 Lewis Black is the Chairman, President and CEO of Almonte Industries, Inc. Lewis, welcome to the Investory Intel Studio via Telephone. Thank you very much for having me. I understand we've found you in Europe, and Europe, of course, is where quite a number of your properties are, Spain and Portugal. You've had a busy time this year. You've acquired quite a few assets, and that's the story. But I'd like to start, if I may, with talking about tungsten a bit and its main uses. Well, I would say that tungsten is the uses of it, date back until the sort of turn of the 19th century. But essentially, 50% of all tungsten is consumed in automobile and aerospace sectors. So, the car and the plane industries are doing well. There's always a strong demand for tungsten. And basically, I always say with tungsten, it's a metal that very few people really know about, but in fact touches everybody's lives every day in the sense that it is in everything that you see around you. All manufacturing, anything that generates heat and friction will have a component of tungsten to protect the alloy that is being used to produce that product with tungsten. When you land on a plane, your braking systems, the turbines, when you manufacture the plane or the cars, you need the inserts. If you drill for oil, gas, you mine, you need tungsten coated drill bits, various carbides that you use. So if you remove tungsten from your life, you would not see the same world around you because it is the key component, an irreplaceable key component for manufacturing in all heavy industry. Now, your expertise and your company's expertise, as I understand it, Louis, is turning around projects that haven't been very profitable in the past. I would say that our expertise is not as a fix-it. Our expertise is five generations of tungsten knowledge. The guys within our core team, our fifth generation tungsten experts, whether they be in essentially the engineering, whether it be the hard rock mining, the open pits, the metallurgical side, geological side, that's their expertise. Their fathers did it, their grandfathers did it. We merely acquire sites that previous management could not make work. One thing you say about tungsten is that, for some reason, many gold guys seem to think it's easy because it shares the same density as gold. But it is the complete opposite to mine gold that is the tungsten. Tungsten is extremely brittle, which means every process you go through, you lose some of the material. And that knowledge to be able to produce this very difficult material to extract has been lost because most of the western mines closed 30, 40 years ago. We were very fortunate that our core team came out of our panaskera mine, which has been running for 126 years uninterrupted. And so there's that mine and there's a mine in Austria called Midasil, which has been going for nearly 50 years now, where that knowledge still exists. But outside of that, there's really no consultant you can call, no book you can go to. It's an extremely difficult metal to work. So that's really our expertise. The demand and supply globally now, Lois, is, if I understand correctly, China, the big supplier and the big consumer, are things shifting a bit? I think that the one thing you say about tungsten is that its demand curve is consistent and has been now for the last two decades. We see a 3% increase every year in demands, just globally. It's a set of watch buyers. What we have is China, obviously, is the largest producer of a concentrate, which they cannot export from China, but they can downstream their products and then export that. And they are obviously a voracious consumer of it. But you have to look at who the customers are within the West. And they are the blue-chip companies that you can only dream of. The car manufacturers, obviously the aircraft manufacturers, the Sandvix of the world. But in terms of demand, it's 3% every year. Well, your supply is predominantly Chinese. So you've been acquiring assets. Your press releases earlier this year have been about acquiring another asset in Spain, another asset in South Korea, and so on. The price has been a bit depressed in the last while, and there seems to be more volatility, but it seems to be rising in recent months. Are you responding to that with the acquisitions? Well, I think that we've made these acquisitions because the current pricing environment has enabled us to see value in acquiring these sites. Because we believe completely in the strategy of consolidation. Because we believe with consolidation, you can react to the market. When things are good, you can increase output. When they're bad, you can reduce it. Up till now, all cluster mines in the West have been standalone mines. So one problem of that mine is a problem for the company. And in every mine, you always have ups and downs. This is the nature of being an operator. So our view is consolidation is the way forward. Just to refresh our collective memories, Lewis, please. You've got production now, and you've added past producers, and you've added in the case of the relatively new asset, Sangdong in South Korea, which I think you've characterized as being maybe the crown jewel of your portfolio. You're going to have production and bring on other production, and you'll be able to stage this. What are the plans with that portfolio? Well, I think that there are certain pressing things that we have to address. Firstly, going back to your previous question regarding price. The price, unfortunately, is governed by a mechanism that worked wonderfully well 25 years ago, when there was actually a fluid liquid spot business. But in these last 25 years, there has been an enormous amount of consolidation within basically our customers. And therefore, the amount of spot business is almost negligible. I think the last estimate done was less than 4% of all world