Vista Gold 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, Joanna.

Good day, everyone. Thank you for joining the Vista Gold Corp second quarter 2026 financial results and corporate update conference call. I'm Pamela Solly, Vice President of Investor Relations. Also on the call today is Fred Earnest, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Doug Tobler, Chief Financial Officer. On July 29th, 2026, Vista reported its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. For additional details, our full financial statements and MD&A are included in our Form 10-Q available for review at sec.gov or sedarplus.ca. Copies of the news release and quarterly report on Form 10-Q are also available on our website at www.vistagold.com. During the course of this call and the question and answer session, we will be making forward-looking statements.

These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements of Vista to be materially different from results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. Please refer to our most recently filed Form 10-K for details of risks and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our forward-looking statements and the cautionary note regarding estimates on mineral resources and mineral reserves. I will now turn the call over to Fred Earnest.

Thank you, Pam. Thank you everyone for joining us on the call today. We will begin with an overview of our second quarter achievements and then discuss our outlook for the remainder of the year. During the second quarter, we continued to execute our strategy to develop the Mt Todd gold project on a standalone basis. We achieved meaningful progress on permitting, added to our Australia-based project leadership team, progressed technical optimization programs, and advanced project execution planning in line with our plans to commence detailed engineering and design in 2027. With our strong cash position at quarter end, we are well funded to continue achieving our interim project development activities while systematically reducing development risk. As we build our Australian leadership team and complete the technical and regulatory milestones ahead of us, we are positioning Mt.

Mt Todd for the start of detailed engineering and design in 2027 and the commencement of an approximate 27-month period encompassing construction and commissioning. I will discuss these topics in greater detail later in the call, I now turn the time over to Doug Tobler for a review of our financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.

Thanks, Fred. For those of you on the call, thanks for joining. We very much appreciate your interest. My comments will provide a recap of our financial position and our results of operations as presented in the second quarter Form 10-Q. All the dollar amounts that I will talk about today will be in U.S. dollars. I'm pleased to report that we maintained a strong balance sheet at the end of the second quarter. We had cash on hand of $49.5 million compared to a cash balance of $13.6 million at the end of 2025. This increase in cash is based on having completed the March 2026 offering for net proceeds of $42 million, which is supporting the work that Fred will discuss during this call. We continue to have no debt. Turning to our results of operations.

For the second quarter, we reported a net loss of $3 million for the three months ended June 30, 2026, which compares to a net loss of $2.4 million for the three months ended June 30, 2025. For the six months ended June 30, 2026 and 2025, we reported net losses of $6 million and $5.1 million respectively. There were three main drivers of the increases in net losses for the three and six months period ended June 30, 2026. First, exploration, property valuation, and holding costs were $2.5 million and $1.8 million for the comparative three and six months ended June 30, 2026 and 2025 respectively, and they were $4.2 million and $3.3 million for the six months period ended June 30, 2026 and 2025 respectively.

The increases in the 2026 for the three and six months period resulted mostly from the addition of executive and project management team members in Australia and higher power costs incurred to meet our water management pumping requirements. These increases were partially offset by lower project program costs in 2026 compared to the prior year when work on the Mt Todd feasibility study was in progress. Our corporate administrative costs were $850,000 and $680,000 during the three months ended June 30, 2026 and 2025 respectively. They were $2.5 million and $2 million for the six months ended June 30, 2026 and 2025 respectively. These increases for the three and six months period resulted from additional legal, consulting, and board costs to support our increasing pre-development activities at Mt Todd.

We partially offset the increases in costs with about $300,000 of greater interest income for the three and six months period into June 30, 2026. That concludes my comments for today. I'll turn the call back to you, Fred.

Thank you, Doug. The second quarter was another period of steady progress as we continued to execute our key initiatives in line with our development strategy for Mt Todd. We remain focused on achieving the important milestones that will position the project for the next phase of development. I'll begin with an update on permitting activities. Our work to obtain approvals for the permit modifications required to align existing approvals with the 2025 feasibility study is progressing as planned. We are actively working with regulators, consultants, and stakeholders to obtain these modifications. Some modifications have already been submitted, and programs to support other submissions are in progress. I'm pleased to report that we have received authorization for certain modifications that are expected to lead to additional approvals being granted in the second half of 2026, with final approvals anticipated in 2027.

We are encouraged by this progress and are grateful for the past and ongoing work of the agencies in the Northern Territory. Turning to site dewatering. Some of you will remember that the Northern Territory received far greater than normal precipitation in the recent wet season. The inventory of water on the Mt Todd mine site is accordingly much higher than we expected. We have commenced the initial phase of a dewatering program at the Batman pit and tailings storage facility, with additional phases planned to commence later this year. I'll now provide an update on the progress of our pre-development optimization programs as they were identified in the Mt Todd feasibility study, which will support detailed engineering and further de-risk the project.

A comprehensive metallurgical test program to optimize grind size and gold recoveries while generating data to support process plant design and equipment selection is entering its final stages. Highlights of the initial results include confirmation of the relationship between grind size and gold recoveries across the complete range of anticipated head grades, and the suitability of water collected below the waste rock dump for process makeup water. Characterization of tailings properties is also in progress. Final results of the program are anticipated late this quarter. The geotechnical program designed to evaluate opportunities to steepen the west pit wall, reduce waste stripping, and potentially convert mineral resources to additional mineral reserves at depth is also nearing completion. We have also completed refinements to the site layout design and are preparing for field investigations related to tailings embankment engineering design. At the same time, we continue to advance project execution planning.

Let me turn now and talk about people. We continue to build our Australia-based executive leadership and project development teams to support the next phase of the project. The executive team is based in Perth, Western Australia, with the project development team being assigned to the Northern Territory, including certain fly in, fly out roles. Since the beginning of this year, we have made significant progress in strengthening our corporate capabilities across key functions, including projects and technical services, external relations and social performance, legal, and permitting. Recruiting is ongoing for executive and project development team members to further strengthen our project execution capabilities in Australia. As part of this effort, we are well advanced in our search for a managing director to be based in Australia with a proven track record in project development and building successful organizations to lead the development of Mt Todd.