Kinross Gold Corporation

Hello and thank you for standing by. And welcome to Kinross Gold Corporation first quarter results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a 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. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Tom Elliott, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. With us today, we have Paul Rolison, President and CEO, and the Kinross Senior Leadership Team, Andrea Fribero, Paul Tamori, and Jeff Gold. Before we begin, I'd like to bring your attention to the fact that we will be making forward-looking statements during this presentation. For complete discussion of the risks, uncertainties, and assumptions which may lead to actual results and performance being different from estimates contained in our forward-looking information, please refer to page two of this presentation, our news release dated May 11th, 2021, the MD&A for the period as of March 31st, 2021, and our most recently filed AIF, all of which are available on our website. I'll turn the call over to Paul.

Thanks, Tom, and thank you all for joining us today. While the global environment remains challenging, we are pleased to report that our business continues to perform well against our expectations. I'll elaborate on this momentarily, but first I want to provide a quick update on how we are managing through the impacts of the pandemic. The safety and wellbeing of our people is our top priority and we are maintaining many of our pandemic related protocols in order to protect our employees and communities. As a result of this work and the continued support from our local governments, all of our minds remain operational and our development projects remain on schedule. I'm also pleased to report that we are cautiously optimistic and see some signs of a return to normal starting to take form. Before turning the call over to Andrea for a financial review, Paul for an operating review, and Jeff for an update on Mauritanian government relations, I will comment briefly on Q1 performance, our outlook, and our commitment to continued leadership in ESG. Overall, we are pleased with our start to the year. During the first quarter, our three largest mines, Paracatou, Coupole and Tassiust, once again represented approximately 60% of our production and delivered the lowest costs in the portfolio. As always, there were some puts and takes throughout the portfolio, but consolidated production is tracking well against our plans. As indicated previously, we expect production to increase throughout the year with the fourth quarter being the strongest. Adjusting for gold prices, which were above the $1,500 per ounce we used for internal budgeting, our financial performance in the first quarter was also in line with our plans. As expected, we generated approximately $76 million of free cash flow in the first quarter, which is lower than recent quarters, due primarily to anticipated higher tax payments in Brazil, which relates to higher gold prices received in 2020. Like production, we also expect free cash flow to strengthen each quarter, with Q4 being our strongest, which is typical of our business. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we finished the first quarter with just over $1 billion of cash, and net debt of approximately $900 million. Looking forward, we remain on track to meet our four-year guidance for production costs and CapEx, and are also well positioned to achieve our three-year production guidance and long-term production goals. At Round Mountain, mining activities in Q1 were impacted by precautionary measures taken after movements in the north wall of the pit were detected by the site's comprehensive monitoring system. The site deferred mining in the area, which delayed access to Phase W ore and affected the mine's performance during the quarter. Paul will elaborate on the issue and potential remedies later, but as I indicated, we do not expect this to impact our 2021 production and cost of sales guidance our longer term production profile, or Round Mountain's total life of mine production. Finally, in line with our commitment to strong environmental stewardship, we took an important step this quarter by committing to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Kinross currently ranks as one of the lowest greenhouse gas emitters in our sector. Notwithstanding our strong ranking, we are also identifying specific greenhouse gas emission targets for 2030. I'll now turn the call over to Andrea for a more detailed review of our financial results.