Equinox Gold Corp. (AMEX:EQX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Equinox Gold Corp. (AMEX:EQX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 1, 2023

Operator: Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Equinox Gold Third Quarter 2023 Results and Corporate Update. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [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, Chris, and thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning to discuss our Q3 results. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today. So please do visit our website and our continuous disclosure documents on SEDAR and EDGAR to learn more about the company. I will now pass the conference over to our CEO and President, Greg Smith.

Greg Smith: Thanks, Rhylin, and good morning, and thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. On the line with me is our COO, Doug Reddy, our CFO, Peter Hardie; our EVP of Exploration, Scott Heffernan and of course, our VP of Investor Relations, Rhylin Bailie. Again, today, we’re discussing Equinox Gold’s 2023 third quarter financial and operating results and I’ll just start with a broad overview for the quarter and then turn the call over to Pete and Doug for more details. So, this was a record quarter or a record third quarter for the company in terms of gold sales and revenue, with just over 148,000 ounces of gold sold at a realized gold price of $19.17 per ounce. Cash cost per ounce sold was $13.63 with all-in sustaining cost per ounce sold at $16.03.

I would note that these costs do include our write-down of inventory at Los Filos, which totaled approximately $70 per ounce on a consolidated basis. For the first nine months of the year, we sold 409,000 ounces at a cash cost of $13.57 per ounce and all-in sustaining costs of $15.95 per ounce. These also take into account the inventory write-down at Los Filos. These results also reflect record sales for the company for the first nine months of the year, and we remain on track to meet our 2023 production and cost guidance. In September, we had a site visit to our Greenstone mine in Ontario that, included our analysts, our lenders and some of our shareholders. Just a reminder that Greenstone, is being developed as a joint venture in cooperation with our 40% joint venture partner, Orion Mine Finance.

Again, the site shows very well, and it was a great opportunity for all the visitors to see the site and the progress in-person. All of our analysts attended. So, there are fairly recent analyst reports out there, and you can get in touch with Rhylin, if you’d like to see any of them. The full site tour deck, is also available for download on our website, and you can track progress in the Greenstone photo gallery, which we update weekly. Greenstone continues to progress very well. As of September 30, we were 93% complete overall with construction 92% complete. And Doug will have more on Greenstone, but the punchline is the project remains on budget and on schedule. I want to take a quick minute now to talk about the convertible note financing we closed in September.

To remind everyone, we announced a $150 million convertible note offering on September 18, with an annual interest rate of 4.75%, a 5-year term and a conversion price of US$6.30 per share. With the overallotment being exercised, we closed the total financing of $172.5 million. As many of you on the call have noted, the market did not react positively, but we strongly believe in the merits of this financing. The new notes, have a lower interest rate, a higher conversion price and a longer term, than the existing convertible notes that mature in April ’24. So, we’ve secured better terms for the company and mitigated the risk of having to cash settle the April 2024 notes, if they mature out of the money. And in the interim, in early October, we did use the proceeds to partially pay down, our revolving credit facility.

This results in substantial interest savings to the company while ensuring the funds are available to settle the maturing note in April if needed. So with that financing closing just prior to quarter end, we finished the quarter with an unrestricted cash balance of approximately $357 million. Before I hand the call over to Peter Hardie to run through our financial results, I want to take a moment and thank Francois Bellemare for his contributions to the company as a Director of Equinox since January of 2022, but Francois has actually been in the mix at Equinox since several years before then. At the same time, I’d like to welcome Fraz Siddiqui to the Board of Directors as the new Board appointee through Mubadala Investment Company. So with that, Pete, I’ll turn it over to you to discuss our financial results.

Peter Hardie: Thanks, Greg. Now on Slide 5 of the presentation. For Q3, for the 149,000 ounces sold, we received an average realized price of $19.17 per ounce generating $285 million in revenue. We had $201 million in operating expenses in the quarter, which is an increase, compared to the $193 million of operating expenses from Q2, an increase, compared to last year’s quarter, which was $189 million. The increase is primarily due to the contribution of operating expense at Santa Luz and higher operating expenses at Aurizona and RDM as a result of higher production. With RDM achieving its highest quarterly gold production since Q4 of 2020, offset partially by lower operating expense at Mesquite as a result of lower production.

