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 second quarter 2024 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 second quarter of fiscal 2024. 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 Denilera. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Chantal, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As you would have seen last night in our press release, we achieved the highest revenue in more than 10 years at a time when we feel we are still very early in the mining up cycles. The fact that the copper supply should fall well short of demand by 2025 is starting to get more and more recognition, and over the last two weeks, we have seen gold return to above the $2,000 mark, which is much higher than what is required for exploration at a time when the gold industry itself is facing depleting reserves. At Major, we continue to see the strength in our business as the increase in demand from copper and battery metals customers more than offset the slowdown in exploration from junior gold companies. During the quarter, we saw our combined revenue from copper and lithium increase by 40% compared to last year, now representing over 30% of our activity, while gold still represented approximately 40% of our revenue. In addition, growth from our South American operations outweighed the decline in North American revenue, showcasing the effectiveness of our global diversification strategy. The strong EBITDA generation, combined with our now completely debt-free position, allows us to continue to create long-term value for our shareholders as we repurchase over 875,000 shares this quarter at an average price of $8.31 a share. Despite executing on the share buyback and an aggressive capital expenditure program to get ready for the future, we still ended the quarter with a net cash position of over $84 million, an increase of $23.4 million during the quarter. With that, Ian will walk us through the quarter's financials, and I'd like to discuss the market outlook further before opening the call for questions.