Hecla Mining Co (NYSE:HL) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 15, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Anvita Patil - VP, IR and Treasurer, Hecla Limited

Phillips Baker - President, CEO & Director

Russell Lawlar - SVP & CFO

Lauren Roberts - SVP & COO

Conference Call Participants

Joseph Reagor - ROTH MKM Partners

John Tumazos - John Tumazos Very Independent Research

Dalton Baretto - Canaccord Genuity

Operator

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Hecla Mining Company Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to turn the conference over to Anvita Patil. Please go ahead.

Anvita Patil

Good morning, Regina, and thank you all for joining us for Hecla's Fourth Quarter 2022 Financial and Operations Results Conference Call. I'm Anvita Patil, Hecla's Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Our financial results news release that was issued this morning, along with today's presentation, are available on Hecla's website.

On today's call, we have Phil Baker, Hecla's President and CEO ; Lauren Roberts, Hecla's Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; and Russell Lawlar, Hecla's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Any forward-looking statements made today by the management team come under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and involve risks as shown on Slides 2 and 3 in our earnings release and in our 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC. These and other risks could cause results to differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures cited in this call and related slides are found in the slides or the news release.

With that, I'll pass the call to Phil.

Phillips Baker

Thanks, Anvita. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call. Hecla is the world's fastest-growing established silver miner, surprising for a 130-year-old company. And I'm on Slide 4. There are 4 reasons that this is happening. First, Hecla's commitment to silver. Since our founding, Hecla has always been a silver producer even when other metals and activities provided more margin.

When I joined Hecla in 2001, investors and others encouraged us to sell or close our silver assets. But what I saw was that our large resource position can survive the ups and downs of the silver market. And we needed to be committed because the silver market would improve. And of course, it did. And because of silver's role as an energy metal, we think the silver market will strengthen further. I'm going to talk more about that at the end of our prepared remarks.