First Quantum Minerals Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the first Quantum Minerals Limited third quarter 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 one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star, then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Benita To, Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on our call today. During the call, we will be making forward-looking statements. As such, I encourage you to read the cautionary notes that accompany this presentation, our MD&A, and the related news release. As a reminder, the presentation is available on our website and that all dollar references are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. On today's call will be Tristan Pascoe, our executive officer, with opening remarks, followed by Rudy Battenhorst, our chief operating officer, who will provide an overview of operations during the quarter. Ryan McWilliam, our chief financial officer, will follow with a review of financial results. Tristan will then wrap things up, after which we will open the lines up to take questions. And with that, I will turn it over to Tristan.

Thanks, Benita. And thank you, everybody, for joining us on our conference call today. Concerns of a macro slowdown have accelerated since our last conference call. And while there continues to be a healthy physical demand for our copper, and we have not seen erosion on this front, the copper price has declined from an average of $4.31 per pound in the second quarter to hover around $3.40 per pound today. This pricing environment, combined with broad cost inflation, has led to margin compression across the industry and for First Quantum. Despite this challenging environment, we saw real operational improvements during the quarter, which Rudy will speak to later on the call. Our commitment to paying down debt over the last two years has placed our balance sheet in a better position to weather the challenges ahead of us and the company is in a considerably stronger position when compared to slowdowns of the past, which Ryan will review. I remain confident that with the quality of our operations and the experience of our team, we are well positioned to navigate through the current period of challenging macroeconomic conditions. We continue to be focused on driving productivity and cost improvements at our operations and exercising financial disciplines to preserve the balance sheet. We will manage capital expenditures prudently which may include deferring as yet unsanctioned items. I will now address the guidance changes that we announced yesterday evening. With our third quarter results, we lowered our 2022 production guidance to between 755 and 785,000 tonnes of copper, a 6% decline from the midpoint of our previous guidance. The main reason for the lowered production guidance is consangie, which I will address. But before going into more detail about Consanti, I don't want the strong operational performance at Cobra Panama and Sentinel to be overlooked with today's guidance changes. Both operations are set up very well for next year. Cobra Panama once again achieved record quarterly production as the mill achieved throughput rates of 95 million tonnes per annum on an annualised basis, and Sentinel achieved its target run rate of 62 million tonnes per annum on an annualised basis ahead of schedule. Rudy will discuss both these accomplishments in more detail when he speaks. At Kansanshi, we lowered this year's copper production guidance to between 140,000 to 150,000 tonnes of copper, which is a 22% decrease from the previous guidance. The lowered guidance reflects the challenges year-to-date of the operation. This year, we experienced an accumulation of water in the main pit after an extended rainy season, but this was resolved by the end of September when the pit was fully dewatered. As a result, however, oxide ore mining in Q3 was restricted and resulted in supplementing ore feed with low-grade and tarnished stockpile materials. This was a setback for this year at Kansanshi, but we have built greater redundancy into the dewatering infrastructure in order to provide greater insurance for the upcoming rainy season. We are preparing Kansanshi to transition to more sulphide ores as the oxide ores continue to deplete. The sulphide ores, which are the future of the operation, are lower grade, and hence the mine will need to transition to higher volume operations in order to offset the grade decline. We have known about this for some time. Although we commenced construction of S3 some years ago, we subsequently stopped the project as it was important to be disciplined and only proceed with a supportive investment climate in Zambia. On this, we have seen significant progress in the last 12 months. The budget speech by the Minister of Finance and National Planning two weeks ago was a further step forward in this regard and reinforced our decision this year to proceed with the S3 expansion. As you may also recall, during the second quarter, we also conducted detailed updates to the geological model at Kansanshi that confirmed that 20% of the sulphide ores comprise vein-hosted areas Given the nature of the venous and lower growth profile of the sulphide ore body, production volumes at Consantia are expected to continue at lower levels until the completion of the S3 expansion project in 2025. With the expansion, Consantia is expected to return to a 200,000 tonne plus copper producing mine with several of the initial years above 250,000 tonnes of production per year and deliver the increased volumes into a better macro environment. I remain confident with First Quantum's in-house capabilities on the successful execution of the S3 expansion, which will be similar in nature to the three trains that are currently operating at Cobra Panama and the two trains currently operating at Sentinel. Among the guidance changes was also an increase in our C1 cash cost guidance range to $1.70 to $1.80 per pound of copper produced. The cause of the increase is twofold, which reflects the lower production from the Zambian operations And secondly, broad cost inflation, which continued to increase further during the third quarter and remain at elevated levels, as Rudy and Ryan will discuss in more detail. With that, I would like to hand it over to Rudy to review our operations.