Artemis Gold Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Artemis Gold Second Quarter 2026 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. To give you assistance during the conference call, you may reach an operator by pressing star then 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Brown, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q2 earnings conference call and webcast. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made on today's call may be forward-looking, and we encourage you to refer to our public filings and disclosures, including the cautionary language in yesterday's news release, for a more detailed discussion of potential risks and uncertainties related to these statements. I will now hand the call over to Artemis Gold's CEO, Dale Andres. Over to you, Dale.

Thanks, Meg, and thank you all for taking the time to join this call. In addition to myself on the call today, we have our new CFO, Eric Marchand, our Chief ESG Officer, Candice Alderson, Our Chief Business Development Officer Tony Scott and unfortunately our President Jeremy Langford is on a plane right now and unable to join us but he will be available for Q&A in the coming days as needed. And as you can imagine it's a busy time right now for Jeremy and he and his team are making excellent progress. I will take you through the highlights of the quarter, then turn the call over to Eric to review the financials before we open up the call for your questions. On slide four, Q2 was a record quarter on many fronts, including record production, record revenue, and record operating cash flows. And of course, this was helped by a low all in sustaining cost of $955 US per ounce of gold sold. We reached a remarkable milestone with declaration of an inaugural quarterly dividend yesterday. So now rewarding our shareholders with capital returns and with more to come in the future. This is after just over a year of being in production and in the middle of executing on our transformational growth. And I think this demonstrates our confidence in the strength and sustainability of our operating cash flows and our confidence in delivering the 1A and EP2 expansion projects as planned. Phase 1A is now 57% complete and on track for tie-in and commissioning before the end of the year. adding 33% capacity to the processing plant. That means that in only a few months, we will start delivering the benefits of that project. The much larger EP2 project is progressing very well, and we recently commenced the start of major works construction, and that's ahead of schedule. We are in a very strong financial position as well, but we did take prudent steps this quarter to further protect the balance sheet during the EP2 construction period. On slide five, the inaugural base quarterly dividend of $0.05 per share announced yesterday will be paid on September 9 to shareholders of record on August 19. This is consistent with our progressive dividend policy that we announced and introduced earlier in the year. and we expect the quarterly base dividend will increase to $0.08 per share in 2027, taking that up to $0.32 per share on an annual basis. Further, beginning in 2028, we expect to top up the quarterly base dividend by a variable amount, such that the total amount of dividends will approximate 40% of free cash flow. This positions Artemis Gold among leading peers who balance reinvestment for growth with shareholder returns, and in our case, doing so halfway through our first full year in operation, which I think might be unprecedented. By the way, it's a great milestone.