Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to B2Gold Corp.'s Fourth Quarter and Year-end 2017 Financial Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Clive Johnson, President and CEO. You may proceed, Mr. Johnson.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome, everyone. We're here to talk about the results -- financial results for the fourth quarter of 2017 and for the full year 2017. Obviously, these result last night in terms of the SEDAR filings and also Newsweek came out, and we're going to focus on the financial numbers from '17 for the first part of the call, and we will touch on some of the things happening in the company, and we will take questions at the end. Obviously, the fourth quarter of 2017 was a very strong quarter of production and financial results for the company, and that was part of a very impressive full year of 2017 results as well as, as you probably read in our -- love to hear more detail on. And the driving force of that quarter was the remarkable success in ramp-up, really, ramp-up of production at our newest mine, Fekola and Mali, but I think that it shouldn't completely overshadow a very good quarter and year for both the Masbate Mine in the Philippines but also the Otjikoto Mine in Namibia. Just in terms of strategy, we just talked about it in the release -- back in the release quite a bit, build our strategy. I think it's important that our shareholders understand that. So our strategy is really, going forward, will be to focus on much of the pipeline, or projects that we have. We've done acquisitions and some of the heavy lifting in there. We have a lot of companies growing and that, to us, was quite a benefit in the things we're able to acquire accretively and then we proceeded to stick with our long-term strategy of growing, irrespective of the short-term market. Visions. So we're in a great position today that we're going to…

Thanks, Clive. Before I start running through the detail of the result themselves, I thought it'd be useful just to set the theme with how we've accounted for Fekola in this last quarter and for the full year. And I think that's important because there's a quite interesting difference between how pre-commercial operations are accounted for versus commercial operations. So Fekola started out really in September. We declared commercial production as of November 30. So we have -- and reflected in our results in under GAAP 1 month of commercial operations for Fekola, and that's in December 2017. And the reason that it's important to understand that, there are probably a couple of reasons, one is because Fekola started up so well, and there's some quite significant results from it. And two, they're reported in very different places in terms of the balance sheet and the statement of operations and the cash flows. Pre-commercial productions, i.e., those results that run up until the end of November, in terms of sales, any ounces produced in that period and any subsequent sales, along with the related costs, the cash cost of production that go with those sales, have all been reported and netted against the carrying value of the Fekola Mine. And the rationale for that is that when you start out and when you have a mine that you're just getting up and running, those sort of revenues and costs that you incur in the commissioning period until you're fully satisfied that the mine has been running the way you intended it to, they're netted against the carrying value of the property. And then, subsequently, once you've declare commercial production, the results then flow through your statement of operations, your income statement. Coterminously with that, there's also a difference in how…

Convertible note?

The convertible note? Yes, we were just discussing that, as our plan to repay that.

Yes. Right. So okay, so covering all the points here, okay. Could you just talk about the projections and budgets for 2018, what we put out there. I think we've added in the release. We'll just talk about our providing everybody relative to what we're projecting.

We're expected to go on in the [indiscernible]

Yes, just from the [indiscernible]

On the [indiscernible]. So in 2018...

No, [indiscernible] about some of the specifics.

Sure. Well, 2018, bringing Fekola online and out into that operating plant for full year has a very significant impact on overall production levels. We think they'll go up somewhere around about 300,000 ounce mark. So we've guided between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces on a consolidated basis. Fekola's 400,000 to 410,000 ounces of that total; Masbate, back to sort of more steady-state level, 180,000 to 190,000 ounces. But as I mentioned, when we bring that plant expansion on, we expect that to increase. Otjikoto made 160,000 to 170,000 ounces. La Libertad, we're forecasted to be 115,000 to 120,000 next year. And El Limon backed it's sort of historical levels of between sort of 50,000. We guided 55,000 to 60,000. Consolidated cash costs related to that production, we've seen it dropping back to the sort of really good levels that we saw in prior years, and we've guided $505 to $550 an ounce. And then on the all-in sustaining basis, we've guided somewhere between $780 and $830. And again, it shows the benefit of lower cash costs at certainly Fekola, Masbate and Otjikoto, and lower all-in costs there and then bringing back La Libertad and El Limon more into sort of steady-state levels.

