Alamos Gold Inc. Class A Common Shares Mining Forum Americas 2026

From here. A good place to start. We're largely a Canadian operator. All our operations are in North America. We actually started out in Mexico with the Mulatos mine, which went into production in 2005. Over the years, we've grown our production and diversified our production. At this point, we're producing just over 500,000 ounces of gold a year, but we're on a growth path to 1 million ounces a year by 2030. We're getting there largely through an expansion at our Island Gold project, which will see production climb from current levels, where we're producing in the range of about 150,000 ounces a year. We're ultimately going to build that up to about 540,000 ounces a year. Then we're bringing on the Lynn Lake project in northern Manitoba. It's in full construction right now. That'll add another 200,000 ounces of annual production.

The interesting thing about it's all fully permitted, fully funded, and all the new production we're bringing on will be lower cost than our costs are today. So we're looking forward to a time where we're going to be generating in excess of 1 million ounces of gold a year from our existing operations at cash costs in the range of about CAD 1,200 to CAD 1,300 all-in sustaining cost.

Yeah. So when we took on Island Gold back at the end of 2017, it was sitting with roughly 700,000, and we saw potential for that district to grow. But even the Island deposit itself, one of the operating sort of assumptions that we had is if you went to depth, you would see an improvement in grade. The reason why we thought that is because of the work that had already been done by Richmont Mines. They'd already started to lay that foundation. You could see it from the early workings prior to Richmont, they were mining four to five gram material up to about the 400-meter level. By the time Richmont was running it was running at roughly nine grams, and we could see some drilling that they had at depth that showed grades closer to 11 grams, even 13 grams.

That really intrigued us. By now, we've invested heavily in exploration, and we've driven our underground reserves there to in excess of 5 million ounces. That's proven and probable reserves. We have seen grades go from roughly 9 grams a ton when we acquired it. They're sitting around 11 grams per ton now. Still open in all directions, still growing. We could already see from the work we've done this year, we're going to continue to add to reserves and resources based on the work that we're doing in 2026. In addition to that, we saw that in order to match this big growth in reserves, we also had to match it with a growth in production. We undertook in 2022 to sink a shaft. That shaft is now completed. We've essentially put in a shaft down to 1,382 meters.

We're in the process now of equipping that shaft. We'll be finished by the end of the year. We'll commission it in Q1, and we'll basically be mining for Island Gold, over the course of 2027 from the shaft, and it will essentially build up to a rate of roughly 2,400 tons a day. So about double our current rate of production from underground today. In addition, we acquired Argonaut Gold, which was our neighbor. They developed an open pit operation. Since we took it over, we've been working on the whole mill complex there, and we finally got it to the point where we've got it mining at 10,000 tons a day, which is its capacity, and that will generate just over 100,000 ounces a year at that rate.

What we're working on now is an expansion of the whole mill complex, taking it to 20,000 tons a day. That work is well underway. It's all permitted. The additional mill is on order. Essentially, what we're going to do is twin the existing line, and at the front end, we're putting in a big gyratory crusher, and that gyratory crusher will feed the two mills. By the time that's completed, that will generate about 400,000 ounces of production from the open pit. Pardon me, from the underground, and about 130,000 ounces or so from the open pit. So significant growth coming from that district, and it's being driven by essentially the big expansion of the underground operation, converting it to a shaft, taking it initially to 2,400 tons a day in 2027.

By 2028, we intend to ramp it up over the course of that year to 3,000 tons a day. Essentially, the only limiting factor is development. It's just going to take us some time to get the development in place to generate the 3,000 tons a day from underground. We will be there as we go through 2028, and by the time we're through that year, that mine will have a run rate of about 535,000 ounces a year. So it's pretty exciting development because the mine grows in a significant way, and we also see the cost coming down.

Well, I will start off by saying we didn't build that mill in the first place. By the time we bought it, we knew going in there were some design problems associated with it, but it was particularly the front end. It was designed so that you delivered ore from the open pit to a stockpile, and then a stockpile would feed a grizzly. The grizzly would effectively provide your feed into the primary and secondary crusher, and ultimately into the mill. That was set up to work perfectly well in an environment like Australia or possibly Africa. It was not set up well to work in a northern Canadian climate, and so we could see that going in. It took us a little longer to get it straightened out. When we took it on, it was barely doing 6,000 tons a day.

If I learned my lesson, it is I would've been much more conservative on guiding what that thing could do. It took us a lot longer to sort out the problems than we initially expected. Anyway, you can kind of see what we had to work through, but we got it there. What we should've ultimately guided to is what the mine was capable of doing by the time we took it on and took out the two primary flaws in the way it was set up. The front end, take out the grizzly setup altogether and put in a gyratory crusher, a much larger capacity. On the back end, get rid of that LNG plant. We were already in the process of bringing in grid power, which will be in by first quarter of next year.

With grid power, we won't be dealing with LNG tank deliveries, which, as you could expect, by the time you get into the depths of a Canadian winter and the road closures we have to deal with due to heavy snow and so forth, it made the plant relatively unreliable. So, we ended up with a much heavier snow year in 2025 than anybody had seen in probably the previous decade, and it kind of dogged us, keeping that plant running. Those two issues will be sorted. The gyratory basically gets rid of the grizzly, and on the back end, we get rid of the LNG plant altogether, and effectively, we'll be running off of grid power, cheaper and much more reliable.

I think I know what you're getting at. I'm even getting inured to it. I'll get a list of drill holes that we're getting ready for press release, and easy, we'll have 5 to 10-meter true widths, and the grades will be running anywhere from 10 to 50 grams. Those are extraordinary holes, and in my whole career I've never seen a mine that coughs up great results like that, but Island does. When we put out another batch of holes, and it's sometimes 20, 30 holes that are all running at least well north of 50 gram-meters, and those would include big step-out holes or even greenfields holes. You get spoiled with those kind of results. I think the important thing to say is we've never lost sight of the potential there.