B2Gold Corp. (NYSE:BTG) Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call November 2, 2022 1:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Clive Johnson - President & Chief Executive Officer
Michael Cinnamond - Chief Financial Officer & Senior VP-Finance
William Lytle - Senior Vice President, Operations
Peter Montano - VP, Projects
Brian Scott - VP, Geology & Technical Services
Conference Call Participants
Lawson Winder - Bank of America
Anita Soni - CIBC Capital Markets
Don DeMarco - National Bank Financial
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 B2Gold Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results 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. Johnson, you may begin your conference.
Clive Johnson
Thank you, Michelle. Welcome, everyone. We're here to talk about as Michelle said, we're here to talk about the financial results for the third quarter of 2022 as we released them last night. I'm going to hand over to Mike shortly here to talk about -- Mike Cinnamond, our CFO, to talk about the financial results, and then Bill Lytle will give us an update on operations.
As we previously announced in the production release for the third quarter, we were less than budget in terms of our ounces produced. And there are reasons for that which are detailed in the news release and we'll discuss them as well. Primarily it was higher much higher than expected rainfalls, the difficult to mine, which will allow us to access some higher grade material that was projected in our budgets.
And the other main other factor was being behind schedule at Otjikoto and giving the other growth, because we had placed a contractor who was not performing with a better contractor and both of those things are identified clearly as primary as the driving force by being and line in production. And both of those are issues that are and rectify themselves as we speak.
In fact, at the Fekola mine, we have a subject to finals to final auditing. We had produced approximately 77,000 ounces in October for Fekola. So that's getting into this much better grade than we couldn't get into before because of the rains, and that's the kind of performance we expect for each of the months in the fourth quarter, which if you do the math, takes us back to the projections that we have.