Thanks. We're going to carry on and then we're going to open up for questions a little later on. But now we'd like to pass it on to Bill Lytle. Bill's going to give us an overview of the operations, just what's happening today in terms of mines [indiscernible]. Bill will touch a bit on the -- we are going to talk about '17 and prior years so. Results you said, driven by a number of things, obviously Fekola being a startup, being each part of that. So maybe they can touch on, on what we did and how we did it, and I think people always interested in hearing a little about how we succeed in building mines. And before I do that, I just would like to [indiscernible] of the call just to mention that we have a room full of the -- the vast majority of our senior executives, our executive group are here, including our, all of our technical executive group, finance, et cetera. So we're bringing them in the room, so we can answer all of the -- any and all of the questions that come up a bit later on. So with that, I'll pass it over to Bill.

Okay, thanks, Clive. Mike has done a pretty decent job of summarizing a lot of the key information on the operational side. So maybe I'll try to provide some color without going into too much detail. And as he pointed out, Fekola obviously was a house on fire when we started out. But as you correctly said, you can't forget about modifying Otjikoto. So talking about Fekola, Clive, he asked me to talk a little bit about how we do it, and certainly, I'm sure everyone's aware, one of the key things that B2 has that maybe some other mining companies do not have, is we have our construction team, a team that's been with B2 and earlier, Bema, really since the late 90s, and this is the fifth project we've all done together. So the accountability and responsibilities that those guys take really is the key. And we were actually talking earlier, or yesterday as a group, and John Rajala also pointed out the fact that very early on, we do the detailed testing early on to make sure that what we -- that the flow that we can put together is what we're actually going to build. So then it is, and it is just making sure that we follow through on the promises. So that's really the key. For those that don't, remember we had about a 27-month construction period -- or sorry, originally it was about a 30-month construction period, which we shortened to 27 months. And basically, that was really aided by some of the early work that we did back in 2015. We were able to punch the access road, and make sure that our logistics' going great. So as Mike said, we started commissioning in September, 60 days later, which is pretty spectacular,…

So I can interject there. We see in our mining costs, we're about $2 million down to 2017. Processing about, right on some increased processing costs associated with increased throughput, offset by lower costs for [indiscernible]. And G&A is down about $2.4 million. So we've done -- we've made a good effort on the costs on this side as well.

Thanks. At Otjikoto, Otjikoto had a wonderful year, for sure. They also had better recoveries than budgeted, higher throughput and better grade primarily due to the fact that we had higher tonnage on the Wolfshag pit. In 2018, we will be mining almost exclusively at Otjikoto, most of our ore will come from Otjikoto, we're doing a big push back in Wolfshag. So we don't know that we'll see the additional tonnage out of Otjikoto. It also should be noted that we have come to the decision that we will create a Phase 4 Otjikoto pit. I think the actual information on that is going to be the NIF at the end of March, but it should be noted that the final decision was to create a Phase 4 pit, but there also is still an underground tail. It does remain open at that. So there is still some future upside there. Libertad, Mike mentioned we did struggle a little bit on permit there. We did rejig things a little bit and end up with a -- with less ounces than we had hoped for. But certainly, we had seen some love in Q4 and being in this year, we don't really want to go into too much details, but we're confident that the Jabali Antenna will come in into our mine plan. We do have a budget for Q3 of this year, and we're anticipating between 115,000 and 120,000 ounces this year. Limon. Limon, as Mike said, suffered a little bit from some water issues and some maintenance issues. Those issues were both rectified in 2017. Limon operates best clearly when we have an open pit and underground feed going simultaneously. With the Mercedes pit coming on in 2017, we anticipate a very decent year for Sherri. Of course, with the Limon Central, there's nothing but upside there. I don't know, how much more you want me to say, Clive, about any operation.

