Fortitude Gold Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Crushing Capacity Triples as East Camp Drill Results Ignite 'Home Run' Hopes

Matthew, Conference Call Operator, Conference Call Services: Good day everyone, welcome to the Fortitude Gold 2026 first quarter conference call. At this time, all participants are placed on a listen-only mode. If you have any questions or comments during the presentation, you may press star one on your phone to enter the question queue at any time, and we’ll open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to hand the floor over to your host, Jason Reid. Sir, the floor is yours.

Jason Reid, Chief Executive Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Great. Thank you, Matthew. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Fortitude Gold Corp’s 2026 1st quarter conference call. Following my comments and associated presentation for those who joined online, we will have a question-and-answer period. Joining me on the call today for the Q&A portion will be Ms. Janet Turner, our Chief Financial Officer. Let me remind everyone that certain statements made on this call are not historical facts and are considered forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties as described in our annual report on Form 10-K and other SEC filings, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by our comments.

Forward-looking statements in the earnings release that we issued yesterday, along with the comments on this call, are made only as of today, May 12, 2026, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update any of these forward-looking statements as actual events unfold. You can find a reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures referred to in our remarks in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC for the year ended December 31, 2025. To say the 1st quarter of 2026 was extremely busy is an understatement. While we are pleased to have 2 new mine permits in hand and are working hard to build and ramp up operations, the pace of activity has been intense. As a result of these efforts, gold production increased progressively each month during the quarter.

First quarter 2026 financial results and highlights included commence production at County Line and Isabella Pearl Scarlett South, completed a $12 million private placement. We entered into a 60% joint venture for the East Camp Douglas property. We had $3.2 million net sales, $10 million cash balance on March 31, 2026, 688 gold ounces produced, $31.3 million working capital at March 31, 2026, $2.2 million mine gross profit, $1.7 million exploration expenditures, $1,017 total cash cost after by-product credits per ounce gold sold for Isabella Pearl Mine, $2,263 per ounce total all-in sustaining cost for the Isabella Pearl Mine, $0.8 million dividends paid, and 611 ounces of gold rounds or bullion at March 31, 2026.

Looking forward, we are now targeting a ramp up in throughput tons from areas being mined to achieve higher gold production in future quarters. We are actively mining from the Isabella Pearl Deep, Scarlett South, and the County Line East pit areas. The latter two areas have a lower average grade that requires increased throughput to achieve more production. To achieve this throughput increase, we installed and commissioned our larger crushing facility, the one we originally purchased for the Golden Mile project, and installed it at the Isabella Pearl processing facility. For those who joined online, you are seeing images of that crushing system in operation. Our team has done a great job bringing that crushing system online.

It is expected to more than triple our crushing throughput capacity, going from approximately 250 tons per hour on the old crusher to easily doing over 800 tons per hour throughput with this new crushing facility. The power line construction has reached the Isabella Pearl project. A custom-built switchgear continues to be the last thing between us and grid power. This delay in delivery is frustrating, but we are told this month is the month. Substantial power savings are expected once the line is connected. Among our many ongoing projects, reaching the high-grade gold at the County Line main pit is a priority. We are actively mining the old access ramp at the County Line main pit as we prepare for the pit layback. The ramp has some nice gold grades, and its extraction is part of the larger pit layback program.

The layback is expected to take the rest of the year to complete. Accessing the approximate 40,000 ounces of high-grade gold after the pit layback is complete is targeted for 2027 and 2028 production. The joint venture on East Camp with Hawthorne Land & Minerals is extremely exciting. It has not only allowed exploration efforts at East Camp to be reinstated immediately, but efforts are positioned on an accelerated and aggressive basis, the likes of which Fortitude could not have achieved in the foreseeable future by itself. We are pleased Hawthorne shares our vision in our district-sized land position and whose JV during the quarter allowed the initiation of an extremely aggressive exploration program.

Initial results from the drilling program in East Camp have returned what may represent the strongest set of drill intercepts the company has achieved to date. This mineralization is both shallow in depth and possibly comprised of vein swarms that could potentially be mined via open pit. Intercepts recently announced during the second quarter included 3.05 meters grading 12.90 grams per ton gold within 24.38 meters grading 3.89 grams per ton gold, 10.67 meters grading 2.08 grams per ton gold, 46.24 meters grading 1.13 grams per ton gold, 7.62 meters grading 4.95 grams per ton gold, 7.62 meters grading 3.13 grams per ton gold, and 18.29 meters grading 1.1 grams per ton gold. While we have and continue to expect positive outcomes from our targeted mine builds both active and in the future queues, I have said for years East Camp Douglas represents home run potential for Fortitude.

These recent drill results set us up for that potential. In addition to East Camp Douglas, exploration efforts are focused on Scarlett and County Line with the goal of expanding mineralization in those areas. On the permit front, we continue to work to obtain permits for Golden Mile and Scarlett North. We want to permit everything possible during this mining-friendly administration. With that, I would like to thank everyone for their time today on this conference call. Operator, will you please open up the lines if there are any possible Q&A?

Matthew, Conference Call Operator, Conference Call Services: Certainly. Everyone at this time will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you have any questions and comments, please press star one on your phone at this time. We do ask that while posing your question, please pick up your handset if you’re listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. If you’re listening through webcast, you can submit a question by clicking on the Ask Question button on the left of your screen. Type your question into the box and hit send to submit your question. Once again, if you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone. Please hold while we poll for questions.

