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.

Thanks, Rod, and hello, everyone. It's incredibly exciting to comment on another positive financial quarter for the business as shown on slide nine. I'd like to preface this slide with the fact that this is the first time SSR recorded results under U.S. GAAP, which is the basis of the accounting for the numbers shown here. I also want to take a minute to thank our team members for what was a major undertaking over the last month. This was an incredible effort across the business and involved almost every function in the company to get us where we are today, filed for the first time as an SEC large accelerated filer. As we take our first look at the US GAAP results, Q4 was another solid quarter operationally for the company. We produced over 211,000 gold equivalent ounces and had gold equivalent sales of over 218,000 ounces for a total of $408 million in revenue for Q4, bringing total 2021 revenues to over $1.4 billion. Attributable net income for the quarter was $127 million for $0.60 per basic share and adjusted attributable net income was $98 million or $0.46 per basic share. For the full year, Attributable net income was $368 million or $1.70 per share and adjusted attributable net income was $402 million or $1.86 per share. As Rod highlighted, we continue to deliver in all aspects of our business and are proud of the cash flow and returns that are generated as a result, including $609 million in operating cash flow, and $444 million in free cash flow during 2021, equivalent to a peer-leading 12% free cash flow yield. On the right side of the slide, I'd like to provide you some commentary on our reported 46 cents in adjusted earnings per share that are calculated based on the company's definition of adjusted attributable net income per share. We start with our attributable net income of 60 cents per share. and then make adjustments to exclude the after-tax impact of specific items that are not reflective of the company's ongoing operations. Each of those items is outlined in the waterfall chart on the right of the slide with the largest of the adjustments for $0.28, primarily related to the removal of the FX impact on non-monetary assets for the purchase price adjustment recorded as a result of the Alistair transaction. We will get into more details of this on the next slide as it's a new adjustment as a result of the US GAAP conversion. The remaining material adjustment is one you've seen before for 14 cents due to the fair value adjustment for inventory assets at Chirpler. This adjustment will not continue in 2022. The smaller adjustments are for COVID-related costs, other tax impacts, and transaction or integration expenses. Turning to slide 10, we can talk about SSR's SEC transition. Effective as of January 1, 2022, SSR mining transitioned to US GAAP, reporting as a large accelerated filer under the SEC. As a result, our full year 2021 financial results were released under US GAAP and were reported along with restated 2019 and 2020 financial results. On this slide, We have highlighted some of the more material changes to our financial reporting as a result of the US GAAP transition. As we have spoken about previously, our underlying business remains the same. Our basis of accounting has changed and overall, despite performing a very thorough analysis of the details underlying the business that make up our financial position and evaluating the accounting positions necessary to complete the transition, we only have a few material adjustments to highlight. A few key points to consider that are also listed on this slide. First, the equity component of convertible debt is reclassified from equity to debt and is amortized under US GAAP. Under US GAAP, changes in the fair value of marketable securities are reclassified from other comprehensive income to net income. This is adjusted out of adjusted attributable net income. Our reclamation and closure cost assets and liabilities have been updated to reflect the use of a company's specific discount rate under US GAAP and the concept of tranche layering required to complete the discounting analysis. This results in lower liability, lower depreciation of the asset retirement assets, but higher accretion expense. The net impact to the income statement for the higher accretion and lower depreciation is not expected to be material. U.S. GAAP does not allow for the write-up of impaired assets. Prior to 2019, under IFRS, the Perquitas Mill at Puna that had previously been impaired was written up when the Chinchillas Mine presented an opportunity to extend the mill's operating life. This subsequent write-up has been reversed under U.S. GAAP to reflect the original impairment. U.S. GAAP also removes foreign exchange impacts on deferred taxes. Under U.S. GAAP, when the functional currency, such as the U.S. dollar, is not the local currency, or is the lira in Turkey, remeasurement of non-monetary assets and liabilities is required. For example, purchase price accounting for mineral properties and equipment of approximately $1.2 billion, which was the adjustment created at the time of the Alasdair acquisition, is considered a non-monetary asset that is remeasured resulting in a book basis deferred tax liability that will never be deducted for tax purposes. This item is adjusted out of the adjusted attributable net income as it is only a book entry for foreign exchange on non-monetary assets. Deferred stripping is no longer capitalized and instead is expensed through production costs which increases cash costs and holds AISC relatively steady dependent on gold prices and the total inventory value. Finally, based on the US GAAP conversion, we remove the GAAP-related impacts attributable to the 20% non-controlling interest in Turkey. Overall, the changes associated with US GAAP regulations do not impact our underlying business, and outside of deferred stripping, are largely immaterial with respect to analysts' estimates and forecasts. On slide 11, we can talk about SSR's continued balance sheet strength. At the end of 2021, the company had cash and cash equivalent balance of over $1 billion after returning over $191 million to shareholders and $70 million in debt repayments that occurred during 2021. Ninety-six percent of that cash balance is held in U.S. dollars. We remain well positioned to continue our capital allocation policy going forward, fully funding our portfolio, focused on additional exploration spend and growth opportunities that align with our business. We continue to maintain a peer leading net cash to EBITDA ratio of 1.1. And the magnitude of our capital returns is best illustrated on slide 12. We returned more than $190 million to shareholders through the inaugural 2021 share repurchase program and our base dividend payment in 2021, yielding capital returns of more than 5%. As we have noted, our continued operational outperformance translated to robust cash flows in 2021, and we clearly aligned that free cash flow performance with our capital returns initiative. With our inaugural three-year guidance announced in January, we illustrated a strong production profile. Our board declared a dividend, which increased our base dividend by 40% to $0.28 per share annually, furthering our commitment of significant capital returns to our shareholders. As we continue through 2022 and look beyond, our capital allocation priorities remain investing in growth, maintaining balance sheet strength, and returning cash to shareholders. We will continue to be disciplined when executing on our priorities, both financially and operationally, as we move through 2022. And now I'm going to turn it over to Stu for an operational update.

