Paul Rollinson
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead
Thanks, Tom. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Kinross is a strong operator with an excellent track record of consistently hitting or exceeding our targets. Q2 marks the 12th consecutive quarter of delivering on those targets. As of the first half of the year, we are tracking at the high end of our production guidance and below our forecast for all our sustaining cost and production cost of sales. This is particularly notable given the heavy rains in late March which led to the nine week suspension of operations impacting both production and cost at the same. One of Kinross's strengths in addition to its skills and operator is the diversity of its asset base. While unavoidable events temporarily affected one site, we saw strong shines at a number of other operations in Q2. At Fort Knox, production was up significantly year-over-year while cost declined as a result of an increase announces processed from the heap leach, higher grades and lower energy cost. Round Mountain had the best production and cost performance in almost three years, partly as a result of the new continuous improvement initiative to enhance heap leach performance which Warwick will speak to in greater deal later on our call. And lastly, in Russia, the combined Kupol-Dvoinoye operations continue to outperform. As noted in the news release, the region is already very low production cost of sales with $490 an ounce would have benefited even further if not for the timing of gold sales. The timing of coupon gold sales - the additional cost incurred as a result of the heavy rains in northern Chile, and above all, the continuing decline in the price of gold impacted earnings this quarter. The average realized gold price declined by about $100 an ounce year-over-year to just under $1200 in Q2. What I want to underscore however, is that Kinross still generated free cash flow in Q2, as well as in the previous quarter. In fact, we ended Q2 with more than $1 billion in cash on our balance sheet, and as a result we have one of the strongest balance sheets among our peers. We have been able to achieve this because of the very disciplined approach when we first undercut three years ago with the Kinross way forward to maximizing margins, managing costs, and deploying capital. As a result, Kinross is well positioned to whether the current volatility we are seeing in the gold price. The idea that gold producers have little room to maneuver in the current environment is not accurate in our case, we not only continue to benefit from the foreign exchange and lower oil prices, but we remain keenly focused on driving down cost. For example, our supply chain team has leveraged current market conditions to drive down cost for key inputs such as grinding media, tyres and reagents. We have also undertaken a sustained company-wide campaign to reduce working capital which has reduced inventory supplies by $37 million in the last year. We also have a number of other levers at our disposal for containing cost, particularly regarding non-operating discretionary spending. Over the course of the past three years we have made significant reductions in this regard, and we have the flexibility to further reduce spending in the future. Maintaining liquidity and preserving our balance sheet strength has been a key differentiator for us as a company, and will continue to be a priority for us going forward. I'd like to now turn to talk about some opportunities we are advancing for reducing cost and improving margins. As you know, in Q1 we decided to differ the 38,000 ton per day mill expansion to preserve balance sheet strength, and our decision has proven to be a prudent one, since then we have been focused on measures to enhance performance. In addition to a number of continuous improvement initiatives, we are exploring opportunities to optimize no throughput to address the hardness of the higher grade ore. One concept which is currently being analyzed involves enhancing the common using circuit with the installation of additional grinding equipment to improve throughput capacity. In addition to these operational improvements, we are also assessing other options for getting cost down. For example, we have initiated discussions with employee representatives regarding possible cost saving measures including a potential workforce reduction. This is the beginning of a process under more attanian [ph] labor law and we will provide an update when we have further news to share. As I've said many times in the past, Tasiast remains an attractive growth opportunity with significant ounces in the ground. However, our objectives in the near term are clear. We need to reduce cost to make it a sustainable operation, and we need to optimize production capacity while preserving future growth potential. Tasiast's future potential is in addition to a number of promising organic production initiatives that Kinross currently has in the pipeline. These include Perka2 [ph] challenge reprocessor project which is on-track to begin production in Q4. The Chilean oil mine lease extension, and the potential restart of Lacoika [ph]. These initiatives have a number of common elements, they are all quality brownfield projects, they leverage existing infrastructure and they involve relatively low execution risk. These initiatives are part of Kinross's overall strategy which is focused on building a sustainable business that creates value for shareholders within the context of the gold price environment. We believe that we have the fundamentals in place for creating that value, a strong balance sheet, a focus on operational excellence, and a number of organic production opportunities. Those fundamentals underpinned our Q2 results which mark another strong quarter for Kinross and has us firmly on-track to meet our guidance target for the year. I'll now turn the call over Tony for a review of our financial results.