Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Ximen Mining (TSX-V: XIM) CEO Chris Anderson on the Ximen Story & 2019 Plans for the Flagship Brett Gold Project in BC

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Ximen Mining (TSX-V: XIM)(OTC: XXMMF), Mr. Chris Anderson. Chris, how are you again this afternoon?

Chris Anderson: Excellent, Gerardo. Thanks for having me on the show.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you for coming on. This is a story that's new to our readers and listeners. You're doing something that is intriguing to me. One, you have a great share structure. I want to talk about that here in a bit but two, you have a district-scale precious metals exploration asset, the Brett property that you're actually, unlike a lot of resource companies, exploring and you have pretty aggressive plans in 2019. I'd love to talk about that. There's also a lot of history tied in to the Brett property, some pretty spectacular numbers from the property. Before we get into that, I would love for you to just provide a brief overview of the company and then let's talk the flagship in 2019.

Chris Anderson: Absolutely. Ximen Mining is focused in precious metals in southern British Columbia. We have three assets in the company. We own them all 100%. Since the market has been fairly tough, we've made a decision that we wanted to use our geological expertise to assemble assets and then what we did was we decided to option two of these assets out to other public companies. We got some cash and stock on an annual basis on two of our projects that we own 100%. Then our main asset is the Brett project, which is one of the late discovered epithermal discoveries in southern British Columbia that's been yet unmined.

The Brett project has had about 186 diamond drill holes put into it and it's got a 1,500-foot drift done and it's already had a bulk sample done that was done at surface. I've overseen two of the drill programs that have been done in there in 2014 and again in 2016 when we did some drilling in there. Recently we just opened up the portal that's been closed off for a while, we opened that up in November. Right now, we're in the stages of doing some permitting so we can go in and put some underground drill stations in and drill along some of the parallel structures.

Some of the holes that have been drilled in here, what kicked the property off originally was an RC drill hole, 235 feet at 2 ounce. They just hit a sweet spot within the system. The diamond drilling, the best hole into this one structure here, the Main Shear, they call it the Main Shear because it's only one of many we're assuming, is 55 feet of 1 ounce. In one of the parallel structures that we're chasing on the underground side, the best hole that's into that is 4.9 ounces over 1.3 meters. Rather than doing some more surface drilling, we want to get in underground and drill along and try and delineate that structure from underground.

2014, we did some regional exploration within the camp and we've assembled a fairly large land package there. We've done some regional drilling but we've got some very good, comparison numbers to something like Blackwater with low disseminated gold, 30 meters of 1.8 grams. But nobody's going to be opening an open pit up in that area.

We're chasing high grade, that's what we're focused on. The property itself, we've paid several million dollars for it now and we own it and we've just cleared the NSR that was outstanding on it in November. Due to market conditions, we've sat back for the last two years we've been not doing any marketing on it. We've been focusing on cleaning the company up. We had some work to do there and then we in November, well in October basically, we were looking at the landscape and made a decision that is was probably about time that we start to do a little bit of marketing on the company. We felt that we should stick our head out of the sand and let the world know that we've got everything going in pretty good shape. The company's debt free. We own all our assets and we're ready to go to work.

The North American markets, as you're probably familiar with, a lot of the retail market was consumed with Bitcoin and then with cryptocurrencies and with the marijuana stocks. We took a focus and kicked off our marketing in Europe. We started with the Munich show in Germany. I have been spending a fair amount of time over there making introductions and head roads into the European market and it seems to have worked well for our market.

The other thing we've done recently was we brought on – we have a great team with us – but we added a couple other gentlemen. We brought on Dr. Matt Ball who's very familiar with southern British Columbia gold deposits and he's been involved in active mining operations. So we wanted to bring in him to help delineate and provide us with some direction on the geological side. Dr. Matt Ball has now joined us, he's the VP of Exploration for the company.

Just recently, as of yesterday, we announced another gentleman that's joined the team, Lloyd Penner. Lloyd's got a 30-year mining history around the world, but specifically in high-grade gold, narrow vein mining as well as underground mining. He's been involved in some operations, I think he ran the QR mill here in BC. He's been working with Dr. Matt Ball to advance our permits and help us get our underground program that we want to get organized for the Brett.

There's a couple of things. Our share price has done fairly well recently. We've had on the radar several other key assets in the area and have provided that we maintain our capital structure. It's one of the cornerstones that we want to make sure we do.

Gerardo Del Real: And it's a good one, by the way. Love to get into the capital structure in a second.

Chris Anderson: Sure. What we're using right now is we want to use our structure basically to help acquire some other key assets that may be very near term to production. One of them that we announced that we're working on right now is the Kenville Gold Mine, which is near Nelson. They were almost ready to go, they were three months away from breaking the ground and Lloyd Penner, who's joined our team, was the one spearheading that when they ran out of money. We're looking at acquiring that and you might want to follow us closely on that one.  They got a 43-101 with about 300,000 ounces in it. That's a very interesting project that we're looking at. And that's something that's come up only because we can use our share price towards the acquisition.

