. You had some news today and I'm glad that we're able to catch up on it, because it really sounds like a win/win/win. But I can understand how parts of the market may not catch it as that. You announced that Dolly Varden and Fury were announcing the sale of Dolly Varden common shares to an institutional investor. The sale of the shares does a couple of different things, right? Obviously, it brings in a new and interested institutional investor. And the second thing it does is it allows Fury the option to advance some of the exploration at some of their projects. Break down the transaction to me and then just your thoughts on how you view it.

Shawn Khunkhun: Sure. No, and I appreciate the opportunity because I think it's so important to provide this color around this transaction. The first thing I want to say is Fury and Dolly created a win/win deal in combining Homestake and the Dolly Varden project. We demonstrated where one plus one could equal five, and I think what we've done here is we've done this again in a very elegant way in that Fury has funded drilling at Eau Claire, and Éléonore South Joint Venture through the sale of seven and a half percent of their position in Dolly Varden.

What this all means, Gerardo, is at Dolly Varden, prior to this transaction, we had eight shareholders that controlled roughly 85% of the company. Today, we have nine. Okay? Who we've added, so Fury's gone from a 33% stake to about a 26% stake, and we've added a new institutional investor that's come in for seven and a half percent of the company. This has now put Fury in a position where they are fully funded for their operations, their drilling operations in Quebec, and it takes away the perceived overhang that some investors thought that Fury may need to sell stock in Q1. We've been proactive and we've taken that uncertainty out of the equation.

Gerardo Del Real: Well done. We had a massive move in the silver spot price today. I can tell you from some of my contacts, silver dealers, that the premiums were... We had a nine percent move in the spot price. The premiums for buying physical silver were somewhere along the lines of between 25 and 33%. Obviously, Dolly Varden shot higher along with the better silver companies. Thoughts on the silver space right now.

Shawn Khunkhun: Well, listen, I've been saying it and I'm usually quite... I'm known by my friends and those who know me very closely, I'm very conservative. I'm very, very conservative when it comes to exploration. I'm very, very conservative how I explain how these companies are moving forward, and I went out in August into September and I was pounding the table saying, "This is the buying opportunity of a lifetime." We haven't seen in the last 30 or 40 years better opportunities than this last 60 days in the market. If you just look at Dolly, the last one, two, three, four, five trading days, we're up 15 and a half cents a share in the last five trading days. The 6 cents we put on today mark a 14% appreciation today. And the reason is we are coming off the lowest levels we've seen in years. I think that if you look at the fundamentals of a company like ours, we're hitting outside the resource area, we're well-capitalized, we have great partners, and in terms of silver itself, I think silver was up almost nine percent today.

For me, when I look at silver, when I look at gold, the hard work has been done. Both metals spent over six years consolidating between 2013 and 2019. When we had that breakout, right, when we had that breakout in gold in 2019 and gold went up 50%, and silver followed, and silver's breakout, it occurred in six weeks in the summer of 2020. Now what we've done is we've consolidated that move, we've went out, we tested the breakout, and now we're moving higher. This is a moment where... I think this is an all-in moment. If you stick with quality, you stick with good companies, good management teams, good grade projects, safe jurisdictions, I've been saying it for the last 60 days, this is an all-in moment, and it's nice to see that the price of silver, the price of gold and the price of some of these equities are starting to reflect that.

Gerardo Del Real: What comes next for Dolly? You had some phenomenal assays recently. I am assuming that you're waiting on more and hoping to, at the very least, come close to those grades and those widths that you just announced here recently.

Shawn Khunkhun: Gerardo, in this business, this is a business where you let your winners run, and when something is working, you push the bet. I've been around companies like Dolly Varden for 18 years, companies in the junior resource sector. There's been two times in that 20 year career that I felt this confident. We are in a tremendous geological setting in the golden triangle. We're around some of the biggest and richest mines on the planet. Our technical team is one of the best in the business. We're well-capitalized and the company is hitting. We are hitting and adding resources, and we've already got this tremendous foundation of high grade resources. In all categories, silver equivalent, we've got close to 140 million silver equivalent ounces. That's 50% silver, 50% gold. If we break it down, it's 63 million ounces of silver and a million ounces of gold. These are high grade, this is in Canada, and what we've demonstrated with our last two press releases is, outside of that known resource estimate, we are expanding it.

Gerardo, you and I talked about this in person on the 13th of September when we put out the Wolf drilling. As we go incrementally deeper, we're getting grades that are 50% richer than our resources, in some cases twice the grade. So as we go incrementally deeper, this thing is starting to blow out. We've got what's to come. We've got almost 30,000 meters of drilling to report, probably somewhere in the magnitude of 100 holes, so we put out results in August, we put out more results in September. October, November, December, January, they're going to keep coming. The company's in a great place. Like I said, we're well-capitalized, we've got over $10 million in the treasury today. We're just winding up our drilling operations, but we anticipate to be reporting results right into Q1.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to those results, looking forward to the rest of the year, and most definitely looking forward to 2023. Shawn, thank you so much for that update.

Shawn Khunkhun: Okay. Thanks for having me on.

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