Royal Gold, Inc.

good morning thank you for attending today's royal gold 2022 second quarter results conference call my name is amber and i will be your moderator for today's call all lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end if you would like to ask a question please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at any time i now have the pleasure of handing the conference over to our host alistair baker Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development with Royal Gold. Alistair, please proceed.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning and welcome to our discussion of Royal Gold's second quarter 2022 results. This event is being webcast live and you will be able to access a replay of this call on our website. Speaking on the call today are Bill Heisenbuttel, President and CEO, Paul Lindner, CFO and Treasurer, Mark Gifto, Executive Vice President and COO of Royal Gold Corporation, and Dan Brees, Vice President, Corporate Development of RG AG. Randy Sheffman, General Counsel, is also available for questions. During today's call, we will make forward with your statements, including statements about our projections and expectations for the future. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from each statement. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in yesterday's press release and our filings with the SEC. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted net income, adjusted net income per share, adjusted EBITDA margin, and cash G&A. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in yesterday's press release, which can be found on our website. Bill will start the call with an overview of the quarter and the recently announced transactions. And Dan and Mark will follow with some detail on those transactions. Mark will provide an operating update for the quarter. Paul will provide a financial update. And Bill will wrap up the call with some closing comments. We'll then open the lines for a Q&A session. I'll now turn the call over to Bill.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the call. We are reporting earlier than most of our counterparties, so our operating comments will be relatively short. That will give us a bit more time to discuss the recently announced Great Bear and Cortez royalty transactions. Turning to the results for the quarter, I'll begin on slide four. Q2 was a good quarter from an operating perspective, and lower production at certain properties was expected when we issued our calendar 2022 guidance. Our financial results were solid with a healthy $146 million of revenue, strong operating cash flow of $120 million, and earnings of $71 million. Adjusted income was $54 million. Our margins remained healthy, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 78%, in line with where we were for the same quarter a year ago. This is noteworthy given the recent rise in costs as reported by some of the operating companies. and really highlights the advantages of our low and relatively fixed cost base. We increased our cash balance over the quarter, and at quarter end, we remained debt-free with cash on hand of $281 million. We have subsequently drawn on the revolver to fund the recent Cortez transaction, and Paul will provide some additional detail on our liquidity in his remarks. Our commitment to the dividend remained firm, and we paid 35 cents per share in the quarter. During the quarter, we also hired Allison Forrest into the newly created role of VP of Investment Stewardship. Allison has a long professional resume in ESG sustainability and responsible investment, and was most recently with the Resource Capital Funds Private Equity Group, where she established its ESG function. Given the similarities between our business and that of RCF, she is well-placed to be Royal Gold's point person for all of our ESG efforts. I hope you get to engage with her soon. I'd now like to make some comments on our most recent transactions. We announced two transactions after the end of the quarter and both fit our strategy and investment criteria, which we call the three P's, people, place, and project. It is challenging in our industry to find two opportunities that combine excellent project attributes, experienced operators, and low risk jurisdictions. As Dan will explain in more detail, these are royalty interests on gold assets that we expect will provide benefits to our shareholders over multi-decade mine lives. Our history shows that while we are always disciplined in applying our criteria for investment, we're also not afraid to be aggressive when we see world-class opportunities. And I believe that both of these will be significant contributors to royal gold over the long term. Whether it is 5, 10, or 15 years from now, I believe our shareholders will benefit from the prospectivity of these high-quality royalty interests. I'll now hand the call over to Dan.