Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

February 16, 2023 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning. My name is Julie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Fourth Quarter Results 2022 Conference Call. 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.

Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi, you may begin your conference.

Ammar Al-Joundi

Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and have the opportunity to talk about 2022, but more importantly, about 2023 and beyond, where we are quite excited, and we see some exceptional opportunities that by the end of the call, I think, hopefully, all of you will see them with us.

Just before we jump in, some forward-looking statements you should take into account, the normal sorts of things. But why don't we then just jump right in on page 5.

So, we're going to talk about, again, 2022 and 2023. I would say that 2022 full year can be characterized by two things: number one, solid and strong operational performance; but number two, and this is important, some very strategic consolidations that have led and will lead to some great opportunities that we're going to talk about.

On the operations side, for the full year, we had a strong year with regards to production, meeting our guidance, but I would say more impressively, costs meeting the upper end, slightly above the upper end of our guidance where we had told the market we would come out. We all know that 2022 was a tough year for inflation. It was a tough year on the workforce side, but the Company delivered quite well overall. We had continued advancement of some key development projects, Odyssey, Detour Lake, some other key projects that we're going to talk about. And we delivered all of that with the Company's best safety record in 66-year history of the Company. That's impressive.

At the same time, we repaid $225 million of debt with cash as it came due. And we paid a dividend of $0.40 per share quarterly dividend continuing, which is at a good level. At the same time, we increased mineral reserves by 9% to almost 50 million ounces. So a very strong year operationally, I think, across the board. And we'll talk about the fourth quarter where there were a few more challenges, but I'm very proud of the team for what they delivered this year.