Hecla Mining Company

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Q4 and year-end 2020 HECLA Mining Company Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker 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 Mr. Russell Lawler. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. This is Russell Lawler, HECLA's treasurer. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for HECLA's fourth quarter 2020 financial and operations results conference call. Our financial results news release that was issued this morning along with today's presentation are available on HECLA's website. On today's call, we have Phil Baker, HECLA's president and CEO, Lindsay Hall, senior vice president and chief financial officer, Lauren Roberts, HECLA's senior vice president and chief operating officer, Curt 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 our 10Q and 10K filings with the LTC. 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 us for our call this morning. We recognize there's a number of calls today, so our remarks are going to be brief to allow time for questions. And I'm going to speak to slide four. You all recognize the challenges of operating mines in a pandemic, our fast response and our industry being considered essential in the U.S., allowed us to produce significantly more silver than we guided at the beginning of the year. So 1.4 million more ounces we produced than what we had guided. So in a pandemic, we had our highest revenues, fourth highest free cash flow, and third highest reserves in our history. Reserves would have been even better if COVID-19 hadn't reduced our drilling by a third and slowed down assaying. But COVID didn't slow down our growth in U.S. silver production. We are now producing 50% more than we were three years ago. This growing U.S. silver production allowed us to generate $90 million of free cash flow in 2020. But over the last 18 months, we've generated $152 million. We now have $130 million in cash and $380 million in liquidity. Our silver industry-leading dividend policy that ties dividends to the silver price along with the payment of a minimum base dividend returned 10% of our free cash flow to shareholders this year. We accomplished this by recording our lowest all-injury frequency rate of 1.22 in our history. And I think our safety culture is a big reason why we've responded so well to the impacts of the pandemic. We've continued to help our communities with testing assistance, contributions from our foundation, and I think our unique HECLA Bucks program, which gives employees vouchers to spend in the local communities. With all that we've had to deal with, 2020 was a remarkable year. And with that, I'm going to turn the call over to Lindsey to update our financials. But before I do, with Lindsey's retirement in a month, I want to thank him for for his leadership, particularly in 2020. We had the need to refinance our debt, which he led, and, of course, we've had to deal with the pandemic, which he was instrumental in our success. Lindsay.