Champion Iron Limited

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Champion Iron Limited second quarter results of the financial year 2026 conference call. At this time, our 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 need assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, October 30th, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Marcotte, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. Before we get going, I'd like to point you to our website at championiron.com, where you'll find the presentation we'll be using throughout this call. On our website, you can also find our MD&A, where we make references to forward-looking statements, as we'll be making several forward-looking statements throughout this call. Joining me here today includes our CEO, David Catterford, who's going to be doing the formal presentation, and also Alexandre Bello, our COO, in addition to other members of our executive team and some directors. With that, I'll pass it over to David, who will also do Q&A portion on the back end of the call. David?

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, everyone, for being on the call. Very happy to be able to discuss our second quarter fiscal year 2026 results. We had a few challenging quarters last year, but very happy to be able to announce robust results this quarter. So despite a... Maintenance on the rail of about 12 days. We still managed to hit a record concentrate sold So a very good job that we've managed to achieve. We'll be able to discuss this a little bit more in detail also Improved our production. I mean despite the fact that we had semi-annual shutdowns I think the team did a fantastic job in being able to understand a little bit better the harder ore that we have and and not only improve in terms of the plants' uptime, but also be able to work on the iron ore recovery to improve despite the generation of slightly more fines with this harder ore. When you combine all of these together, it allowed us to reduce our cash cost to about $76 per ton. So as we've always said, we've got quite a lot of fixed costs at Bloom Lake. When we do improve our production, that allows us to reduce our operating costs in terms of Financial highlights managed to achieve $175 million of EBITDA and just over $56 million of net income, which also allowed us to declare our ninth semi-annual dividend of $0.10 per share. If we turn to community governance and sustainability, one of the important elements that we have achieved in the past few months is to be able to present the opportunity for Canada to be able to invest in the high-purity iron ore industry. So working with various groups on the federal level to be able to highlight the importance of investing in infrastructure to be able to help the Labrador Trough develop over the coming years. We've had quite a lot of traction on that side and been in Ottawa quite often to be able to meet with various groups, but I think the discussions are extremely positive. We also welcomed the new chief and his council to site, so we had two productive days. of being able to present everything we do and what are the next steps for Bloom Lake and other potential projects with the new chief and his council.