Thank you very much, Alison. Before I dive into the detail, let me just comment on our composite production profile from the technical reports on slide 13. It is just the next step and a great foundation for us to leverage from. Remember that this slide includes C2 but does not include any production upside from our extensive near-mine and in-mine exploration portfolio. This year we've made a considerable commitment to increase our organic growth spend to make sure that we can define and show what we believe to be a much longer, stronger future production profile. I'll share my positivity with you as we work through the slides for each of the properties. Let's start the discussion with Cherfla on slide 14. We started building the Cherfla district master plans a number of years ago to help direct and focus the strategic mine development. We published CDMP 20 in November 2020, outlining Arditch as PEA case with an intent to convert it to a feasibility level reserve in the following year's technical report. As promised, in this year's CDMP 21 report, Arditch added 1.6 million ounces of reserves and 1.2 million ounces to our production profile, which was even better than the case that we laid out in the PEA. The production and development group and the Chirpler team have been busy with permitting and preparations and we plan to start work on the ground later this year. The cost of the project is very low, limited to infrastructure work and expansion of the Chirpler heap leach. The ore at Arditch will be trucked to Chirpler for treatment. We are still exploring at Arditch and it is still open. Based on the ongoing drilling, we expect that the resource and reserve will continue to grow. We also have some ideas and studies underway on how to extract more value from the deposit by improving recoveries. So there is still more value to be expected to come from Arditch. Additional to the success at Arditch, we have showcased an initial assessment or a PEA case with a first look at the next development of the Chirpler deposit. C2 project. I'm going to take a minute to describe the C2 project. Sherpa has a large amount of copper in the deposit both in and surrounding the resource and reserve. In the past this copper was assigned little or no economic value. After some successful drilling and metallurgical test work we changed the paradigm and re-looked at the mine assuming that we could leverage value from the copper. The outcome of this study was the highly accretive of the food project outlined in the initial assessment case. In the initial assessment case we add a small 1.8 million tonne per annum copper concentrate to Churpla. This will make both a gold rich copper concentrate for sale to the smelters and a gold rich pyrite concentrate which we will use as supplemental fuel and gold feed into the autoclaves. We're also adding a copper recovery circuit within the sulphide plant that will make a copper concentrate for sale. Adding the copper concentrator and sulphide copper recovery circuit has two big impacts. The first, and really obvious one, is that it adds direct value from the copper and gold recovered from the copper gold ore as copper concentrates. And secondly, The extra value from the copper allows us to make a much bigger pit. As we dig this bigger pit, we uncover a lot more sulphide and oxide gold ore to feed the existing oxide and sulphide gold plants, giving a longer life and higher production from these plants. The C2 project is being accelerated into feasibility study. We expect to leverage more value out of the project as we optimise the metallurgy and the mine scheduling. Chirpler is a fantastic asset. And in addition to Arditch and C2 upside outline of the technical report, Cherfla and the Cherfla district has a number of exciting and active exploration targets. Let's skip to Marigold on slide 15. Given the accelerated filing of the technical report, the recently announced exploration results at Marigold were not ready for inclusion. Marigold still delivered a strong base technical report with a couple of poignant features. As we mine out the existing high grade areas, there is a dip in production, especially in about 2026 and 2027 before red dot comes into production with a big jump in production in 2028. Much of the recent and ongoing exploration you saw in our December release is aimed at filling the production dip 2024 through 2027, especially the near mine exploration within the existing plan of operation and the current application to extend Valmy, including much of the new millennium exploration. In the longer term, we have extensive targets at Marygold, including Trenton Canyon and Buffalo Valley, which we do have some historic permitting, which may make them easier to accelerate. Most of our exploration