Contango Silver & Gold Inc.

Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you're logging in from today. I saw some early rising Australians on the list. So thank you very much for joining us. Appreciate particularly everybody joining us on St. Patrick's Day for a corporate update and Q&A session from Contango or related to this morning's press release regarding 2024 earnings. I'm joined today by company's president and CEO, Rick Van Nieuwenhuizen and CFO, Mike Clark. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. Good to see you again, Romeo. Awesome. So here's how today's going to work for the folks in the room. I'm first going to throw it to Rick for just a quick rundown of today's news. And then I've got some questions I'll be posing to both speakers. After that, though, we are eager to take questions from the audience. This is an interactive event. Please use that chat button on the bottom right of your screen. If for whatever reason we don't get to your question today, or if it's been covered in a previous event, et cetera, uh, all good. I'm going to send that chat transcript to the contango team. They'll get back to you as soon as possible. Uh, last piece of housekeeping. Today's event is also being recorded and will be available probably late this afternoon, um, on both six.com and also our YouTube channel. That's enough out of me. I'm going to throw it to Rick, uh, to get to the protein of today's events.

Uh, thanks Romeo. And, thanks everybody for joining us on St. Patrick's day. Um, We put out our annual one-year news release on our activities for the year, for 2024. It was a good year, I think. We produced more gold than we had planned originally. And our cash costs came in just a little, just a slight bit over our guidance of $1,200 an ounce. And so I think, you know, overall, it's been 2024 was a good year for production, getting Moncho up and running. We started production in July. produced just a little shy of 42,000 ounces. And as I said, that good cash costs. So, you know, for an annual report, I think it's been a good year for us. And we are off and running for 2025. We can certainly talk more about that, but we're in the middle of our, actually probably about two thirds of the way through the first batch of gold pour for 2025. and have three more planned for the year with a total projected goal production of about 60,000 ounces. So that's a quick introduction. Today's release on our year-end results are mostly for Mike to take credit for. So I'm sure there'll be lots of questions for Mike on that. And so, Romeo, we'll just open it up for the Q&A.

Awesome. Sounds great. So like I said, I got a couple of questions to run through first. I did want to ask a question. What were the factors you reckon that led Poncho to exceed that production guidance by over 25% in 2024? How did that come to be is really my question.