On a per unit basis, our cash cost per ounce of $13.63 is consistent with the previous quarters of this year. Our all-in sustaining cost per ounce of Q3 is in line with Q1 and increased, as planned from Q2 thanks to additional sustaining spend at Aurizona on deferred stripping and tailings facility work, which is a typical Q3 activity at that operation. When compared to last year, cash cost per ounce decreased in Q3 – to $13.63, pardon me from $13.91 and all-in sustaining cost per ounce decreased to $16.30 from $17.51. One of the trends we’ve seen this year is the increase in leach pad inventories. We’ve seen a year-to-date increase of $130 million in those inventories related to an increase in ounces on the pads of Mesquite and Los Filos. For Mesquite, most of the increase occurred during Q3.

At Los Filos, the increase occurred in the first half of the year. During Q3, at Los Filos, we saw an overall drawdown on pad ounces. Doug will speak – to leach pad dynamics during his review of the operations. We’re seeing decreases in input costs in Brazil and Mexico from Q2 of this year. There was an increase in the U.S., though, which was driven by higher fuel prices. In Mexico and Brazil, some of the benefits of decreases in input costs, unit input costs are offset by stronger performance in the local currencies against the USD. Equinox manages its foreign exchange exposure with the corporate hedging program. Year-to-date, the company’s realized gains of $26 million on its peso and real risk management. Those gains are recorded below the line in other income and are not included in our company’s mine operating or cash and all-in sustaining cost metrics.

Had those realized foreign exchange gains, being included with mine operating earnings, they would have decreased cash and all-in sustaining costs by $76 an ounce for Q3 and $63 an ounce on a year-to-date basis. And those savings are attributable to about 60% at Los Filos and 40% to the Brazilian operations. Our EBITDA in Q3, 2023 was $65 million or $81 million on an adjusted basis. We had net income of $2 million for basic and fully diluted earnings – per share of $0.01. Included in net income is an income tax recovery of $8 million. On an adjusted basis, we had net income of $29 million or $0.09 a share. The differences between net and adjusted income include $18 million for unrealized losses on foreign exchange contracts, $11 million in unrealized losses recognized in deferred taxes and $6 million for unrealized gains on gold contracts.

Cash flow from operations before changes in non-cash working capital was $83 million or $0.26 a share, which is entirely in line with our Q2. With respect to our remaining sustaining spend, year-to-date, we spent $77 million, and we expect to be a little under our guidance for the year – by the end of the year of $136 million. Moving to Slide 6. In terms of liquidity and capital position, we ended the quarter with $357 million of unrestricted cash, which includes the net proceeds of the convertible bond that Greg already discussed. And yesterday, we closed a $75 million long-term prepay arrangement with funds provided by Sandbox Royalties and Regal Resource Royalties in exchange for delivering 9,000 ounces of gold over 15 years with monthly deliveries to the greater of 500 ounces a month or 1.8% of Greenstone gold production.

The gold deliveries can be satisfied with production from any of our mines and they start next month. We will receive 20% of spot gold price for every ounce delivered, and we have the option at any time to buy down as much as 75% of any undelivered gold ounces for spot gold, assuming a minimum price of $2,000 per ounce. With respect to Greenstone, we are ahead on spend. Our guidance for the year was $277 million and we spent $270 million through Q3 with $90 million spent during Q3. Based on construction progress to-date, we believe the construction spend will decelerate and our share of the remaining construction budget, is about $80 million to $85 million, which is about $140 million on a 100% basis. We expect to fund our remaining share of the spend through our cash at the end of the quarter, our operating cash flow and the proceeds of the $75 million long-term prepay that we just closed.

Additionally, we have the $100 million accordion feature on our revolving credit facility that, remains available and undrawn. And finally, we have other levers in our investment portfolio and ATM should they be needed. And I will note, we have not drawn on the ATM since January. With those sources of liquidity, we believe we are well funded to complete Greenstone construction. I’ll turn things over now to Doug for a review of the operations.

