Grupo México

I think Traccion announced a tender offer for its stocks, which is worth commenting on.

And Grupo México closed its transaction, taking over Savi Energía, making it one of the largest independent power producers in Mexico.

So why don't you kick off, Eduardo, with Liverpool?

Yeah, sure.

I'd take a little while still.

Yes, I mean, I don't think that a spinoff is likely because, of course, they bought out the minority interest in Grupo Microtransporte, so they went the other way.

So it seems that he wants to put everything into Grupo México and he has the money.

So there would be really no point.

Also within the Copper Triangle, there's only three copper smelters in the whole United States and two of them are right here.

One just north of us owned by Freeport and one just south of us owned by Grupo Mexico.

So it's an amazing place to be.

We're finding unbelievable amounts of copper, both oxide and sulfide type copper.

Not necessarily, because remember that if you go to one of the established equipment manufacturers and you are a single asset developer, you want to place your purchase order and you say, well, I'll pay you double.

Grupo Mexico or, you know, Barrick or Newmont.

And no matter how much you want to pay, they're going to take care of the bigger client first, right? So that's part of the issue, no? So we've been moving early for several months now, placing a lot of these orders, advancing the work.

So by the time we make the final construction decision at Diambasut, for example, our timeline changes.

Absolutely, thank you, Rob.

Well, I started my career in mining through Grupo Mexico.

Grupo Mexico owns 90% of Southern Copper Corporation, one of the largest copper companies in the world, probably a third largest today mining company in the world by market cap, around 170, 180 billion market cap company.

I started 20 years ago with them, and I joined as the CFO for the group.

and i eventually became the responsible for the mining assets the group has a lot of other assets including railroads toll roads lots of infrastructure but at the beginning i started overseeing all the assets and at the end of my career i managed uh the mining division for the group And whilst there I managed tens of mining projects and ran sites across many regions of Mexico and Latin America.

Again, a lot of projects, projects were of various sizes and across multiple stages of development.

uh my first ceo job was the underground division of grupo mexico which is called industrial minera mexico and that's how i started in mining 20 years ago so so since then today i've joined i've been five years the executive chair of cinda i'm in several board of directors of many of the mining companies some i've been in the past uh just like southern copper and had been minerals in the past and i currently have other board positions today mostly within the electrum group portfolio companies of thomas kaplan and um another non-mining related which is brookfield the private equity um big uh infrastructure group

Great.

He even blocked, effectively blocked foreigners from buying Banamex saying, You know, I don't want any foreigners to buy Banamex, and guess what? No foreigners bought Banamex.

And then he didn't really like Grupo México buying Banamex, so he took over one of their minor, their smaller railway concessions and provoked Armando Laurea into a fight, and then he pulled out.

So, you know, the government always has... means to block an investment that they don't want whether they have this law or not um but so i don't from my perspective believe it's not a big big game changer but it does give them more power maybe it's there to stop the chinese maybe it's there to give them you know more um discretion over who they like and don't like but um And nor can one argue that this is, you know, particularly or specifically Mexican because the US obviously has the same safeguards as does the EU.

So really the devil is how it's going to be implemented and whether it's going to be done in a fair and transparent and predictable way or not.

the fairway.

Right on the fairway, right next to San Martin from Grupo Mexico, which is an incredible, incredible copper project without a mill.

So it gives us a lot of optionality there as well.

It's about 19 million ounces historically.