Golden Star Resources, Ltd

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Golden Star Resources second quarter 2021 results conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Today's call is being recorded on Thursday, July the 29th, 2021. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Michael Stoner, Director, Investor Relations and Business Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, everyone, for joining our Q2 results call. Before I hand over to the team, please could you note the disclaimer on slide two? The presentation is already available on our website, so you can either follow on the webcast or with the PDF on the website. I'm joined today by Andrew Ray, our CEO, Graham Crewe, our COO, Paul Thompson, our CFO, and then Mitch Wassil, who heads our exploration efforts. And with that, if I could hand over to Andrew to commence the call, please.

Thank you very much, Michael. And good morning, good afternoon to everybody. If we move on to slide four and A quick reminder there of who we are, where we are, and also the updated plan that we put out earlier this year in terms of both the reserve plan plus the life of mine extension in the PEA, which takes us up to around 17-year mine life. And we'll talk through progress on that plan, the work that's ongoing, and where we believe we are in that respect. If we move on to the next slide, slide five, specifically on Q2 and performance in Q2. As you can see there, some of the numbers, as we highlighted a few weeks ago, below target, there have been one or two challenges come up during the quarter, which Graham will give a little bit more detail on, which we're making pretty good progress to resolving, which is good. At the same time, we've continued to strengthen the balance sheet, which Paul will go into a bit of detail on, and we're in a good position to continue investing in the business to deliver that plan that I referred to on the previous slide. On the next slide, specifically looking at the ongoing COVID situation, I think it was probably These set of results a year ago where we were showing the first quarter under COVID and I don't think anybody at the time thought we'd be here a year later in many ways in the same position, certainly as regards to COVID. There's been in Ghana another tick up in cases as we've seen in many other countries. So we're back to probably the sort of rates we were at in end of February going into early March. We've maintained all of our protocols, controls at site. Unfortunately, we've managed to really minimize any impact. Certainly, we've had no serious illness and no fatalities, which I think is the most important thing. And the business has had minimal impact, albeit we have seen in terms of logistics that getting people in and out of site, in and out of country is clearly difficult. a lot more complicated than it was, which has meant some skills are harder to get. And we've seen that in certain of the operational areas, which particularly has affected some of the development and meant that we've had to plan around that. So we're working with that. But fortunately, from a health perspective, minimal impact. On to the next slide, as I mentioned, we've had a number of challenges you can see reflected there. in the guidance. So our focus as we go through this year is resolving those challenges this year, continuing to invest for the longer term future of the business and really exiting this year into 2022 with the business back on track and where it expects to be.