Wesdome Gold Mines Ltd.

Good morning. Welcome to Wisdom Goldmine's conference call to discuss the company's financial and operating results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2025. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Your host for today is Trish Morin, Wisdom's Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Morin, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Before we get started, I'd like to point out that during today's call, we may make forward-looking statements as defined under Canadian securities law. I ask that you view our slide presentation for cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements and the risk factors pertaining to these statements. Please note that all figures discussed on this call are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Our press release, MD&A, and financial statements are available both on CDAR Plus and on our website, westome.com. With us on today's call and webcast is Antje Ba, Westome's President and CEO, Guy Ballou, our Chief Operating Officer, Jonah Lawrence, our Senior Vice President, Exploration, and Raj Gill, our Interim Chief Financial Officer, as well as Kevin Lonergan, SVP Technical Services. Following management's formal remarks, we will then open the call to questions. And now over to Anthea.

Thank you, Trish. Good morning, everyone. As we move past the halfway point of 2025, one thing is clear. Western has made significant strides over the last two years. We've delivered consistent sequential improvements in both operational and financial performance, culminating in record results across several key metrics for the quarter and the first half of the year. At the consolidated level, Westone is effectively executing its strategy, shifting from a short-term, just-in-time approach to one that is focused on building long-term, sustainable value. That said, while our financial performance here to date has been strong, we are updating our guidance to reflect Eagle River's excellent performance and the challenges are keener. At Eagle River, the past 12 months have marked the start of a multi-year turnaround. While there's still much to do, we've seen vast improvements in safety, increases in production, and decreasing costs. As demonstrated again this quarter, Eagle River continues to deliver strong results. This is due to good performance against our plans, compliance to our sequence, and improved dilution. Given performance to date, we are raising production guidance, increasing the top end to 115,000 ounces, and tightening the grade guidance to between 14 and 15 grams per ton. All in sustaining cost per ounce are expected to improve, benefiting from ongoing cost optimization initiatives. Whilst Eagle River is training upward, Kina has fallen slightly behind. Kina's challenges in the second quarter were largely a continuation of existing issues. Equipment availability challenges impacting our plan sequence, accentuated by our reliance on a single mining horizon. This dependency limits operational flexibility and heightens our risk. When you're mining just three to five strokes per month, under or over performance in just one stroke can have a significant impact. We've consistently highlighted the importance of operation, of improving our operational flexibility, which is why since the mid 2023 timeline, nearly every major initiative at KINA has been aimed at unlocking operational agility. As a result, KEEN has undertaken a number of significant and important projects, many of which will be completed by the end of this year. These include the tripling of the number of active mining zones, doubling of our development meters year on year, developing an exploration ramp, which allows us a second material movement access as well, which completely unlocks our material movement in the mine, freeing up shaft capacity by 50%, rehabilitating our 33-level drift, allowing us access to the upper sections of the mine, adding 10 to 15 neutral platforms underground, as well as increasing our ventilation by 100% at Kina Deeps in 2026. There's a lot going on at Kina. The breadth and the pace of these initiatives represents a very deliberate and strategic investment in Kina's long-term value creation. The team's ability to simultaneously ramp up, de-risk, and expand operational flexibility while maintaining active mining and development is a notable achievement. This mine at a fundamental level is incredibly strong and its future is taking shape. However, in hindsight, our higher risk tolerance may have been warranted given the scope and the complexity of the work underway. As we noted in our Q2 production release in mid-July, Kina has been pacing at or just below the lower end of guidance. While we have a mid-year forecast indicating that Kina can still meet the lower end of its original production range, we believe it'd be prudent to revise guidance to reflect inherent risk in the plan. We're now targeting 80,000 to 90,000 ounces in 2025 with the corresponding increase in costs. We have indicated up to 10,000 ounces from Preskill. If you take the average of the last five quarters, which is between 20 and 21,000 ounces, you can see we can get there. There's also obviously additional grade and development coming from peanut deets, which adds to this and helps us get to the numbers, which makes it very sensible. Over the past 18 months, the block model has reconciled extremely well. We remain confident in the Kinoor body, and the team continues to prove that they can mine this extremely well, which is the most important thing personally for me. We have a multifaceted program in place to deliver on this revised guidance, which includes an integrated action plan, short interval controls to track our performance and to quickly course correct. And we've added more resources, which helps us increase our redundancy As well, the lower grade ore for Preskill is set to be processed in the second half of this year. As mentioned, we expect this to produce up to 10,000 ounces from what is the first near-surface zone accessed via this new exploration ramp. Each of these critical steps is aimed at securing the second half of the year and building for the future, enabling a more efficient, predictable execution and building a solid foundation for more consistent performance. On a consolidated basis, with the increase at Eagle River largely offsetting the short for Akina, we expect to remain around the midpoint of our original production guidance for the year, albeit at higher costs. With respect to investment, the increment of $30 million is mostly due to increasing growth capital Akina, which is well spent. The change reflects a redesign of the ventilation infrastructure because we have a larger ore body relative to the original design. as well as the capital to accelerate this development and to extend the footprint of this larger Preskill zone to a deeper level. This will establish an additional mining front, giving us much more flexibility as Preskill gears up for future growth. No changes have been made to our 2026 guidance. The second quarter was a strategically important one for Westrome, one that showcased our discipline, our focus, and our ability to pursue the right opportunities for long-term growth. In June, we closed the acquisition of Angus Gold, a move that contributed our land position in Eagle River to 400 square kilometres. With the acquisition of Angus, we've inherited more than 40,000 metres of drilling, plus a rich data set of geological information. We've now consolidated a highly prospective land package around Eagle River, and we've added top-tier exploration targets that directly support our full-demol strategy. During the quarter, we also amended and upsized our revolving credit facility. Financial housekeeping, as the previous one was maturing, we took advantage of this opportunity and increased the facility to $250 million and locked in more favorable terms. With over $500 million in total liquidity, we strengthened our financial position, giving us the runway to balance strategic growth with returning capital to our shareholders. Let's look ahead at what's coming down the pipe that could drive the next phase of value for Western. Exploration is central to our future, and this year we're investing up to $50 million to unlock that potential. We are on track to release an Eagle River update this month and follow up with additional results from both sites later in the fall. At Eagle River, work on the updated global resource model is advancing well. Our intensive drilling program is aimed at maximizing our resource QAQC with the goal of delivering a technical report that more accurately reflects the full potential and the intrinsic value of this asset. We've set a drilling cut-off date of December 31st this year. Therefore, we'll update our minimum reserve and mineral resource estimates when we publish the results of our updated technical reports in June next year. At KINA, the upfront technical report work is centered on cost optimization, near-surface opportunities along 33 level, and a full review of mine design and mining methods. Different approaches at each month, but the goal is the same, to show the potential of each asset and to unlock this long-term value. There's a lot of foundational work ahead of us as we move both Tukunga reports forward. And as always, we'll keep you informed every step of the way. Now over to Guy.