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Retail and institutional investors are clearly on the hunt not for just established companies with ore-producing mining operations, but junior explorers on the cusp of exciting new finds. And junior explorers that are providing shareholders eight-bagger returns year-over-year.
Enter
Tocvan Ventures Corp. (TOC) (
CSE:TOC,
Forum) – an early-stage natural resource company formed to acquire, explore, for economic and shareholder interests, to develop high-grade mineral properties…including its Pilar Gold project and the newly acquired El Picacho Gold project both in the Sonora State of Mexico. The company’s management feels both of its projects represents tremendous opportunity.
In this compelling video interview, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson caught up with company CEO Derek Wood and VP of Exploration Brodie Sutherland to get shareholders and investors up-to date on all things Tocvan Ventures.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
Derek W: I can speak a bit to myself. Brodie and I have been good friends and colleagues for quite a few years now, but I have involvement in the junior capital markets almost 30 years now, I guess to sort of date me, mostly as a broker and always with a big focus on early-stage resource investing. And that has been tough, we’ve had some trying times over the last while and when the markets were really bad, it was really hard and there was a lot of good projects not getting funded. We decided why don’t we try to build a company ourselves, take advantage of the downturn in the junior resource market and put together a company with a big emphasis on keeping our capital structure as tight as possible for as long as possible, so that if we are successful, we're able toreally reward early-stage investors.
Brodie I've known, he's quite a bit younger than me, but a very accomplished geologist, and Brodie and I started this company together back in 2018.Started with one project added another, andnow a third. We've been very successful keeping the capital structure as tight as possible - we still have less than 30 million shares out. We will de-risk the assets and move the company along to the point where a lot of people have been rewarded, but there's still a lot of upside left for past and future investors. So we're pretty pleased with the way things are going.
Brodie S: A good intro from Derek. Just to add from my side, I'm a geologist, I've worked in industry for over 15 Years, I've been very fortunate to work in over 20 countries on a range of deposits, but primarily gold focused on epithermals, and you know, when Derek and I met, we were kind of looking for an opportunity to form a company that we felt could add the most shareholder value as possible and we've so far had been successful in doing that.
SH: You’ve just announced an agreement with Millrock for the El Picacho Project in Sonora Mexico. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of it?
Brodie S: Yeah, for sure. I can take that one. So, you know, with the acquisition of El Picacho, it really gives us a one-two punch in Mexico. We've got Pilar, it's quite advanced, it's seen over 20 kilometers of drilling on it now and with Picacho, it's early stage, it hasn't seen a lot of drilling, but it's got everything going for it. It's got a great background of surface sampling done. Millrock has done an excellent job in kind of priming this project. It's blanketed with soil samples, rock samples across the property and we're seeing, up to an ounce of gold in grab samples, up to 10 ounces of silver, and over big areas. We're seeing five target areas defined so far and the biggest one being our Cornea trend, it's 2.3 kilometers long and across those five targets, we see artisanal workings showing that there's a long history there of people extracting gold.
On top of that, it's an excellent jurisdiction. It's in a well-defined gold belt in Mexico, we’re 18 kilometers Southwest of San Francisco mine that's defined over 3 million ounces of gold, 50 million ounces of silver, open pit. You know, we've got full road access, we've got a railroad that runs just east of the property. In a couple of hours you can drive from Hermosillo the Capital of Sonora to site. So it's just got so many good things going for it and we like what we see there. We're fortunate in that Millrock has a geologist that worked at San Francisco. He sees a lot of parallels at El Picacho,and he has what I think is a really good exploration model and something thatwe really want to test there. So, you know we just saw it and said, we can hit the ground running here. It's on top of that, permitted for trenching, permitted for drilling, we can get going as soon as we're ready there.
SH: The company has also recently released updates on expansion drilling at Pilar. Can you expand on these drill results for our investor audience?
Brodie S: At Pilar, it's quite unique in that there was a very well-defined Main Zone there, but we looked at it and you could see kind of instantly it was open for expansion in a lot of directions along strike and at depth, and what we wanted to do there was first establish, what's going on the Main Zone, what are its characteristics, what's the structure doing? So to do that we did step out holes, you know, kind of up and down dip of historic stuff, to not only confirm and see what's there, but understand the geology better but at the same time, expand that Main Zone, and we've been extremely successful in doing that so far. Our latest round of results have shown that it does continue to the north, it's from surface down 30 plus meters, plus another zone deeper down that is economic. So, you know we really like what we see at Pilar, every time we step out, we seem to find a little bit more. So we're excited about that. On top of all that we have defined new target areas that have never been drilled tested and, we've just done that in our latest round of drilling. We hope to have those results soon.
