Torex Gold Resources Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator, Welcome to TORX Gold's second quarter 2024 conference call and webcast. 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 throw a star, then one, 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 Rowland, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. On behalf of the TORX team, welcome to our Q2 2024 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.torxgold.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 Q2 2024 MD&A. On the call today, we have Jody Kazenko, President and CEO, Andrew Snowden, CFO, as well as Dave Stefanuto, Executive Vice President, Technical Services and Capital Projects. Following the presentation, Jody, Andrew, and Dave will be available for the question and answer period. This conference call is being webcast and will be available for replay on our website. Last night's press release and the accompanying financial statements in MD&A are posted on our website and have also been filed on CDAR+. Also 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. Q2 marked another strong quarter of safe, consistent operational results, and I'm pleased to say that we're on pace to deliver production guidance for the sixth consecutive year. With yet another record quarter for realized gold price, our margins are strong, and the cash generation from ELG is fueling us through the last stages of the Medialuna build. While margins have improved quarter over quarter, our costs remain a very sharp focus for the entire team, which Andrew will speak to in more detail when he gets on the call. With the strong production results, we remain in an excellent financial position. With only a minimal drawdown on our revolving credit facility, we've maintained our strategic objective of keeping $100 million of cash on the balance sheet and are fully funded for what remains of the MediLuna project spent. Dave will speak to the project progress in his section, but the headline here is that we're tracking well to deliver on our targets of first concentrate production in Q4 and commercial production in mid-Q1. Before we dive into the quarter, I want to briefly provide an update on where we stand across our six strategic pillars set out here on slide four. As of the end of June, overall project progress for Medialuna sat at 78% complete across engineering, procurement, underground development, underground construction, and surface construction. With engineering and procurement largely complete, our focus now is on ensuring that the remaining deliveries arrive at site on time for the four-week shutdown of the processing plant planned for Q4. Simultaneously, our operational readiness teams are working hard on integrating Betty Luna with ELG to ensure a smooth handover from the project team to the operations team as the project nears the finish line, with mine development and production scheduled to be handed over from the project to the operations later on this month. As I mentioned at the outset, we're delivering on our objective of maintaining a strong balance sheet with available liquidity well in hand to complete the project build. On grow reserves and resources, we've become even further advanced on getting the people we need and the systems in place to deliver on the work of this strategic pillar, which is coming along nicely. You'll recall that earlier in the quarter, we released our multi-year exploration strategy, first one ever, with multiple highly prospective targets identified across the Morelos land package. I'll touch more on that and the specific progress we have made on the ELG underground drilling results that were released during the quarter before the end of the call. On talent, work is ongoing to retain our employees during the MediLuna transition and to continue to hire from local communities. Transitioning our open pit miners to the underground is going well with 200 of the 400 people now placed. and systems are in place for technical training progression across various levels of theory, simulator training, and field training. And last, but certainly not least, is ESG Excellence. In May, we released our 2023 Responsible Gold Mining Report. If you haven't had a chance to read the report yet, I'd encourage you to do so. It's posted to our website. Now to get into our specific quarter results set out here on slide five. With gold production of 229,000 ounces through the first half of 2024, we're well on pace to deliver full year production guidance. While costs have trended above guidance through the first half of the year, we expect them to improve in the second half as the strip ratio comes off in Q4 and as open pit mining winds down even further. Although costs are up slightly quarter over quarter, margins continue to expand with byproduct all in sustaining cost margins increasing to 44% from 41% quarter over quarter, with margins significantly higher than the 38% delivered in 2023. The solid production and strong margins allowed for strong cash generation of $46 million prior to spending on Medialuna. Including $108 million spent on Medialuna, free cash flow was negative, as would be expected in the quarter, at $62 million. However, as I mentioned, our liquidity position remains strong, and we remain very much expecting to return to positive free cash flow mid-next year. Slide 6 is a snapshot of our operational performance in the quarter, with gold recoveries remaining above 90% for the second consecutive quarter, production remained consistent quarter over quarter at 114,000 ounces. Q2 also marked the sixth consecutive quarter of processing rates above 13,000 tons per day in the plant. The bottom left chart shows process grades at similar levels to that of Q1, while the bottom right chart shows that underground mining rates have once again returned above their steady state levels of 2,000 tons per day, and we expect this rate to continue going forward. Slide 7 shows a summary of our guidance for the year. One area to note here relates to CAPEX on the Medialuna project, which you will have seen at the end of July was finalized at $950 million, up from the $875 million we published years ago with the technical report in early 2022. We have been publicly discussing the impact of the strong Mexican peso on Medialuna CAPEX for months. but we're holding off on finally adjusting the upfront project capex until we were very confident in the final number. With 97% of the project expenditures now committed, we saw this as an appropriate time to publish the final forecast. Now, if you normalize for the peso, the $950 million would be $902 million, representing only a 3% increase in capex over the original technical report estimates. Everyone listening will have their own view of the CapEx increase. I personally consider 3% on a 33-month build in this supply chain and inflationary environment to be a pretty massive accomplishment. And importantly, I'm very proud of the fact that aside from the nominal amount we plan to draw on our credit facility, we have funded this project entirely on cash flow from ELG without diluting our shareholders and without giving up future upside at Morelos through a royalty or a stream. It's a pretty significant accomplishment for a mining company RSI. And with that, I'll pass the call over to Andrew to discuss financials in more detail.