No, I think that's good. Great. Thanks, Bill. Maybe just a couple of comments back to, now we're talking about '18, just about I'm going a bit more on the strategy going forward. We talked about it quite a bit in the press release, but we've mentioned that early in the call as well. But the real focus is to go out and see which of the pipeline of projects that we have, right. I think that, at B2Gold we've always believed very much in the value-added exploration. With B2Gold, we'll go forth, more of exploration, and I think therefore that's definitely in our DNA, that we have just a tremendous track record of Tom and his team of both assets across discoveries, but also the ability to find gold in [indiscernible] qualities around all of our mines and our discipline in acquisitions remains at it always has been, which is we won't acquire anything, any deposit, any project that needs either a higher gold price or exploration success or both to justify the purchase price. And I do pound away on that quite a lot, because sadly, to me, that's a strategy that's not been used by some others in our sector, unfortunately it hurts all of us in terms of what we see, some of the acquisitions that happened historically. So I think that's one of the reasons why, when we looked at doing [indiscernible] for Fekola. Fekola, that growth was really out of favor at those times, because at the end of the day, we were all in the dilly box, and we didn't belong there, and a few others didn't, but everyone was in the dilly box where the market was very negative on the growth because of the problems of companies attempting to grow. So…

I'll just give a brief summary on Fekola, and then you can hit me with the other targets with questions. So at Fekola this year, we're spending $15 million in exploration, which is close to 30% of our total exploration budget. Of that 15,000, we're drawing close to 90,000 meters of drilling without auger drilling. The bulk of that drilling is split between the snakes and Fekola Deeps or Fekola extension. Now the Fekola extension, we're drilling up to, well, mostly, we'll drill up to 1.6 kilometers away from the reserve pit boundary. But currently, we're drilling within 900 meters of the resource pit boundary, and this is an area where we see the extension of the heart of Fekola or the pipe that makes Fekola so economic. We're trying to fall that dump on, but also drilling above it. If a lot of -- I'm sure a lot of you have seen the long section of Fekola Deeps drilling. We've been drilling above that area, looking for the extension of the high grade on higher up or more realistically now, we think, is a second ore shoot that sits above the main Fekola pipe. We saw some of that in the Fekola pit, and we're seeing that now in some of our drilling as we go down plunge, the ideas being, we think or we believe strongly, that there's good potential to expand the Fekola pit. Probably that gets, we don't know. That will come under the drilling we're doing. Results of that drilling will come out sometime in the second quarter. And once that's done, we'll complete a new resource, including all of this year's drilling to then see how big we think the pit can get and then go from there in the next stage of planning.…

Thanks, Tom. Just to, I guess, to point there, maybe because of what, as we said, being bored of exploration a couple of times is obviously in our DNA, you can see why. But we're always looking to do high-quality drill that can add value. There -- not every company goes through a major drill program during 2.5 years of a little over two years of construction in the mining of Fekola. But because of the fact that we were -- have been drilling all through that piece, now here we are today with a very good understanding of the potential and where to go and drilling and doing it effectively, looking at the north and also the great work these guys had done in understanding the snakes at the Anaconda region area. That's not simple as fishing under the cover of the saprolite. So that's, I think, one of the other ways to think outside the box a little bit. Let's find out, even while we're building a mine, what the potential size is. That's one of the reasons why we -- the automized feasibility study to Fekola is at 4 million tonnes a year. But we overbuilt. So as we did with Otjikoto, so we could go from 4 million tonnes a year to 5 million tonnes throughput, with very little additional money on top of the $450 million of construction costs other than $50 million or so. Now the intention would have been to do that in the first or second year of production as we did at the first year on Otjikoto. Essentially doing so well at Fekola, it's important to remember that the guys gave us some -- well, we've got everybody on site, why don't we just do the expansion? Why don't we just…

[Operator Instructions]. And your first question comes from Rahul Paul from Canaccord Genuity.

Just one question for me, really. The Fekola from a cost standpoint, we've seen extremely low cost so far. In particular, you've indicated that mining costs were below budget. Can you remind me as to what the -- what mining cost per tonne you're targeting? And the -- as per the last study that you put out, I think it was a 5 million-tonne scenario that you completed last year. And do you see an opportunity to do better than that?

I mean, well, we'll definitely come back for sure. But I can answer the second part, that we do think there is some upside and we can't beat what our mining costs are. We did have a bit of conservatism built in there. So once I give you the number, we think we could beat it.

[Operator Instructions]. We do not have any questions at this time. Sorry, we do have a question. Okay, we have a question from John Bridges, JPMorgan.

The next catalyst seems to be the agreement with the Malians on the additional 10%. Could you give us a bit more color on that?

