Argo Blockchain plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Argo Blockchain PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Given the large attendance of this call, the company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to Tom Devine, Vice President of Investor Relations. Good afternoon to you.

Thanks, Alex. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation and remarks may contain forward-looking statements. For our full risk factors, please see our Form 20F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the year 2022. With us today for our discussion of Q2 in first half 2023 results are Saif El-Bakli, Argo's interim chief executive officer, and Jim McCallum, Argo's chief financial officer. And now I'll turn it over to Saif.

Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone, and good afternoon to our shareholders in the UK. It's great to have you with us today to discuss our Q2 earnings in first half of 2023 results. As mentioned in previous calls, ever since Jim and I took the helm at Argo, we focused on three key priorities, which are financial discipline and deleveraging, operational excellence, and growth and strategic partnerships for the sustainable future of the company. In my comments, I'll provide updates on our progress as they relate to these key pillars. With that, let's look at how Q2 shaped up. In the second quarter, we mined 456 Bitcoin and generated revenue of 12.6 million, which is an increase of 10% over our revenue from Q1 of this year. Our mining margin percentage came in at 36%, which is down from the 49% mining margin we achieved in Q1. There are a couple of drivers for this, so I'll take some time to address that now. Helios now has a fixed price PPA for a significant portion of the facility's power load. Because we get access to this fixed power price on a pass-through basis, it provides us with greater certainty over power costs going forward, and it also allows us to participate in economic curtailment. This means that during periods of the day when power prices are really high, Helios can curtail operations and sell that power back to the grid in real time. This generates power credits for us, which ultimately reduces our power bills. In Q2 alone, we generated $1.1 million worth of power credits. This is equivalent to mining an additional 38 Bitcoin. In certain instances where power prices spike, it can be more profitable to curtail and monetize that fixed price PPA than it is to mine. And that's something we're closely monitoring. And with the ongoing heat wave in Texas, we are expecting significantly more power credits in Q3. For those of you who live in North America, you know that the summer has been exceptionally hot, Texas especially. It has had several weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees. So that led to very high power prices at certain times. And although we were hedged for the majority of our load, we were still exposed to those prices for the portion of the load that is not covered by the fixed PPA. But the fixed PPA is ultimately a good hedge and it's proving itself to be very valuable so far for the third quarter. All in our average power and hosting costs for the first half of the year was slightly over five cents per kilowatt hour. For the second quarter, we generated an adjusted EBITDA of 1.1 million, bringing our half-year adjusted EBITDA to 2.3 million. As I said on the last call, cash generation is top of mind for us. We ended the second quarter with just over 9 million of cash on the balance sheet. So now I'll let Jim provide some additional comments on our financial results for the quarter.