 On the heels of signing a major off-take agreement for the sale of a minimum 20,000 tons of copper oxide ore and now securing a hydro metallurgical plant for producing a finished product, I'm joined with CEO Russell Fryer to talk about the significant developments for critical metals. My good sir. Welcome. Thank you, Brandon, for having me. And thank you for coming on. Well, let's just dive right into it. This is an absolutely significant off-take agreement for your company. Can you describe what you've been able to obtain for your shareholders? So the off-take discussion started in June of this year, and we were close to signing an off-take agreement. And before we knew it, we had five other interested parties come and visit Malulu mine and say they wanted our production. We started production the third week of January 2023. And then we worked through the rain season to get to having a run-of-mind stockpile of about 900,000 tons in June of 2023. And the buyers came out and they said, we like what you're producing. We like the quality. We all wish to purchase it. And we went through June, July, August, and even September negotiating with all six. And at the last month, a seventh buyer came who had fantastic payables, were helping with the transportation, and came out and gave us the best terms. But in the meanwhile, we had been negotiating to purchase a copper cobalt, cobalt hydroxide processing plant, because we wanted to capture the full value chain of what we produce. And so the key was to be able to find the right buyer that would take a short-term supply contract for our ore and be able to extinguish that at the appropriate time so we could feed our own Malulu ore into our own plant. And so it was a bit tricky. Negotiations were often two and three in the morning, but we managed to find the right buyer for the Malulu ore in a short term. We will take everything that we can produce until we have to start feeding the plant that we announced today. Yeah, fantastic. And I appreciate you going into detail there. I'd like to go into a little bit more detail on that plant. You just announced that, and it's less than 100 kilometers away from your Malulu project as well. How will this rental and proposed acquisition further increase shareholder value? So the plant has a steady-state capacity of 12,000 ton per month of ore feedstock. And out of that, it can produce about 400 tons of copper cathode and 200 tons of cobalt hydroxide. So if you just take roughly spot prices today on LME, cobalt being 33,000, copper cathode being about 8,000, that is just over $5 million in revenue per month that we would get from owning this plant and even renting the plant. And the margins are roughly 20% or so. So you can see our net profits would be roughly about $12 million. And if you add the net profits from Malulu, would be close to $20 million in EBITDA come December 2024. Yeah. And just for anybody who's watching this, you may not be looking, you may not have seen your company before in the past, go look at the market cap of your company and then come back to this point and just listen to everything you just said there. It really, really is interesting because now you're able to not only find a buyer for all of your product, but the processing plant, and it's very, very close as well. Look what it's been able to do for your company and it's really revolutionized it to be honest. Well, the idea now is to optimize it. So I've called in three process engineers and electrical engineer from South Africa to write me up a 113 page report on how to get it past the 400 tons per month of copper cathode and 200 tons of cobalt hydroxide. Now that's obviously a phase three type plan, but the idea is to continually grow this so we can actually start producing well over a thousand tons of copper cathode per month and 500 tons of cobalt hydroxide. That would really put us into the mid tier stage of metals and mining companies, which would obviously put us on the radar of the bigger companies that are looking to enter the Congo and actually looking to enter the region itself. Yeah, very interesting. I was going to ask, do you have plans to scale that up? And clearly you've already answered that. That's fantastic. Now the decision is also to become a processor is a big change for your company and your words are transformational change from the core makeup of what your company was before this announcement. What led to this decision and how will you ensure you have the right team to facilitate this new element to critical metals? Well, one of my previous occupations, we had excellent mines, high grade mines, but what wasn't available to us was our own processing plant to process our feedstock. And so I have the saying, he who controls the region will control the mining processing. And that's what's happened now is you've seen the likes of the China Mali, who own Tenki Fungarumi. You've seen the likes of Glencore, who own Matanda, all big multi billion dollar market cap companies. You've seen Ivanhoe resources or Ivanhoe mining in this case out of Canada come and start to build their own copper cathode plant even though they're currently producing copper concentrates. So the idea is, if you really want to be a multi billion dollar company or market caps above a billion, you actually have to control your downstream production and your finished goods. And it makes sense because nobody really wants to pay the transportation costs to transport to Europe or to North America, an unfinished good product, you want to capture that full value. So copper cathode will produce it 99.95. And our cobalt hydroxide would be a 30% cobalt hydroxide, which could be used in the new plant that's going up in Oklahoma. I believe there's another plant that's being earmarked for Canada in cobalt hydroxide production into sulfates. And I believe there's potentially another plant going up in Europe. So we'll have no shortage of buyers for our cobalt hydroxide to sell into these plants for the EV market. Yeah, very well said. I appreciate that. I'd also like to talk about funding because everyone, you know, you hear this, it sounds amazing, but obviously there needs to be funding in order to bring it all to fruition. You did touch on this a little bit in the news release. Can you give an overview of how this will all be funded? Well, I am highly sensitive to dilution and shareholder dilutions. I mean, the shareholders are really my business partners. And we had a saying in the hedge fund world, dilution is not the solution. And so what's happened is, is I look at our shares in issue much like a Bitcoin where there's a finite amount and I don't want to dilute that. So the key of the key for not diluting shareholders is having some type of cash flow and then going to a finance institution and saying, you've seen our cash flow, you've seen that we have real assets in the balance sheet, let's do some type of debt facility. So we've had three, four finance institutions global that are interested in what we're doing. Two of them are African focused only, which is great because they have to lend capital into African companies. And now that we have cash flow, you know, it's much more palatable to them. Our fourth potential funding would come from the US government. Now what the market doesn't know yet is that we've actually set up critical metals USA out of Greenwich, Connecticut to tap into some of the title three capital that's available here in the US. But also the DFC US institution is actively looking to invest by loans or equity into African companies like ourselves. So the answer to your question is, we are in talks with the US government. I hope to be down in the Congo in one or two weeks with two representatives from Washington DC, do and do diligence on the plants infrastructure that we announced today to visit the Moodle mines and one or two other interesting opportunities that we have up our sleeve. So I expect that visit to certainly happen within the end of this month. And then what has been announced is that we are looking to list on the OTCQX applications been put in. People want us to raise capital off the back of that. What I want to do is just introduce critical metals PLC to the North American market Canadians and the US investors. So they have ability to purchase North American listed stock instead of having to go into London. Yeah, very interesting. And again, well said, I appreciate that. Well, you've already answered a little bit this, but I'll give you some room for anything else that you can think of. Finally, what's next for critical metals? What should investors expect over the coming weeks and months from your company? So I'm on record saying that we were looking for three transactions this year. We've done one, or we've announced certainly one. So I've got three months to announce a bit more. We're going to expand in the copper cobalt space, most likely in the Congo. We are interested in the tantalum tungsten now being in space. We've been visiting mines in various countries over the last year and started due diligence. We've done test work on the diamond drill core that some of these mines have. These mines are operational. So I would hope to have some type of announcement on georeginal expansion here by the year end or so. Certainly an announcement won't be closed, but what's the space? We look to have five operating mines and five jurisdictions. And so I think our next mineral after copper and cobalt will be tungsten and tantalum, potentially niobium. Very interesting. Well, Russell, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate going into all this detail about what you have been doing and what you plan to do. For anyone looking for more information, you can just go right down to the bottom of this video here. You see the website where you can turn to. Thank you so much for your time, Russell. Thank you, Brendan, for having me.