Kinross Gold Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Kinross Gold first quarter 2022 results conference call-in webcast. 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 our first speaker, Mr. Chris Lichtenhoff. Thank you, and please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. With us today, we have Paul Rollinson, President and CEO, and from the Kinross Senior Leadership Team, Andrea Freeborough, Paul Tamori, and Jeff Gold. Before we begin, I would also like to state that we will be making forward-looking statements during this presentation. For a complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties which may lead to actual results differing from estimates contained in our forward-looking information, please refer to page 2 of this presentation. Our news release dated May 10, 2022. The MD&A for the period ended March 31, 2022, and our most recently filed AIF, all of which are available on our website. I will now turn the call over to Paul.

Thanks, Chris. Thank you all for joining us today. This morning, I'm going to provide a brief overview of our first quarter results and our updated guidance. Then I will provide an update on our key areas of focus, including our balance sheet and capital allocation plans, our operations and exploration, and then comment briefly on M&A. After that, I will turn the call over to Andrea and Paul, who will provide additional detail on our quarter and our outlook. With respect to our first quarter results, our assets performed largely as planned and are set to ramp up throughout the year. It was a low production quarter as expected due to seasonality and our mine planning schedule, but we remain on track to deliver stronger performance as the year progresses. Two key operating milestones were achieved during the quarter. First, TASI has delivered record production and exit the quarter with throughput of approximately 21,000 tons per day and is on track with its target of 24K by mid next year. And secondly, La Coypa poured its first Dore bar in February and is on target to ramp up production in the back half of the year. With respect to guidance, In our news release last night, we updated our outlook to reflect the pending divestitures of our Russian operations and Toronto. We have effectively restated our original production targets, excluding Russia and Toronto for all of 2022 and future years. With all other operations remaining on track with our original three-year guidance. Regarding costs, we updated our original guidance to exclude Russia and Toronto, but to also reflect the higher gold and oil prices we are currently experiencing. This meant that instead of lowering operating costs, we left the guidance at $830 per ounce to reflect these higher prices. At this point, we are not making further provisions in our guidance but we are monitoring the macro environment closely and will adjust later in the year if appropriate. Andrea will comment more on this shortly. I now want to address our focus on the business moving forward given the two major catalysts that have impacted us, namely the pending divestitures of our Russian assets in Toronto and the continuing inflationary pressures we see across our business. With respect to our balance sheet, we are in a strong financial position with an investment-grade balance sheet, which we expect to continue to strengthen over the coming years. With respect to our capital allocation strategy, our objectives have not fundamentally changed. We will continue to reinvest in our business, maintain the strength of our balance sheet, and return capital to our shareholders. In the current gold price environment, we expect to continue with our baseline dividend and share buyback plans, returning approximately $300 million per year to shareholders. However, given the current environment, we will be closely monitoring the gold price and the impacts of inflation on our margins as we go forward. Turning to our operations, the combination of the pending divestitures with the acquisition of Great Bear has reshaped the geographic mix of our portfolio. We now have 70% of our production coming from the Americas. Two Tier 1 assets, Perica 2 and Tassius, accounting for approximately half of our production. a return to low-cost operations in Chile with potential for further growth, and a world-class development project in Canada. In the current environment, we are very focused on continuous improvement and cost management, maintaining our reserves, and growth through exploration. Starting with continuous improvement, we are maintaining our strong focus in this area to help manage ongoing cost inflation. For example, we are executing a plan to enhance synergies in Nevada between Bald Mountain and Round Mountain. We are making investments in grade control to minimize dilation. We have developed alternate supplier strategies with a focus on total cost of ownership over the life cycle. And we have been advancing certain vendor payments to lock in preferential pricing where possible. With respect to maintaining our reserves, we are analyzing our reserve pricing in the context of today's environment. We recognize that ongoing inflation puts upward pressure on cost structures, and in turn, the gold price required to support the economics of new projects. We are not considering dropping cutoff grades or otherwise compromising the quality of ounces we mine in light of higher gold prices. Rather, we are evaluating how to realign the reserve price assumptions on both gold price and input costs to more accurately reflect today's inflationary environment. We are not changing our reserve pricing yet, but it is something we continue to analyze. Finally, with respect to exploration, we are excited about our prospects and have increased our budget to its highest level in recent years. With respect to our brownfields exploration program, we have several exciting projects, including Curlew and potential underground extensions at a number of our existing mines that we plan to advance over the coming quarters. Great Bear in particular will be an exciting and significant area for continued investment to demonstrate the assets world-class value over time. I am excited about the potential of our exploration programs, and I expect over time our investments in this area will surface value in our pipeline of projects and ultimately layer growth and profitability on top of our baseline production. Next slide. I want to provide a brief comment on the M&A question we've been getting. We are happy with our balance sheet, our current operating profile, and pipeline of opportunities and don't feel any pressure to replace the production from Russia or Toronto. It's been a challenging first quarter with our pending exit from Russia and Ghana. With that, 70% of our production now comes from the Americas. And all things being equal, we'd like to see this rebalanced portfolio contribute positively to our share price. Before handing off to Andrea, I will briefly discuss ESG. Last night, we released our 2021 sustainability report. We continue to rank well among our peers in major ESG rankings and ratings, and more importantly, remain focused on doing what's right on the ground. For example, last year, we generated approximately $3.5 billion in economic benefits in our host countries. We recycled 80% of the water used at our sites, and we approved an investment in solar at Tassius a strong step towards our goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity. We are proud of our achievements and our consistent performance in all aspects of ESG. I will now turn the call over to Andrea.