Equinox Gold Corp. (NYSE:EQX) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 4, 2022 10:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Rhylin Bailie - IR
Christian Milau - CEO
Peter Hardie - CFO
Doug Reddy - COO
Conference Call Participants
Mike Parkin - National Bank Financial
Operator
Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Equinox Gold First Quarter 2022 Results and Corporate Update. [Operator Instructions]
I would now like to turn the conference over to Rhylin Bailie, Vice President, Investor Relations for Equinox Gold. Please go ahead.
Rhylin Bailie
Thank you, Sheri, and thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today. So please do take the time to visit our website, SEDAR and EDGAR to read the rest of our continuous disclosure documents.
I will now turn the conference call over to our CEO, Christian Milau.
Christian Milau
Thanks, Rhylin, and welcome, everyone. Doug, Peter and I will walk you through the first quarter results here and take questions. But just as a reminder on the first Slide 3, we're an Americas-focused group that's really building a sizable platform in the Americas. We've started out with 6 producing mines at the moment. We've got the one in commissioning in Brazil, and it's ramping up towards commercial production at the moment, and we've got 4 large growth projects. So this year, we'll be producing 600,000 to 700,000 ounces with a clear path to 1 million ounces over the next couple of years as our growth projects come in on stream.
We've also got a strong balance sheet to fund that. And just leading into this quarter, as expected, we said the first half of the year would be a bit slower in first quarter, particularly. And we expect costs will continue to reduce over the year. And as we move through the year, production will ramp up as we bring new mines online and we hit into the higher periods of production starting in sort of Q2, Q3 period this year. So pleased with the first quarter's costs. They are roughly in line with expectations. We set those with our guidance early in the year.
Production was a little bit light, and we'll walk you through why that happened and how we see production moving up over the year. And definitely, it's hard to compare to Q4 2021 as we were very back ended last year. So we'll walk you through the quarterly production here.