Capstone Copper Corp.

Good morning, my name is Pam and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Capstone Mining Q4 and year end 2021 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 followed by two. Thank you. Mr. Annette, you may begin your conference.

Good morning. I'd like to welcome everyone on the call today. Please note that the news release and regulatory filings announcing Capstone's 2021 fourth quarter and full year financial and operational results are available on our website and on CDAR. If you are logged into the webcast, we will be advancing the slides of today's presentation, which is also available in the investor section of our website. I'm joined today by our CEO, Darren Pilot, our President and COO, Cashel Marr, our Chief Financial Officer, Raman Randhawa, our Senior Vice President, Risk, ESG, and General Counsel, Wendy King, and our Senior Vice President, Exploration and Strategic Projects, Brad Mercer. Following our brief remarks, there will be an opportunity for questions. Please note that comments made on the call today will contain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. This information, by its nature, is subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from the views expressed today. For further information on the risks and uncertainties pertaining to our business, please see Capstone's most recent filings, which are available on our website and on CDAR. And finally, I'll just note that all amounts we will discuss today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise specified. Now I'll turn the call over to Darren Pilot.

Thank you, Gerald, and good morning, everyone. On the title page, you will see a recent photo of Pinto Valley's tailings thickeners, which were just upgraded last year to improve water recycling capabilities and has lowered our overall water consumption. Turning now to slide number six, 2021 was a strong year for Capstone as we achieved the top end of copper production guidance and the C1 cash costs at the midpoint, despite the backdrop of industry-wide cost pressures. We benefited from cost controls and optimizations at both Pinto Valley and Cozumel, which will be discussed later in more detail in this presentation. In January, we announced provisional 2022 guidance for both mines of a combined 82 to 90,000 tons of copper at a C1 cash cost of $1.85 to $2 per pound. We'll update this for capstone copper following the completion of the combination with Mantos Copper. Moving on now to slide number seven, we realized record financial results on the back of high copper prices and optimized operations. Specifically here, you can see adjusted net income of $242 million, adjusted EBITDA of $432 million, and operating cash flows of $376 million, which were all record numbers. Our net cash position at year end grew by $56 million to a total of $264 million, which was a $389 million increase from a year ago. That's truly transformational and positions us to fund future growth projects that we will have throughout the capstone copper portfolio. On to slide eight. This graph shows how significant 2021 was for capstone as we generated over three and a half times more cash flow than the average of the previous 13 years, fueled by high copper prices and solid operational performance. Slide number nine. In January, we released our annual production and cost estimates and gave a preview of how we performed in Q4. Our adjusted EBITDA of $113 million met straight-up expectations, and our adjusted earnings per share of 18 cents was also a beat. It's also worth noting that Q4 EBITDA would have been $8 million stronger had it not been for the lower expected sales of 46.8 million pounds sold versus the payable production of 49.8 million pounds. And those sales were impacted by COVID-related logistics issues that caused problems with border crossings and just overall trucking availability in December. But since then, we have caught up on these deferred sales in this current quarter. Now I'll pass it over to Raman.