SSR Mining Inc.

Hello everyone and welcome to SSR Mining's fourth quarter 2021 conference call. This call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the conference call over to Alex Punchak from SSR Mining.

Thank you, Operator, and hello everyone. Thank you for joining SSR Mining's fourth quarter 2021 conference call, during which we will provide an update on our business and a review of our financial performance. Beginning with the fourth quarter and annual 2021 financial results, our consolidated financial statements have been presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. These statements, along with the comparative restated financial statements for the two years prior, have been filed on EDGAR, CDAR, the ASX, and are also available on our website. To accompany our call, there is an online webcast and you will find the information to access the webcast in our news release relating to this call. Please note that all figures discussed during the call are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, so please read the disclosures in the relevant documents. Joining us on the call today are Rod Antle, President and CEO, Allison White, CFO, and Stu Beckman, COO. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Rod for opening remarks.

Thanks, Alex, and hello to everyone, and thanks for joining us today. We're going to take our time, as there is a lot of positive information that we're excited to share with you today. The highlights include, firstly, our record full-year production, lower costs, and significant free cash flow generation. Second, our substantial organic growth opportunities within our portfolio that have delivered a 14% increase to our reserves, which is a phenomenal success. Three, the publishing of our new technical reports, which lay out an incredibly positive 700,000 ounce a year baseline for our business, And finally, our upcoming execution plans for the near-term growth opportunities, which represent some of the highest returning projects in our sector. So first, starting off with our performance. 2021, which was our first year post-merger, allowed us to showcase the quality and resilience of our globally diversified asset base. We delivered nearly 800,000 ounces the production of the top end of our guidance range, while our all-in sustaining costs of $955 an ounce beat our previously lowered all-in sustaining cost guidance, bucking the inflationary trend. These results were a testament to our exceptional operational performance and proactive supply chain management, and that our performance resulted in peer-leading 2021 free cash flow generation of $444 million, or a 12% yield. As we had committed to our shareholders, this free cash flow has translated directly into capital returns, and we distributed nearly $200 million to shareholders last year, or about a 5% yield. Given the robust outlook for free cash flow generation for years to come, we will continue to deliver against our capital allocation strategy, and the recently announced 40% base dividend increase is evidence of that commitment. Second, in addition to our full year results, we released our updated resource and reserve statements. They included an impressive reserve growth of 14% or 1.1 million ounces year over year. This was a direct result of our successful resource to reserve conversion at both Arditch and Seabees Gap Hanging Walls. This achievement is even more remarkable given the cut-off for our technical reports did not give us the opportunity to incorporate much of the drilling that occurred last year. We now sit with over 10 million ounces in reserves with a weighted average mine life in excess of 17 years, anchored of course by Chirplo's 22 plus year mine life. Third, as part of our transition to becoming an SEC issuer, we're obligated to issue the SK1300 technical report summaries at all four of our operating assets. As I mentioned, while the timing was not ideal, given much of the positive drilling results from 2021 did not yet make it into the update, we're excited by the outcome of the new production base line for SSR. Together, the new technical reports have added more than 2.5 million ounces of gold production over what was represented in the previous iterations. This means our vision to sustain a production basis of over 700,000 ounces of gold production for at least the next decade has just become a reality. Finally, and on this point, we're excited by the prospect of improving this even further from the drill bit. The fourth highlight is in respect to our upcoming growth projects. As part of the Chirpler technical report update, we showcased both the maiden reserves and development plan to Chakmak Tepe Extension, or ARTIC, and initial resource and development plan at Chirpler Copper Gold Project, or C2. This report highlighted how the abundant growth opportunities at Chirpler can significantly add value and deliver high return, low capital intensity projects. Both Ardich and C2 will have at least 1 million ounces of production for modest capital investments. C2, for example, will provide us with 1 million ounces of production in its initial iteration for about $220 million of capital and an impressive IRR of 60%, while Ardich will deliver 1.2 million ounces for about $70 million of capital. Overall, we had fantastic results across the board during 2021. Just moving on to slide four, which is ESG. And I want to reiterate our commitment to our ESG priorities and initiatives. But before we do, I want to take a minute to reflect on a sad loss of one of our team members in Argentina. On January 26, Melina Estrada passed away when the vehicle she was travelling in was washed off a river crossing on Highway 70 while on her way home from the mine site. The three other occupants of the vehicle were rescued, but sadly Melina was not. Actions were taken to prevent a repeat incident and to support her family and those who have been affected. Our thoughts have and continue to be with her family, friends and work colleagues. ESG years has long been a core value and focus for SSR mining as it firmly underpins the success of our business. We are committed to the communities and to the environment and we continue to deliver against our priorities outlined in our 2020 sustainability report. We will review and refresh those priorities as we move into 2022 in a finalising and updated sustainability report for release in the coming months. Importantly, we continue to work towards our commitment to an action plan for achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We take this commitment and its path forward seriously and are baking it into our project development cycle, ensuring the longevity and quality of our assets. Additionally, we have already started to enhance our disclosures on climate and water and disclosed for the first time to the Carbon Disclosure Project. We are proud of our efforts to improve our approach to ESG and will continue to evolve as a sustainable business in the future. Moving