Sure. We mentioned it in the release. The situation there, John, is that as part of the 2012 mining convention, which we were the first large company to go through the process there, and part of that, there's 10% carried interest to the government, and then there's a 10 -- the government has the option to buy 10% interest at fair market value. So we, early on, both sides appointed an evaluator, we gave them everything and obviously, transparently, the feasibility study, everything we had. And the Mali government used that in a group comparison. We used that group out of the U.S. And anyway, the valuations -- the values came back and there was a lot of negotiations over that. It actually came out within about $1 million of each other. So that was great. So early on, the number was established in the sector. And we then went into a process, and we have, as we said in the news release, have actually reached agreement on the -- the shareholders agreement, which includes the 10% purchase. And the only thing we've been waiting for is the needs of the formal approval of the Parliament in Mali. So the ministers responsible have signed the agreements. The Council of Ministers, Prime Ministers, et cetera, have approved. And the president, obviously, is very much in approval. He was on site, made a great speech about the importance of the mine, et cetera. So we are just -- out of respect -- for the fact, joint venturing with the government, we are waiting for the session. In April, we expect it to be approved. The next part is the session. Now the reason that it hasn't happened was because there was a change in the prime minister level. The ministers, our ministers didn't change, which we were happy about because we have a really good relationship with the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Mines and others. So it was really just the fact that with the new prime minister, there was a delay in having the next meeting of the parliament. So that's where we stand, and then we'll be able to come out and talk about it. I think the important thing, and Michael, jump in, you're very good at this world, but the important thing is that the idea is that they purchase, that our 10% there is based on core fair market value, but they also -- we get repaid in our own sort of reasonable interest rate. For those, we put in to build Fekola, and that by assuming a 10% interest, they would be assuming 10% of the low level set. Is that good, Mike?

I think you're getting better at this accounting thing. That's good.

Sorry?

I think you're getting better at this accounting thing, okay?

Well, there you go. Well, that's frightening. Okay. Go ahead. I hope -- no corporate costs just seem to be said, so do you want to explain that a little better than I did?

No. No. That's right. There's two elements to how to stay for longer on interest. There's the first 10%, which is the entitlement of priority dividend, which means they will get paid 10% of recorded earnings each year, and that's irrespective of what anyone chooses to do with loans or dividends or in other words, they work at their priority dividend. But for the second 10%, it's participating interest, and the state will have the same rights in their ordinary shares as we do in our 80% shares. So we're entitled to -- in fact, we've negotiated with them in such that all our loans will be repaid first. Full-in cash loans related to the investment we put in will be returned with an interest rate, which is basically LIBOR plus the West African rate. It's quite a healthy range. And thereafter, whatever is left, we'll split up between extraordinary shareholders.

But I think that the only thing whereas I draw the line is that -- its transparency is really reality, while it's always been reality for us. But at the end of the day, we made a point, and I've talked about in the press conference in the speech down in Mali at the grand opening, which is to actually go and talk about the benefits to the people of Mali of the -- of building Fekola, not only the 2,000 jobs that we have now, which will come down a bit as we finish closing development of Fadougou, but with local workers. But not only that and all the benefits that we know mining brings, but also when you really look at between the dividends and royalties and taxes and other things, the government, over the 10-year base case, based on what we did on AngloGold, will receive, over that time, an amount of up to USD 1 billion or effectively after the loans, where we paid about -- and based on the initial, about 10-year mining, they will be looking at about something approaching 50% of the economic benefit of Fekola. Now I don't know. I think more companies should be talking about that transparently, though it's not like it should be a huge news. It's not a negative thing. In fact, I think it's a real positive thing in the world today, where we have people still around the world saying these 4 mining companies are going to be exploring the Africans or other places. Did these happen in the past? Absolutely. Does it still happen? I'm sure it does sometimes, but that's the real thing that's changing, and we're part of that. We embrace and applaud the government ownership, at least with levels and mines, but…

Clive, can I just answer? We're not even talking about it. So the follow-up question was on the life of mine, mining costs or the mining costs at Fekola. Life of mine, we're about 2.65, but for 2018, the life of mine will be at 2.20. We think we're going to be around $2 or just under.

