Endeavour Mining plc

Welcome to Endeavour Mining's first quarter 2025 results webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management presentation, there will be a question and answer session. So for those who wish to ask a question, please dial into the phone line. Please note that due to time constraints, we will be prioritising questions from covering analysts. Today's conference call is being recorded. Any transcript of the call will be available on Endeavour's website tomorrow. I would now like to hand the conference over to Endeavor's Vice President of Industrial Relations, Jack Almond. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Endeavor's Q1 2025 results webcast. Before we start, please note our usual disclaimer. On the call today, I'm joined by Ian Cockrell, Chief Executive Officer, Guy Young, Chief Financial Officer, and Jaria Traore, Executive Vice President of Operations and ESG, who's joining us from Dakar in Senegal. Today's poll will follow our usual format. Ian will first go through the highlights, Guy will present the financials, and Jaria will present our operating results by mine before handing back to Ian for his closing remarks. We'll then open the line up for questions. With that, I'll hand over to Ian.

Thank you, Jack, and hello to everyone joining us on the call today. I'm proud to say that we've delivered another strong operational and financial quarter for the first quarter of 2025, building on the momentum from the second half of last year. Our operating performance combined with our disciplined cost management has enabled us to capitalize on the rising gold price environment and generate record free cash flow. This has enabled us to significantly strengthen our financial position, surpassing our leverage target, and position the group to deliver higher shareholder returns through this particularly exciting phase. We produce 341,000 ounces of gold, as an all-in sustaining cost of $1,129 per ounce in the first quarter, placing us firmly on track to achieve our full-year guidance. As we move through the year, we are planning for slightly lower production in the second half, but we will focus on keeping our cost discipline and improving productivity and operational efficiencies to maintain our class-leading cost and maximize free cash flow generation. Since the end of our organic growth phase in Q3 2024, our operations have generated $775 million in free cash flow, and that represents over $795 for every single ounce that we've produced over that period. More importantly, our free cash flow generation has continued to grow in each quarter since the beginning of 2024, demonstrating the quality of our improved portfolio and the benefits of bringing low-cost production online in a rising gold price environment. As a result, we were able to reduce our net debt by $354 million, and we reduced our leverage significantly down to 0.22 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA, and well below our long-term target of 0.5 times. We significantly strengthened our balance sheet and improved our financial flexibility, which allows us to focus on increasing shelter returns and our longer-term organic growth pipeline. We paid record dividends for 2024 of $240 million and total return of $277 million, equivalent to a 5.9% indicative yield, or $251 for every ounce that we produced. We expect to exceed that total returns envelope in 2025 as we seek to supplement our $225 million minimum dividend commitment with additional dividends and buybacks. And you've seen that we've already supplemented returns with $52 million of share buybacks the year to date already, which brings minimum commitment for 2025 already to $277 million. That's exactly what we delivered for the whole of 2024. And as such, we're clearly well positioned to deliver on an increased shareholder returns profile for the third consecutive year. While shareholder returns remain the near-term focus, we are keeping one eye on the future by enhancing our organic growth pipeline. Our Tier 1 Assault Food Project, which will underpin our 35% production growth, to 1.5 million ounces by 2030, is on track, and we're confident that our exploration program will continue to increase the endowment of this already world-class complex. We expect to provide a resource update in the second half of this year as we advance the definitive feasibility study towards completion. Finally, during Q1, we were delighted to complete the commissioning of our solar plant at Sabadala Masawa, which will support our continued improvement in emissions intensity and, importantly, help reduce fuel consumption and power costs at that mining complex. As you can see from the snapshot, Endeavour has entered 2025 with a great deal of momentum. And I'm confident this will continue through the rest of the year and to the benefit of all of our stakeholders. Let's dive into a little bit more detail. And I think this particular slide really is a snapshot of what's happened in Endeavour over the past year or so. As we look at the operating performance on slide seven, you can see in the first quarter of 2025, Group production of 341,000 ounces was slightly lower compared to Q4 24, but in line with our mining sequence. But importantly, it was up 122,000 ounces over the corresponding period in 2024. Despite this, we improved our all-in sustaining cost, which improved by $12 per ounce quarter over quarter, as we improved mining, processing, and capital costs across the group. With lower costs and higher realized gold price of $2,783 during the quarter, we generated a strong all-in sustaining margin of nearly 60% or more. translated to $1,654 for every ounce that we produced. Overall, our safety performance has remained strong, with the group LCIFR of only 0.05 during the quarter. Jerry is going to touch on our safety performance in a little more detail later. And the strong first quarter performance has certainly positioned us well to achieve our full year guidance, as you can see on slide eight. Our Q1 group production was more than 30% of the lower end of the guidance range, and our all-in sustaining costs was well below the lower end of our guidance. This operational performance translated into record quarterly free cash flow generation for the group, as you can see on this slide. We generated $409 million of free cash flow during the quarter, equivalent to $1,199 for every ounce of gold we produced, and our free cash flow margin also increased to 39%. Free cash flow has been supported by strong production, improving costs, seasonally lower taxes, and significantly lower capital following the completion of our growth capital phase. Over the past three quarters, since the end of this organic growth phase, we've increased free cash flow generation every quarter. And cumulatively, we've generated $775 million of free cash flow. That's equivalent to $795 for every ounce of