is focused on delivering high-grade oxide ores, which provide the lowest cost, easiest development pathways. However, we have had some really interesting sulphide intercepts at Merigold, for example, those recently at Trenton Canyon, and have a hypothesis on a potential for significant sulphide deposits. Given this potential and the company's skill set with building plants and treating refractory sulphidic ores, we do maintain some exploration effort on the sulphide ore targets. This year we'll see significant increase in funding for exploration and resource at Merigold of about 20%. Please move to slide 16 and we'll discuss CV. A couple of key takeaways from the technical report. It more than doubles the life of CV. We had record production in 2021 of 119,000 ounces at CV and are budgeting for 22 and 23 to be successive record years. Both of these years will be over 120,000 kilo ounces, 120,000 ounces, the new normal for CV. While the technical report schedules the production to drop off in years 24 and on, we expect to add higher grade ore from Santoy 8 and 9, the current source of high grade ore, to the production profile in the later years. Santoy 9, for example, delivered some wonderful upside production surprises in 2021, continuing into this year as a great reminder of the potential for in-mine exploration. We are increasing exploration and resource development drilling at Seabee by more than 20% to make sure that we maintain the current production profile at this new normal. Additionally, we have managed to achieve good production performance improvements at Seabee and are baking those into the plan. Even with those improvements, we still have excess capacity at the mill, which we can take advantage of by building production rates in the mine. and at very little cost. Outside of the active mining area the CV district has a spectacular endowment of exploration targets at various stages of evaluation. We have a multi-year exploration strategy that incorporates the Tiger Holdings. Our focus is primarily on near mine low cost development with a modest spend still going to generative and target evaluation. One area that is bubbling to the top of our list right now is the Shane target, which sits just off the haulage road, close to the CB plant. You will hear more about Shane through the year. Please move to slide 19 and I'll give a brief update on Hoonah. Hoonah delivered a solid base technical report, which assumes the recently demonstrated improved mill percent performance at 4,500 tons per day. In 2021, we were busy at Puna revisiting the exploration database, some extensive field geotechnical, geochemical sampling and re-logging and re-assaying of some of the historic drill cores. We have some very good targets and we'll start drill testing imminently. First, within and adjacent to the Chinchillas pit, we think that there is good opportunity for expansion of the resource and we'll start drilling soon. After re-assaying some of the Cortadaris drill core, we have some hypothesis on potential extension of the deposit and value. As with the depleted Sand Lake well pit, we are seeing gold starting to develop at depth in addition to the silver and zinc. The GOs are busy developing a drill program that tests possible extension and value proposition. We also have some regional targets that came from last year's work, and we will put some effort into developing these as well. Please move to slide 11 for close. SSR has a very high-quality and extensive exploration portfolio, which we are aiming to leverage value in a structured manner. As we did with the Cherfla District Master Plan, we are strengthening strategic mine planning and charting pathways to a growing and long-term production profile. In closing, 2021 was a great year for the operations and development teams at SSR. We cared for our communities and teammates through another tough year of the pandemic. We delivered improved ESG performance, more than halving our total recordable injury frequency rate, and improved our ESG reporting, which was recognized by improved ESG ratings. The result, as always, from this improved ESG and operational discipline comes better production performance better production performance. And in 2021, we delivered the top end of guidance in a merger year. On the back of a lot of work, bucked the industry trend and managed to keep the cost down below guidance, grew our resources and reserves, and delivered a number of highly accretive projects for the business, which you can see showcased in our technical reports. We have a great team, great exploration portfolio, you can see on this slide, and a solid base which we'll continue to develop and leverage value from. With that, I'll turn the call back to Rod for his closing remarks.