Doug Reddy: Thanks, Pete. We’re on Slide 7 in the presentation. At Mesquite, during Q3, the mine switched from waste stripping to ore movement and stacked 7.6 million tonnes on the leach pad. The strip ratio reduced from 2.0 in Q2 to 0.6 in Q3. Those stack down has begun to come under leach during the quarter. So, now we’re waiting for them to start coming off the pad in Q4. Early in the quarter, they’re actually in the end of Q2 and into start of Q3, there were issues with precipitation of a magnesium silicate and also low pH levels were caused by – releaching of some older areas of the pad. Both of those were addressed and resolved. During the quarter, the site has also been working on our plan to mine the Ginger deposit, which is a new zone that’s next to the Brownie pit.

So, we look forward to seeing how Ginger can come into our mine plan going forward. At Castle Mountain, crushing and agglomeration throughput continues to improve. We were at 67% of the ore being crushed before its being stacked. We continue to make up the difference with the run of mine ore, which does have a lower or slower percolation rate and a lower overall recovery. We are working on additional modifications to the crusher that will – we’ll end up with improving ore throughput. Scaling on the drip lines on the leach pads, did occur at Castle Mountain in the quarter, and those have been addressed and resolved. At Los Filos, our productivity improvement program in the open pits and the underground mines has been underway from Q1 onwards.

That program has seen a strong increase in the total tonnes being moved year-on-year and a reduction in dilution from the underground and at the same time, delivering more ounces overall to the pads. 80% of the ore is coming from Los Filos, Bermejal and Guadalupe open pits and the underground ore is from the Los Filos underground only. On the leach pad, we had delays in gold recovery, as noted in Q1 and Q2, but we’re starting to see those ounces draw down in Q3. One of the areas was previously reported problem with broken leach pad piping, that was fixed, and we believe all of those ounces have now come off the pad in that area. We also had some areas with carbonate precipitation in an area where the pH had gotten very high and that was in preparation for the rainy season, where there was a drawdown of the overall solution on the pad.

The area with the carbonate precipitation has now been turned and is being released. So that’s been addressed. And then the higher grade ore with copper content continues to be separated, that receives a higher cyanide dosage and the long leach cycle time and for clarity, this impacts less than 14% of the recoverable ounces that have been stacked year-to-date. More recently, the mine sustained no damage, as a result of the hurricane that devastated the coastal region around Acapulco. Our employees at Los Filos have initiated a voluntary donations campaign that’s in an effort, to support the affected families in Acapulco and other impacted areas and Equinox Gold will be supporting this effort. On the next page, in Brazil, all of our mines have had tailing storage facility construction either recently completed, or currently underway.

So as Pete noted, this is the time of the year where we do the big push in all of our tailings facilities. And that’s reflected in our sustaining capital expenditures for each of these mines. At Aurizona, Q3 production was higher than the prior quarter as they mine more tonnes and had access to higher grades. We continue mining with a second contractor on the site, that’s to help move more waste and help build up an ore stock or stockpile for the coming rainy season. Currently, we’re over 400,000 tonnes on the stockpile. We’ve largely caught up on waste movement with almost 8 million tonnes being moved in the quarter. Fazenda was mining from a combination of open pit and underground sources. Underground mining was up on both tonnes and grade in the quarter and the feed grades going into the plant, plus the plant throughput was above plan.

So a very good quarter for Fazenda. Drilling was over 16,000 meters in the quarter. This is in the underground. That brings our underground drilling to over 39,000 meters year-to-date, that’s focused on reserve replacement. That’s been a successful program for the last half dozen years, and it’s looking to be the same for this year as well. Exploration overall in the Fazenda, Santa Luz, Greenstone Belt continues on several promising targets. At RDM, the mine achieved its highest quarterly gold production since Q4 of 2020, primarily due to sending higher grade in situ ore to the plant. You’ll recall that much of the previous year, we were supplementing feed to the plant with low-grade stockpiles. So we’ve been able to focus more on the in-situ or the RDM team has been doing a great job in mining with owner-operated equipment, and that’s a combination of our trucks plus additional rented trucks.

