Kinross Gold Corporation

Good morning. My name is Rob and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Kinross Gold third quarter 2022 results conference call and webcast. 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 followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. Chris Lichtenheld, Vice President, Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Thank you and good morning. With us today, we have Paul Rowlinson, President and CEO, and from the Kinross Senior Leadership Team, Andrew Friborough, Claude Schemper, Ned Jalil, and Jeff Gold. 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 two of this presentation, our news release dated November 9th, 2022, the MD&A for the period ended September 30th, 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, and thank you all for joining us. Today, I'm going to update you on our third quarter performance, our expectations going forward, and Great Bear. First, I would like to introduce our operational leaders. Claude Schimper is our new Chief Operating Officer. For those of you who don't know Claude, he has been with Kinross for 12 years. And prior to taking on the COO role, he very successfully led our Russian business and then took on added oversight of our African operations. Ned Jalil is our new Senior Vice President of Technical Services. Ned first joined Kinross 10 years ago and has added significant value in several areas, including previously leading our successful optimization of Perica 2 in Brazil. Both Claude and Ned are mining engineers with deep technical experience globally and a boots on the ground management style. As you will hear shortly, our new operational leadership is off to an excellent start as we see significant improvements in key metrics across our portfolio. With respect to our third quarter performance, our operations continue to make strong progress with production up 17% and cost down 8% compared to the second quarter. Similar to prior years, our plans again this year called for increasing production throughout the year, which we are seeing. Last quarter, I discussed the production increase we expect in the second half of this year and the four key areas where it is expected to come from. Specifically, Pariquetou, the US Heaps, La Coypa, and Tassiust. At Pariquetou, as per our mine plan, grades have increased from the second quarter to the third quarter and the operation continued to deliver on plan in October setting the stage for an exceptionally strong Q4. Second, the seasonality effect from our U.S. heaps is playing out as expected and production increased nearly 20% in the third quarter. Third, we have worked through the challenges at La Coypa where the operation is expected to continually improve. However, given the time required to resolve the issues, we now expect four year production to be approximately 100,000 ounces. At Tassius, mill throughput and recovery were lower than planned due to some commissioning challenges in processing high grade ore. As Claude will describe later, we have made good progress in resolving the challenges and we expect the fourth quarter to be significantly stronger than the first three quarters. However, Given these challenges, we now expect TASIUS to come in around 550,000 ounces for the full year and then back up to design levels going forward. Given the slower ramp ups at La Coypa and TASIUS, we now expect consolidated production of approximately 2 million ounces for 2022. Going forward during the 2023 through 2025 timeframe, we expect combined production of more than 6 million ounces with relatively stable production each year and a renewed focus on capital discipline, cash flow generation, and resiliency. I would now like to comment broadly on how our business is positioned in the current economic environment. Given that the gold price is down compared with the first half of the year and cumulative inflation in the past 18 months is approximately 20%, we are adapting our plans. As always, we remain disciplined in our business planning. We are prioritizing reinvesting in our business where we can generate the highest returns and our mind plans are focused on generating attractive margins. In order to ensure we are positioned for strength in this environment, our new technical and operational leaders have completed an extensive review of major investments and pit phases across our portfolio. The good news is we have optionality in our portfolio in a number of areas, including where we are looking at the transition from open pit to underground mining. As part of this process, we have also completed the optimization study at Round Mountain and have decided to defer open pit expansions for Phase S and W3 to focus on more attractive underground targets that have shown very positive results. Of course, the ounces from the open pit phases are still in the ground, and we maintain the optionality to mine these phases if the environment improves. Ned will provide more detail on these plans later on the call. Finally, this extensive review of our operations has also served to confirm the robust economics of our other plans across the portfolio. Finally, I'd like to comment on Great Bear and how excited I am about the results we are seeing. Our drilling continues to confirm our thesis of a large high-grade deposit with mineralization coming to surface and remaining open in all directions. In particular, our drilling continues to confirm our thesis that the deposit extends to depth. In fact, as you can see on the slide, Our current drilling program recently intercepted 16 grams per ton over 24 meters at a depth of approximately 700 meters at the Yuma Chute. While we are still early in our study process, we are very pleased with what we are seeing and expect to release our initial resource early next year alongside a technical report focused on geology and metallurgy. We are targeting an initial resource of 4 to 5 million ounces, but ultimately expect this deposit could support a multi-decade mine, which produces many times this amount at robust margins. We are excited to have an asset in Canada, and Red Lake is an excellent mining jurisdiction. Our timeline is consistent with projected timelines for other projects going through the same process. Having said that, we have an excellent team that will take every opportunity to expedite the process with the goal of achieving first production as soon as possible. With that, I will now turn the call over to Andrea.