Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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 Second 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].

And now, I will turn the call over to Ammar Al-Joundi. You may begin.

Ammar Al-Joundi

Thank you, very much, and good morning, everyone. Before we jump in, I would like to point out that we believe talking about some forward-looking concepts and statements and there is some documents at the beginning of the package that you might want to go through. We have our team with us today. We're going to be in a very good position to talk about the quarter and a very good position to answer questions afterwards. But really today there are only three key takeaways that we'll go through.

One, we had a very strong operating quarter, consistent performance by the team across all the sites, and I'm proud to say now for several quarters in a row. Two, excellent progress on our Abitibi optimization programs. As many of you know, we have a very ambitious program to consolidate and optimize our Abitibi platform. We believe, we have the potential to add several hundred thousand ounces of additional production, potentially and we've made some good progress on that and we'll talk about that and where we are.

And the third point is we've had some excellent exploration results. Gi will talk about that, but excellent results across many of the operations. And I would say that all of these results are in places we already operate. We have infrastructure, we have teams, and we have the capacity to utilize and leverage off existing infrastructure. These are not exploration results, at the top of a mountain range in the middle of nowhere. These are in our backyard, and they will make a big difference. Gi will talk about it. In fact, we're so confident that we've increased his exploration budget putting us over $300 million this year, demonstrating again the confidence we have in the business.

When we talk about strong operations, just hitting some highlights, record quarterly production, costs $840 cash costs at the bottom of our guidance range, all with another quarter of exceptional safety performance. I'm proud to say that we have now had the safest first half of the year ever in the 66-year history of the company. There is nothing more important than the safety of our people and our communities. And I've said it before, I'll say it again. You cannot have that kind of safety performance without excellent operating capabilities. And you can't have the kind of operating results we've had without that type of safety performance.