Agnico Eagle Mines Limited (NYSE:AEM) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call August 1, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Ammar Al-Joundi - President and Chief Executive Officer
Jamie Porter - Executive Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer
Dominique Girard - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Nunavut, Quebec and Europe
Natasha Vaz - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Ontario, Australia and Mexico
Guy Gosselin - Executive Vice President of Exploration
Carol Plummer - Executive Vice President of Sustainability, People and Culture
Daniel Paré - Vice President, Quebec

Conference Call Participants

Josh Wolfson - RBC Capital Markets
Anita Soni - CIBC World Market
Lawson Winder - Bank of America Securities
Ralph Profiti - Eight Capital
John Tumazos - John Tumazos Very Independent Research
Mike Parkin - National Bank Financial
Tanya Jakusconek - Scotiabank

Operator

Good morning. My name is Lara, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Q2 2024 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. Ammar Al-Joundi, you may begin your conference.

Ammar Al-Joundi

Good morning and thank you for joining us today.

We are very excited to be reporting another exceptional quarter and to share with you some of the important work that teams are focused on to create additional value. Some of the highlights this quarter include continued strong operational performance with excellent cost control. This focus on cost control has allowed us to deliver for our owners’ tremendous leverage to increased gold prices as demonstrated by our third consecutive quarter of record free cash flow. A significantly strengthened investment-grade balance sheet with over $900 million of cash at quarter-end and $250 million of debt repaid in July.

We continue our long-standing commitment to shareholder returns with $50 million in share buybacks in the quarter and almost $200 million paid out in the quarterly dividend, marking over 40 years of consecutive quarterly dividends.

Prudent, measured and importantly economically-driven reinvestment into the business, including approximately $50 million of supplemental exploration budget focused primarily on Detour, Malartic and Hope Bay and based on exceptional ongoing exploration results and announcing the next steps to developing the Upper Beaver mine and expanding Detour to potentially over 1 million ounces a year of annual production, both investments based on exceptional projected risk-adjusted economic returns.