Endeavour Mining plc

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Endeavour Mining's third quarter 2023 results webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. So for those who wish to ask a question, please dial in to the phone line for questions. Please note that due to time constraints, we will be prioritising questions from Covering Analysts. Today's conference call is being recorded and a transcript of the call will be available on Endeavor's website tomorrow. I would now like to hand the call over to Endeavor's Deputy CFO and Head of Investor Relations, Martino Di Ciccio.

Hello everyone and welcome to Endeavor's Q3 2023 results webcast. Before we start, please note our usual disclaimer. On the call, I am joined by Sebastian, Mark, Guy, and Jono. Today's call will follow our usual format. Sebastian will first go through our Q3 and year-to-date results highlights. Then Guy will present the financials. And finally, Mark will walk you through our operating results by mind. After Sebastian's closing remarks, we'll open the floor up to questions. And now, I will hand it over to Sebastian.

Thank you, Martino, and hello everyone. Calling with Marc and Jono from our ET mine in Côte d'Ivoire today. I'm first pleased to report that we have continued to deliver against our six key focus areas for the year as presented on the screen with the goal of unlocking near-term value for all stakeholders. I will go through each area in detail in the upcoming slides, but as a quick summary, On the operational front, thanks to the efforts made in H1, we saw the strongest performance so far this year in Q3 and we expect Q4 to be even stronger. This means that we expect to meet full year production guidance for the 11th consecutive year and maintain our status as one of the lowest cost gold producers in the sector. On the capital allocation front, despite the significant investments in our growth, we are continuing to deliver strong shareholder returns while maintaining a healthy financial position. Regarding our plans to unlock growth in the short term, we expect 2024 to be an exciting year for Endeavour, as both the brownfield expansion of Sabadola-Massawa and the La Figue development project remain on budget and on track to be commissioned next year. Meanwhile, regarding our plans to unlock long-term growth, our exploration results continue to demonstrate our ability to self-generate an organic growth pipeline. Our major focus is our recent Tenda Iguala discovery in Côte d'Ivoire, where results so far have exceeded expectations, extending the mineral strength by 50% and delineating several potential satellite deposits. As previously mentioned, we believe that Tenda Iguala can be a tier one asset, and we look forward to publishing an updated resource estimate later this year. Alongside this year's investment in our organic growth, we are pleased to continue to offer attractive shareholder returns as we have delivered $240 million to shareholders over the first nine months of the year. Since our first dividend payment in early 2021, we're proud to have returned over three quarters of a billion dollars to shareholders. which is equivalent to over $200 for every ounce produced. Looking ahead, our goal is to increase our shareholder returns program further, still, once our two ongoing organic growth projects are complete, to ensure that our efforts to unlock growth benefit all stakeholders. As part of our ESG strategy, we continue to launch important new initiatives with a name to protect the places where we operate and promote sustainable social economic growth in our host communities. We are pleased to see that our initiatives are being noticed as Sustainalytics recently upgraded our rating, making us the top-ranked gold producer. I will now dive deeper into each of these themes, starting with our operating results. So first, as outlined in this year's guidance, operating performance is weighted toward the second half of the year, as we expect stronger production and lower costs at our Hyundai, Sabadell and Massawa, and Manaminds. And as you can see on page 7, this is the trend we are seeing. Due to the stripping efforts done in the first half of the year, we had access to better grades in Q3, which represents our strongest quarter to date, with production increasing by 13,000 ounces over the second quarter and all-in sustaining costs falling $33 per ounce. And we achieved this despite Q3 being impacted by the rainy season. The good news is that we anticipate the fourth quarter to be even stronger. I will let Mark run you through the mine-by-mine performance later. Turning to page 8, you can see that year-to-date we've already produced 792,000 ounces at an all-in sustaining cost of $974 per ounce, which places us on track to meet our guidance for the year. We have already achieved 75% of the bottom end of our production guidance with, as just mentioned, Q4 currently on track to be the strongest quarter of the year. And as you can see on the screen, we are pleased that this operating performance continues to be achieved safely with a sector-leading safety record. On page 9, we can see that our year-to-date all-in sustaining cost performance continues to place us as one of the lowest cost-goal producers in the sector, which means that we are capable of generating healthy margins in order to fund our capital allocation priorities. Diving a bit deeper into this year's capital allocation priorities, you see that we have invested more than $370 million in gross capital so far this year, with the key focus on the Sabadola-Massawa expansion and the Lafayette Greenfield project, in addition to our exploration efforts, which I'll discuss in the upcoming slides. Alongside these investments, we have returned $665 million to our stakeholders, which include investors and our host countries. A total of $240 million has been returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, while $425 million has been returned to governments in the form of taxes, minority dividends, and royalty payments, which is important for maintaining our social license to operate