Major Drilling Group International Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first quarter 2022 results conference call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Chantal Melanson. Please go ahead, Ms. Melanson.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. As mentioned, we would like to welcome you to Major Drilling's conference call for the first quarter of fiscal 2022. On the call, we will have Denis Larocque, President and CEO, and Ian Ross, our Chief Financial Officer. Our results were released yesterday evening and can be found on our website at www.majordrilling.com. We also invite you to visit our website for further information. Before we get started, we'd like to caution you that during this conference call, we will be making forward-looking statements about future events or the future financial performance of the company. These statements are forward-looking in nature and actual events or results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. I will now turn the presentation over to Denis Larocque. Please go ahead.

Thank you Chantal and good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. I must start by saying that the team and I are very pleased with the progress we've made this quarter. Our proactive strategy and efforts across the last few quarters focused around having rigs and inventory ready for immediate deployment to customers have delivered results that have seen major drilling grow its revenue by close to 70%. This represents our highest quarterly revenue since our second quarter of 2013. I'm confident that the cyclical recovery is well underway and we will continue to see increased activity in the industry, and I will explain the basis for management's view on this later during the call. During the quarter, we saw strong regional growth in North America where gold projects are still the main driver of activity. We also added two months of revenue from McKay acquisition, which closed June 1st. While still in the early stages, the integration is going very well and operations are performing at high level in a very busy market as anticipated. In South America and Asia, our operations continued to be impacted by the effects of the pandemic, which delayed several projects and continued to disrupt some of our operational activities. The increase in demand for major drilling services this quarter allowed us to generate net earnings of $11.1 million compared to $2.1 million in the same period last year. despite headwinds brought on by cost inflation, labor challenges, and the pandemic. Our operational leverage, combined with more favorable terms in pricing on some of our contracts, are starting to bear fruit, and we expect this to improve margins going forward, although it will be somewhat offset by cost inflation for supplies and labor. With that, Ian will now walk us through the quarter's financial, then I'd like to further discuss our market outlook before opening up the call for questions.