QCAAF (QCAAF) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

All right. Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the first quarter Quinsam conference call. It's only been a few weeks since the year-end call. So there's not a whole lot of news over the last number of weeks. The first quarter results are out, best quarter we've had in a while. We made over $1 million addition to NAV and NAV is now nearing $0.12 a share. Second quarter is, at this point, also looking good. Obviously, there's still 6-weeks to go. But as of right now, our NAV has advanced from the end of the first quarter by another few hundred thousand dollars. Key performance drivers over the last number of months, probably the two most important have been Nevada Organic Phosphate, which we've owned for quite a long time. We were kind of a seed investor there before it went public and have added since. It's made a great deal of progress. When we started out, it had a $1 million valuation more or less. It now has just closed a financing of almost $5 million and is sitting with a $30 million, $40 million valuation. So that's been a very solid win for us. We've owned quite a lot of it. We've also sold quite a bit, but we did actually participate in the financing last week. Another key driver for us has been EDM Resources. This was a very modest purchase going back about 2-years ago. It's a Canadian mining company. They're looking at restarting a past producer in Nova Scotia. It's a -- very advanced situation. It's got a huge amount of capital that's being expended, and it's basically ready to go. It's just held up by really permitting issues. We put $150,000 in units with full warrants at $0.11, and the stock has lately been hovering around $0.50, which when you take the warrants in consideration, mean this has been about roughly an 8x return for us. That one, we're quite optimistic about. The company has, we think, a great plan. They're basically waiting for the permitting to be done. They're going to update the preliminary economic assessment. This should all happen in the course of the next short number of months, and the plan that they have at that point then is to sell. So they are optimistic that they're going to get a significant premium to the current price. And I think that, that plan has attracted a lot of attention. And it's what's been driving the price over the last number of months. Anyway, so that one is a key performer. One that was an important performer for us was Saturn Oil & Gas. That obviously has done very well with the sudden increase in the oil price after the Iran conflict. We've exited that. And at the current time, I think it is correct to say we haven't got any oil and gas exposure. So as we look forward, probably the most important variable in the near term is the expected upcoming listing for Peninsula. Peninsula is a U.S. real estate rental business. They have bought thousands of single-family homes, mostly in the Northeast U.S. And they're looking to set it up in a REIT-like way with a dividend and so on. They are in the process of doing their direct listing, probably will trade, I'm going to guess, in July. It's possible June, but I'm guessing July. That is going to be quite a big holding for us. So where it trades is going to be quite important to NAV. We're carrying it at $1.30, which is where they last financed, and they have an NAV of around $1.90, and I understand they're looking to launch with a 3% dividend on the $1.90 NAV. So I can't really predict where it's going to trade. Hopefully, it's somewhere between the $1.30 and the $1.90, but that will be a very important thing to watch because it's probably nearing $0.02 of our NAV at this stage. So it's a big holding. It's an important event. And I think the risk of it not listing is quite low. There's really, at this stage, nothing that should get in the way. We have 2 or 3 other companies that are also looking to list in the next number of months, Longview Gold, Pelican, which is Pelican AI, which is a technology play, Bond Intelligence, which is also a technology play. These are all relatively small investments, and we think they'll all have a positive impact, but I wouldn't expect any of them to be hugely material just because they're not big enough to be hugely material. So that's really the lay of the land at this stage. Nothing to really report in terms of a significant transaction. But with Peninsula listing, that will be another big chunk of our longer-term private equities getting into the liquid stage. So we're in a much -- that will put us in a much better position to act. And in the meantime, given current market conditions, we're optimistic that NAV will be on a positive trend. And with that, I guess, ask if there are questions.

Roger can you hear me? It's John Lewis.

Good morning, John.

Yes. Nice to see a positive quarter and a bump in the NAV. So always good. And I appreciate that you did go into some of these mining. I wasn't sure at the time, but of course, that's where all the money is right now. So nice to see we're participating there. I guess what I'm interested in is -- and I'm assuming you've thought about it. But what would be the -- as far as a transaction goes -- an ideal -- the ideal investment for an operating company? What would it look like investment amount, industry? Or is that just...

