Newmont Corporation

Good morning and welcome to Newmont's second quarter 2024 earnings call. All participants will be in lesson only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a girlfriend specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I will now I'd like to turn the conference over to Tom Palmer, President and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call.

Today, I'm joined by my executive leadership team, including Natasha Boullion and Karen Overman, and we'll all be available to answer your questions at the end of the call. Turning to the next slide, please note our cautionary statement and refer to our SEC filings, which can be found on our website. Before I cover our results for the quarter, I'd like to take a moment to provide an update on the important work we are doing to reinvigorate our safety systems. Following the tragic loss of four of our colleagues over the last year, we initiated a comprehensive, systematic review of our safety and risk management systems in order to better understand the key challenges and opportunities we have to improve our safety performance going forward. Our enhanced approach includes a heightened level of diligence across our entire fatality risk management assurance model, bolstering our leadership work in the field to ensure we have a balanced approach between both the quantity and quality of our critical control verifications and an increased focus on leaders, coaching leaders and their teams aimed at building and strengthening capability through all levels of our organisation. With this reinvigorated approach, we are actively driving improvements in safety performance and strengthening operational effectiveness across all of our managed operations. Turning now to our second quarter highlights. We delivered solid operational performance as planned, keeping us firmly on track to achieve our 2024 guidance and positioning us to deliver improving financial results. These solid results have also enabled us to progress our capital allocation priorities, which I'll touch on in a moment. With a continued focus on safety delivery, we've also made meaningful progress on the four key commitments we made to our shareholders at the start of the year. First, we continue to strengthen Newmont's position as the gold industry's recognised sustainability leader. During the second quarter, and as I just mentioned, we launched a safety refresh across our managed operations globally and are leveraging this important work to reinvigorate our safety systems, tools, standards and infield leadership work. Supported by this approach, we restarted operations at Cerro Negro in late May, returning our focus to safe and efficient mining in this highly prospective district in Argentina. In May, we also published our annual climate report. summarising our performance for the sites managed by Newmont throughout 2023. Moving to our second commitment, Newmont has created a world-class portfolio focused on Tier 1 and emerging Tier 1 operations and districts. From this portfolio, in the second quarter, we produced 1.6 billion ounces of gold and 477,000 gold equivalent ounces from copper silver, lead and zinc. Notably, this included 38,000 tonnes of copper for the quarter. We generated $1.4 billion of cash flow from operations and $594 million in free cash flow in the second quarter. And yesterday, we announced the monetisation of our Bata Hijau deferred payment obligations and we expect to receive $153 million upon closing by September 30th. It is also worth noting that Newmont received $44 million associated with contingent payments from production at Bata Hijau, bringing total proceeds that we will receive this year from our former operation to $197 million. In addition, we received the first $180 million payment from the sale that we announced last quarter the London Gold financing facilities. From these two transactions, we will receive nearly $530 million by the end of this year. With this progress and with the confidence we have in our divestiture program, we now expect to reach at least $2 billion from the sale of our seven high-quality non-core assets alone. Taking all of this into account, we continue to build momentum, enabling us to advance our capital allocation priorities. Since our last call, we continue to safely progress the projects we have in execution from our industry-leading organic project pipeline, including the second expansion at Tanami, our new mine at Harpo North, and the two new block Ks at Katia. We have retired $250 million in debt and we have returned approximately $540 million to shareholders in the form of regular dividends and share repurchases, which Karen will discuss in more detail in a few minutes. Turning now to synergies, we remain firmly on track to deliver above and beyond our initial commitment of $500 million. In the second quarter, we achieved $100 million in synergies, bringing our run rate to $205 million since we closed our acquisition of Newcrest only eight months ago. With this solid momentum, we have now disbanded our back office integration team and remain firmly on track to achieve a $335 million run rate by the end of this year, well ahead of our initial estimates. Looking at the three components of our Synergy delivery, and starting with full potential. We are now advancing into the delivery stage for the initiatives we have identified at Lahia, Cadia and Redcrest, with the largest value drivers coming from our two new Tier 1 assets in Lahia and Cadia. On our call last quarter, we provided an update on the opportunities we have identified at Lahia. In this quarter, I'll briefly describe some of the opportunities we see in front of us at CADIA. We recently completed our full potential diagnosis phase at CADIA, from which we have identified a series of initiatives that are expected to deliver more than $100 million of value by the end of next year. During this first phase, we had a team of experts from Newmont's Global Technical Services Group working to support the site to identify opportunities to high production and improved cash flows. As one example of this, and through collaboration with Bonington, CADIA is working to optimise the output from its high-pressure grinding roll circuit in the mill. With these HPGR improvements, CADIA will be able to lift its mill feed by approximately 80 tonnes an hour, or more than 600,000 tonnes a year. Implementing the initiatives we have identified and leveraging the experience we have gained over the last 10 years with our full potential program, we are working with the team at Cadia to increase average mill throughput to 34 million tonnes per annum, representing a meaningful step up in productivity from this world-class gold and copper asset. With La Hia, Cadia and Red Cris, all now entering the delivery phase of full potential, we are on track to meet our initial $200 million commitment. Moving to supply chain synergies, we continue to leverage our combined scale to drive improved commercial outcomes for both pricing and terms. In the second quarter, we realised $60 million in synergies from around 40 initiatives in contracted services, mining equipment, energy, information technology, among other categories. And we have a clear line of sight to reach $140 million run rate by the end of this year as we progress our commercial work across several spend categories, including chemicals, explosives, grinding media, tyres, fuel, as well as spare parts and roadables. And finally, turning to G&A synergies. we have now achieved 95% of our initial $100 million commitment, with an additional $15 million realised during the second quarter. The latest G&A synergies have primarily been coming from continued labour rationalisation and ongoing reductions in our contractor spend. Taking these synergies into account, combined with the higher production volumes anticipated in the second half of this year, we expect to deliver lower unit costs in the third and fourth quarters. And with that, I'll now turn it over to Natasha and then on to Karen for an update on our operational and financial performance for the quarter. Over to you, Natasha.