B2Gold Corporation (NYSE:BTG) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 3, 2023 1:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Clive Johnson - President, CEO & Director

Michael Cinnamond - SVP, Finance & CFO

William Lytle - SVP & COO

Victor King - SVP, Exploration

Conference Call Participants

Ralph Profiti - Eight Capital

Ovais Habib - Scotiabank

Don DeMarco - National Bank Financial

Anita Soni - CIBC

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to B2Gold Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Clive Johnson, President and CEO. Please go ahead.

Clive Johnson

Thank you, operator. Apologies on behalf of the phone service, not our technical issues, but theirs. So we're a little bit late getting going. Welcome to the conference call to discuss B2Gold's Second quarter 2023 Financial Results. We had another very strong quarter, again, highlighting the excellent performance of our -- by operating team. And we're very pleased with the results, and it makes us feel very comfortable we're on track to -- for our guidance for 2023 for the year of annual guidance.

I'm going to pass over to Mike Cinnamond soon, our CFO, who's going to walk you through, at a high level, what you probably already read, which is the details of the financial results, and we're going to have an update from the line on focusing on Goose Project construction at Back River, and things are going very -- pretty well there. So we remain in an extremely strong financial position in the company, and that allows us, and Mike can talk at a high level about that to look at funding the Goose and continuing along with our industry-leading dividend and then maintain a very strong cash position with Goose now looking to come into production, as Bill will highlight, in the first quarter of 2025.

I want to deal with an issue that's come up, I guess, since we put out the news release about Mali and about the conversations around a potential new 2023 mining code. What we've put out in our news release, what we said in our news release set, the Fekola Mine will continue to be mined on Page 5 -- in front of Fekola and Cardinal -- actually Page 6 from the Cardinal pits. Receipt of an exploitation license for Bantako, which is one of the areas we were going to -- we were hoping to start trucking ore down to Fekola, if you remember the Fekola mill.