Equinox Gold Corp.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Equinox Gold first quarter 2021 financial result and corporate update conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press the star, then the one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. If you are participating through the webcast, you can submit a question in writing by using the text box in the lower left corner of the webcast frame. I would now like to hand the conference over to Rylan Bailey, Vice President, Investor Relations for Equinox Gold. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Amanda, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. Some of you were just with us at the AGM, which we've wrapped up, and now, of course, we're going to walk through the Q1 results and our corporate update. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today, so please do take the time to visit our website and to visit our continuous disclosure documents that are available on CDAR and on EDGAR. I'm now going to turn the call over to our chairman, Ross Beattie, for opening remarks.

Thank you very much, Rulin, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today. As Rulin said, we just wrapped up our AGM, and the very first slide I'm going to show you here in our presentation that's on our website is our wonderful board of directors, all of the motions before the meeting were passed, and I, of course, appreciate all the support we have from our shareholders. All of the director nominees were voted in as well to serve on the board for another year, and I want to thank all of the board members who you see here today for their service to the company. Obviously, the board runs our governance and major strategy. We spent almost all day yesterday in committee meetings. We had a board dinner where we talked strategy and cybersecurity and various issues like that that come up today. And I have to say, every single board member made a significant contribution, and we certainly are well-led on that front. And your shareholders should be very proud of the board as it is right here. So thanks to the board. As you all know, you know, this is the third year really that we have done this, and I like to kind of give a bit of a report card on what we've achieved in the three years we've been in existence since we began right at the beginning of 2018. And this kind of says it all. 2018, we didn't have any operations at the start of the year. We decided to build the one mine we had under development. We had a pre-feasibility study on the Castle Mountain mine as well, which we did. We We spun out and sold some of our non-core assets. We spun out Solaris Copper to Equinox shareholders, and we acquired the Mesquite Mine late in the year, which gave us production of 25,000 ounces in 2018. In 2019, on our mission to have increased scale and diversification and production, we completed construction of Arizona, started producing there. We had a full year from Mesquite, produced 200,000 ounces of gold, And at the end of the year, we announced that we were going to merge with Leogold. We also listed on the New York Stock Exchange and graduated to the TSX and the TSX-V. Another great year of growth. And in 2020, the year just passed, we also had a quite extraordinary year. We added four producing mines and the development project with the Leogold deal. increased trading liquidity from what was less than $1 million a day to about $40 million a day on average, and our liquidity and scale attracted new institutional investors. We were added to the big indexes. We extended the Arizona and Mesquite mine lives, commenced production at Castle Mountain, started St. Louis construction in Brazil, and at the end of the year, we announced the acquisition of Premier Gold. as well as Solaris Resources listed on the TSX. And in 2020, we ended with production of 477,000 ounces. Not bad for three years of growth. So what's ahead? If you look at us today, here's what we look like. We have seven producing mines, four growth projects, those four being the mine development in Brazil, Sandaluz, expansion of Los Filos, the expansion of Castle Mountain, and finally underground work at Arizona, as well as, of course, the Greenstone Mine in Ontario. We have tripled our reserves. We were at 5.8 million ounces of reserves in December 2017. Today we have 16.1 million ounces. Again, not bad. That's our capital resource base, don't forget. That's what's going to drive our continuing production in the future. And included in those reserves, we have 29.4 million ounces of total gold reserves resources, which is really to be an extraordinary endowment for future production. We produced 470,000 ounces, as I said, in 2020, and we're on target right now. We're guiding for 630,000 ounces this year. And we are very much on the path to produce more than 1 million ounces in just the next couple of years. We have a target of $1,230 an ounce for all in sustaining costs. And our liquidity is quite incredible. We've actually got nearly a billion dollars of liquidity when you combine our cash, our credit facilities, and our investments. So just an amazingly powerful financial base to add to this growing production base. and this tremendous story that I think is just in the middle of being executed. So, you know, these are some examples. You know, it's not just growth for growth's sake. What we're trying to do is also create real value. And, yes, we get real value through growth, but we also get real value through just good execution of a fairly simple business plan to provide investors fantastic leverage to the gold price and build a really significant investment significant in scale, you know, a world-class company really. And our motto right now is to build the premier America's gold producer. And we mean premier in the biggest sense. We mean premier in not just size, but in quality. Something where in the short time we've been going, we have already built up a tremendous reputation for quality. And that's what we want to have, quality in engineering, in exploration, in management generally, financial management, but also in environmental management and environmental and governance and social matters. We want to be a complete company and really give value in all of these things because each one of those boxes of value gives things