Hecla Mining Company

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the third quarter 2020 Heckler Mining Company earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Russell Lawler. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. This is Russell Lawler, HECLA's treasurer. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for HECLA's third quarter 2020 financial and operations results conference call. Our financial results news release that was issued this morning before market open along with today's presentation are available on HECLA's website. On today's call, we have Phil Baker, Heckler's President and CEO, Lindsey Hall, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Lauren Roberts, Heckler's Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Kurt Allen, Director of Exploration, and Keith Blair, Chief Geologist. Any forward-looking statements made today by the management team come under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and involve risks shown on Slides 2 and 3 in our earnings release and in our 10Q and 10K filings with the SEC. These and other risks could cause results to differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures cited in this call and related slides in cautionary language for our use of the term resource instead of reserves are also found in those documents. With that, I will pass the call to Phil Baker.

Thanks, Russell. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. I'm going to start on slide four, and I want to start by commending our management and workforce to their resiliency and commitment to operating safely. including the way they've dealt with the exposure to COVID. This resiliency and commitment has really allowed HECTA to deliver very strong operating financial results this quarter. So strong that in our history, we've never generated as much EBITDA. This was $75 million this quarter. And only four times in our history has the free cash flow been higher. This reflects the quality of our silver mines, particularly Greens Creek. Part of the reason we generated so much free cash flow is that our capital requirements are generally low. So with the $50 million of free cash flow, we used that to repay our revolver. We put cash on the balance sheet, and we announced a 250% increase in this quarter's dividend. That's a 50% increase in the base, and the rest is the fact that we triggered the new levels for the SilverLink dividend. Before I hand it over to Lindsay, I want to highlight two of our ESG programs that focus on the social element of ESG that supports our communities. Nothing is more important than that support because, frankly, HECLA has been part of these communities for decades. The first program is something we call Hecla Bucks, where we support local business by giving employees vouchers that they can spend with the businesses that are in a local business organization. Most of them are Chamber of Commerces. It's been a big success by providing an injection of spending into the local economy as they deal with the pandemic. The second program, which we are doing with Coor Mining, is bringing COVID-19 lab that does PCR testing to Juneau. You know, it's surprising that the capital of Alaska doesn't have adequate testing, but they don't. When you get tested, the test has to go to the lower 48, so it takes three days to know the results. So we have brought a lab to Juneau. In addition to testing our employees, which is going to allow us to shorten our quarantine time, We are offering key government organizations like first responders the opportunity to get one-day turnaround. And this is going to be critical when the legislative session starts in January. I think we're making a real difference over and above being the largest private employers in these communities. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Lindsey. Go ahead, Lindsey. Thanks, Phil.