Sprott Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SPROT, Inc.' 's 2022 Second Quarter Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for questions. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, August 2, 2022. On behalf of the speakers as follows, listeners are cautioned that today's presentation in response to the questions may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Canadian Provincial Securities Laws. Forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Certain material factors or assumptions are implied in making forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. For additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements, Please consult the MD&A for the quarter and Sprott's other filings with the Canadian U.S. securities regulators. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Whitney George. Please go ahead, Mr. George.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. On the call with me today is our CFO, Kevin Hibbert, and John Chimpaglia, our CEO of Sprott Asset Management, our largest business unit. Our 2022 second quarter results were released this morning and are available on our website where you can also find the financial statements and MD&A. I'd like to start on slide four this morning. We delivered strong second quarter operating results despite a very challenging market, which everybody is well aware of. We've continued to build scale in our ETF business. We completed the acquisition of URNM in the second quarter, and this morning we announced the launch of Sprott ESG Gold Fund, a new and very innovative ETF that I'm sure John will tell you all about in a bit. We continue to strengthen our management team with a notable addition of Stephen Shafstall, who is now director ETF product management. He is an extremely experienced ETF executive with many years of service at much larger competitors. We actively develop new products in all four of our asset management businesses, and we completed a CEO transition. On June 30th, I took over from Peter Groskopf, the CEO of Sprott. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Peter for his many contributions over 12 years in leading the company. During Peter's tenure, Sprott grew from $5 billion in AUM to more than $20 billion today and established itself as a global leader in natural resource investing. Peter played a key role in launching our successful private lending franchise as well as our institutional brokerage franchise. More impressively, Peter presided over a rare transformation from a founder-driven firm to a global organization. In addition, Peter achieved this feat while operating under the scrutiny that comes with running a public company. Peter has left us a company that is very well positioned for continued growth and very bright prospects for the future. I thank Peter for that and I look forward to continue to work closely with Peter in some of his new assignments. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Kevin for a look at our financial results for the quarter. Kevin?

Thanks, Whitney, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on slide five, which provides a summary of our historical AUM. AUM was $21.9 billion as of June 30th of this year, down $1.7 billion, or 7% from March. but up $1.5 billion or 7% from December of 2021. Our quarter over quarter AUM was negatively impacted by the recent market challenges across most global asset classes as Whitney alluded to earlier. But on a six months ended basis, our cumulative market value declines were largely offset by continued strong inflows to our physical trusts in particular our uranium and gold trusts, the onboarding of new commitment fee generating private strategy LPs, and $1 billion of AUM from the URNM acquisition Whitney mentioned. Slide 6 provides a brief look into our three- and six-month earnings. In short, the strength and resiliency of our business model was clearly demonstrated this quarter as adjusted base EBITDA was $17.9 million, up $2.9 million or 19% from this time last year. And on a year-to-date basis, adjusted base EBITDA was $36.1 million, which was up $6.4 million or 22% over the same six-month period last year. Adjusted-base EBITDA benefited from the things I mentioned earlier, the strong net inflows into our physical trusts, the URNM acquisition and the onboarding of additional AUM as a result of that, as well as inflows to our private strategy LPs. Those increases were, however, partially offset by weaker mining equity origination activity in our brokerage segment. Moving now to slide seven. Despite the ongoing challenges encountered across most global markets and asset classes, our balance sheet, our cash flow and liquidity metrics remain strong at the halfway mark of the year, and we expect to see this strength continue throughout the latter half of 2022. For more information on our revenues, expenses, EBITDA and balance sheet metrics, you can refer to the supplemental information section of this presentation as well as our second quarter MD&A filed earlier this morning. With that said, I'll pass things over to John.