Kinross Gold Corporation

Hello and welcome to the Ken Ross Gold Corporation third quarter 2021 results 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 would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Chris Lickenheff, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good morning. With us today, we have Paul Rollington, President and CEO, and from the Kinross Senior Leadership Team, Andrea Fribero, Paul Tamari, Jeff Gold, Before we begin, I would like to bring your attention to the fact we will be making forward-looking statements during this presentation. For a 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 2 of this presentation, our news release dated November 10, 2021, the MD&A for the period ended September 30, 2021, and our most recently filed AIS, all of which are available on our website. I will now turn the call over to Paul.

Thanks, Chris, and thank you all for joining us today. We are pleased with how our portfolio is positioned today and our outlook going into next year. Reflecting back on the five months since the fire at Tassius, I'm pleased to report that the mill is back up and running, the expansion project remains on track, and we expect to have built high-grade stockpiles by year end. Despite TASIUS having recovered, our market value is still significantly lower than it was before the fire. To the extent a portion of this may be caused by lingering concerns around TASIUS, today we hope to alleviate those concerns. The restart of TASIUS combined with the La Coypa project and strong performance from our broader portfolio puts us in an excellent position to grow production and free cash flow over the coming years. Turning to the third quarter, results were in line with our expectations, and I'm encouraged to see signs of a continued return to normal across our operations, including a return to the Toronto office. Before turning the call over to Andrea for a financial review and Paul for some operating highlights, I'll discuss some additional detail on TASIUS the results from our studies on the Udinsk and Lobomarte projects, and some highlights from the quarter. At TASIUS, thanks to the excellent work by our team, the mill repairs were completed at a cost lower than earlier estimates, and we are on schedule to ramp up and reach throughput of 21,000 tons per day by the end of Q1-22. Over the next few weeks, we will be focused on getting MILF throughput back to levels comparable to the first half of the year. Moving on to our projects, yesterday we released study results for two of our key growth projects, which in both cases largely confirmed our previous views. The pre-feasibility study for UDINSC reaffirms this is a low-risk, high-return project extending our presence in Russia. We are now working on a feasibility study, which we plan to complete next year, after which we expect to make a formal construction decision. We continue to expect that UDEMS will be the first mine on our Chalbacan land package, and we are targeting first production in late 2025. Turning now to Lobo Marte, The feasibility study reaffirms all of the project's key parameters. Lobo Marte continues to offer long-term growth optionality as our potential next mine in Chile after La Coypa. Moving now to third quarter results. Our operations tracked well against our expectations, notwithstanding the challenging environment as the world works to come out of the pandemic. We remain on plan to meet our 2021 guidance, and we are well positioned to deliver our production and cash flow growth over the coming years. While our production growth and related cost efficiencies are expected to drive our cash flow higher, we are also facing inflationary pressures, which will offset some of this. Andrea will provide more detail on this in a few moments. On capital returns, last quarter we announced our share buyback program with the intention of spending roughly $150 million over the following 12 months. I'm pleased to report that to date we have spent $50 million repurchasing our stock and are well on track with our plan. We continue to view our shares as extremely attractive and are pleased to be able to repurchase at these levels. Finally, I would like to provide an update on the progress we've made with respect to ESG. We established an ESG executive committee that will report to our board on a quarterly basis to further enhance our initiatives. In addition, we are working to develop a roadmap that will support our greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2030. We expect to complete this assessment and provide detail around our targets with our year-end results. I'll now turn the call over to Andrea for a more detailed review of financial results.