Yes. Well, I mean, there's a couple of ways that things could go. We could do one transaction or we could do more than one. But in the traditional one transaction model, we would basically merge with whatever that entity was. Let's say, our NAV is $12 million. We would end up with 12 million of shares in that entity. In my ideal scenario, we would end up with a -- as a group, a very important stake, but not so important, that it means it's a very tiny company. So maybe it's a company with a $50 million value, we end up with 1/4 of it. And hopefully, we would agree to purchase it on terms that when it listed, we would get a bump over and above. So if we could find like, for instance, a roll-up of a conventional business or just an operating entity where we're getting in at 4x EBITDA, 5x EBITDA. And on listing, it's able to trade at 6x, 7x, 8x EBITDA, that would be an ideal kind of transaction where we've got a nice operating company with a good outlook, cash-generative and so on. So that would be one kind of transaction. Another transaction might be a company with a more modest capital requirement. Maybe they would look to us for maybe a couple or $3 million of financing, which we could give to them, and then we could take that equity investment and dividend it out to our Quinsam investors, thereby giving them the distribution they need for a public listing. So something like that, we could do a couple or 3x potentially. The trick is to find, again, something where we can get an investment where we think we're going to get a lift over and above NAV after the fact. I want to make sure if we do something like this, that we're getting into a situation that is relatively low-risk. So not very interested in cash-negative companies, for instance, in, let's say, life sciences, but also mining is an area that is tricky. Right now, it's very positive. But if you're in preproduction and you're basically spending exploration dollars and you're cash-negative, if equity conditions can change, you can have a very sudden negative movement. So I'm a little resistant to resources for our significant transaction. It's a different matter if we're making portfolio investments where you've got diversification. But if you're making one single very, very large investment, I'm not sure in the resource space, I would want to do that. Wouldn't rule it out. So I don't want to say that it couldn't happen, but that's not the ideal transaction at this stage given the options we're seeing.

Okay. I get that it's because the resource can come and go. We have a position in a company called California Nanotech. Now I know you're a Director of that company. So -- but it's had a round trip and a lot of money has been made on it. The company -- I'm just wondering if there's anything you can say in general to where the company is now and...

Yes. I mean it had a fabulous run. It probably got ahead of itself, and it's come a long way back. And at this stage, in my opinion, it's overcorrected significantly. The company has a great portfolio of capabilities in nano materials. It's got 2 main businesses, Spark Plasma Sintering and Cryo-milling. These are both very advanced technologies where for many years, we've had this great capability, but there haven't been that many commercial applications. And we've been doing a lot of research work with major aerospace companies, major industrial companies. It's kind of a Fortune 500 list of customers. But the trick has always been to find the sustaining commercial application. So we have not announced and we haven't got a significant sustaining commercial application as yet. But we're in discussions with a whole host of companies. And we've been in discussions with companies for 20-years at various stages. But we're of the opinion that these discussions are getting to be much, much closer to significant commerciality. We're seeing in a couple of industries, in particular, some really interesting things going on, and the one in particular right now is the small nuclear reactor business. So in the United States, Trump has said he wants the first small nuclear reactor to be commissioned by July 4. Not sure if that's going to happen. But there's a huge amount of money going into the space. So we did some boron control rods for a company in November, Valar Atomics, and it was a funny situation. They came to us in September with this very advanced requirement for boron control rods, and they wanted them in like 2-weeks. Anyway, we managed to get them -- to them in about 3 or 4 weeks in time for them to be able to do their test at one of the U.S. nuclear facilities where a window had suddenly opened up and the rods were a success. So we're now seeing a large number of these small nuclear companies looking for control rods and potentially other products. And we think we may be the only domestic source of supply of this product in the United States. And we think it could be a very interesting and lucrative product. So time will tell. Valar Atomics, after we did the work for them in the fall, they've just got an equity investment. I think it's $300 million or $400 million, I've forgotten which. But the amount of money coming at this industry is massive. And the commercial opportunity also looks extremely interesting. So like these are the sorts of nuclear reactors where they're talking about putting a small reactor in things like a data center. So the market for these is potentially extremely large. This is not like a large-scale industrial reactor like Bruce Nuclear or something like that. These are very, very different devices. So we think commerciality is coming. We think we'll have contract announcements in 2026, but that's what we think. It's not what we know at this stage. Okay. Well, if there are no further questions, thanks very much for your attendance, and feel free to call any time. Thank you.