Torex Gold Resources Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the TORAC Schools Resources, Inc. fourth quarter and year-end 2020 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 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dan Rollins, Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Rollins.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Torex team, welcome to our fourth quarter and year-end 2020 conference call. Before we begin, I wish to inform listeners that a presentation accompanying today's conference call can be found under the Investor section of our website, at www.torexgold.com. I'd also like to note that certain statements to be made today by the management team may contain forward-looking information. As such, please refer to the detailed cautionary notes on page two of today's presentation, as well as those included in the Q4 and year-end 2020 MD&A. On the call today, we have Jody Kazenko, President and CEO, as well as Andrew Soden, CFO. Following the presentation, Jody and Andrew will be available for the question and answer period. This conference call is being webcast and will be available for replay on our website. This morning's press release and the accompanying financial statements and MD&A are posted on our website and have been filed on CDAR. Also, please note that all amounts mentioned in this call are U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated. I'll now turn the call over to Jody.

Thank you, Dan, and good morning to all on the line. Welcome to the Torex Gold Q4 and year-end 2020 results conference call. There are two new aspects to our call this quarter. The first is a slide deck setting out the key highlights and results visually to make it easier to follow along, and the second is that Andrew Snowden will be joining us for the first time on this call in his capacity as CFO. We welcomed Andrew to Torex at the start of January, and I know that he is no stranger to many of you. The agenda for the call is not new. I will step you through a quick overview of the pillars making up our strategic plan, key highlights for the quarter, an ESG and operations update. Then I will turn the floor over to Andrew for a summary of financial performance. And finally, I'll close with an update on Medialuna, exploration, and other key projects. Starting with slide four, this slide sets out the pillars that form the foundation of our strategic plan to deliver both business excellence and, over time, enhanced shareholder returns. There are five areas of focus. They're not in order of importance and don't imply sequence. We think of them as parallel paths. I won't take you through each of the sub-bullets in detail, but the plan is to Optimize and extend ELG with a specific focus on stability of production and cash flow in the coming years and delivering a smooth transition period between ELG and Medialuna in late 23. We plan to advance and de-risk Medialuna, optimizing the economics and bringing the project on in Q1 of 24. Makahai testing and commercialization, that's ongoing. We're looking to shift to revenue generation from our proprietary innovation. And the last two points there are building on ESG excellence and closing the valuation gap. Slide five sets out the key highlights for the year, and there were certainly many of them. Amidst a very challenging COVID context, the team came up large again in Q4 to deliver some outstanding results. With gold production at 130,000 ounces in the quarter, it was effectively a mirror image of Q3. We closed out the year with over 430,000 ounces produced. This outstanding production in Q3 and Q4 was bolstered by a strong realized gold price and ongoing discipline around cost containment, all of which led to pretty impressive financial performance shown on the right-hand side of this slide. We closed the year with cash and short-term investments of $206 million, with only just over $40 million left on our revolving credit facility to pay down, This will be looked after this quarter. We rounded up the year with record operating cash flow of $342 million, generating $137 million of cash flow in Q4 alone. Margins were healthy as well with TCC coming at $672 an ounce for the year and ASIC at $924 an ounce. Overall, we came in with a solid beat to our guidance that we revised after COVID interruption in Q2. and we were into the lower end of original guidance on both production and ASIC. Turning to slide six, this one sets out some ESG highlights for the quarter, and I'd like to draw three points to your attention. First is COVID. It continues to be a serious concern in Mexico and for our operations. Last count for the all-in since the start number stands at 147 cases, with almost half of those, a full 68, occurring in the first weeks of 2021. during that critical post-holiday period. To manage this, our screening methods continue to be applied with rigor. Our health team is processing some 10,000 screens per month with a view to keeping the virus off site. And our rapid response COVID tracing has been applied successfully when individuals have displayed symptoms on site. This is working. A positive sign in our data is that the weekly case count just last week dropped to one. This shows a serious inflection point in the curve, and we will keep doing what we were doing to manage COVID for the duration. On safety performance, we proudly crossed 10 million hours lost time injury free in November, but picked up a lost time injury in December when a diamond drill contractor pinched his finger. We closed out the year with an oppressive lost time injury frequency of 0.15. That's over a million person hours. And finally, on ESG more broadly, We saw ratings improvements from various agencies on the back of a very concerted effort to improve our disclosure, and you can see some detail on that in the top right-hand quadrant of this slide. Turning now to operational performance on slide eight. In terms of production, you can see this slide sets up some key highlights. From the open pits to the underground to the process plant, there really were no weak links in the chain. Execution was phenomenal. The team delivered an excellent second half to close out the year. In the quarter, the open pits produced an impressive 18,000 tons per day. Not to be outdone, Sub-Sil and Elie-Mondype, which we're now thinking about as a combined underground, broke a record high this quarter and delivered 1,300 tons per day and 22,000 ounces. This demonstrates the ongoing potential of that asset and bolsters our confidence in this goal of 20,000 ounces a quarter for the duration. The process plant closed out at 12,560 tons per day. We were closing in on a quarterly record when some unplanned maintenance in the form of a torn feeder belt and damaged sag liners took the plant down for 80 hours through Christmas Eve. That notwithstanding, Solid production and cost control allowed us to deliver robust margins on both total cash costs and ASIC, shown in the bottom right quadrant of that slide. Moving to slide nine, one of the areas that we made significant progress on through 2020 is cost discipline, and this was at all levels of the organization. To my mind, this shows up quite nicely in the unit cost analysis. You can see here that the unit costs in all areas were largely flat or even improved offsetting both inflationary and COVID cost pressures. We're expecting this to continue into 2021. The one area where we did see pressure was the level of profit paid to our employees through the mandated profit sharing. The higher payment is consistent with our strategy of aligning the economic interests of the company with the economic interests of our employees, and by extension, the economic interests of our host community, which is very important for uninterrupted operations in Guerrero. I will now pass the call over to Andrew for an update on the financial performance.