Hecla Mining Company

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Heckler Mining Company fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Anvita Patel. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Regina, and thank you all for joining us for HECLA's fourth quarter 2022 financial and operations results conference call. I'm Anvita Patel, HECLA's Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. 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, Hitler's President and CEO, Lauren Roberts, Hitler's Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Russell Lawler, Hitler's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Any forward-looking statements made today by the management team come under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and involve risks as shown on Slides 2 and 3 in our earnings release and in our 10-Q and 10-Q 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 are found in the slides or the news release. With that, I'll pass the call to Phil.

Thanks, Indita. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call. Hekla is the world's fastest-growing established silver miner, surprising for a 130-year-old company. And I'm on slide four. There are four reasons that this is happening. Heckler's commitment to silver. Since our founding, Heckler has always been a silver producer, even when other metals and activities provided more margin. When I joined Heckler in 2001, investors and others encouraged us to sell or close our silver assets. But what I saw was that our large resource position could survive the ups and downs of the silver market. And we needed to be committed because the silver market would improve. And of course it did. And because of silver's role as an energy metal, we think the silver market will strengthen further. And I'm going to talk more about that at the end of our prepared remarks. The second reason for our industry leading growth is the foundation that came in 2008 when we purchased the 70% of Green Street we didn't own. This acquisition increased our silver reserves by two and a half times and provided the base and cash flow stream to further invest in the mines, and others into that mine and other mines, including the Lucky Friday. And then the third reason is the investment in the Lucky Friday has ultimately resulted in a new mining method, the Underhand Closed Bench, or UCB, that is transforming this 80-year-old mine with a safer, more productive mining method that with higher grades allows it to double its historic silver production. And now the fourth reason for the growth is Keno Hill. In just four months since the acquisition, Keno's reserves are a third higher and will produce about 2.5 million silver ounces this year and in excess of 4 million next year. Looking at the chart on the left, silver reserves are almost five times where they were at the start of 2008, despite having produced more than 200 million ounces since then. Combining what has been replaced with the increase in reserve, HECLA has added 400 million ounces over the last 15 years. So we have ore bodies that grow. To grow reserves and production, our strategy since 2008 has focused on large prospective land positions in the U.S. and Canada. And for a long time, the market didn't differentiate between jurisdictions, but we stayed the course with this strategy. And today, whether analyst reviews reflected the market clearly values being in the best jurisdictions, and we are in the best jurisdictions. Now, looking at the chart on the right, from 2008 to 2012, we produced about 9 million ounces per year. Then we increased the average by about 50%, giving us a decade of about 12.5 million ounces. And now we're having another 50% increase in subproduction to 18 million ounces. Realize that we only show three years because we've not put together a long-term plan for Kino. But I expect that we'll stay at this 18 million ounces or more from these three mines for at least a decade. 2022 had the highest production in our history, and 2023, 24, 25, I think are all going to set new production records for the company. And this growth doesn't require significant capital investment. Russell is going to talk about how we have the balance sheet and silver margins to achieve this and position us for even more growth. Russell?