That's kind of a quick overview. One of our projects which is called the Gold Drop has recently made some significant headlines. We've optioned that off to a company called GGX Gold and this year we put out some drill results there. We got 7.3 meters of over 4 ounce gold. It made the seventh best gold drill hole in the world 2019. Another interesting thing about it was it comes with another element called tellurium. And tellurium's used in the cadmium tellurium solar panels. The market for tellurium is increasing significantly and we probably got there some of the best drill holes, or within the top 10 drill holes in the world. Along with the gold, it was running I think an average of around 800 grams per tonne over 7 meters. That clawed vein that they're drilling there in GGX is one of many high-grade gold veins that we've delineated in Ximen while we were working the property over the Gold Drop area in Greenwood BC, which is a very friendly mining camp. Right near the border. There's a couple options on mills.

One of them is the mill that Kinross has in Buckhorn across the border. And then there's another mill that's in the about five clicks away, it's called the Golden Dawn mill. Then a company called Golden Dawn, the CEO of that company recently, last year, had a stroke so the company's been off the rails for a little bit. You'll see my name there. I've stepped in as interim CEO on that company. That's another topic. Potentially it's a brand new mill. It's only operated for about eight months and it's one of the only two line tailings pond in the province. There's an opportunity there for Ximen to develop some assets to go for production.

Our option partner has recently announced on Sunday that they've gone back in there drilling. They're drilling there now. And then our other asset which is up in Treasure Mountain, that's fully permitted and we expect that there'll be a drilling program on that this summer as well. Maybe in the next couple of months. Within Ximen there's pretty steady flow of news because on all three of the assets that are currently in the company, they should all have drill programs running on them this year. Which is exciting for us, an exciting value created for our shareholders we think as well.

Sorry I rambled on there a little bit, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: That was great history, Chris. Can you provide just a brief, just for context, a brief snapshot of the share structure and the market cap right now? Because in light of all of that exploration upside and again, these aren't greenfield properties, these are what at one time were some of the largest properties in the regions. Can you provide a quick snapshot, an overview of the share structure and where the market cap is today?

Chris Anderson: Yes. I think I'm still one of the largest shareholders personally. Friends and family are involved in there as well. We've got 32 million shares out. Recently with the appreciation of the stock price, we've had a series of warrants that have been exercised at 18 cents, 25 cents, 30 cents, 50 cents. That's over the last quarter. The stock has seen a nice rise from 20 cents up to, we were 83 cents yesterday and today I think we're in the mid-70s. The last financing we did was no warrants, no finders fees, was done at 60 cents.

We've been trying to manage that capital structure going forward so that we can really create value for the shareholders and I'm extremely motivated to do so. I guess you can figure that out why.

Gerardo Del Real: You should be commended for that, Chris, because again, in these tough markets, to see a financing done at a premium of what shares traded at months before and without a warrant to limit the dilution, I think shareholders should obviously take note and see that interests are aligned. You of course, being if not the largest, one of the largest shareholders in the company, obviously aligns interest with shareholders as well. It's good to have skin in the game.

Chris Anderson: Yes. I tell you that I'd really like to see, we've got some warrants at a dollar and I'd really like to see those warrants get exercised, sooner rather than later. Hopefully we can continue on this positive path we've been working towards because that would be preferable over doing a massive equity financing at the moment but we'll see.

Anyways, things are going good. We've got money in the bank. We got enough to do our work programs and we own all our assets and we're debt free and we got cash payments coming in from our two option partners and we got a good amount of news flow going forward on all our projects coming in and we're looking at some strategic assets that I really think are going to add some value, should we be successful in acquiring them. I don't know what else you want me to say here, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: I think that's it. That's a lot of shots on goal for a company that has a market cap of roughly $23 million. Let me ask you this. In regards to the Brett property, you mentioned that the permit application would be filed this month, to extend the historic mine drift along the trend of the Main Zone. How long do you anticipate that process to play out?

Chris Anderson: I think probably within 60 days that we'd be ready to go.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic. We can expect hopefully some drills turning within hopefully within the next couple of months at Brett and of course the partners that you have at the other projects are going to provide some shots on goal as well.

Chris Anderson: Yeah, yep. One of them is already drilling now.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Well, Chris, there's a lot to like. I encourage everybody to go to the company's website. We will make sure we post a link. Is there anything else that you'd like to add, Chris? And I'm hoping to have you back on soon as the news flow continues. You've obviously executed very, very well in very, very tough market. I can't imagine what you'll be able to do if we get what I think is going to an exciting second half of the year in the precious metals space.

Chris Anderson: I'm looking to forward to a positive market. I think when the market turns, we'll be in good shape to take advantage of that. But no, there's nothing else I think I need to add at the moment.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Chris, thank you so much.

Chris Anderson: You're welcome. Thank you.