INTERNATIONAL TOWER HILL MINES LTD (THM) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

International Tower Hill Mines owns the Livengood Gold Project, a large, fully-explored but not-yet-permitted gold deposit north of Fairbanks, Alaska. A 2017 pre-feasibility study identified proven and probable reserves of about 9.0 million ounces of gold plus another 4.6 million ounces of measured and indicated resources, using a gold price assumption of $1,680 to $1,800 an ounce that is well below where gold has traded recently. The company has never produced or sold anything. It has no revenue, and every dollar of spending each year has gone to exploration, engineering, environmental baseline work and the overhead needed to keep the project alive while it works toward a construction decision that has not yet been made. Because the company books its exploration and permitting spending as an expense as it is incurred, rather than capitalizing it, there is essentially no depreciation and no capital spending to separate out. That makes the accounting simple in one respect: the owner earnings figure we use each year is, in practice, equal to the reported net loss, after adding back the modest non-cash stock compensation and reversing the small swings in receivables and payables, both of which wash out. Over 2020 through 2025 that loss ran between roughly $3.0 million and $6.0 million a year, funded entirely by issuing new shares. That funding pattern just changed materially. In January 2026, after the fiscal year covered by the latest annual report, the company raised about $118 million, split between a public stock offering and a placement to funds affiliated with Paulson & Co., a long-time shareholder that has backed the company since 2016 and has board representation. Management has stated the money is earmarked, over the next several years, for roughly $50 million of feasibility and technical studies, $35 million of permitting and community engagement, and the remainder for legal, land and general costs. In other words, the company is entering a materially more expensive phase of trying to advance the project, not a phase of generating cash. All three cases below are built the same way: as a continuation of that spending, because that is what the filings actually support. None of them assume the mine gets built or starts selling gold within the ten-year window used here, because no feasibility study has been completed, no construction decision has been made, and no permits for building a mine have been applied for or granted -- only routine exploration permits exist today. Without a dated commitment to build and a specific timetable, projecting future gold sales would be speculation, not valuation, so no case includes any. The base case assumes the company spends through the roughly $118 million raised over about five years, then settles into a smaller, ongoing spending level -- higher than its old baseline, since it will still be carrying a bigger organization through permitting -- funded, as it always has been, by issuing more shares. The bear case assumes the same program runs somewhat over its stated budget (the company itself notes its 2026 budget has not yet been finalized, and separately warns that further share issuance, and the dilution that comes with it, is likely) and that a slower, more contested permitting path keeps spending elevated for longer. The bull case assumes the disclosed program is executed efficiently and, once the feasibility and permitting work is substantially done, the company is able to scale back to a leaner care-and-maintenance level while it waits for a future financing or construction decision that is outside the ten-year window we can responsibly forecast. Beyond ten years, nothing in the filings lets us say what happens, so nothing is added or assumed one way or the other; the story simply stops where the evidence does. Discounting that spending at a flat 6% over ten years, current value works out to about -$0.44 a share in the bull case, -$0.47 in the base case and -$0.58 in the bear case. These are not typographical errors -- a company with no revenue and no dated path to revenue is, by this kind of cash-flow math, worth less than zero on its own, because it is projected to keep spending shareholder money with nothing evidenced coming back within the forecast period. That is a statement about the operating entity only. It says nothing about the in-ground gold itself, which is real and substantial, or about the January 2026 placement by a long-term shareholder at a much higher price than the company's stock has fetched in past financings. That placement rests on the deposit eventually being permitted and built; this analysis cannot responsibly put a number on that outcome, because there is no evidenced date, no completed feasibility study and no permit in hand to build on. Given that, the cash-flow math alone supports no margin-of-safety price. What would change that is a specific, dated development: completion of an updated, bankable feasibility study showing the project is economic at current gold prices, together with a real production decision and visible progress through the formal state and federal permitting process (rather than the exploration-only permits the company holds today). Once a start date, or even a credible permitting timetable, can be pointed to, the case could be rebuilt around it. Until then, the shares are best understood as an option on that future event, not as a claim on cash the business is generating or is on a dated path to generate. One more item worth flagging plainly: the company has run at a loss for its entire history and carries an accumulated deficit of roughly $278 million. That alone might raise a going-concern question. It should not here: the company raised over $118 million in cash in January 2026, on top of its existing balance, and management states it has sufficient resources for at least the next twelve months.