Ero Copper Corp.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Eric Hopper Fourth Quarter 2024 Operating and Financial Results Conference Call. 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 1 on your telephone keypad. If you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star 10-0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Courtney Lynn, Executive Vice President, External Affairs and Strategy. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning and welcome to AeroCopper's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. Our operating and financial results were released yesterday afternoon and are available on our website along with our financial statements and MD&A for the three and 12 months ended December 31st, 2024. A corresponding earnings presentation can be downloaded directly from the webcast and is also available in the presentations section of our website. Joining me on the call today are Marco DiFilippo, President and Chief Executive Officer Wayne Dreyer, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Jelson Batista, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. For a detailed discussion of these risks and their potential impact on our business, please refer to our most recent annual information form, available on our website, as well as on CDAR and EDGAR. Unless otherwise noted, all figures discussed today are in U.S. dollars. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Marco DiFilippo.

Thank you, Courtney, and thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us today. As we previously released operating results in February, I thought I would take a moment here to outline our strategy, reflect on some of Aero's achievements in 2024, and set expectations on cadence for 2025. First and foremost, Arrow is an incredible business. We have a committed leadership team, a passionate workforce, a diverse portfolio of operating assets, and an enviable long-term growth project in Furnas. It is an honor to be stepping into this role at such a pivotal time for the company. There are several moving pieces in our portfolio over the next few quarters, which we will have ample time to address on this call. But our near-term strategy is simple. and can be summarized by four steps. Step one, achieve commercial production at Tukama. Two, deleverage our balance sheet. Three, aggressively advance the long-term growth initiatives we have in our portfolio, including our partnership on Pernas. And four, initiate returns to shareholders. So with that said, let's start with Tukama. And before diving into the challenges we've worked through, I want to highlight some key positives. Since completing the project on schedule last year with a local workforce and doing it without a single lost time injury, our mining operations have continued to track ahead of schedule. The grades from our infill drill program have been higher than we expected, and of particular note, our process plant has consistently achieved at or above design met recoveries and concentrate grades for months now. I am deeply proud of these achievements. At the same time, I acknowledge we've had several challenges that impacted production, both outside and inside our mine gate. External to our operation at Tucumana, we faced a multi-week power outage due to an extreme weather event, as well as extended periods of low power quality, which required intervention. Since resolving these factors, we encountered conventional teething pains as we ramped up throughput volumes. These teething pains can broadly be described as material flow constraints which ranged from minor equipment issues, such as valve dimensioning, small component and pipe weld failures, as well as more substantial constraints, including damage sustained to one of our three tailings filters, which impacted operating flexibility in that portion of the circuit. While the dollar quantum for these fixes and adjustments is small, on the order of $2 million, each one of these adjustments required dedicated engineering, manufacturing, delivery to our site in Perah, and installation during a scheduled maintenance period. This is a long-winded way of saying they all required time. Working closely with our operational teams and third-party providers at the end of last year, we developed a plan to implement these changes during two extended periods of planned downtime in January and February. These shutdowns were completed, and I'm pleased to report that we are already seeing substantial improvement with performance strengthening from late February into March. The final repair to our third tailings filter remains on track for completion by the end of Q1. With these improvements either completed or on track for completion this month, we are already seeing and expect to continue to see increased plant reliability and throughput volumes and consequently increasing production beginning in the second quarter. I want to stress this production cadence is aligned with our reaffirmed full year guidance. Switching gears slightly to production cadence at Cariba and Giavancina, for different reasons, we expect Q1 to be the softest of the year as we work to set these operations for long-term success. At Cariba, as I outlined in our Q3 conference call, we only expect to see the benefit from additional development we are doing at Polar to emerge over the next several quarters. Mobilization of a second development contractor is well underway. And if you have any specific questions on how that work is progressing, Jelson can provide details during our Q&A. At Javanchina, we are working to transition the mine to a fully mechanized operation to increase productivity, reduce costs, and most importantly, reduce exposure to our workforce, which is our top priority. We have a capital investment cycle occurring at Javanchina this year, which includes the purchase of equipment to complete the mechanization of the mine, ventilation and cooling upgrades, as well as an asset integrity program to ensure that we can operate through the duration of our now-extended reserve life. Again, it is worth noting that our full-year guidance, including elevated all and sustaining cost guide for 2025, reflects these investments. We are excited about the future prospects for the Givenchy operations and see considerable potential for further growth. For both of these assets, We expect softness to be isolated to the first half of the year as these changes are implemented and expect the impact to be the most evident during the first quarter. Again, our guidance ranges reflect this. With that backdrop, let's discuss the second step of our strategy, deleveraging the balance sheet. There are two key points to highlight here. Firstly, we see a clear pathway to an inflection as Tucumaw production ramps up, and we expect a fairly significant deleveraging to occur with the achievement of commercial production. Near to medium term, we are targeting a normalized net debt leverage ratio of 1.5 times, and while the pace of achieving this milestone will be influenced by copper price, we are confident that the quality of our assets and consolidated operating margins will support our ability to meet this objective. Second, regarding overall liquidity, we remain well positioned as Tukama rounds the corner and the recent expansion of our evolving credit facility, which Wayne will touch on. The next two steps of our strategy, advancing long-term growth and shareholder returns, will emerge over the coming quarters. While long-term growth remains a priority, we intend to pursue shareholder returns more proactively once we make meaningful progress on deleveraging our balance sheet. Touching up for an ask quickly, We have five drill rigs on site right now and expect to complete the 28,000-meter Phase I drill program by mid-year and the majority of the 17,000-meter Phase II drill program by year-end. In parallel, we are advancing key technical work streams, including a geotechnical program, hydrogeology studies, as well as additional metallurgical test work on the high-grade zones we are drilling. We are also progressing initial mine and infrastructure layout designs to support a preliminary economic assessment, which we expect to complete in the first half of 2026. We have a great partner on this project in Valley-based metals, and we are very encouraged by the results we are seeing thus far. To ensure we have sufficient time for Q&A, I will leave it there and pass the call to Wayne, who will provide more detail on our financial results.