to our shareholders. And we're going to just – these three examples here are just examples of what we've already done that can be kind of quantified. We bought the Mesquite Mine in late 2018. We paid $158 million for it. We've already produced 316,000 ounces of gold. and we've generated $139 million in free cash flow. We've also added 670,000 ounces of gold in discoveries. So we've extended the mine length. We're going to really have fundamental value there that's being created. We then built the Arizona mine. This was a mine that had actually gone bankrupt with prior operators. Well, it cost us about $160 million to build. We've already generated $175 million in free cash flow from this asset. while at the same time producing 238,000 ounces of gold and discovering another 820,000 ounces. We've also got the underground preliminary feasibility study in progress because we think we're actually going to extend this by life literally by decades. That's real value creation. Another example is Solaris. We spun out Solaris back in 2018 to our shareholders for about a $33 million value. Equinox tapped 40%, and we spun out 60% to all of our then shareholders. Well, you know, under the sterling management of Richard Wark and his team, who have taken off management of Solaris, you know, they've developed the words to deposit in Ecuador into a really world-class discovery and corporate development. So even though it's not gold for us, our shareholders are benefiting from that in two ways, from the shares they got on the spin-out, And from the now 30% or so, or now it's being diluted because we raised 66 million U.S. on the sale of a partial interest just a month or so ago, and we still have $200 million of value from that asset. So that's real wealth creation through, to me, it's almost like financial engineering where we did the spin-out, so we didn't have any additional costs. or exposure, or liabilities, but we've had this wonderful windfall of value thanks to the successful efforts of Richard Wark's team in Solaris. And we've got a whole abundance of opportunities yet to deliver in terms of wealth creation. St. Louis, that's going to come at the end of this year. Castle Mountain, that's a couple years out. Los Feliz, that's in progress. Arizona Underground, very much in progress as well. and I-80, which is this new company that was spun out from Premier, which Equinox Gold owns 30% of, and it's doing great things in Nevada under the leadership of you and Donnie. We expect good things to come from that, great returns for the Equinox shareholders as well, and we're very, very pleased with all of this real wealth creation that we've achieved that is so tangible in such a short period of our growth. Well, with all of that, we've had share price performance, which has, generally speaking, been pretty good, although we've had a rather rough quarter in the last quarter with the decline in gold. If you look, however, at our share price appreciation since we started the company at the end of December 2017, we've outperformed gold, all the indices, and all of our peers. And investors holding Equinox Gold shares in August 2018, when we spun out Solaris, have also enjoyed this great trajectory of that copper-focused company. So, you know, I think the last quarter, we are in all the indices now. We are with ETFs, of course, and as the gold price goes up, there's natural buying coming from those. As the gold price goes down, there's natural selling. And we've had to suffer some of that. I think we've had some overhangs, quite frankly, from the Premier deal, which just closed a few weeks ago. And we, I think... have yet to prove to shareholders that this great growth we've got in front of us, it's not yet been delivered. In other words, it's right in the middle of execution right now. We're a bit of a show-me story right now. Even though we're producing over 600,000 ounces of gold, we're making lots of money, we've got a great balance sheet, we've got excellent exploration upside, we've got all of this stuff built in. But I think to some degree, investors are also saying, you know what, I'm just going to wait until we actually enter some of these projects. My point would be, you know, you can wait if you want, but by the time we've done it, it's going to be too late. I mean, the stock is going to run, and we're going to get to a great price to net asset value, more multiples, more like our peers. And this next page shows that. On page 8, you know, this is why we are building a major gold company, why we're so focused on growth, because the market's reward scales in age. As you get bigger, your multiple goes up. It is wealth creation simply by getting bigger. You have less risk. You have broader investor appetite. Overhead costs are lower on a per ounce basis. You have a reduced cost of capital and more funds available for shareholder returns. So it's just good business to get big. The other thing you do, of course, is you have even more leverage to the gold price. And with a big company, you have leverage in two ways. You have leverage on the income statement. With every ounce you produce, if you get $100 more per ounce with a gold price run, that's real wealth creation to the bottom line for instant value leverage to the gold price. You also have what I call balance sheet leverage with the gold reserves and resources. So right now we have 29 million ounces of gold reserves and resources. Every time the gold price goes up, you know, every dollar it goes up, that's fundamentally leverage. an increase in real value to our shareholders because those are going to be long-term returns to us. And we have such a huge resource base now, we can really think long-term and build this long-term store of value that I think always creates value for shareholders. So I'm expecting that over the next year or two, we will outperform the market because we now have this large scale, we have diversity. The premier deal gave us a really nice opportunity school, the fourth leg to the school. We have one leg in Brazil, one leg in Mexico, one leg in California, and now we have this big leg in Canada. We have all of these catalyst-rich investment plans. Year-on-year growth, we're going to produce over 600,000 this year. We'll be well over that next year, well over that the following year. We're going to blow through