Earnings Labs

Pan American Silver Corp. (PAAS)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 19, 2015

$52.22

-5.45%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-6.45%

1 Week

-10.38%

1 Month

-9.82%

vs S&P

-9.83%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Yamana Gold's Q4 2014 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. I will now turn the call over to Ms. Lisa Doddridge, Vice President, Corporate Communications and Investor Relations.

Lisa Doddridge

Management

Thank you all for joining us this morning. Before I turn the call over, I need to advise that certain statements made during this call today may contain forward-looking information and actual results could differ from the conclusions or projections in that forward-looking information which include but are not limited to, statements with respect to the estimation of mineral reserves and resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, cost of production, capital expenditures, future metal prices and the cost and timing of the development of new projects. For a complete list of risks, uncertainties and factors which may lead to our actual financial results and performance being different from the estimates contained in our forward-looking statements, please refer to our press release issued last night announcing our fourth quarter and full year 2014 results, as well as our Management's Discussion and Analysis for the same period and other regulatory filings in Canada and the United States. Throughout the presentation when speakers use the term ounces, they will be referring to gold equivalent ounces, unless otherwise stated. Gold equivalent ounces include silver production at a ratio of 50 to 1. I would like to remind listeners that as of 2015, we will no longer be converting silver ounces to our gold equivalent. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded and will be available today replay beginning at 12 PM Eastern. Replay information and the presentation slides accompanying this conference call and webcast are available on our website at yamana.com. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Peter Marrone, Chairman and CEO.

Peter Marrone

Management

Ladies and gentlemen, first of all welcome and thank you for joining our call this morning. I am joined on the call with the following members of our management we have Lisa of course, we also have Chuck Main, our Chief Financial Officer; Darcy Marud, our Executive Vice President of Enterprise Strategy; Gerardo Fernandez, who manages our Southern Operations; Daniel Racine, who manages our Northern Operations; Barry Murphy is also here who manages our Technical Services; and Bill Wulftange, who you’ve met before manages our Exploration. This morning there seems to be a lot of activity with lots of conference calls with some of our peers and in light of that and in order to permit for more questions, we decided this morning that I would speak on behalf of management and provide the presentation. Management is here of course for any of your questions and to answer those questions, and hopefully this will allow us with a forum for a longer question period. We recorded annual production of over 1.4 million gold equivalent ounces in 2014 with a new quarterly record in Q4 of over 405,000 ounces. We continued with efforts to mitigate our costs with all-in costs of $807 per ounce and declined throughout the year, we established a Canadian platform with our purchase and integration of a high quality Canadian portfolio most notably a high quality Canadian Malartic mining Quebec. We’ve made new exploration discoveries at our core mines. Our focus was on our primarily portfolio and cornerstone assets. We also recognized where we struggled with certain development stage projects in 2014. We expected responsibility for our failures and we then began a process for remediation and reclamation of value. We applied our lessons learned on development stage projects towards the plans for the development of our…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. The first question is from Andrew Quail from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Andrew Quail

Analyst

Thanks very much for the call and congratulations on a solid quarter. I have got a couple of questions. Firstly on Cerro Moro looks like a pretty good project with all the economics. Just on the up front CapEx of 265, can you break that down with the US dollars and local currency? And what you guys are seeing sort of trends in inflation numbers or deflation numbers on both?

Peter Marrone

Management

Barry, if you want to address that? The local currency and then what we see is the potential inflation or the impact?

Barry Murphy

Analyst

Sure Andrew, the 265 is about 75% local currency the balance being in U.S. dollars, and the give me a moment to tell you what the forecast is on the currency movement and we assumed in 2015 that Argentinean peso to the US dollar in 2015 of 10.5, 2016 of 13.5, and 2017 of 14.5.

Andrew Quail

Analyst

And of that 24% of the U.S. dollar, you guys seeing any sort of deflation or impact of that or is that sort of pretty much get size constant?

Peter Marrone

Management

I think, we -- sorry Andrew, let’s make sure that we have understood the question, the split between local currency and U.S. dollar, the US dollar would be the US dollar, we're not going to see any benefit of devaluation of the local currency.

Andrew Quail

Analyst

Down to -- we don’t know on the actual CapEx of the number, like one lead item that you guys have been buying?