SH: Can you elaborate about timing on assay results, as geo labs have been backed up which has become notorious of late in the industry?
Brodie S: Yeah, absolutely. It's beena nightmare for some this year. We'reextremely fortunate in Mexico. We work with ALS Labs in Hermosillo, their turnaround time I think, outperforms almost any lab that I've heard of. They're quite dynamic. They help us out if they're seeing backup in certain areas, they'll move the samples around. So, we've been quite fortunate to see kind of four-to-five-week turnaround. Things are starting to slow down a little bit it looks like, so we've redirected our gold samples to go to the lab and Lima, Peru, and it seems to have sped things up a little bit, but overall we're quite fortunate in Mexico, not seeing the month plus kind of lag that you see in other jurisdictions.
SH: I have to mention your stock has had an extremely nice bump over the last 12 months…a nearly 800-percent increase in value since June 2020. What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s still a good buy right now?
Derek W: Sure. I think it speaks to a little bit about the team we've built since we went public and the property portfolio we put together and the amount of de-risking we've done on the flagship, Pilar. When I was new to the business, you'd be kind of upset if you saw a company coming to market with 30 million shares outstanding and now most of them come with like 50 million shares. It's not uncommon to see a hundreds of millions of shares outstanding on a junior exploration stock. So it was something we really worked hard at. We've added value. We've done stuff to make sure that people realize the value proposition that we have created and continue, to create. Is there still a lot of room to grow? You bet there is, you know one thing that we did when we decided to take on Pilar – and that was after looking at it, you know, probably almost a hundred different properties before we focused on Pilar as a new addition – is that it’s got the potential to be a near term production play, actually, you know, I can't say that it is yet, but we believe within the next year, we'll get to a bulk sample.
We've already done metallurgical testing. We know the size of the pit. We sort of have an in-office back of the house number, and we think there's very likely an economic production story there. And if we could actually accomplish that, well, now we get to explore other properties with cashflow instead of share issuances. So we do everything we can to keep the share structure tight. We've got a fantastic team in Mexico and here, everybody contributes, and we want to build the next mid-tier mining company, is the goal here. We started off with something we thought we could get over the goal line. Now we're adding additional properties and we’ve got a management team that works really, really hard, and we're here to create upside for everybody, past and future shareholders. It's been a good run, but I think it's going to continue.
SH: What’s the long-term strategy for the company moving into 2021 and beyond, and what retail and institutional investors should be looking out for?
Derek W: Well, primarily when we went public, this was a pure retail deal. It was a very small IPO and we've done a couple of financings since then, and we've gotten a really good group of shareholders now that believe in the team and our projects and our approach. So we want to continue to de-risk this Pilar asset is probably the focus here. So we’ve done more drilling to confirm and expand. We've done a lot of geophysics, we’ve stepped out a lot from the Main Zone, but there's targets all over the property, but we would like to demonstrate economics there in the near term andwe've also spent, myself in particular, quite a bit of time in Mexico, networking ourselves with the community there, great mining community down there, Rodrigo Calles, Exploration Manager of Tocvan, isactually a Mexican national who worked with senior mining companies all over Mexico for 30 years.
So we would like to leverage off the success and build a much bigger company, but you know, right now we want to focus on Pilar, prove that economics, get the new acquisition along closer to drill target ready, and financing permitted goas fast as we can. In the past it’s made sense given the market conditions. We've also had a great rise in the commodity of gold and silver since we started out at this and there's just a lot more attention being paid to the market, you know, to the junior mining market. I think we're at a level now where we can start to attract some institutional interest here. I think we've got enough there, and it looks like a stage in our development where we are starting to attract larger shareholders and we're having those sort of meetings now.
SH: And finally, gentlemen, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked, the floor is yours.
Derek W: Well, I'll just say, I think we're at the very early stage of a super cycle in the mining sector. I think one of our advantages there is that we put this together just as we were at the tail end of probably the worst mining market of all time and now, I think we're probably entering one of the best ones of all time. We've got great people and we've got great assets and we're going to continue to build on those assets and the team's just working great together. So that's my little summary.
Brodie S: I'll just add quickly that, we are just about to complete our phase two drill program at Pilar. So there'll be a lot of news coming out in regards to that. We're excited, we're testing some new target areas, keep the expansion going at Pilar, see what else we can do there.
For regular updates, visit
tocvan.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.