Coeur Mining, Inc.

And welcome to the Core Mining Third 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 touch-tone phone. 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 Dupartu, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to Core Mining's third quarter earnings conference call. Our results released after yesterday's market close and a copy of the press release and slides are available on our website. I would 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 presentations, as well as the risk factors described in our recent 10Qs and 2020 10K. Now, I'll turn it over to the team.

All right. Thanks, Paul, and good morning, everyone. Overall, the third quarter reflected a continuation of our strategy of investing in our North American assets to further reposition the company with lower costs, sustainable free cash flow, and solid returns over longer mine lives. Starting off on slide three in today's presentation, I'd like to highlight a few key points before turning the call over to the rest of the team. As you can see, it was a quarter with several significant developments and decisions. Results were in line with our internal forecast and were set up to deliver a strong finish to the year and achieve our original production guidance. Mick will go through the operations in more detail shortly, but I'll quickly touch on a few main points. WARF led the pack and achieved its second highest operating cash flow and free cash flow since we acquired the operation six and a half years ago. Palmareo and Kensington were largely on plan and are on track to deliver strong fourth quarters, and Rochester's results reflect steady progress despite devoting 38 and a half days, or about 45% of the quarter, to crushing and hauling overliner material to the new Stage 6 leach pad before winter. It's worth pointing out that Rochester's year-to-date results reflect two and a half months of essentially no stacking on the legacy Stage 4 pad as they've prioritized activities to support the POA 11 expansion. On the exploration front, results continue to validate our ongoing commitment to these higher levels of investment. We invested $20 million in exploration during the quarter alone. This commitment to drilling has led to double-digit reserve and resource growth over the past few years, and we look forward to hopefully delivering further growth again at the end of this year. If you turn to slide seven, you can see that exploration continues to be a real differentiator for CORE. We anticipate investing $70 million in exploration in 2021, which is nearly 40% higher than the record we set last year and is one of the largest programs in our sector. We remain on track to achieve our full-year drill footage targets, yet investing slightly less than originally anticipated, which reflects efficiencies we are realizing from these larger programs. We will plan to provide another exploration update before the end of the year that will focus on exciting new results at our assets in Nevada, both at Rochester and from the Crown District in Southern Nevada, where there continues to be a lot of activity. Switching over to our expansion projects, I want to walk through some updates, starting with the Rochester POA 11 expansion. This project remains our top priority and is a transformative, well-funded source of production and cash flow growth for the company. Things are moving right along. Overall progress stood at 42 percent complete at the end of the third quarter. In addition to completing the crushing of Overliner for the new Stage 6 leach pad, the team also kicked off foundation work for the Merrill Crow Plant and the Crusher Corridor during the quarter. As we mentioned on our last conference call, we're experiencing the impact of inflation on remaining unawarded work, like most companies are reporting. Overall, we're fortunate to have had the vast majority of our contracts locked in prior to the current spike in costs and supply and labor disruptions. We're trying to mitigate some of these impacts by re-scoping and re-bidding unawarded contracts, but we currently estimate that we're likely to see a 10 to 15 percent overall increase to the POA 11 construction costs. Thanks to the ongoing test work and operating experience taking place at Rochester, our technical team has identified an opportunity to create additional operating flexibility by installing prescreens into the new crushing circuit. We have kicked off detailed engineering and will be evaluating the merits of implementing this process improvement over the coming months. Assuming we elect to pursue this opportunity, it could potentially extend the timetable for completion and commissioning of the crusher by three to six months. In the meantime, we plan to install prescreens on the existing crusher during the first half of next year to give us some full-scale runtime and experience that we can potentially incorporate into the new crusher configuration. Now, switching over to Silvertip, Given the current inflationary environment and pandemic-driven supply and labor disruptions, it's not an ideal time to be kicking off a new capital project on an accelerated timetable, despite multi-year high zinc and lead prices. Fortunately, a Silvertip expansion and restart is still in the early innings, which gives us a lot of flexibility. Despite the uncertain macro environment, which contributed to higher than expected capital estimates for an accelerated expansion and restart, one thing we are certain of is the quality and prospectivity of the Silver Tip deposit. The exploration results, along with the knowledge and new discoveries the team is generating, have led us in the direction of evaluating a larger Silver Tip expansion and restart on a potentially slower timetable. To take advantage of such a high-grade and significant resource, a 1,750 ton per day processing facility isn't likely large enough to maximize Silvertip's value. We're going to take some additional time to evaluate what a larger design and footprint could represent in terms of economics and overall flexibility. This approach will give us time to continue drilling and hopefully keep growing the resource allow for the dust to settle on many of these current macroeconomic factors, and allow us to focus on delivering POA 11 while not straining the balance sheet. Finishing out the highlights, we're pleased to announce that we entered into an agreement with Aveeno Silver and Gold to sell them the La Preciosa project in Durango, Mexico. This transaction offers some real potential synergies to unlock value from that asset with their nearby Aveeno mine. Strategically, the transaction checks a lot of boxes for us with respect to further enhancing our geopolitical risk profile, our metals mix, and the timing of our development pipeline. We can deploy some of the fixed cash consideration into the Rochester expansion and into our highly prospective exploration programs. The transaction provides a lot of upside to the asset through the equity ownership we will have along with contingent payments and two royalties we will retain. Shifting gears, I want to quickly bring your attention to a set of slides starting on slide 17 that highlight the great culture and diversity efforts we have at CORE. To be a high-performing organization, a company's culture, strategy, and capabilities need to be aligned. something that I believe we've achieved over the past few years. To that end, I want to recognize our Head of Human Resources, Emily Skouten, for her efforts on DE&I and for recently winning the industry's Rising Star Award from S&P Global Platts. We continue to integrate our ESG efforts into our strategy and overall decision-making. Before having Mick provide an overview of our operations, I'd like Hans to follow up on my Silver Tip comment by providing a brief overview of the Silver Tip exploration results and why we are so positive about its potential. Hans?