Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

April 28, 2023 8:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day. My name is Michelle, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Mines Limited First Quarter Results 2023 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 and good morning, everyone. On this beautiful spring late April day, it's a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk about our first quarter results. But before I do that, I'm in a room with a lot of my colleagues, who will be dealing a lot with this discussion.

But in particular, I'd like to talk briefly about two colleagues. On my right, Sean Boyd, who mentioned to me that at this AGM at 11’o clock will be his 40th AGM with the company, you don't have many people in any business that committed for that long, who've created as much value as Sean has, so that's quite the milestone, Sean and we'll make sure we point it out again on the 50th.

And on my left, Dave Smith, CFO extraordinaire and a good personal friend, who today is his last official day as CFO. He has agreed to work with Jamie Porter over the next month or two to transition, and then move -- I think happily into retirement good for you, Dave. But I just wanted to point that out.

So we're going to be summarizing the first quarter results, really though the story is three parts. One, strong operational performance, strong production, good costs, good safety, good environmental performance. Two, very good progress on optimizing our assets. 2022 was a year of consolidation, 2023 is going to be a year of optimization. There's a lot of work, particular focus on the Abitibi belt, but the huge potential. And then three excellent exploration results. Importantly, excellent across a number of assets and Guy will talk about that.

But I want to start with safety. Our greatest responsibility at Agnico and I would say at any company is for the safety of our people and the safety of our communities. In the third quarter last year, I had the pleasure to announce that it was the safest quarter in the company's 65-year history. The last call at -- the year-end call in February, I then had the pleasure to announce the safest year in the company's 65-year history, and now in the first quarter of 2023, I can once again -- I have once again the pleasure of saying another record safety quarter in the company 65-year history, that's pretty fantastic.