Well, thanks, Stu and Alison. Definitely a lot to get through today. To summarise, 2021 was a year of outperformance for SSR with respect to our operating results, our free cash flow generation, our capital returns, and, of course, the outstanding results from growth. With today's technical reports, we have now delivered a robust baseline production profile with a clear opportunity to sustain our 700,000 ounces production profile into the next decade. We'll continue to build on that base in the near and medium term. 2022 will be another year of strength for our business, including continued robust capital returns and free cash flow generation. With a robust portfolio of organic growth opportunities, we expect our expanded exploration budget to help further identify and delineate an even brighter future that we've outlined today. So with that, I'm going to pass the call back to Gailene to take any questions you may have.

Thank you, Mr. Antle. We will now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. you'll hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Our first question is from Tyler Langton with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good evening, Rod, Alison, and Stu. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, you know, just maybe to start, I guess, with Chopler, for Arditch, I think you kind of were talking about production starting in 2023. Could you just provide a little more info on sort of, you know, if you need certain permits or, you know, other items to kind of, you know, to hit that production date? And then with C2, I think you said the next step was maybe a PFS, and I'm just kind of wondering, you know, sort of the timing that you're expecting for that.

Okay Stuart, so I'll answer that. So we've been permitting artich for some time and you may remember if you've been on some of these calls about half of artich was covered by the Chukmuk Tepe EIA which is why in a lot of the documentation and you'll see it called the Chukmuk Tepe extension. So the application for the is in process and we're expecting to see that come out in the next couple of months and then we'll have a number of local permitings that come on the back of that. At this stage we see our way to having those permitted to allow us to start work in the fourth quarter of this year and then progressing in line with what you see in the technical report and as always with the permitting there's a series of subsequent permits that come about We're writing the scope of work for the feasibility study for C2 now. We do have work obviously ongoing that came out of the order of magnitude scoping study work that we were doing through last year that's ongoing and we're at the stage now. We did use the SENCO to do the capital cost estimates and then we factored those based on the numbers that we had from the recent construction of both but we've got pretty solid numbers there, and we're at the stage now for much more detailed scheduling and engineering work, which we expect to have approved at the beginning of April and start work in earnest directly after that.

Great. That's helpful. Thanks. And then I guess just on sort of capital returns, Rod, I mean, I know the dividend, you know, recently the increase in the dividend, just any thoughts on buybacks and then Obviously last year you had a fair number of non-core asset sales. Is there anything else that you're potentially looking at or have you kind of divested mostly what you wanted to?

I'll answer the second part, Kyle. I'll let Alison answer the first question. So from the portfolio review process, it's still ongoing and we are looking within just to make sure There's obviously the obvious targets that you could ask about like St. Louis and others, but we're also taking that same discipline across the exploration portfolio. We're land rich. We have a lot of land around our asset bases and we continue to churn through that where the hypothesis might not have lived out in terms of our exploration efforts and we'll turn those over and replace those as well. So that churn will continue as normal course of business for us as 2022 rolls on. But we did do a heavy lift in 21. So I think the sort of larger scale opportunities have pretty much been done there.

And Tyler, I'll answer the first part of that on the share buyback plan. So you may recall earlier in 2021, we announced a plan to be able to repurchase 10 million shares. And we still have about 1.2 million shares outstanding on that plan. And our intention is to execute against it as long as it would be accretive for us to do so. So we will take a look at what that valuation constitutes and act accordingly.

