OceanaGold Corporation

Good morning and afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Oceana Gold 2023 Third Quarter Results Webcast and Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. And if at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Also note that this call is being recorded on Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time. And I would like to turn the call over to Rebecca Harris. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to Oceana Gold's third quarter 2023 results webcast and conference call. I'm Rebecca Harris, Director of Investor Relations. We are joined today by Jared Bond, President and Chief Executive Officer. Marius van Niekerk, Chief Financial Officer. David Londano, Chief Operating Officer, Americas. Peter Sharp, Chief Operating Officer, Asia-Pacific. and Craig Febrey, Chief Exploration Officer. Also present is Brian Martin, Senior Vice President, Business Development and Investor Relations. presentation that we will be referencing during the conference call is available through the webcast and on our website. I would also like to remind everyone that our presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. As we will be making forward-looking statements during the call, please refer to the cautionary notes included in the presentation, news release, and MD&A, as well as the risk factors set out in our annual information form. All dollar amounts discussed on this conference call are in U.S. dollars. I will now turn the call over to Jared for opening remarks.

Thank you, Rebecca, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'll begin our overview of our Q3 results with safety. A 12-month moving average total recordable injury frequency rate at the end of September was 4.1 per million hours worked. This is a little above what we've reported previously, which would broadly be a concern. However, this is coming off industry-leading low injury rates, and the nature of the injuries we had had fortunately been low severity. We are committed to creating a safe workplace at Oceania Gold, and in support of this, we are rolling out the Our Safe Behaviours program across our business, which is a proven program that focuses on our workforce being empowered to work safely and to mindfully identify risks before performing a task. From a production standpoint, Oceania Gold produced just over 99,000 ounces of gold and 3,400 tonnes of copper in the third quarter. At the start of the year, we did expect Q3 to be our weakest quarter. However, as detailed in our September 14th news release, it turned out to be weaker than expected due to the poor grade reconciliation in the final benches of the Hale mill zone pit. Mining in mill zone is now complete. So that reconciliation issue is behind us and we have transitioned into a stripping phase at the Leadbetter pit. The third quarter was additionally impacted by disappointing production from Waihi, driven by an increased reliance on redundant stope material in the period. We expect to source more ore from fresh stope in areas in the fourth quarter and finish the year with stronger production at Waihi. Despite its lower production, Hale celebrated a number of positive milestones in the quarter, including mining its one millionth ounce of gold since start-up in 2017. Hale also delivered first development ore from the Horseshoe Underground in the third quarter. Subsequent to quarter end, Hale blasted its first stope and has now begun processing through the mill both stope and development ore. To think we only blasted the portal at the beginning of the mine 13 months ago. We're extremely proud of the team for achieving these milestones with the Underground safely and on schedule. At Macraes, the bore mill was repaired and returned to full operation in August with no further disruptions from this issue expected going forward. The rate of milling at Macraes is now higher than ever before as a result of some of the learnings derived through this repair period. And this higher milling rate is why we expect Macraes to perform strongly for the remainder of the year. During the quarter, we released some excellent exploration drill results at the DPO at Hale, with the results from both representing an exciting upside to our current plans at those operations. Craig will share more about this later on the call. Moving on to guidance. Although Hale's full year production guidance is now lower than originally expected, the strong performance and outlook at both McRae's and the DPO allows us to remain within our original group production guidance range. With three quarters behind us, we're tracking towards the bottom end of the original production guidance range for the year and have narrowed the top end of guidance to reflect these changes at a group level. Consolidated gold production guidance now sits at 460,000 to 480,000 ounces of gold, with 347,000 ounces produced year-to-date. Copper guidance remains unchanged, and we're expecting to be towards the top end of the 12,000 to 14,000 ton range, with more than 10,000 tons of copper produced so far this year. As mentioned, due to the lower production from hail, our all-in sustaining cost guidance for the year will consequently increase. We've updated group cost guidance to be $1,550 to $1,650 per ounce. Overall, total group capex and exploration expenditure is on track to be within our full year guidance of $330 to $385 million. We know that delivering on production guidance is a key expectation in the market, and our focus remains on delivering within our original production guidance range while continuing to focus on operational efficiencies to safely and responsibly lower our cost in producing those ounces. Now to turn the call over to Marius, who will provide an overview of our third quarter results.