Wheaton Precious Metals Corp

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wheaton Precious Metals 2023 fourth quarter and full year results conference call. 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'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star too. Thank you. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded on Friday, March 15, 2024, at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. I will now like to turn the conference over to Emma Murray, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for participating in today's call. I'm joined today by Randy Smallwood, Wheaton Precious Metals President and Chief Executive Officer, Gary Brown, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Katham Hodelay, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Kurt Bernardi, Senior Vice President, Legal, and Wes Carson, Vice President, Mining Operations. Please note that for those not currently on the webcast, a slide presentation accompanying this conference call is available in PDF format on the presentations page of the Wheaton Precious Metals website. Some of the commentary in today's call may contain forward-looking statements, and I would direct everyone to review slide two of the presentation, which contains important cautionary notes regarding forward-looking statements. It should be noted that all figures referred to on today's call are in U.S. dollars, unless otherwise noted. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Randy Smallwood, our President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Emma, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Wheaton's fourth quarter and full year results of 2023. I am pleased to announce that our portfolio of long-life, low-cost assets delivered another solid quarter, allowing us to meet our annual production guidance, achieving 620,000 gold equivalent ounces in 2023. Our strong quarterly performance was underscored by Solobo, which reached its highest production level in the last four years. We were very excited to see Vale Base Metals successfully complete the throughput test for the first phase of the Slobo III expansion project in November, marking a significant milestone that demonstrates increased reliability and continued operational excellence. We look forward to further advances as that expansion project continues to ramp up through 2024. In 2023, we also achieved a milestone in our growth strategy with the announcement of a record eight acquisitions totaling just over $1 billion in commitments. Hatham will discuss in further detail these recent acquisitions, which include a silver stream on Waterton's Mineral Park project, gold, palladium, and platinum streams on Ivanhoe's Platte Reef project, which is our first foray into Africa, gold and silver streams on BMC's Kutsutakaya project, a Gold Stream on Dalradian's Kernel project, and lastly, a Royalty on Vista's Mount Todd project, marking our first foray into Australia. We are excited to welcome our new mining partners and look forward to supporting them as they advance these projects, the largest being Ivanhoe's rapidly advancing Platte Reef project. We are very pleased to have Ivanhoe as partners who have had long-standing relationships in South Africa and and have done an immense amount of work to de-risk one of the highest-grade, undeveloped precious metals assets in the world. Each of these acquisitions further diversifies our portfolio in terms of geographic presence and strategic partnerships, and once ramped up, our forecast to contribute meaningful production and further strengthen Wheaton's already prominent position as the leader in the sector's growth landscape. Our growth pipeline of development projects was also further de-risked in the quarter as Adventus Mining received multiple key permits for the Curripamba project and conveyed that a construction decision is expected within the year. In addition, Rio 2 announced that they have received approval of their environmental impact assessment, allowing them to advance the Phoenix project through permitting, financing, and into construction activities in 2024. During this quarter, we are also proud to have been recognized as one of the world's 100 most sustainable corporations by corporate nights, an achievement reflective of our commitment to operating responsibly in all areas of our business and representing the quality of the mining partners that we work with to deliver society its much-needed commodities. To reinforce our confidence in the sustainability and the growth potential of Wheaton, We are pleased to announce a transition to a new progressive dividend policy. This new approach is marked by an increase to our 2024 annual dividend. Under our new policy, Wheaton's payout ratio is expected to remain the highest within the entire precious metal space. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Wes Carson, our Vice President of Operations, who will provide more details on our operating results.