Sprott Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Sprott Inc's 2022 Annual 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, February 24th, 2023. On behalf of the speakers that follow, listeners are cautioned that today's presentation and the responses to questions may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the Canadian Provincial Securities Law. Forward-looking statements involve risks 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 and U.S. Securities Regulators. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Whitney George. Please go ahead, Mr. George.

Thank you, moderator, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. On the call today with me is our CFO, Kevin Hibbert, and John Cipaglia, CEO of Sprott Asset Management. Our 2022 annual results were released this morning and are available on our website, where you can also find the financial statements and MD&A. I'll start on slide four. Sprott's positioning in precious metals and energy transition materials served our shareholders well during a very challenging year in 2022. Our physical trust and private strategies delivered strong net sales and continue to be key drivers of AUM growth. We've made good progress building scale in our ETF business through the 2022 acquisition of URNM and several new products offered early in 2023. We launched an actively managed energy transition strategy to capitalize on the depth of our investment team, and we are pleased with the early results. We're currently experiencing very high levels of engagement from both new and existing investors. The expansion of our energy transition offerings has attracted the interest of a global investor audience in new geographies and new demographics. We expect these activities to translate into meaningful AUM growth when markets stabilize and investors reposition themselves for the new geopolitical and global economic realities. We are focused on our core asset management activities and have been gradually transitioning away from transaction oriented business. To that end, this morning we announced that we are exiting the Canadian broker dealer. This is a very difficult decision, which was made mutually with our partners at SCP, Sprott Capital Partners, who will continue to run that business independently of Sprott. Peter Groskopf and the SCP team have been great colleagues and partners, and we wish them continued success in their new venture, which we are certain will benefit from the imminent natural resource super cycle in front of us. Our U.S. broker has gradually been transitioning assets from AUA to AUM assets under administration in the broker dealer to assets under management in an advisory business. We expect to complete this in 2023. Looking ahead, we intend to increase our focus and investment in evolving our service offering in this area to attract high net worth individual investors and family office investors. With that, I'll 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. So we finished the year with $23.4 billion of AUM, up $2.4 billion, or 11% from September 30th, and up $3 billion or 15% from December 31st, 2021. Our quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year AUM benefited from strong inflows to our physical trusts, in particular our physical uranium, gold, and silver trusts, as well as the onboarding of new commitment fee generating private strategy LPs and $1 billion of AUM from the UR&M acquisition in the second quarter. Slide six provides a brief look into our three and 12 month earnings. Adjusted base EBITDA in the quarter was $18.1 million, up $378,000 or 2% from the fourth quarter of last year. And on a full year basis, adjusted base EBITDA was $71 million, up $6.9 million or 11% from the year ended December 31st, 2021. We benefited from strong net inflows to our physical trusts and the URNM acquisition, as I mentioned earlier. However, these increases were partially offset by weaker mining equity origination activity in our brokerage segment and lower AUM in our managed equity segment. Finally, as you can see on slide 7, Despite the challenges encountered across most global markets and asset classes in 2022, our balance sheet remains strong as seen by our liquid co-investments continuing to represent approximately 20% of our total assets. We are largely under leveraged at a less than one times debt to EBITDA ratio and an 11% debt to capital ratio. EBITDA has grown for a third straight year. demonstrating our ability to churn meaningful profitability from on-balance sheet assets and off-balance sheet AUM. In addition, our ability to tap North American equity markets as needed remains strong given our superior five-year total shareholder return profile. 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 fourth quarter MD&A filed earlier this morning. With that said, I'll pass things over to John.