Jason Reid, Chief Executive Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: Okay, Matthew, while we’re waiting to poll if there’s any live Q&A, we do have some write-in questions. I’ll get to those first. The first question is from Tim. Well, first four or five questions is from Tim Boettcher. Here are a few things I hope management team will address. One, what is the anticipated ramp-up of production? It would be good to have some perspective on that. Tim, great question. We’re not going to forecast production until we get our feet firmly under us. We’re starting up two new mines in addition to the Pearl Deep mining. It has many moving parts. Scarlett South and the County Line East Pit have a lower average grade compared to the Pearl Deep and County Line Main Pit.

As you heard on my comments, we just commissioned our larger crusher to increase throughput as a means to allow for increased production. 2026 is a rebuild year where we target increased production later in the year. Forecasting a number of ounces is complicated. Your second question, what if any new costs are involved in the running of three mines instead of just one? Another great question, Tim. Trucking costs from Scarlett South and County Line are new, with County Line being the farther distance of the two. We expect to offset some of the trucking costs with the grid power savings. We estimate approximately $80,000 to $100,000 a month in energy savings. We hope this month will be the final month to connect this. It has been a struggle to make this power line happen.

Once we can actually connect, we plan to press release that news, hopefully this month. Third question, do you have any issues with manpower, important areas of expertise that need to be addressed? Another great question. Manpower is always an issue, Tim. We recently lost people to a neighboring operation that poached some of our people. Retaining manpower is a real issue that will likely increase going forward. I’ve talked about this in previous conference calls. With metal prices up, more interest in the mining space, many old and new companies starting up activities, it’s a challenge to keep people where employees will leave us for $1 more an hour to go to another operation. We have stemmed the tide of the recent manpower losses for the time being, I expect manpower issues to be an issue going forward for the entire industry for that matter.

Fourth question, how should investors think about the dividend going forward? Will it be tied to free cash flow or some other metric or financial metric? Great question. The dividend will not be tied to metrics. We used to do that with a past company. No dividend policy can adequately capture all the inputs, variables, and operational unknowns to create a clean, long-lasting policy. As always, we are still committed to the dividend. We are also working to get our feet under us to overcome the Biden era challenges. We’re building new mines. That all takes capital. With that, we continue with our dividend policy that is stated on our corporate presentation. It gives us latitude to modify as we see fit. Tim, great questions. There’s another question we’ve got from several people. I just want to address it. It’s a general question.

It revolves around any supply disruptions due to global unrest or wars. The response to that question is that there isn’t any supply issues. I was just at site last week. I heard nothing about supply issues. With these recent questions, I circled back with a general manager yesterday. There’s no supply issues at this point in time. Hopefully that gets in front of that. Operator, are there any live questions? There’s some others in the portal, but I’ll see if there’s any live first.

Matthew, Conference Call Operator, Conference Call Services: Certainly. There are no questions in the queue at this time. Once again, everyone, if you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone.

Jason Reid, Chief Executive Officer, Fortitude Gold Corp: We do have a question in the Q&A. When will the company be listed on a Canadian mining exchange? As a Canadian, I trade through a tax-free savings account, which most speculators trade on. Canadian mining journalists will only report on companies on major exchanges. This was by Gary Hayes. Gary, thank you for the question. Great question. Interesting that, you know, we are a U.S.-based company. We’re one of the few, very few U.S.-based mining companies. Most mining companies are based in Canada or elsewhere. With our past company, we actually looked twice at up-listing into Canada, and it didn’t make sense for a number of reasons at that time. I’m going to assume those same reasons will hold and be the same.

What some of the primary reasons are the capital’s here in the U.S. Going back to your point of an up-listing, when and if we up-list, it will be the New York Stock Exchange. It won’t be to the AMEX or the NASDAQ, excuse me. It’ll be the American Stock Exchange. We’ve done this in the past. We know the guys there. We would like to do that with a serious catalyst. I think that makes more sense. I’ve watched some companies up-list just to up-list stake, and it didn’t do anything for their stock. When the time is right, the up-listing will likely happen to the New York Stock Exchange, and at that point, it’ll address some of your questions and some of your issues. Having said that, we typically don’t play well in Canada.

We don’t lower our head grade and count a bunch of uneconomic ounces to try to impress the market with, you know, a resource that’ll never be mined. You know, we don’t play well in Canada in that regard. I don’t ever really expect to be followed by a lot in the Canadian market, but that’s okay. We’ve proven with our past company and this company, we’ve done great things just focusing on where the money is, and that’s the New York Stock Exchange. Great question. Another question from Craig Hooper. Are you still working in the IPD? Any results that you can report on grade recovery? Craig, great question. Yes, we are. You probably heard me say that in some of the comments.

We had to move a lot of material and create a new ramp access down and then do this pit layback. You know, those who followed us know that took the better part of it, of a year. We’re there now. We’re mining it. There’s high-grade pockets. There’s also some low grade to make sure to take it as well. Yeah, we’re happy. I have to say, the Isabella Pearl has exceeded all of our expectations. I mean, we came into the Isabella Pearl pushing a 4-year mine life, and you know, I was just out there talking to the guys, you know, we’ve been out there 7 years. It’s an incredible deposit. We are really pushing to find another one of these. Across the highway from us was a 300 ounce producer in the past.

We have the trend that goes for 10 kilometers, and I truly believe there’ll be another Isabella Pearl, and we just wanna be the ones that find it. Isabella Pearl is a phenomenal deposit, and it’s fun to still be mining it, so that’s wonderful. With that, let’s close the conference. If I didn’t get to your question, feel free to reach out to Greg or myself, and we look forward to updating you next quarter. Thank you, everybody.

Matthew, Conference Call Operator, Conference Call Services: Thank you. Everyone, this concludes today’s event. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.