Equinox Gold Corp.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Equinox Gold second quarter 2022 results and corporate update. As a reminder, all participants are in 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 star then 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 turn the conference over to Relynn Bailey, Vice President, Investor Relations for Equinox Gold. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today for the Q2 conference call. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today, so please do visit our website, CDAR, and EDGAR to read the rest of our continuous disclosure documents. I'm now going to turn the call over to our chairman, Ross Beattie, to make some opening remarks.

Thank you, Merlin, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I don't usually get involved in these quarterly calls, but this particular one is important. I think I'm going to talk a little bit about the CEO transition and a little bit of the background of that. Obviously, it was a poor quarter, and I just want to make a couple editorial comments here to all investors. whether they're short-term investors or medium-term or long-term. If you are short-term, I want to point out that our Q3 and Q4 this year should be much better than our first two quarters. We signaled that at the beginning of the year, and we expect that to happen again, just like it did last year where we had a blowout quarter in Q4 last year. So short-term, things should be much better as the year progresses. If you're a mid-term investor, I'd like you to focus on our growth. Obviously, Greenstone is the biggest growth project we have that will add a couple hundred thousand ounces at least to our gold production profile in the next couple of years. But we also have a dramatic growth potential at Los Filos in Mexico, Arizona, in Brazil, Castle Mountain Phase II in the United States, and of course, our new Santa Luz mine in Brazil. tremendous amount of growth. I think we probably lead the entire sector in terms of growth of our production profile and our decreasing cash cost profile. And if you're a long-term investor like me, you should be looking to simply own a company that is being built into one of the world's major gold producers. This will provide a sustainable business over the long term. It will be low cost and it will be a significant generator of strong cash flow and long-term dividends when we complete our growth to produce more than a million ounces a year, which is our medium-term target. There will be lots of detail on our second quarter coming later in this call, but right now I want to talk about the news last night that we announced about the CEO transition. Christian approached me and others on the board some time ago, expressing a desire to shift into a different business. These things happen sometimes, and you can't fight them. You have to just simply go along with them and deal with the succession as best you can. Luckily for us, we had a built-in successor who had always been considered a successor to CEO, and that was our president, Greg Smith. Greg and Christian were both founding members of the Equinox Gold Management Team, joined me right at the start in building Equinox from an idea to what is now a major gold producer company. with seven operations and a whole bunch of growth, as I've just described. Christian obviously will be missed, but we are very content with a strong successor who we know well, knows all the team, a veteran industry expert in the mining business. Greg's had a long pedigree in other companies before joining and forming Equinox Gold at the beginning of 2018. So it's a healthy transition. It was a unanimous decision by the board. We did have a significant succession plan and succession procedure that we followed. And so Greg will start at the beginning of September. Today, he's on a well-earned holiday, I think, just getting ready for the new job. But he's been in the saddle as president. A lot of analysts know him. A lot of investors know him. And I look forward to him really stepping up and taking this company on to new levels. Needless to say, I want to express my thanks to Christian. He was a strong CEO, great guy. We worked together very, very well. And we've had a lot of, I think, enjoyment building Equinox together with the rest of the management team and building the management team. Really under Christian's reign, he really added to a small team at the start and what is now a fully functional major company build-out team, really starting at admin, finance, ESG team, and, of course, all the operations team that is required. I think we have 6,000 to 7,000 employees now, and it's a significant company that's going to become even bigger and better. So many thanks to Christian. Welcome to Greg. And I look forward to investors being able to talk to Greg once he's in the saddle in September, and then, of course, on future calls like this. I can't resist completing my comments with a couple of words about gold. You know, I feel gold is kind of like a coiled spring right now. Even though it came down just under 10% from its highs, it still outperformed almost every other asset class this year and the general decline of all asset classes. But there's still a very, very strong case for gold and a very strong case for gold moving higher in the foreseeable, in the very near-term future and longer-term future. Obviously, it responds well in this geopolitical turmoil, which I think we can say we have today between what's going on in Asia, what's going on in Ukraine. Certainly, we have persistent inflation. This is not going to go away anytime soon. Gold always does well in times of inflation. Even though bond interest rates have risen, bond yields have risen somewhat, there's still negative returns on a real basis. And why anybody would buy bonds is beyond me. We have declining equities, declining values in real estate, and so on. In the face of all of those negative other asset classes, you know, you've got 2,000 years where gold has been a store of value and has held its value. So I think all things included, I have a good outlook for gold in the short term and in the medium term and in the long term. And in that environment, Equinox Gold is really being built as a great way for investors to play the gold market, plus play a great growth company, which is what we're all working hard to build. So with those comments, once again, thanks to Christian and welcome to Greg. And I'm going to turn the call over to Christian for his last CEO role, really, in terms of presenting Q2 results. And Christian, I'll turn the call over to you. Thank you very much, one and all.