a million ounces in the next two or three years. And I can see going to 1.3, 1.4 million ounces without too much difficulty based on the Los Fieles expansion, the St. Louis expansion, or the St. Louis mine development, the Greenstone project in Ontario, and, of course, Castle Mountain, and eventually Arizona as well. We've got all of this built-in growth, which is going to deliver fabulous returns to shareholders everywhere. And all of this is going to be self-financed with our strong balance sheet. We don't need to raise any more equity money at all. So all of this begs the question, what about gold? You know, gold's had a kind of a rocky start to this year. It came off its high from last August. You know, is the party over? Well, I just, to me, there's nothing that is different in the gold equation than was, that existed a year ago. Absolutely nothing. There is a natural tendency for markets to be, you know, they don't go straight up. There's a natural up and down. There's bear rallies inside bull markets and vice versa. So I just think currently we are in a secular bull market that started in 2016 and it remains intact today. If anything, I think it's even more powerful today than it was even a year ago. We've had all this stimulus. We've had this explosion in sovereign debt debasing all global currencies and Negative interest rates still exist. We have even greater prospects for higher inflation, and higher inflation always drives the gold price up. The U.S. dollar is beginning to crack, and it should continue to weaken. That's always good for gold. And, of course, you have so little global assets held in gold, and I think any change in this allocation is going to be very sliverish for the price of gold. On the supply side, there are bullish factors. Exploration funding is constrained. Reserve replacement is slow. New gold mine development is slower and more difficult than ever. Just look at what's going on all over the world. Governments are getting more demanding. Environmental activism, social activism is making more difficulties for mine developments. And it's just a tougher business. It takes a lot longer for gold mines to be developed. And actually, you saw that in 2019 and 2020. The global gold mine supply actually decreased. So there's not just these powerful demand factors for higher gold prices. There's also all sorts of supply reasons why I think gold is going to continue to go higher. So I expect gold will shoot through its previous high sometime later this year, maybe 2022. But the party is certainly not over. If anything, it's still going in a very solid and substantial way. And Equinox Gold will benefit from that every single step of the way. Not only are we building a great gold company in terms of production and sort of people and finances, but part and parcel of every responsible company today, be it a mining company or really any company, is that companies look after their environment, their social aspects of their business, and general governance, diversity, equality, those kind of principles. I'm very proud to say that today we published our first ESG report. We just published it this morning. You can find it on our website. Christian's going to talk a little bit more about it. But I just want to tell every one of our shareholders and interested parties on this call how very important this stuff is to me personally. I feel, you know, you can't have a successful mine if your workers are unhealthy, if your workers don't have jobs, good safety records, if you can't deliver good quality employment to them, if you can't look after diversity on your workforce, you've got to do this sort of stuff. If you can do that, then you're more successful. You can't have a successful mining company unless you look after your environment as much as possible. We all know that mining is tough on the environment, generally speaking, but it can be minimized. And at the end of the mine life, you can reclaim a mine And once reclaimed, many mines, such as, for example, the Castle Mountain mine in California, before we took it on and rebuilt it or redeveloped it, you know, you can do a reclamation these days where you hardly even know there was a mine there in the first place. So this is the nature of mining today. It's not like it was done 20 years ago. And today's responsible mining is one where you really try to minimize your impact as much as possible on the environment. And then finally, of course, you have to look after your communities. We strive very hard to look after our communities. We put a lot of effort into this, a lot of money, a lot of time. You've got to work with your communities. After all, they're the ones who are creating your social license and creating your ability to work in these far-flung places of the world. So it means a lot to us. We spend a lot of effort on this. We just spent half of yesterday with our full board, actually, going through our environmental and social governance reporting. And I think every one of our board members is signed on to this, and every one of our management team as well. It's very important stuff, and I look forward to good dialogue with our shareholders about how well we're doing and some places where we could do better. We certainly had a hiccup late last year at the Los Feliz mine with what I think was a legacy issue that came out of the Leogold and the prior operators of that mine. and we've really tried to spend the time there to fix the problem for the long term. So, you know, hopefully that won't happen again, and hopefully we won't have that kind of situation anywhere else. So with all of that, I'm going to end this preamble about the company and just finish off by saying how proud I am of what we're doing, how very appreciative I am of our management team, our senior management team, right down to the people at the face working at Underground and our OpenFit operations, our administration team, our aspiration team, our whole team, our ESG team and so on, our whole 6,000 strong management team that are building this company for great results in the future for all stockholders and all interested parties, all people who are affected by our operations. And with that, I think I'll turn the call over to Christian now to talk about our Q1 results and give you an update on the project. Over to you, Christian.