Marimaca Copper Clears Its Discount Conditions Ahead of 2026 Financing

• Marimaca Copper has completed a definitive feasibility study (DFS) on the Marimaca Oxide Deposit (MOD) and holds environmental approval granted in 2025.
• The DFS gives a post-tax net present value at an 8% discount rate (NPV8%) of US$709 million based on a long-term copper price of US$4.30 per pound.
• Management identifies no copper junior of comparable development scale for the company to price against.
• Market sentiment and share trading liquidity are the 2 discount drivers management places outside its control.
• A project financing package is targeted for announcement before the end of 2026.

Junior mining developers trade below the value of what they own for reasons that can be listed. Management at Marimaca Copper (TSX: MARI | ASX: MC2) has listed them: 9 conditions covering study stage, permitting, growth, execution risk, funding, jurisdiction, market sentiment, share trading liquidity, and how the market reads a board. Set that list against the company, and several entries fall away on work already completed. Two do not, and neither answers to anything done at the project. A ninth, how the market reads the board, management marks with a question mark of its own.

The Conditions Marimaca Has Already Retired

Several entries on that list are settled by documents in hand, not by argument. The 2025 definitive feasibility study (DFS) on the Marimaca Oxide Deposit (MOD) gives a post-tax net present value at an 8% discount rate (NPV8%) of US$709 million, a 31% internal rate of return (IRR), and a 2.5-year payback at a long-term price of US$4.30 per pound for copper. Initial capital totals US$587 million, with a capital intensity of US$11,700 per tonne of annual copper cathode capacity. Steady-state output is targeted at 50,000 tonnes per annum of copper cathode in years 2 to 8, against a 13-year mine life and a life-of-mine average of 43,000 tonnes per annum.

Environmental approval for the MOD was issued in 2025 following a submission in 2024, and the auxiliary permits required for construction and operation are progressing according to the master schedule. The balance sheet held US$147.2 million in cash as of March 31, 2026, with no debt.

Chief Executive Officer of Marimaca Copper, Hayden Locke, scores the company against the conditions he has just listed:

"Marimaca is financeable, and we have a significant amount of cash in our balance sheet to continue to push our projects forward. We're permitted, we have deep board and management experience."

Location closes out the group. The MOD occupies the low coastal range of Chile's Antofagasta Region at a low altitude of 1,100 metres (m) above sea level, 25 kilometres (km) from the Port of Mejillones and 40 km from Antofagasta and its airport, with Route 1, the national highway, and a power spur and line shown in the DFS layout, in the world's largest copper-producing country. Growth is the final entry of the six, and a 30,000-metre step-out and delineation drilling program at Pampa Medina had 6 drill rigs active as of July 17, 2026.

Peer Comparison & Price to Net Asset Value

The usual method for pricing a developer relative to its sector fails here because management cannot identify the sector. Copper candidates either come in too small in production terms to compare or too large to finance. No group of listed companies is at a similar stage.

Locke puts the comparison question back to the people asking it:

"I want to ask the question, really, who are our peers? In the copper space, there aren't really any juniors with significant scale development assets that can come into production, and so actually we don't see there to be too many peers in the copper space."

The substitute management comes out of gold. Construction-ready junior projects in that sector have traded well above net asset value (NAV), and management cites Montage Gold, a long way through its own construction process, as the right comparison.

Applied to its own study, that arithmetic lands close to where the shares already trade. Management characterizes the multiple the market gives a permitted, financeable developer approaching construction as 0.8 times NAV, and at that multiple, using a long-term consensus price of around US$5.00 per pound for copper, describes the shares as trading roughly in line with, or at a slight discount to, the MOD alone. The shares stood at C$7.12 on July 31, 2026, for a market capitalization of C$962 million. Management's illustrative funding assumption, an equity raise alongside an equal amount of debt, which it describes as conservative and more than needed, would lift the implied value of the MOD once the project is fully financed.

Market Sentiment Beyond the Project

The first of the 2 conditions management places outside its control moves on inputs that the company does not touch. Copper has been trading at or near all-time highs, while uncertainty out of the Middle East and Iran feeds through the global supply chain into oil and into acid supply, an input cost for the operation. Neither of those responds to permitting progress or to drill results.

Share Trading Liquidity & the Shareholder Register

The second condition operates on the shares themselves rather than on the orebody. Management describes institutions that want the position as unable to assemble one at scale, and as having internal limits on how much of any company they may hold.

On that second uncontrolled condition, Locke identifies buyers who want the stock and cannot get it:

"A lot of the smart money who would like to own our shares are finding it incredibly difficult to buy a meaningful stake, but also they have risk limits in terms of what they can actually own."

The disclosed register names Assore at 18.7%, Ithaki Limited at 14.9%, Greenstone at 6.4%, and Mitsubishi Corp. at 3.4%, as at February 26, 2026, against 135,156,927 shares outstanding as at July 27, 2026. Coverage runs to 9 research houses.

Ahead of the Project Financing Decision

A formal project financing process is underway, with market conditions supporting a competitive process, and the package is targeted for announcement before the end of 2026, as set out by management on July 17, 2026.

Construction is targeted to begin in 2027, on a 24-month build that would deliver first cathode in 2029. Management is targeting a maiden mineral resource estimate for the Pampa Medina oxides and sulfides in early 2027.

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