Fox Tungsten Ltd (TSX-V:FOXT, OTC:HPYCF, FRA:1HC) CEO Steve Gray talked with Proactive about the company’s strategic rebrand from Happy Creek Minerals and its sharpened focus on advancing its high-grade tungsten asset in British Columbia.
Proactive: Welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom, and joining me now is Steve Gray. He is the CEO of Happy Creek Minerals. Steve, great to see you again. How are you?
Steve Gray: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today.
Exciting news about the company — you've decided to take it in a new direction as far as the name is concerned. You've renamed it Fox Tungsten from Happy Creek Minerals. On paper, it looks like a logical decision, but tell me about the reasoning behind it.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's two things. One, we're trying to capitalize a little bit on the excitement in the critical minerals market, in the tungsten market in particular. Tungsten prices are at all-time highs right now, and there's been a lot of interest in the commodity. We're hoping to capture some of that for ourselves.
It's also a reflection of the focus of the company. In 2024, we sold our Happy Valley project to Metal Energy. So we refocused. We just have two projects now, and one of them is Fox Tungsten. We are focused on our Fox project in BC, and the new name change reflects that focus.
Last time we talked, we discussed what happened in 2025 and the work that was done, and how you were looking forward to 2026. Let’s reiterate what’s ahead, because there is a lot of work planned for this year.
We had a very successful drill program last year, but a relatively modest-sized one. We're hoping to increase that quite a bit. We're looking to do 20,000 metres this summer. That should roughly double our resource. We'll do a PEA and a resource update on the back of that.
With all the excitement in the tungsten market right now, now is our chance to accelerate development. We're going to have one more big push on drilling this summer, grow the resource as much as we can, then complete the resource update and the PEA. That will enable us to start advancing the project from an exploration project to a development project.
Lastly, for people not familiar with tungsten, talk to us about why there's such a need for it right now.
Tungsten is a niche commodity, but it's very important. It's uniquely hard and uniquely dense, which makes it a very good drill bit. For the same reason, it makes a good tank bullet. It's used in a lot of national security inputs.
Eighty percent of world tungsten comes from China, and there are no operating tungsten mines in North America. With geopolitical tensions, there's a huge demand to in-source tungsten production into North America.
We're uniquely positioned to do that. We have the highest-grade tungsten deposit in the world in southern BC, close to infrastructure and power. Our resource is 1% tungsten. To put that into context, at spot prices, 1% tungsten is about 14% copper or 11 grams per tonne gold on an equivalent basis.
So we have an extremely high-grade resource in the right commodity in the right place.
Quotes have been lightly edited for style and clarity