Kinross Gold Corporation

and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Kinross Gold Corporation second quarter 2021 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in 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 one on your telephone. If you require further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Chris Lichtenheld, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. With us today, we have Paul Rowlinson, President of Freeboro, and the Kinnock Senior Leadership Team, Andrew Freeboro, Paul Tamori, and Jeff Gold. Before we begin, I would like to bring your attention to the fact that we will be making forward-looking statements during this presentation. complete discussion of the risks uncertainties and assumptions the actual results and performance being different from that forward-looking information please refer to page two of this presentation our news release dated july 20 2021 the mg name for the period ended june 30 2021 and our most recently found in the area all of which are available on our website i will now turn the ball put the call over to paul thanks chris and thank you all for joining us today

While there continues to be challenges globally coming out of the pandemic, we are seeing signs of a return to normal across our operations. With the safety and well-being of our people as our top priority, we are maintaining our pandemic related protocols where needed. However, we are also benefiting from a continued return to more efficient operating practices wherever possible. Notably, With travel restrictions easing, we have been able to reach most of our sites more easily. Before turning the call over to Andrea for a financial review and Paul for an operating review, I will comment briefly on the situation at Tassius, our return of capital plan, and some highlights from the quarter. We realize the fire at TASI has created a lot of uncertainty, which negatively impacted our stock price. Our objective today is to provide an update that helps remove this uncertainty. We needed the past several weeks to make mechanical inspections, and based on this, we do not believe there is any substantial damage to the integrity of the mill. As a result, we are confident that we will be operational before year end. Furthermore, our updated estimate for the cost of repair is now reduced to not more than $35 million. And importantly, the gold is still on the ground, and we have an insurance claim for the damages and the interruption to our business. Therefore, we do not see a fundamental change in the value of our business. With respect to the 24K expansion, while the plant is down, we have been able to continue to mine and advance the project. We will begin 2022 with substantially more ore in stockpile, which further secures our ability to meet our production goals in 22 and 23, and now 24. I was recently in Mauritania, and we visited Tassius and met with senior government officials. On July 15th, we signed the final agreement, which provides enhanced certainty on the economics of TASIUS. Achieving this important milestone reinforces our strong partnership with the government. We appreciate, we are appreciative of the strong support from the government, particularly as we work through the impact of the mill fire. We have a high degree of confidence in our strong production growth and increasing free cash flow over the next few years. In addition, the fact that we see no fundamental change in the value of the business, coupled with our recent stock price performance, makes now a highly compelling time to begin the share buyback program that we announced last night. We see the buyback as a meaningful addition to our regular dividend as we are targeting to double the total cash we are allocating to returns over the next 12 months. Moving on to the broader portfolio, we are confident in our ability to meet our revised 21 production guidance and our outlook to 2023, which sees us growing production to 2.9 million ounces. With respect to the cost guidance, the setbacks we faced this year at Tassius and Round Mountain on their own would not have taken us out of our original guidance range. However, combining these setbacks with higher gold prices and inflation has created a need to update our outlook on costs for the year. Importantly, though, our margins remain strong and ahead of our original budget expectations. Andrea will provide more detail on our guidance update in a few moments. Finally, I would like to highlight two other important recent developments. One, we completed a scoping study at Manchot, which confirms the value of the project. And two, we published our 2020 sustainability report which outlines our strong performance and targets in areas of safety and sustainability, environment, social and governance. Along with this, we also released our first climate report, which outlines our climate strategy. Notwithstanding our strong record on safety, which is our first priority, we were recently reminded that our work in this area is never done. I'm saddened to report that in June, we experienced a fatality at our Toronto mine in Ghana. The loss of one of our employees reinforces the need to continue focusing our efforts on enhancing safety and risk management systems across our global operations. I will now turn the call over to Andrea for a more detailed review of our financial results.