Earnings Labs

Taseko Mines Limited (TGB)

Q4 2019 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 21, 2020

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Sylvie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Taseko Mines' Fourth Quarter and Year-End Conference Call. Note that all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Taseko you may now begin your conference.

Brian Bergot

Analyst

Thank you, Sylvie. Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today to review Taseko's fourth quarter and annual 2019 financial results. The news release announcing our financial results were issued yesterday after market close and are available on our website at tasekomines.com. With me today in Vancouver is Stuart McDonald, President; John McManus, COO; and Taseko's Chief Financial Officer, Bryce Hamming. Russ who is traveling today will not be participating on the call. After opening remarks by management which will review the fourth quarter and annual business and operational results, we will open the phone lines to analysts and investors for a question-and-answer session. Before we proceed, I would like to remind our listeners that our comments and answers to your questions will contain forward-looking information. This information by its nature is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the stated outcome to differ materially from the actual outcome. For further information on these risks and uncertainties, I encourage you to read the cautionary note that accompanies our annual MD&A and the related news release as well as the risk factors particular to our company. I would like to now turn the call over to Stuart for his remarks.

Stuart McDonald

Analyst

Okay. Thanks Brian and good morning everyone. Thanks for dialing in to our 2019 and fourth quarter earnings call. I will be starting with a review of our fourth quarter results at Gibraltar and also give an update on Florence and our other development projects. I'll then hand the call over to Bryce for a review of the financials. So, fourth quarter earnings from mine operations were $24 million and adjusted EBITDA was $18 million. At Gibraltar, we produced just -- produce and sold just over 33 million pounds of copper. Average head grade for the period was 0.25% which is in line with life-of-mine average grades. Copper recoveries were 84.5% which was slightly lower than the previous two quarters due to a higher proportion of oxide ore being processed, although the impact of that was offset by higher mill throughput which averaged about 85,000 tons a day for the quarter. Molybdenum was a bright spot again as we produced 728,000 pounds in the quarter. We did experience some negative impacts from the CN Rail strike in November, which forced us to adjust the mine plan towards lower grade areas and lower production as we were temporarily constrained by a lack of concentrate storage capacity. The resulting delay in getting our product to the port backed up our concentrate pipeline and delivery schedules and we weren't able to fully recover and get inventory levels down at year end. So, that had an impact on cash flow for the period which Bryce can talk about in a minute, although I should say that we haven't seen any impact from the recent rail blockades in Canada and our rail service is running normally at this time. So, while Q4 production and sales were slightly lower than planned, we still achieved our annual…

Bryce Hamming

Analyst

Thanks, Stuart. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to cover in further detail the fourth quarter and 2019 year-to-date financial results that were released. We reported earnings from mine operations before depletion and amortization of $23.9 million on a quarterly basis bringing our annual total to $70.6 million. Earnings from 2019 continued to be impacted by the copper price. The realized copper price for the year was $2.74 per pound, a $0.10 per pound realized decrease from 2018. 2019 copper sales of 122 million pounds was also below our production levels by 3.5 million pounds as our copper concentrate inventory remained elevated at 5 million pounds on a 100% basis at the end of December. This inventory would have had a sales value of approximately CAD14 million for a 75% share. Due to the CN Rail strike that Stuart mentioned in late November and the associated freight backlog, we were unable to get this copper concentrate inventory loaded into a ship. We expect to generally bring down our copper concentrate inventory levels in 2020. Site operating costs for the three months ended December 31, 2019 increased by $12.1 million compared to the same period in 2018, primarily due to the lower levels of capitalized stripping occurring in the quarter and our next mining pit phase Pollyanna. We capitalized only $4.3 million in waste-stripping costs this quarter compared to almost $19 million in Q4 2018 and that lower capitalized amount had a negative impact on our P&L. As we noted in Q2, we continue to recognize higher levels of depreciation previously capitalized stripping costs for this last phase of Granite pit as we mine more ore from the bottom of this pit. This resulted in $31.4 million of depreciation in Q4 in line with our quarterly guidance compared to $28 million and…

Operator

Operator

Stuart McDonald

Analyst

Okay, operator I think we're – I think there aren't any questions, so maybe we can just wrap it up. But certainly if people do have questions after the call they can contact myself or Brian Bergot. Thanks everyone for joining and we'll talk to you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again thank you for attending. And at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines. Enjoy the rest of your day.