Peter Marrone

Management

I see, so should we expect some improvements as a result of what’s happening in the industry generally. And I think all addressed that. I think we’re seeing some benefit coming from decreased activity in the extractive industries but equally what we’ve attacked to do is balance that with the efforts in Argentina. You’ve heard me say before that I think Argentina is improving, has an improving socioeconomic and geopolitical state certainly from a mining company’s perspective. But what we try to do is we attract the counterbalance the improvement in the industry generally with recent experiences in country. As you all aware one of your peers a bigger operation for sure were going at a 1000 tons that is more than 4000 tons but that experience led to an increasing capital costs, so we took that as an opportunity to say let’s build that experience into what we’re planning to do. So I wouldn’t expect that we’re going to get some significant benefit coming from the improvement to the extractive industries with some of the long lead time items because I would say that we’re going to get the potential negative impact of that from having to engage in this development in the country. Now I think it will improve. We have done in the CapEx estimate is taken the recent in-country experience and absorb that into our cost structure.

Andrew Quail

Analyst

Okay, thanks for that. You’ve also talked about on exploration your budget for this year sort of somewhat between 70 million and 98 million, can you break that down what will go through the P&L sort of what would be capitalize and what would be expensed?

Peter Marrone

Management

At the 70 level it would approximately 15 to the P&L and so then if you scale it up would be the same proportion, if you move that up to 98.

Andrew Quail

Analyst

And last one, you guys are -- what sort of you guys put any hedges in place with your energy so any of your diesel cost what sort of [indiscernible] you guys have some of your peers have hedged big portions of that, if you guys done any program like that?

Peter Marrone

Management

No not yet, we’re happy we have not because of some of those peers have did that from what we can see did that a sustainably higher prices, so we’re not looking that but clearly there is a significant amount of volatility oil prices. We see less of that volatility in diesel but we have seen some improvements to diesel costs certainly in some of our operations and that’s very true to Chile and Canada in particular. As you know diesel is subsidized in Brazil and so we would not get the negative impact of increases in diesel costs but we also don’t get the entire positive impact of decreases in diesel costs. But Canada and Chile for sure we’re seeing some significant improvement and we’re now looking what we can do to improve or to solidify those improvements by looking at some hedging strategy. We have not done it to-date and we’re happy that have not.

Chuck Main

Analyst

And Peter, I could just add to that when we did the budget, we were using our own $80 crude prices so we’ve got some benefits to reap from the basically the budget number.

Peter Marrone

Management

That’s a fair point and on the Canadian side, Andrew, interestingly, it is a windfall effect or double waning effect because it’s not just crude -- and the impact to diesel that is improved but it’s also the dollar. And the dollar’s weakness and dollar’s weakness impart as a result of oil prices coming down. And we budgeted on our Malartic City $0.85 and already at $0.78 to $0.79.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from Anita Soni from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Anita Soni

Analyst

Hi, thanks, Peter. Could I get perhaps this might be better for the Analyst Day but could just walk us through some of the way you’re doing your cost now? I am just little bit confused on the what’s being applied when you calculate your AIC?

Chuck Main

Analyst

I think generally on the cost side, I think the first point is and as Peter pointed out, we're moving away from the GEO to having a cost per gold, cost per silver and cost for copper. When we do our all-in sustaining cost and our cash costs our headline items is on a byproduct basis. So what we're doing is we're taking the copper margin, the revenue minus the copper cost and then splitting it between the gold and the silver which on a relative revenue basis which if you just take gold and silver that’s roughly 9010. So that's how we then come up with the byproduct cost. As far as the definition of all-in sustaining cost it's the same as that's always been it's our cash cost, our G&A, our expense to exploration

Peter Marrone

Management

And the attribution and need of the split between gold and the silver which is I think in part of your question is also on a revenue -- comparative revenue contribution basis between the two metals.

Anita Soni

Analyst

So what you are doing is basically a gold all-in sustaining cost and a silver all-in sustaining cost for you like distributing the sustaining capital between the two as well and then the applying the copper margin to both of them on metal basis, is that a good way to think about it?

Chuck Main

Analyst

That's correct. On a comparative revenue contribution basis.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. There are no further questions registered at this time. I would like to turn the meeting back over to Mr. Marrone.

Peter Marrone

Management

Well ladies and gentlemen thank you for that. We did promise that we would have a more brief meeting than normal. I will mention and Needham mentioned an Analyst Day -- there is an Investor and Analyst Day that is planned for later day. The result of that is that we will have a more fulsome and detailed presentation that will be available on our website as of this afternoon. So we would encourage everyone that is interested in learning about your Yamana in more detail to look at that presentation when it is posted on our website later today. The summary of what we see here and referred to and the detailed presentation is what will be available later this afternoon. So thank you for making the time on the call and we look forward to this call for the first quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.