trade is done on spot, and yet that drives the price. So we've seen huge volatility in this price because of this illiquid mechanism. In terms of our plan, Sangdong is the crown jewel. It is a mine that is similar to our Portuguese project 40 years ago. It has 70-plus years of reserves. It has the highest grade that exists out in the West. It's a balance of operations for someone else's page for the infrastructure. But our plan is to balance our output to the demands of our customers. And we have pretty much now total saturation of the Western customer base. So we will continue to develop and ship products at the request of our clients who feel that dependency on China is not a long-term strategy or not a dependency 100% for their raw material needs. And so they've been very supportive. But that is our strategy. We have no intention of bringing product into the market that does not already have a customer. Your customer's use of tungsten within their finished products as a percentage is relatively small. Is it not? Yes, it is. I mean, this is one of the factors that I think many people don't realize that this market is not price-driven because the amount of tungsten that they consume at the end is negligible. But at the same time, your customer is always looking for the best possible price. And so would certainly disagree with me on that comment. But they're not all that picky other than they want competition. They want basically a viable Western source that has a reliable supply track record. We've never breached a supply contract. We've always, you know, at the US Postal Service, can rain or shine and we deliver. Even if it's actually to our detriment, but a contract is a contract. When things are good, your customer takes all the material that he orders and he pays for it on time. When things are bad, we are expected to continue that process. And unfortunately, many people who are in the junior mining space fail to understand that as an operator, you can't always have it good. That there are times where you have to eat hamburger instead of steak. And so, you know, our cost controls came in last year when we started seeing after last summer prices start to weaken. We immediately put in our cost control programs and continues to do so. Because we can't just close up shop and say, well, we'll see you again when the prices recover. We have an obligation under our contracts and our customers have been very supportive. They pay us the highest prices from material and they do everything they can to be able to facilitate our survival when things are bad. In terms of delivering to your customers, it brings me now to ask about the recent announcement of acquiring Ben Bayo, the processing facility in Vietnam. You'll be now able to supply your customers with a finished product as opposed to raw material or what's the strategic fit for Ben Bayo? Our customers are in the APT Oxide Pounder business. They're not in the ferro tungsten business. We would never dare to imagine ourselves downstreaming into a product that competes with our existing customers. This would be, for one of the better words, completely unethical and would be not well appreciated by our customers. The idea of acquiring a ferro tungsten plant, a brand new ferro tungsten plant that produces a Rolls Royce spec of ferro tungsten, is because, A, it has Japanese clients who we know already through our concentrate business and obviously through our steam trains and sojets. And we know that the levels of loyalty these Japanese clients have to a product is extremely good. And secondly, because it's a way of protecting some of our margin when we're in a low price environment. So whether we supply it with additional capacity that we have through the company or we're going to have, it's a way of just capturing some margin to protect us obviously from this current situation. So it's a new departure for us, but it will be the only downstream departure that we did. We will not be looking to downstream into any other product except ferro tungsten. Lewis, what else can we expect in the way of news in the latter half of 2016? Well, I think we've obviously announced the debt financing from KDB, the Korean Development Bank, for the Samdong project. I think that our shareholders should look out in the next six months for the announcement of the equity portion of that build. I think they should also look to some dramatic reductions of our debt ratio currently. One thing that's always pointed out to us by those who aren't intrinsically linked with our Monty is that they consider our debt ratio to be close to 60%. It should be dangerously high. What they've always failed to really look at or analyze is the vast majority of that debt is through friendly hands. It's not punitive. It's low interest. It's unsecured. It's essentially been the vehicle that we've used to be able to grow this business without subjecting our shareholders, including myself, as a very large shareholder, to enormous amounts of dilution. But over the next six months, there is now a program in place to dramatically reduce that through a process of conversion to bring that ratio down close to the 40%. So I think those are the two main things that our shareholders should look for. The finalization of the equity for the Samdong build so we can commence cleaning the project in October of this year and a dramatic reduction in our current debt ratio to bring us back into levels that we consider to be acceptable. Lewis, thanks very much. It sounds like your interests are completely aligned with those of shareholders and that the story will continue just to unfold in a positive way. Thanks for updating us. As one of the largest shareholders in our Monty, I should be aligned with the shareholders. That's a great story. Thank you very much. All right. We'll look forward to the next update. Thanks, Lewis.