RDM is also in the permitting process for a filtered tailings storage facility that was submitted at the start of the year. So, we’re looking for that to come through, sometime at the end of the year or into the New Year, but it doesn’t have an impact. We have sufficient space to carry on in any case. Santa Luz continues to work on changes to overall recoveries. They were running at 67% in the quarter. We’ve been running just size 70% in October. So it’s the small changes that make a difference at Santa Luz. I’ll note that in the quarter, the total organic carbon content of the plant feed was running higher than planned. While we did have recoveries well into the mid-70s, when the lower total organic carbon levels are being fed in. Our work continues on increasing overall recovery, increasing the throughput and being able to feed ore with higher total organic carbon into the plant.

And one of the initiatives that we’re currently working through engineering work, and we’ve done a lot of test work on it already, is the impact of desliming of carbon from the ore that’s currently being fed. So, we see that this will result in an overall enhanced to recovery. And essentially, it’s removing the highest carbon portion of the ore and the remaining mass therefore, ends up with the improved overall recovery. Moving on to Greenstone on Page 9. Full-scale construction of Greenstone was announced in October of 2021, and two years later, the project remains on budget and on track for H1 of 2024 production. We are fortunate to have a very experienced and focused diligent team at the site. And this is a great photo showing the progress in the last two years.

In the foreground is the ore storage dome. On the left-hand side is the primary and secondary crushing building feeding into the HPGR building that’s near the center of the photograph. Behind the HPGR is the truck shop and warehouse building. And on the right-hand side is the mill building process plant building with the thickener in the foreground of the building and the leach tanks to one side. In between the thickener and the ore storage dome is the on-site power plant. The project had one LTI in the quarter and has had over 5 million hours worked so far. Move on to Page 10. Progress at the site as of September 30. The overall project is 93% complete with construction at 92% complete. Procurement is 90% complete, and then mechanical piping and electrical, those are the big focus.

The big focus at site, as we reduce the personnel on site in the fourth quarter. This is how – the construction team will start to ramp down as our ops team has been building up, and we’re in towards pre-commissioning and commissioning. The capital spend is 89% complete. On Page 11. Process plant is 91% complete. Both ball mills are mechanically complete, conveyors installed belt installation underway crusher, reclaim and HPGR substantially complete and the hydro testing and leach tanks has been underway. Our pre-commissioning activities are underway in several areas. Our process – the power plant is already complete and has been through commissioning. It’s fully operational. The pipeline is commissioned and operational, and we’ve been switching over to powering portions of the plant during Q3.

Full transition happens in Q4. The tailings facility is 94% complete. The South portion is complete to the final elevation, 340 elevation and buttress work continues. It will be – it is on schedule for completion and ready for use in Q4. There’s a list of additional infrastructure over to the right, and I’m not going to read that through. Suffice to say that the key areas that remain are the tailings storage facility and the process plant. We’ve already done the realignment of the Highway 11. That was opened for traffic in ’20 in August of this year and we’ve relocated the Ministry of Transportation Petroleum. So going to Page 12, looking at key milestones. As noted, the highways open, Process plant is 90% complete, and we’ve moved into pre-commissioning.

So, our operational readiness and commissioning teams are in place and very active on site. In Q4, the big focus is the mechanical piping and electrical installation. And then, we move into wet commissioning on the process plant. The TSF, as noted, will be ready for use and preproduction mining ramps up. We’ll have 800,000 tonnes on the stockpile. Currently, it’s over 400,000 tonnes on the stockpile. The mining fleet will be augmented in Q4 going with and – six additional trucks bringing our fleet to 14. And then, we’ll continue adding trucks, to the point where we’re at 22 trucks by Q3 of next year. So H1, 2024, we’ll see hot commissioning first gold for mining at 145,000 tonnes a day and the buildup of the lower stockpile. Looking at our other expansion projects, Castle Mountain is in permitting.

The application was submitted in March of 2022. In the meantime, we continue with our optimization work. We’re doing additional met test work and we continue with front-end engineering. The Aurizona expansion will see concurrent mining of Piaba underground, along with Piaba open pit and other nearby open pits, such as Tatajuba and Genipapo. The engineering work continues on supporting infrastructure, for example, additional power that’s required for vent fans and supporting the underground. And the underground portal development will happen in 2024, the ramp and drill stations and the ramp provides drill stations and we will be doing test mining and it provides the basis for future production. At Los Filos, the CIL plant would add life and improve overall recovery.