Great. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

The next question is from Cosmos Chu with CIBC. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Radha and team. Maybe my first question is on Chirpillar and the growth potential here. As you talked about, the copper rich ore will allow you to open up the pit. How much of that potentially additional sulfide and oxide material have you included in your technical report today?

So, Cosmo, all of the material that's mined that's above the cutoff grade for feeding to the plants when we've made the larger pit is included in feed to the plants. So, the value of C2, although the copper drove us to be able to make the bigger pit. Most of the value comes from gold. And in fact, the concentrate that we make from the concentrator runs about two ounces. So it's predominantly a gold concentrate as far as value goes.

Great.

And then... I think... Yep. Sorry. Here you go, Scott. Yep.

Okay. Yeah, and I just want to follow up on the CapEx here. You know, $218 million at C2. You know, you have a very good track record in terms of delivering on budget and on time. But I'm just wondering how much, you know, inflation have you factored into, you know, your CapEx estimates? You kind of touched on it, but I just want to, you know, get a bit more, you know, granularity on it in terms of You know, how have you factored that in? There's also been volatility in the Turkish lira. You know, how have you accounted for that potential risk as you come up with these capex numbers?

Yeah, so remember this is an initial assessment case, so the However, I would say we've got a pretty good handle on what the costs are. We just finished building the flotation plant, so concrete and steel costs, particularly those which we can source locally in Turkey. It's a very cost efficient place to build things. As I said, Asenko supported us with the engineering work and then we factored that with good factoring numbers. at this stage. But we do have a lot of work to do and I think there's actually quite a lot of opportunity for what we end up with ultimately in the plant and how we might be able to leverage value out of the plant going forward. We've been looking at whether or not we would get a significant advantage by bringing artichore and some of the higher grade artichores, the oxidores, and treating those through the sulfide plant, either just grinding or augmenting them with sulfide to increase the recoveries and leveraging quite a lot of value out of that. But that's quite a large exercise in scheduling, which will happen subsequent to this piece of work. So I think there's a lot more to come from it yet, Cosmos.

Yeah, it's great that you brought it up because that kind of connects well to my next question in terms of leveraging the infrastructure, the copper concentrate. And as you mentioned, you've increased your ownership at Copper Hill. You know, things like that. Is that was that taken into consideration as well? Could you leverage that later on down the road in terms of some of these other sort of copper richer areas?

No, you know, there'll be some synergies from the business, of course, but the distance between the operations is is going to preclude us moving any of the material around. And with Copper Hill, what we see at Copper Hill is a very clean chalcopyrite ore that's really just chalcopyrite. And it's close to the coast and it's actually very close to the smelter. So we'll move it there. Chirp was also blessed with amazing infrastructure as well. So you might remember when you were there, we had a railway directly underneath the mine on the other side of the highway. So as far as the infrastructure for building a copper concentrator, it could be in a better place. A little bit more flat ground would have been handy, but that's all.

For sure. Maybe moving on to Marigold, as you mentioned, today's technical report was really just a base case, just based on reserves. Could you remind us, as you showed on the map, there's quite a few targets here in New Millennium, Buffalo Valley, Trenton, Kenya, and Vahmi, just to name a few. What's been included in this base case and what can we expect in terms of what's being included in, I believe, another technical report that will be coming out later on this year?

So pretty much the reserves as they were is all that's remained at Merigold, so just the existing deposits. The areas that we're looking to leverage going forward are the areas around the existing pits and you'll remember we also have an application for an extension to Valmy and that extension to Valmy was done at a much larger pit shell with regards to the application. So it takes in pretty much all of the new millennium and that will pretty much make it into that new pit. We're busy focusing on drilling out that area so that in the next year or so, we'll be able to include that into the reserve and then show that value and fill that gap that I referred to in the production profile before we get to CB. Not CB, to Red Dot.

Maybe one last question, just a follow-up here. I read in the MD&A that there's the potential for separate infrastructure for Buffalo Valley and Trenton Canyon. Maybe could you elaborate on that? Is that just getting it to a bigger size, or are you alluding to potentially for the sulphides? Could you elaborate a little bit?

