Evolution Mining Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Evolution Mining half year 22 results. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you'll need to press the start key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I'd like to now hand the conference over to Martin Cummings, General Manager of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

thank you ben good morning and welcome to the evolution mining fy 22 first half results and december 2021 mineral resource and all reserve update conference call as ben mentioned my name is martin cummings and joining me on the call today we have jake klein our executive chairman laurie conway our cfo and finance director and glenn masterman our vp discovery and business development today we released our fy 22 first half results an update to our mineral resources and oil reserves, and a presentation that covers both. On the call today, we'll be talking to the presentation pack. I'll now hand over to Jake and the team who will take you through today's presentation. Thanks, Martin.

Good morning, everyone. Really appreciate you joining us. I'm going to start on slide three of the presentation, which is titled Highlights. Since we formed Evolution in 2011, our strategy has remained the same. Build a great team, focus exclusively on Tier 1 jurisdictions of Australia and Canada, have a small concentrated portfolio of high-quality operations in well-endowed geologically prospective gold districts, and continually seek opportunities to improve the quality of the portfolio of assets. In that context, this has been a truly transformational period for evolution as we have achieved a genuine step change in the quality of our portfolio. Our average mine life is now over 14 years with good geological upside and we have consolidated our ground positions in each of the world-class districts in which we operate. Our avatar margin of 44% in the first half remains very strong, with improvements expected from ownership of 100% of Ernest Henry. Turnaround at Red Lake yet to take effect. Our consistent focus on margins means that we continue to be conservative in our estimation of gold ore reserves and use a sector-low price of AUD$1,450 an ounce, or US$1,050 an ounce. and have today released record high reserves of over 10 million ounces and resources of close to 30 million ounces. Importantly, we continue to return money to shareholders with our 18th consecutive dividend declared of 3 cents per share fully franked. This leaves us well-positioned for a very strong second-half performance, and our FY22 production and cost guidance remains unchanged. Turning to slide four, titled Accelerating Sustainability. Delivery of strong financial outcomes needs to be built on strong foundations. Our progress in the area of sustainability is respected by our people and communities and is also being recognised by external agencies, which is encouraging. We are proud of our relationships with the communities and our First Nation partners and the shared value projects that we have committed to. It's this improvement and ongoing commitment that will continue to underpin our relevance for decades to come. We also recognize our obligation to provide a healthy and safe working place for our people, a place that's safe both physically and mentally. I acknowledge and welcome the media attention that this topic is currently receiving. At Evolution, we are supportive of the opportunity to actively discuss our performance and how we can do better. It is only through our commitment to providing a workplace that is free of bullying, harassment and prejudice that we as a company and as a sector will truly be the best we can be. Moving to slide five, titled Creating Real Shareholder Value. Our strategy of focusing on quality over quantity and margins over volume, in our view, is the pathway to being able to generate sector-leading returns on the capital we deploy. You can see the double-digit returns we have consistently achieved whilst also extending the mine life at our cornerstone operations. These mine life extensions have been achieved through the drill bits or accretive transactions that have generally been negotiated on a bilateral basis and which add genuine value. This, in our view, is the holy grail in our industry and is the true measure of a gold company's performance over the long term. Cal and Red Lake now have mine life visibility of close to 20 years, and Ernest Henry and Mangari in excess of 10 years. This provides us a great platform to astutely allocate capital and deliver on the outstanding organic growth opportunities we have in front of us. On slide six, we outline the transformation of our portfolio. There have been lots of calls for consolidation in the gold sector. In the background, we have quietly been doing this. actively securing and expanding our positions in areas we understand and we believe in the geological upside. At CAL, we are on track to grow this operation to 350,000 ounces of low-cost production. The underground project is on schedule and budget, and we have commenced studies on being able to continue production from the open-pit resources. At Red Lake, we took advantage of a window of opportunity to consolidate the district by acquiring the adjacent Battle North assets. This quarter, we are making encouraging progress in the turnaround of Red Lake. Laurie and I are looking forward to visiting the site next week. At Ernest Henry, the integration is going well with a positive response from the local workforce and community. We've kicked off the pre-feasibility study to extend the mine life and have decided to extend the study a further 100 metres below what is considered in the concept study which was completed by Glencore and anticipated a four to five year mine life extension. As you'll hear from Glen, we are excited about the geological potential of Ernest Henry. The consolidation of the Manggari district with the acquisition of the Kandon and EKJV interests have opened up an exciting range of opportunities for us at that operation. A pre-feasibility study has been completed around an expansion of the mill to 4.2 million tonnes per annum and unlocks the rich mineral endowments of the district to achieve production of 200,000 ounces for at least 12 years. Recognising the opportunity, yesterday the Board committed $9 million to transition this into a full feasibility study, which we expect to be completed in the December quarter this year. As we discussed at the quarterly results, there are the headwinds of COVID and cost inflation. But as you'll hear from Laurie, these are well and truly exceeded by the very strong tailwinds in the price of both our core commodities, gold and copper. With geopolitical tensions rising and inflationary pressure in the US increasing to its highest level in 40 years, it is encouraging to see investors turn to gold in its traditional storer of value role. With that, I'll hand over to Laurie.