Jeff Klenda
Analyst · Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead
Thank you very much, Penne, and good morning everyone. I, too, would like to thank you in joining us. I briefly toyed with simply replaying the webcast from the second quarter, but then thought what the fun in that. So let’s talk a little bit about what happened in Q3 for us. Unfortunately, lower prices continue to define the Uranium space. We reported to you in our last webcast that we had experienced in the second quarter a $4 drop in spot price and there are striking resemblances to the second quarter. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, we dropped another $4 dropping from $26 a pound to $22 a pound. And unfortunately for us, it didn’t stop there. We also saw another $3.50 decline in spot price for the month of October. There were a number of reasons for this. Of course, our industry continues to be characterized by elevated inventories, limited demand and oversupply. And there are actually a number of contributing factors as I think most of you on this call are aware. We have been waiting for the Japanese to restart reactors that has been much slower in coming than we had thought. And we also have seen a growing inventories due to underfeeding in the industry, but I will take just a couple of minutes here to point out a few things and that is that we find ourselves also in a zero interest rate environment, I just came from a conference in New Orleans, where an economic panel spent to better part of an hour talking about the destructive nature of zero interest rates and soon to be probably negative interest rate environment. And the fact is that it is simply a destroyer of capital. But few people associate that with the lower prices that we are experiencing in uranium, the simple fact of the matter is that this feeds of the carry trade and whether we like it or not the carry traders are setting the pricing in uranium almost on a daily basis. Beyond that we also find ourselves in a position where because of the lower demand because of the carry traders are providing product to the marketplace even in this low cost environment. That actually facilitates what’s called underfeeding. And this is where essentially pounds are created out of nowhere out of thin air in the form of what’s called U3O8 equivalent and we find ourselves with growing inventory in UF6 and EUP in rich uranium product as a result of that underfeeding. But I don’t want you to think that all things are negative for us or in uranium land. What we’re going to try and do throughout this webcast is that we’re going to try and point out not only some positive developments in the industry and there are some, but we’re also going to point out what we as a company are doing to respond and adapt to a changing market environment and I think in a lot of very positive ways. So with that will begin. Go to Slide number 3, which is entitled Ur-Energy at a glance. And here ladies and gentlemen, what I point out is that these are the areas where we feel our emphasis should lie and these are areas of priorities. It’s imperative in this market that we sharpen our focus and that we do a very good job of allocating very dear dollars. Under the first bullet point as usual it is important to us that we grow the resource here at Lost Creek to have a slide devoted to this, but we will be primarily seeing the growth in our resources coming from the development of our mine unit number two this year. Also we continue to benefit from our long-term sales contracts as you see there on the slide at the end of the month we found ourselves in a position where the midpoint spot price was $18.75, and the mid-term price was $35.50. Beyond that we have our performance at our Lost Creek. Now, Steven Hatten is going to be coming on, and he is going to be taking you through our operational performance for the quarter. We’re very proud of the fact that we are doing just an excellent job of adapting to these markets, worrying about the subsurface and our well fields and bringing down our costs and operating in a more efficient manner on a quarter-over-quarter basis and Steven Hatten will take you through that. Also with respect to Pathfinder, we have our Shirley Basin project. This is our next project, which will come into production. And we are working on advancing the permits and licenses for Shirley Basin, but as I’m sure you can appreciate we’re in a position right now where this is nothing that we’re going to be hurrying on. We’ll take it as it comes and that actually is good for us because it means lower cost, lower expenditures out the door to advance that project to permitting and licensing. Now I’m going to move on to our next slide, which is our market position where we go to our share capital and cash position. Unfortunately, you folks out there that are in attendance, I’m understanding that the slides are not advancing, so you’ll have to bear with me and I hope that I can keep you adequately entertained and depict for you what these slides are supposed to be visually, what you’re supposed to be seeing in a visual. But on our Share Capital & Cash Position, this is a slide that we’ve shown you many times before. I’d like to point out a few things and that is that you see that we have about 7.6 million stock options out there in the marketplace, and about 8.2 million warrants. We’re going to see a couple million of each of those drop off at the end of the years – at the end of this year from exploration. So that’s kind of cleaning up the capital structure as we move forward. Our cash position right now at the end of the month was $5.2 million. So while that does not exactly give us a lot of latitude in terms of our expenditures. We do feel that we’re on very solid ground. One of the things that I also like to point out, normally you’d be able to see our performance charts on our stock