Peter D. Barnes
Management
Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. Some of my commentary may contain forward-looking information, therefore you are cautioned that our actual results could differ materially from my conclusions, forecasts, or projections. I refer you to the section entitled Description of our Business Risk Factors in our most recent annual information form available on [CEDAR], which sets out certain material factors that could cause actual results to differ. Net earnings for the quarter were $23 million, or $0.10 a share from the sale of 3.1 million ounces of silver, compared with $25 million, or $0.12 a share from the sale of 3.8 million ounces of silver in 2006. Operating cash flows were $28 million, or $0.13 a share, compared with $33 million or $0.15 a share last year. These results were impacted by temporary production shortfalls at Luisman’s San Dimas mines in Mexico, where silver production was close to 800,000 ounces below budget for the quarter. All of our other operations were at or above expectations. San Dimas sees their production shortfalls continuing for the remainder of this year and as a result, we are reducing our guidance for the second half of the year to 6.5 million ounces from 8 million. We are confident though that the San Dimas production shortfall is only temporary and that it will be resolved by the end of the year. Randy Smallwood, our EVP of Business Development, will discuss our operations in a bit more detail in a few minutes. Really though, the major story of our second quarter is our two acquisitions, which will transform the company. These two acquisitions help us more than double our annual ounces sold over the next five years to close to 30 million ounces a year. In addition, they will boost our long-term cash flow per share by about 30%, with no shareholder dilution. Goldcorp’s Penasquito Project in Mexico also provides us with a very strong organic growth profile through further exploration success. Just in the last 12 months, Penasquito’s silver reserves increased by 50% as a result of strong exploration results, and this is expected to continue going forward. There also appears to be strong potential for the open pit production from Penasquito to be increased by up to 30% a year above the feasibility study levels at no further cost to Silver Wheaton. Also, there is good potential that Penasquito will ultimately develop into an underground mine, again at no extra cost to us, and that would further boost annual production levels. The future growth prospects for Silver Wheaton have never been better. Our expectation is that we have positioned ourselves to do a minimum of two to four accretive transactions a year over the next several years. I shall now turn it over to Nolan Watson, our CFO, to review our quarterly results, following which Randy will make a few comments on the operations.