gold we've produced over that period. With our major growth projects now fully ramped up and our cost base stabilised, we're focusing on maximizing the free cash flow generation for every ounce of gold we produce to capitalize on this strong gold price environment. On the next slide, I want to highlight just how strong free cash flow generation has helped improve our balance sheet this quarter. We significantly reduced our leverage from 0.55 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA to just 0.22 times. comfortably below our long-term target of 0.5 times. And looking forward, we certainly want to maintain our leverage below 0.5, and Guy will discuss our balance sheet in a little bit more detail later as well. Given our free cash flow growth and that we have now deleveraged our financial position, we're well positioned to prioritize shareholder returns. We want to build on the record dividends of $240 million, an attractive total return of $251 for every ounce that we produced last year. We're committed to exceeding our minimum commitment of $225 million this year, and we've already completed the $52 million of buybacks. So that means a total return so far guaranteed for 2025 of $277 million. And we're well positioned now to deliver an increased envelope to our shareholders. As you can see on this chart, since we started paying shoulder returns with our first payment in Q1 2021, four years ago, we've returned more than $1.2 billion to our shareholders. That's equivalent to a third of our market cap at the start of the program and reflects our sustained commitment to delivering shoulder returns both through phases of growth and phases of cash flow generation, and reiterates the quality and the resilience of this business. Looking at our supplemental share buybacks in a bit more detail on the slide, you can see that we've accelerated buyback activity in Q1 by four times that of the previous quarter. We've delivered $52 million in share buybacks through the purchase or repurchase of 2.4 million shares. As we've advanced into our cash flow phase, we still see significant valuation upside by repurchasing our own stock. We'll be continuing to be opportunistic with buybacks and maintain flexibility to allocate supplemental cash towards buybacks or dividends, depending upon where we see the best return. To put our shareholder returns in context, it is clear that in the gold mining sector, our returns are consistently amongst the highest both on a yield basis and a dollar per ounce basis. When we compare our shoulder return indicative yield against other sectors, it's equally attractive. And that comparison for 2024 doesn't capture the recent improvement in the gold price. While gold has performed well, generous portfolios do still remain underweight with gold equities. But we believe that consistent operating performance, disciplined capital allocation, stable and transparent returns, and a sustained high gold price environment are key drivers for these investors to pivot towards gold equities. And I genuinely believe Endeavor is amongst the best positioned gold equities to capitalize on that trend. While shoulder returns continue to be the major focus, We're also progressing our longer-term organic growth to ensure that we can continue to grow production and maintain our first cost quartile position. This year, with a $75 million budget, our exploration program is focused on adding near-mine resources across the portfolio to improve optionality at each of our mines. At our development project at SAFU, we're expanding resources, as well as delineating new resources at the surrounding satellite deposits. We're also building out our early stage exploration pipeline with our green fields and new ventures program to ensure that we have visibility of future organic growth beyond SAFU. On the next slide, nothing better exemplifies Endeavor's ability to unlock value through the drill bit than the SAFU project. This Tier 1 project is advancing on track, and we're excited with the progress we're seeing on the exploration front. We are continuing to drill at this deposit to further delineate the known mineralization and extend that mineralization both along strike and at depth. We're also drilling nearby satellite targets, notably Parler, which is only about one kilometer west of the South Loop. We expect to increase the Asafo endowment in a resource update in the second half of this year that will incorporate up to 190,000 metres of additional drilling over and above the existing resource. Last year, we signed a joint venture agreement with Kulu Gold, who have an option to earn up to a 90% interest in the Asafo permit, which is due east of Asafo. The CERFRAE shares a similar structural and geological setting to ASAFU, with golden soil anomalies highlighting multiple prospective structural contexts that are yet to be extensively explored. We're excited by this potential to further expand the endowment of the ASAFU complex, potentially advancing it into a truly world-class system. For Asafo, we're on track to deliver the DSS by late 25, going possibly even into early 26, and could start construction in the latter half of 26, permits permitting, with first production expected in the second half of 28. On the next slide, we're certainly building on our strong ESG performance in 2024, and we've kicked off 2025 with a continued focus on delivering tangible outcomes across all pillars of sustainability. We remain committed to producing gold responsibly and sustainably so we can create meaningful value for all of our stakeholders. Building on our first quartile emissions performance in 24, we're targeting an even lower emissions intensity in 25 as we continue to implement our decarbonisation roadmap which will be supported by the introduction of a solar plant at Sabadala Masawa. On the social side for 2025, we continue to strengthen our commitment to local content. Although we're already spending about 80% of our annual procurement budget in-country, which over the past three years equates to approximately $3.6 billion, there's more that we can do, particularly for those smaller suppliers around our mine sites. We recently launched the Local Content Accelerator, which is a key initiative led by Endeavor to boost the local economic ecosystems around our mines. With regards to local talent management, we're strengthening our West African leadership teams by building succession programs and developing female talent. And we look forward to providing more detail on these initiatives towards the year end. In terms of health and safety, we're really pleased with our current performance, and we set robust targets for 2025 linked to group-wide compensation to ensure that we maintain a safe workplace for all of our employees. And with that, let me hand you over to Guy, who will walk you through the financial results in detail. Guy, over to you.