Royal Gold, Inc.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to Royal Gold Inc.' 's 2026 First Quarter Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Alistair Baker, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Business Development. Alistair, go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to our discussion of Royal Gold's first quarter 2026 results. This event is being webcast live and a replay of this call will be available on our website. Speaking on the call today are Bill Heisenbuddle, President and CEO, Paul Libner, Senior Vice President and CFO, and Martin Rothfield, Senior Vice President of Operations. Other members of the management team are also available for questions. During today's call, we will make forward looking 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 these statements. 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, and cash G&A. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable gap measures are available in yesterday's press release, which can be found on our website. Bill will start with an overview of the quarter, Martin will provide portfolio commentary, and Paul will give a financial update. After the formal remarks, we'll 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. I'll begin on slide four. 2025 was a transformational year for Royal Gold, and the benefits of last year's activity are clearly seen in this quarter's results, with materially higher records for revenue, operating cash flow, and earnings. Quarterly revenue was $469 million, operating cash flow was $294 million, and earnings were $281 million. These were increases of 143%, 115%, and 148%, respectively, over the first quarter of last year. After adjusting for unusual items, net income was a record $233 million, or $2.72 per share, an 80% increase over last year. Gold contributed 71% of total revenue for the quarter. This is lower than what we've seen over the past few quarters, but it was driven by very strong silver prices during the quarter and not weakness in gold revenues. Our adjusted EBITDA margin remained high at 83% for the quarter, reflecting our low and stable cash G&A. We paid dividends of $40 million to shareholders in the quarter at our new annual rate of $1.90 per share. And we repaid $300 million on the revolver during the quarter, raising our total available liquidity to $1.1 billion. During the quarter, we also completed the restructuring of the Bear Creek debt and equity investments. In keeping with our strategy, we plan to rationalize non-core assets acquired through the Sandstorm transaction, and where possible, convert those into holdings that are more consistent with our royalty and streaming business. The Bear Creek restructuring was a multi-step transaction, and we were successful in converting those interests into cash, Islander silver shares, and royalties on the Karani project and Mercedes mine. We sold the Highlander shares during the quarter, leaving us with the royalty interest only, which is in line with our core business. With respect to capital allocation, we provided an overview of our framework during our investor day in March, which is to reinvest in our business, maintain a strong balance sheet and liquidity, and pay a growing and sustainable dividend. We believe our outlook remains strong with healthy metal prices and good growth within the portfolio, but we also believe in being flexible and prepared for changing market conditions. With that in mind, we have added two new tools to keep us positioned to continue growing our per share metrics depending on circumstances. The first is the new $600 million accordion feature under our revolver. If exercised, this effectively increases the total revolver capacity to $2 billion. We don't see a need to use this today, but we're in a healthy business development environment And this additional source of non-dilutive capital may be helpful if more large transactions come to market. The second is the authorization by the board for a $500 million share repurchase program. At times, we believe Royal Gold shares trade at a discount to what we perceive to be a fair value. And putting this program in place now will allow us to act quickly if we see a significant disconnect between the market value of Royal Gold shares and our view of that intrinsic value. I want to be clear that we view these tools that will be used separately and in different circumstances, and we do not plan to use expanded revolver capacity to buy back shares. We're putting both in place today to make sure we are positioned to respond to opportunities quickly and help us continue to execute our capital allocation strategy and grow per share value in any market environment. I'll now turn the call over to Martin to discuss portfolio performance in the quarter.