One of the opportunities that's come up to really drive some efficiency and maybe some significant rescheduling at Marygold would be to build a heap leach at the southern end of the property where the current pits are and reduce the haul and then be able to use that also for Buffalo Valley and also for the southern pits from the existing Marygold deposits and then we would take the carbon from there and then take it up to the existing desorption circuit So we're just running through that at the moment. But we think that we might be able to, you know, squeeze some real value out of Merigold by doing that. But we haven't done enough work yet to really wrap our arms around what it might be worth.

Great. Thanks, Stu and Rod and team once again. And looking forward to all these different growth opportunities.

Thanks, guys. Thanks, Scott. Thanks.

The next question is from Ovez Habib with Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Thanks operator. Hi Rod and SSR team and congrats on a strong quarter and really thanks for updating all the mine plans with all the tech reports you released today. Most of my questions have been answered, but maybe a bit of a follow up question from last question asked by Cosmos. In regards to tech reports released today, you pointed out that these are all base case scenarios and did not include drilling that took place in 2021. Now, based on the info on hand and your exploration team's expectations, which operating asset do you see the most potential upside in the near term?

That's a difficult question. There was some inclusion. For Arditch, for example, the cut-off date was at the end of May, beginning of June for the drilling, and we had about, I think, a subsequent 104 holes there. So I think Arditch will continue to grow. We're sure that we're going to see growth around the existing pits at Marygold, so we'll leverage that over time. We're really excited about what's in CB and I think when you look at the numbers at CB you sort of see this higher production rate than a step off. We're quite sure that we'll be able to fill that as we've been able to do with the extensions on Santoy 8 and 9, extending those laterally from where the mine currently is and given that we do have so much headboard free capacity in the mill then we can put the slightly lower grade five or six grams is lower grade at CV, we'll use that to top up where we've got spare capacity in the mine. Ultimately, in the future, and there's a long way to go to get there, we'd like to see maybe another decline at CV and an all weather road and a material increase. That's perfectly conceivable at CV, but we've got a lot of work to do and a bit of exploration luck to go with it as well. But, you know, the indications are good.

Yeah, I think you can take it when you look at it across the portfolio. They're different, but they're all just as exciting as each other as we work through. I think what Stu's outlined here and what the team have done during 2021 has just been terrific in terms of prioritising and being very methodical and thoughtful in the way we've approached it. That's going to continue into this year and if we have time and obviously success you can see what we can do if we have the focus on the right areas and we do expect that to come from the rest of the portfolio as Chirp did say.

I think you should start to get excited about Copperhill at some point too. If you look at the drill intercepts we have there and it's open around it's a It's a nice high-grade copper deposit, relatively easy. It looks like it'll be easy to treat at daylights, so relatively easy access. So we're hoping we can develop that story pretty quickly as well, but that'll rely on getting access to drill.

Perfect. Thanks for that. And just to follow up on that, I mean, obviously we've talked about all this upside, apparently, in your current portfolio. Any thoughts on M&A? Any thoughts on projects that you're looking at, extensions to your existing assets or anything that's out in the market?

It's the same answer as I think we've always given. We will be thoughtful. We will look at We won't stop looking at opportunities that aren't in our portfolio that would stay on strategy for us to ensure they sort of complement the great asset base we have, but also the great fundamentals of the business that we've built and we'll progress them. Unless we talk about them, they're obviously not interesting to us and we're not talking about a whole lot. There's really nothing else to talk about at this stage, but we will keep looking.

Okay, perfect. Thanks, Rod. Thanks, Stu, for this, and that's all for me.

Bye. Thank you.

The next question is from Mike Parkin with National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Really, everything's kind of been asked, but... Just in terms of the exploration work that you're doing at Trenton Canyon and Buffalo Valley, can you walk us through? You've given us some pretty good information in terms of what you're thinking, but how can we think in terms of updates beyond exploration updates? Where do you target seeing resources starting to come together there if drill programs continue to show success?