both on the Toronto and the New York Stock Exchange. And we experienced a massive movement upward in the month of June where over a three, four day period of time, we actually traded about 38% of our shares. We turned over about 13% of our shareholder base and we advanced, we increased in price by about 65%. It’s important to note that only four companies participated in that. So I think that that’s something that’s very indicative of what we can expect in the future and we certainly plan on being one of the company that benefits when this thing ultimately turns around. But one of the other things that I would point out to you is that, since February, when we had to do a financing because of the delay in the delivery of a contract with one of our utilities. We've actually turned over a significant percentage of our stock at $0.50 or greater and I would think that’s probably in excess of 30% of the total number of shares that we have outstanding. Our highest priority asset company continues to be – to see low or no delusions to you. And we're going to do our very best as a company to deliver on that. Normally we'd be moving forward to slide number five right now and this is just demonstrating once again our mineral growth and resource growth. One of the things that I mean this is where $0.01 will not like it, but I like to make a forward-looking statement here. And that is that we've always regarded our last three project is being very scalable. We have clearly demonstrated that scalability since Fukushima over the last five and a half year where we have grown our resource from 6.2 million pounds to now in excess of 21 million pounds. And it's important to note that we have done that while producing over 2 million pound now at Lost Creek in three years of production. So we're very, very proud of that in that growth under a pattern of our resources from over 6 million pounds to 21 million pounds is net of that 2 million pounds that we had produced during the last three years. Also I would like to reiterate that we are expecting that the bulk of our growth this year in fact it may very well be a 100% of our growth this year. We'll come from our development of Mine Unit number 2. Again a forward-looking statement that you will recall when we developed our first Mine Unit that with that infill development and well fill drilling we found ourselves developing a significant increase in resource and I'd like to think that we're going to experience something similar with Mine Unit number 2. And then of course there's always the possibility for acquisitions. The simple fact of the matter is, is that assets out there in Uranium land have gotten very, very inexpensive and we feel that that's going to continue and particularly in a sub $20 environment. Right now, I'm moving on to slide number six and this is once again has to deal with our marketing strategy and our sales guidance. And normally what you'd be viewing right now is a first bullet point that in big bold letters says cash flow is king. And normally I tend to skip right over that and go right to our committed sounds and the pricing in the years ahead because I think those are our most relevant factors. One of the things that I think has become very interesting in our industry is that I believe that we – our industry is now being separated into very – two very distinct camps. Those that have revenues and those that don't. And very simply if you've got revenues right now, if you've got the long-term sales contracts, what this is going to translate into over the quarters and perhaps the next year or two ahead is whether or not you are subjecting your shareholders to ongoing dilution. We do not anticipate that, that is not say I cannot promise that we will never have to go back into the marketplace. But the fact is that I wouldn't trade our position with anybody right now. As we have said before we have targeted 60% of our production at Lost Creek at prices of $50 a pound through to the end of the decade. This has given us a tremendous amount of security and has derisked our story for our shareholders. And right now perversely as we continue to drop in stock price, our contracts are worth more and more. And we are indeed realizing for every pound we deliver into our contracts on an average basis, we are realizing $30 plus margins in a sub $20 environment. Nobody anywhere else in any commodity that I know of is accomplishing that as a company. So we feel very, very good about this. I understand that our slides have returned, so I hope that you're joining me now on slide number six. One of the things, one of the last comments that I would like to make with respect to this slide is that we really have not been able to enter into our discretionary spot sales. This is something where I believe Roger will discuss this a bit further on. But our business model does call for discretionary spot sales. We don't feel that in a sub $20 environment that that's in the best interest of our shareholders. And one of the other things that I will express a little bit of frustration over is the fact that we are very well secured with high cost or high takeaway sales contracts through the rest of the decade and yet, we don't get value for this in the marketplace. That is something that's very puzzling to me. But having said that what I'd like to move on to now is Steve Hatten's presentation. When we talk about our high optic contracts moving through the end of the decade that's only half of the equation. The other side of that is that you need low cost to complement that and I can assure you low cost don't just happen. It takes guys like Steve Hatten and his superb team out there at Lost Creek to bring about these low cost. So with that, I will turn this over to Ur-Energy's Vice President of Operations, Steve Hatten, he's going to tell you how he works that magic. Steve if you would please.