Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Kutcho Copper (TSX-V: KC)(OTC: KCCFF) CEO Vince Sorace on Discovery Focused Drilling in 2023

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of one of my favorite copper speculations in the space, Kutcho Copper, Mr. Vince Sorace. Vince, it's great to have you back on. It's been a bit. How are you, sir?

Vince Sorace: I'm doing well, and yes, it is great to be back on, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's get right into it because I want to provide listeners and readers a freebie today, and this is a heck of a speculation at current valuations, and I want to highlight that right off the bat before I get into why I think it's headed much higher. You have an after tax net present value of $831 million Canadian at slightly higher copper prices, right? $4.30ish, $4.25ish. If you want to play devil's advocate and you want to come down to $4 a pound of copper, you have a $536 million market cap. Mind you, these are feasibility study numbers. This isn't a PEA. This isn't on an inferred resource. This is a feasibility study metric that I'm providing here, and yet your market cap is where today, Vince?

Vince Sorace: Our market cap trading about, what is it, about 30 million, I think.

Gerardo Del Real: Okay, so a big, big disconnect between 30 million and at the very least 536 million. You have low cost production. You have 1.1 billion pounds of copper equivalent. For those that want to be cynical and say, "Well, forget copper equivalent, Gerardo, how many pounds of copper does he have?" 765 million pounds of copper make up that 1.1 billion pounds of copper equivalent. The grade is great, but here's the part where I get excited. As awesome as these numbers are and as much value exists, if you never find another pound of copper or zinc, this is the year where finally shareholders like myself will get to see a substantial exploration program to go and look for what we all think is there, more of these deposits. So let's get into what that's going to look like this year because I think it sets the table well.

Vince Sorace: Yeah, and listen, we've been really busy behind the scenes even last year. I mean, we didn't have a lot of news, but we were working. You'll see the last couple of press releases we put out. We've been identifying kind of all the additional opportunities to our feasibility study, which we've spoken about, and we've been working on the potential even increase to the numbers you are talking about through reduction of development capital, looking at conversion of the existing inferred resources to make this better, extension of mine life. This project just offers still a lot more improvements, even again to that feasibility study. But nevertheless, and to say that we're amidst going through a permitting regime and a positive construction decision, this is significantly de-risked today.

But to your point, on the exploration side, it's been tough the last couple of years with respect to allocation of capital and getting what we wanted to get done here. Feasibility, post feasibility work, the focus now is going to be on exploration, and that's also something we've been doing over the past like two to three months, looking at the best exploration techniques to quickly identify new targets, new zones.

This is a VMS district, and people can do their own homework, when VMS deposits are formed in these areas within this type of geology, there tends to be more, almost in every case, there tends to be more. Kutcho is no different. We've got the right horizons, the right mineralization throughout our entire claim block, and so we're going to now be focusing on finding more deposits, making this project scalable and bigger. We're ready to kick that off this year.

It'll be an extensive geophysics program. That's important because geophysics is an amazing tool that can help identify additional potential targets in this environment, and we're going to do it property wide through all the multiple horizons that could facilitate additional discovery of lenses. So we're excited about that. That's our focus this year to drive that home and really exploit the potential that we always thought was there throughout our entire claims position and the project as a whole.

Gerardo Del Real: Let me tell you why I get excited outside of the exploration work that's going on this year. There hasn't been significant exploration on the property since 1990, and copper prices weren't flirting with $4 a pound back in 1990. The other thing that really gets me excited is what you mentioned. This is a VMS style project, and that always, always happens in clusters. It's very, very rare that you find just one or two of these things. Look, when I look at some of your slides on your corporate presentation, and I encourage everyone to go to that corporate presentation, and I look at the host rocks and how much of the land package is covered in those host rocks, and then I take a look at some of these other deposits and targets and the potential grades there and the potential strike, it's going to be really, really fun for me to watch the results come in.

This was already a fantastic project with top-notch infrastructure, world-class partners, fantastic shareholders, great community relations. You've done a brilliant job behind the scenes of making sure that that is taken care of. But I have to admit, Vince, I was bored a bit the second half of last year waiting for this moment, so I am glad to hear that 2023 is a year of discovery drilling for Kutcho Copper. Can you add anything to that before I let you go?

Vince Sorace: I think that that sums it up. I think, again, I guess two big points here. One, with what we have and the de-risked stage of this project, we are trading exceptionally cheap to our peers. We've got some good metrics about that in the presentation. As you said, people should take a look at. So there's, I believe, a massive value gap with respect to us and our peers right now as it stands and the exploration potential. We're going to go at it, I think with some positive results there that could really tip the scale in our favor, and that's what we're hoping.

Gerardo Del Real: Really looking forward to it, Vince. When can we start expecting some of those geophysics results?

Vince Sorace: Most likely probably mid-summer.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. So the work goes on between now and then, then we can start seeing those results. I encourage everybody to use the next several months to, at the very least, do some due diligence. For those of you that are looking for excellent de-risked copper exposure, Kutcho Copper again is one of the better speculations in the entire space right now. Vince, thank you so much for your time. We were overdue for a catchup. Looking forward to chatting some more.

Vince Sorace: Pleasure. Thank you, Gerardo. 

Click here to see more from Kutcho Copper Corp.