I think that'll probably become more clear through this year probably into next year. Buffalo Valley, we did do a lot of geochemical work making sure that we hadn't missed anything. We were looking at the right places and using some different techniques. We have been drilling to extend the known resource that's there. We're also seeing some interesting things at Trenton Canyon and we're seeing a bit more sort of narrow bone, higher grade material there compared to sort of the larger emplacements of low grade that we see at other parts. And that would be sort of consistent with the way it was mined in the past as well, which was relatively narrower compared to the way we mine that now. So we do have a bit more work to do before we come out with sort of a clear development pathway there.

Okay, and do you have access to the historical drill core that the legacy pits were based on?

Yeah, so all of that data was handed over, as is the case when these things happen. A lot of them are quite old, so I wouldn't say it's perfect, but we do have all of that old data.

Because from my understanding, it was kind of done on a smaller scale, smaller benches. So cutoff grade is probably elevated. So do you see potential that some of that data could be kind of low-hanging fruit for you that you probably, I guess, maybe just given the age of it, look to confirm with some holes? But is that some of your thoughts that, you know, maybe low grade, but actually very good? in terms of what you mine at Marigold today and make lots of cash doing on a bigger scale?

I think if you're thinking about that, you probably think more about Buffalo Valley. We do get some anomalies in that part of the world with the drilling because when it was done, and certainly we see this at Trenton Canyon when it was done some time ago, where the grade was below the cutoff for We're going back and redoing analysis of some of those samples. That in part drives the drill plans that we're putting together for those projects.

Last question. We're seeing some tightness in drill crew availability in mostly Canada. Are you seeing any of that kind of constraint in Turkey or in Nevada?

We're doing okay. We've got all what we want in Turkey. Certainly the laboratories are struggling. Jim, the manager in Nevada, has managed to secure the drills he needs for this year, but it wasn't easy, I'm told. So we have seen that there is some tightness there.

Okay. That's it for me, guys. Thanks very much and looking forward to the next years.

Our final question is from Michael Superco with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanks very much and thanks for staying late for me here. Maybe just looking at the three-year guidance, Obviously, you had a great year in 2021 and almost at that 800,000 mark, but the outlook is lower over the next couple of years, understandably on sequencing things you've discussed. How concerned are you about that lower headline production number? And are there any levers you can pull maybe in 23 or 24? Is an 800,000-ounce year possible from the base you've established, or are you fussed about it at all?

No, look Michael, I think it's really just a consequence of the mine sequencing that we have. And particularly at Sherbley, if you look at the aggregation of all the operations, we had telegraphed in the last tech reports the life and mine production profiles for it, and it does take a step down while we bring Chacamec Tepe online. So it's as expected, and no, we're not worried about it. Our job has really been focused on creating a longer-dated future and trying to set that next decade out where we can sustain at least 700,000 ounces and give ourselves a very stable platform. If it goes to 750 and then 800 and down to 750, we're okay with that as well. But our priority has really been around targeting that 10-year plus 700,000-ounce production profile. You know, with the tech reports that have been published, you know, you heard us say probably about four times during the call that we feel very confident that we're going to achieve that. So that's really been a priority for us.

Okay, great. Thanks. And then very quickly on capital allocation, apologies if I missed it earlier in the call, but you're hitting your 52-week high or close to it now. Can you update any guidance on how you're thinking about buying back stock, where you'll be active, and maybe is there a point at which you'd rather do a special dividend than a buyback?

Yes, so thanks for the question. We do have intention to continue on with the share buyback program that we had started in 2021. We still have a few months left on that. program to repurchase shares and we also still have some shares left on that program to repurchase. There's about 1.2 million shares left. And then in addition to that, we will take into consideration the current market prices as well as the valuation for the company and reassess, you know, does it make sense to have another share buyback program or would we look at other options like a special dividend or even something else? We'll definitely be taking a look at that and just need some time to kind of work through all that based on everything that's come out today and all the information that we have.

Okay, great. Thanks very much. Have a good evening.

All right. Thanks, Mark. Thank you.

This concludes the question and answer session. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Antle.

Well, thanks, everyone. Obviously, a lot to get to today. So I appreciate your patience as we trawl through it. But obviously, a huge amount of really interesting, exciting news building on a fantastic 21. So I look forward to keeping you up to date during the year and talk more as 22 unfolds. Thanks, everyone.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.