and our position as a trusted partner in countries. Moving to slide 11, I'll now provide an update on the progress being made at our growth projects, starting with the Sabadola-Massawa expansion project. As a reminder, once this expansion is completed, the Sabadola-Massawa mine will rank as a Tier 1 asset capable of producing more than 400,000 ounces per year, thereby increasing the quality of our portfolio and further diversifying our production base. In addition, based on the exploration success in finding oxide ore, we are confident we will be able to further boost production in the short term. I will let Mark provide details on the build within this section, but at a high level, construction work is progressing on budget with 84% of the $290 million initial capital cost now committed. It is also on schedule with first goal from the biox plant expected during the second quarter of next year. Moving now to our next growth project, which is our La Figue development in Côte d'Ivoire. It will be another cornerstone asset for the company, with an envisaged annual production of more than 200,000 ounces over the initial 13-year mine life, at a low oil and sustaining cost of below $900 per ounce. Like the Salvador and Massawa expansion projects, we have now committed around 84% of initial capital, with costs in line with expectations. And we are on track for first production in Q3 next year. In fact, we just showed the progress of the project to our board yesterday and was very pleased to see it coming nicely. Shifting now to our ongoing exploration efforts, which continue to generate excitement amongst the team. So far this year, we spent nearly $80 million with a significant focus on our greenfield discovery Tenda Iguala, as can be seen on slide 13. Whilst I'll focus the discussion on Tenda EGWALA in the upcoming slide, I also want to highlight the success that we are seeing across the portfolio, which we're happy to address during the Q&A session. This success across the group leaves us well positioned to meet our five-year discovery target of discovering 12 to 17 million ounces of indicated resources for continuing operations over the 2021 to 2025 period at the low discovery cost of less than $25 per ounce. Now, looking at Tenda Iguala on page 14, I must say, given the drill results received, we continue to be more and more convinced that it has the potential to be another Tier 1 asset. Last year, we were thrilled to announce an initial maiden resource of 1.1 million indicated answers and a further 1.9 million inferred answers. And this was solely based on approximately 60,000 meters of drilling. This year, we have already drilled 131,000 meters and are on track to drill in total of 180,000 meters. The results have exceeded expectations, extending the mineralized trend by 50% and delineating several potential satellite deposits. We are therefore eager to publish an updated resource estimate later this year, which is expected to result in a material increase in the overall resource base with a greater proportion in the indicated category. As mentioned earlier, in addition to investing in our growth, another key capital allocation priority for us is returning capital to our shareholders. This year, we have already paid out $240 million to shareholders, which is comprised of the $100 million dividend for H2 2022 that was paid in Q1, and another $100 million dividend that was paid in Q3 for H1 2023. On an annualized basis, the dividend paid for the first half of the year represents $25 million more than our minimum dividend for the year, which reiterates our commitments to paying supplemental shareholder returns. In addition to our dividend, we have returned over $40 million in share buybacks year to date, which means that since the launch of the program in early 2021, we've bought back more than $270 million worth of shares, representing over 12 million shares. As you can see on page 16, overall this means that our progressive shareholder returns program has now returned more than $775 million in the form of dividends and share buybacks since we declared our first dividend in 2020 and commenced payments in early 2021. To put this in context, we have returned approximately 13% of our market cap since the beginning of our returns program. Another way to look at it is that we delivered significantly more than the capital required to build one new mine. Looking ahead, once we complete our current two builds, we then expect to focus on further strengthening our balance sheet and increasing our shareholder returns before launching a new build, thereby ensuring that our efforts to unlock growth provide immediate benefits to all our stakeholders. Before I hand over to the team, I wanted to touch on our ESG initiatives. We continue to believe that mining has the potential to be one of the most impactful industries in contributing to improvements in living standards, particularly in West Africa where we operate. And we are able to see this firsthand through the results of our ESG initiatives and our economic contributions to host countries, which amounted to over $2 billion last year. While there are many ongoing initiatives, we are particularly proud this quarter to announce that we have now received external assurance for compliance to the World Gold Council's Responsible Gold Mining Principle across all our mines, in addition to ISO certifications for environmental and health and safety management. These are significant milestones for Endeavour and demonstrate our commitment to responsible gold mining practices. In fact, looking at the next slide, you see that because of our efforts, we are proud to now be the top rated gold mining company in Sustainalytics ESG rating universe and also one of the top performers across other sectors as well. In the appendix pack, you will see that we are now better ranked than Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, or Glencore, but also be on mining better than Alphabet, Unilever, or Amazon, just to name a few ones. And on this positive note, I'll hand it over to Guy to walk you through our financial results.