on to the next slide in our performance highlights. I just want to highlight a few that are relevant to consider for the quarter. Operationally, we had another strong quarter with more than 210,000 ounces of production and rolling sustaining costs of $961 per ounce. Financially, we delivered adjusted EPS of 46 cents in the quarter. Our robust margins and low cost production translated to $149 million in free cash flow and $444 million for the full year. After $191 million in capital returns, and our continued debt repayments, we maintained a net cash position of $681 million, providing us with the required flexibility to advance our large organic pipeline while delivering continued capital returns in the future. We highlighted our growth portfolio with a number of positive exploration updates across the business, and we continued our successful track record in accretive and strategic M&A transactions, We increased our presence in core jurisdictions, including the announcement of the acquisition of Tiger Gold in Saskatchewan, and an increase in our ownership in the Copper Hill Prospect in Turkey. Additionally, our portfolio rationalization continued, and we realized over $235 million in total consideration through the sale of non-core assets, including our royalty portfolio and the recently announced sale of Piteria Project in Mexico. Moving on to the next slide. As we look to 2022, it's worth highlighting our impressive track record of growth and execution. In January, we released the inaugural three-year guidance that shows a strong production platform where we expect to produce over 700,000 gold equivalent ounces annually through 2024. This is a level that we believe we can maintain over the longer time horizon, given the wealth of exploration and growth opportunities which Stu will discuss in greater detail and is supported by the suite of new technical reports we released today. Moving on to our outlook for 2022. I want to highlight some of the priorities for the business this year. We expect our stable production base and cost profile will allow us to generate significant free cash flow while continuing to return capital to shareholders through our increased base dividend and share buybacks. As announced last month, our portfolio rationalisation progressed with the sale of Pitoria, and we continue to evaluate other opportunities to surface value within the portfolio. We've now completed the SEC transition, including the new technical reports that showcase our baseline production platform, and we've budgeted a 45% increase in year-over-year exploration then to further accelerate some of the growth opportunities. And on the cost front we'll continue with our continuous improvement efforts and supply chain management initiatives in order to limit the escalating impact of inflation. At the asset level we continue to invest across the business in several high growth opportunities including breaking ground at Arditch later this year and advancing the C2 project towards pre-feasibility study, and ultimately targeting first production in 2025. Overall, we're in a fortunate position with a plethora of exciting growth opportunities underway and on the horizon as we look to improve even further the new baseline production profile contained in today's technical reports. So a couple of highlights on the SK1300s. And we recognize there's a lot of information in the technical reports to digest. So I'll summarize some of the high-level details here and Stu's going to elaborate further in a few minutes. To start, we are proud to showcase the 14% year-on-year increase in gold mineral reserves driven by Maiden Mineral Reserve at Arditch and CB's Gap Hanging Wall conversion. Our current total gold reserves are now more than 9 million ounces. while gold equivalent reserves increases to 10 million ounces. With respect to the technical reports, it's important to note that these documents were a requirement of all SEC issuers under the new SK-1300 regulations. While we had expected to release the new master plan for CHPR around this timeline, a lot of the exploration and study work at CB and Marigold in particular was not yet advanced to a level to be included in these tech reports. At CHERPLA, we have released production scenarios with both a reserve case mine plan as well as an initial assessment case for the C2 project, which is similar to the PEA case for those used to this terminology. The reserve case incorporates maiden reserves from Arditch, delivering a 21-year mine life with a total production of 4.4 million ounces of gold. This represents a 37% increase in life and mine production as compared to the CDMP20 reserve case driven by Arditch, which adds 1.2 million ounces in total production starting in 2023 for just $69 million in development capex. On top of the reserve case, the initial assessment case outlines the potential development of the C2 project. This new resource provides us the opportunity to further increase and extend the production profile by adding a copper concentrator to the existing flow sheets, unlocking additional gold production from sulphide material. The initial assessment case showcases an overall 5.4 million ounces gold production profile with average production over 300,000 ounces per year in the first 10 years. With total capex of about $220 million, this production scenario drives a strong overall after-tax NPV of $2 billion and an internal rate of return of around 60%, which I'm sure you will understand are stunning returns. At Marigold, the life of mine planning includes 2.5 million ounces in total gold production over an 11-year mine life. We see optimised opportunities to optimize the production profile in the near term from targets like new millennium as well as a potential further upside by incorporating exploration success at buffalo valley and trenton canyon at cb the mineral reserve production profile results in a six-year mine life in 2021 mineral reserves increased 18 year-over-year driven by the conversion of the gap hanging wall and we see further opportunities to add additional reserves a long strike current mine development to complement and extend future production profiles. At Puna, the tech report reflects the recent outperformance at the mine, including throughputs nearly plus 4,500 tonnes per day. We're ramping up exploration activities with opportunities to complement the existing production profile to in-pit drilling and targeting other brownfield opportunities. And finally, the key message is the combined technical reports establish a baseline production platform where we see clear opportunity to deliver plus 700,000 ounces of gold equivalent production annually through 2020. However, we're not done yet, and with the abundant growth targets and all four operations progressing, we're excited about the ability to build on this incredible result today. So with that, I'm going to turn the call over to Alison. She's going to discuss the financial performance more on slide number nine.