Okay. Good. Just I don't think we have any questions. So thanks, everyone, for being on the phone. And I just wanted to -- the last thing, we could do a whole hour on safety and CSR, but we are -- our job to -- these things, really often, the focus is on analysts and investors. At the end of the day, we have -- Bill touched on a fantastic safety record. We're very proud of that. And a lot of work was into that. And we've been in growth mode for 10 years. So I think it's really a remarkable job of everyone to be -- to have that commitment to that ongoing. We have a couple more questions, apparently, that have just come in. So go ahead.

Next question comes from Steve Todoruk from Sprott Global.

Tom, I think your only current exploration joint venture was at juniors, Aurion Resources in Northern Finland. Can you please tell us or give us an update on your plans there for this year? And what attracted you to that area?

We actually had quite a few joint ventures at juniors. Aurion's the only one that sits in the budget breakdown. That's in Finland. It's in the early-stage exploration project. It's an orogenic target, really underexplored, some early drilling by Finnish companies had identified a pretty decent high-grade zone that hasn't been drilled to depth. So we're looking at that as a target and the area around that. But just to say, it's a very early-stage orogenic target.

Your next question comes from Ovais Habib from Scotiabank.

Just a quick question for me. Clive, when we see your production profile chart, obviously, in 2009 -- '19, you guys are targeting that 1 million-ounce mark. And there's a lot of initiatives underway during 2018 and I would say even 2019 in terms of expansions, specifically in Masbate, and then you're looking at Limon as well and possibly Fekola. Are any of those expansions or upside potentials already included in that target of 1 million ounces for next year?

Well, the Masbate expansion would be...

Masbate is not currently in the life-of-mine forecast.

Okay. And El Limon Central as well either. But I'm saying no El Limon. So I guess the answer is no. They aren't. Any of those would be potentially additional production beyond what we currently projected for '19.

And when would we start seeing some of that news flow coming in, in terms of looking for those assets to kind of start coming into production or even some studies or anything like that?

Yes -- no. Thanks for asking that because we neglected to talk about that. The El Limon, well, guys, what's the timing there now? We're talking about, just help, somebody, to maybe at the end of the year...

We hope to be at a decision point on the El Limon expansion and El Limon Central by the middle of this year. We're looking out to some tail. There's pretreatment work there that we will have those studies' results until quite later in the year, probably October, November, fourth quarter anyhow. The Masbate mill expansion is underway. It's under construction right now. We're attempting to shorten the schedule. So we finish that a little later than -- we bring that production online no later than the first quarter of next year. We're doing a bunch of what-ifs on Toega and things like that, so those are still in very preliminary stages, and mistakes, they're in kind of in the same category. Until we understand what the snakes look like over there, it's really hard to put plans around it as to what really happens there. So that's a little brief summary.

Sure. Thanks, Dennis. So we're going to see probably a lot more exploration results for a bunch of different areas throughout the rest of the year now, some sort of second or third quarters. And further in the year, lots of this will happen. And also you will see us coming out, and we will be talking, as appropriate, putting news out about some of these studies that we're doing, and then we'll see as we go through the year.

At this time, I'll turn the call over to Mr. Johnson.

Okay. As I was saying before, that we feel sad about safety, and we don't talk about it in the forums more often because we're really trying to report to our shareholders, analysts, and we hope to please the shareholders or inspire the shareholders, I guess. But the deal between safety and CSR, we pride ourselves in being, we hope, the leader in our industry and showing that mining has changed a lot over time and we can be a very positive force in so many ways and in the previous [indiscernible]. So thank you, everyone, on the call for your attention. But just [indiscernible] immediately, we received just now the permit -- the under -- permit for the Jabali Antenna underground zone, which are 1.8 kilometers [indiscernible] so far and are a few hundred meters away from the orebody. So that's pretty good timing. So that will give us access to some good [indiscernible] from underground there as we -- later on in the year. So that's a positive, once again indicative of the fact that we are gaining the permits and the government is supportive of the effort. And now we look forward to mine above that [indiscernible]. So that's a little bit of good news and indicative of what I was talking about with our relationship, exploration with the government, not only the government of Nicaragua, but the local governments and the people support we have and the communities that we work in [indiscernible]. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, operator.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.