Coeur Mining, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Coor Mining second quarter 2021 financial results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, This event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Departu, Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Core Mining's second quarter earnings conference call. Our results were released after yesterday's market closed, and a copy of the press release and slides are available on our website. I'd like to remind everyone that our press release, slides, and some of our comments today include forward-looking statements from which actual results may differ. Please review the cautionary statements included in our press release and presentation, as well as the risk factors described in our second quarter 10Q and 2020 10K. Now I'll turn it over to Mitch, Mick, and Tom.

Thanks, Paul, and good morning, everyone. I'll start off on slide three of today's presentation with some highlights from the quarter. Improved top-line performance was driven by an increase in gold and silver ounces sold and an uptick in our average realized silver price. These factors, along with some positive changes in working capital, led to significantly higher operating cash flow, both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. This revenue and cash flow growth was largely a result of a 27% quarter-over-quarter increase in gold production at Wharf and a 15% quarter-over-quarter increase in silver production at Rochester. Kensington's gold production was down slightly due to timing, and Palmareo's production was essentially flat due to slightly lower grades offset by higher throughput. Looking ahead to the back half of the year, we are reiterating our production guidance and expect a strong second half at each of our operating locations for reasons that Mick will touch on. Overall operating costs increased during the period, reflecting higher throughput and underground development rates, additional maintenance expense, general inflationary pressures, and a non-cash charge at Rochester. Mick will also provide a bit more color on these items in a few minutes. We continued to advance our largest exploration campaign in company history and established a new record for meters drilled in a single quarter of nearly 100 kilometers with 27 drill rigs currently turning. We highlighted some of our progress in a press release we issued back in mid-June which showcased a new high-grade mineralized zone at our Silvertip Mine in northern British Columbia, and more excellent results from our Crown Exploration Property in southern Nevada. Turning to slide eight, you can see we have upped our exploration guidance for the year to keep building on the successes we are having. We now plan to invest approximately $75 million in exploration in 2021, which is nearly 50% higher than last year's record and two and a half times more than our investment in 2019. We continue to view our investment in exploration, which is one of the largest programs in our sector, as a very attractive allocation of capital and an important differentiator. Continuing with the growth narrative, I want to touch on the company's two major development priorities, the ongoing expansion at Rochester and the potential expansion and restart at Silver Tip. Starting with Rochester and looking at slides 11 through 13, POA 11 is advancing on schedule with overall progress at approximately 31% complete and over 90% of the contracts committed, representing roughly $334 million of capital at the end of June. Like most companies going through a large capital project right now, we've started to see the impact of inflation in areas such as contractor labor, building materials, and fuel on a small number of remaining uncommitted contracts. We'll be evaluating these last few contracts as they come in over the coming months, and we'll provide an update on our next call. And finally, our technical team continues to carry out optimization work to incorporate all the important learnings being generated during this transition period until the new infrastructure at Rochester is completed late next year. Turning over to Silvertip and looking at slide 14, the ongoing technical work and success of our exploration program combined with much more favorable market conditions have us feeling confident in a potential expansion and restart of Silvertip. As a result, we have accelerated our level of investment to take advantage of the summer construction season to complete a range of mostly surface projects. We plan to pull the ongoing exploration and technical work into an updated technical report, which is expected to be filed in early 2022. Without question, we believe the growing high-grade deposit at Silvertip is well worth the effort, despite the challenges we've had there in the past. With a retooled flow sheet and a larger, more reliable processing plant, we see Silvertip becoming a high-margin cash flow contributor over a very long mine life in an attractive jurisdiction. Before passing the call to Mick, I want to briefly mention the strategic investment we made in Victoria Gold. It was a unique opportunity to acquire the 18% block from Orion Mine Finance that aligns with our strategy and further bolsters our portfolio of precious metals assets in high quality jurisdictions. We are pleased to be a Victoria shareholder with how the investment has performed and with how the Victoria team is advancing its new Eagle open pit heap leach operation. Beyond that, I'm not going to speculate on today's call about potential scenarios or next steps, which I'm sure you can appreciate. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mick.