McEwen Mining Inc. (NYSE:MUX) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 13, 2022 12:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Rob McEwen - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Anna Ladd-Kruger - Chief Financial Officer

Rory Greyvensteyn - Director of Operations, Canada

Adrian Blanco - Director of Operations USA & Mexico

Stephen McGibbon - Executive Vice President of Exploration

Michael Meding - Vice President, Copper and General Manager

Bill Shaver - Director

Conference Call Participants

Marcus Giannini – H.C. Wainwright & CO. LLC

Operator

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the McEwen Mining's Q1 2022 Operating and Financial Results Conference Call. Present from the company today are Rob McEwen, Chairman and Chief Owner; Anna Ladd-Kruger, Chief Financial Officer; Rory Greyvensteyn, Director of Operations, Canada; Adrian Blanco Director of Operations, USA and Mexico; Stephen McGibbon, Executive Vice President of Exploration; Michael Meding, Vice President of McEwen, Copper and General Manager. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

I will now turn the call over to Mr. Rob McEwen, Chief Owner. Please go ahead, sir.

Rob McEwen

Thank you, operator. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our first quarter 2022 conference call. Last year we saw signs of our turnaround in progress. The trends look good as we closed on 2021 with higher gold production and lower production cost per ounce relative to 2020. This year, our results have been mixed. The Fox Complex started strong and then was slowed down by manpower shortages induced by COVID and that was followed by an equipment failure in the mill. But despite these issues, Fox produced more gold at lower cost than it did in the first quarter of 2020.

An important development in Q1 was our Preliminary Economic Assessment that outlines the future growth prospects of the Fox Complex. It details a bright future for Fox with a nine-year mine life, significantly longer than what we have right now and attractive mining costs. We are confident that our exploration will result in a shortening of the payback period and an improvement in the economics. Our Director of Canadian operations Rory Greyvensteyn will be expanding on the activities later on this call.

Mining at Gold Bar, the costs were very high, and we expected that, because we are in a transitory stage of our mining cycle where there is an extensive period of stripping to remove over burden in order to reach the ore zone. Adrian Blanco, our Director of Operations for America and Mexico will elaborate on both these operation. At the San Jose mine, which is operated by our joint venture partner Hochschild Mining, COVID induced manpower absences resulted in a temporary mine shutdown that adversely impacted gold and silver production and the costs associated with that production.