Major Drilling Group International Inc.

This conference has been recorded. Cette conférence est enregistrée. All participants, please stand by. Your conference is ready to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the fourth quarter 2023 results conference call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Chantal Melançon. Please go ahead, Ms. Melançon.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. As mentioned, we would like to welcome you to Major Drilling's conference call for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. 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 say I'm quite happy with the progress our company has made this year, considering that major drilling generated the second highest annual revenue in the company's history. at a time where mineral exploration expenditures is still at only 60% of the amount spent at the peak in 2012. This allowed us to grow our EBITDA to $1.74 per share, and we saw our net earnings grow by 40% to close the year at $75 million, again, the second highest in our company's history. What I'm particularly proud about is the fact that despite this growth, and adding new crews, we were able to achieve a new milestone of 9.4 million hours worked without a lost time injury, achieving an industry-leading LTI rate of 0.05. This shows the dedication and attention of our employees in applying the company's tools like the Take 5 program and our 10 life-saving rules. Also, I commend our recruiting and training teams for their success in the development of our workforce at a time when we brought in a significant number of new employees over the last two years. Great job, everyone, and please continue to stay safe. Looking at the fourth quarter, as mentioned on the last call, the quarter got off to quite a slow start with challenging weather conditions in Nevada, northern Canada, and February. which affected our revenue for the quarter. Fortunately, we were pleased to see robust activity levels return by the end of the quarter and moving in the first quarter. The strong performance this year allowed us to grow our net cash position by $61 million during the year to $59 million net cash at the end of the year, while at the same time continuing to modernize our fleet and invest in our future. With that, Ian will walk us through the quarter's financials, and then I'd like to discuss the market outlook before opening the call to questions.