Fabiana Chubbs
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Norm. Good morning, everyone. I will go through the financial statement, highlighting changes in significant accounts. Commencing with the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalent balance of $357 million, compared to a near-end cash balance of $340 million. The increasing cash balance is a result of cash generation from operations, net of the usage of cash for debt repayment, capital program and dividend payment. The inventories increase is mainly related to material and supply as a result of increase in operational needs requirements. I would like to bring to your attention that inventory levels will increase during commissioning of the Efemçukuru mine, as flotation concentrate is produced at Efemçukuru and shipped to Kisladag for further processing. On the liability side, yesterday, we paid $74 million of the outstanding debt, which brings the debt balance to $105 million as of September 30, 2011. During October, we paid an additional $18 million on this debt. As you may recall, this is the debt with Chinese banks resulting from the acquisition of the Sino Gold mines, and at acquisition, it has a balance of $190 million. Moving on to the income statement. Revenues of the $326 million for the quarter were up $136 million from a year ago due to higher selling prices and an increase in sales volume mainly for increased production at Kisladag. Year-on-year, the $270 million revenue increase is a result of higher gold prices, as well as revenue from iron ore sales. On the income tax expense, for the quarter was $63 million, compared to $30 million in the same quarter last year. This increase is due to higher taxable income from operations in Turkey and China and the impact of the weakening Turkish lira incurred on deferred income taxes. I discussed with you during the visit at our Turkish mine, under IFRS, a company has to revalue its tax basis of foreign currency using the current exchange rate and record tax evaluation as income taxes in the income statements. This results in volatility in income taxes due to foreign exchange rate movement. As a way of reference, a 10% change in the exchange rate for the Turkish lira will result in approximately $7 million adjustment in our deferred taxes, and a 10% change in the exchange rate for the RMB will result in approximately $16 million adjustment. On the cash flow statement, we generated cash flow from operating activities before changing in non-working capital of $367 million for the 9 months ended September 30, 2011, as compared to $270 million in 2010. This increase is a direct result for an increase in operating profit. The 3 main usage of cash related layer of cash relate to our capital program $202 million repayment of debt, $74 million, and payment of dividend, $61 million. Those are my comments on the financial statement, I will return the call back to Paul.