We’re looking for the conditions that are conducive to investing in the construction and the extension of the mine life. So in the quarter, we have met with communities. We started the dialogue and that needs to involve all parties. We’ll need everyone to be involved so that we can – all stakeholders to be involved so that we can put Filos on the path towards being able to invest in the CIL, additional stripping and ultimately extending the life. With that, I’m going to hand it back to Greg.

Greg Smith: Yes. Thanks, Doug. Rhylin, why don’t we move on to Q&A.

Rhylin Bailie: Sure. Operator, can you please remind people how to ask a question?

Operator: Certainly [Operator Instructions].

Rhylin Bailie: Sure. So I’ve got a couple of questions online, and we’ll take one of those while we’re waiting for people to queue up. First question here, why did the convertible notes now? Why not wait until the spring when the 2024 note was coming due?

Greg Smith: Yes, I’ll handle that one, Rhylin. So as you noted, in April 2024, we had $140 million convertible note that was maturing. And the company has been involved in a large capital program for the last 2 years in building Greenstone. And we did not want to be in a position just as we’re in the heat of commissioning and ramping up Greenstone where we had to make $140 million debt payment. So we’ve been pretty clear in the past that we wanted to get ahead of that maturity, effectively refinance that note. And so we’ve been looking at a number of options to do that. Why now, why September in a large part because the market was cooperating. The terms were very attractive in the context of the note that was maturing. Again, much higher conversion price, lower interest rate, and of course, you get the extension of the term.

And we were able to do it in market conditions that were favorable to the company at a period where we were able to then park those funds on a revolving credit facility and save a fairly material amount of interest, the delta in the interest between our revolver and the convertible note over the period of time between now and maturity of the April 2024 notes. So from our perspective, we have to control or focus on the things we can control. We don’t know where the gold price is going to be, where the market is going to be in April 2024. And so to mitigate having to make that payment in cash, if those notes matured out of the money, we wanted to get well ahead of that, and that’s why we executed on those notes in September.

Rhylin Bailie: Perfect. Thank you. Operator, can we go to the phone lines now, please?

Operator: Certainly, the first question comes from Wayne Lam with RBC. Please go ahead.

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Q&A Session

Wayne Lam: Yes. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just wondering maybe at Los Filos. Just wondering what the expected leach cycle is now for those delayed ounces beyond the 60 days. And I guess, given that it’s been a couple of quarters now, should we be expecting a big catch-up announces coming off at in Q4?

Doug Reddy: So on – for example, the longest leach time is on the high copper ores. So that’s a 120-day overall cycle. Yes. It’s a longer drawdown of those ounces will go through Q3, probably into Q4 for those ounces. And we had hope that it will be quicker, and we all come out in Q4, but it’s likely going to drag into 2024.

Wayne Lam: Okay. Great. And then just maybe related to that, it looks like the heap leach inventories have built up by quite a bit this year. What proportion of that number is related to Los Filos versus, say, Mesquite and Castle Mountain and at what point in time would you have to consider taking a bigger write-down on those inventories if they don’t come off the pad, like would that come with impairment testing at year-end?

Peter Hardie: Yes, Wayne. So about 2/3 of the buildup is at Mesquite and most of the buildup at Mesquite occurred during Q3, which was frankly planned with the stacking activity and our budgets for the year. And I’ll note that at Los Filos during the year, we saw a net drawdown overall of the ounces. So the ounces that we had expected a little earlier in the year. We have started to see those come through during the year. And as Doug just mentioned, we hope that, of course, that, that continues. It’s just taking longer than we expected.

Doug Reddy: One of the things to note at Mesquite as we saw opportunities to optimize our mine plan a little bit, which meant a bit more stripping to get more ore, and that is up a little bit. So we knew it was a risk that some of the ounces would push into 2024, but you see the large number of tons that we’ve managed to stack in Q3, we were opportunistic and we took that opportunity to optimize the mine plan.

Peter Hardie: Yes. I guess a final note on the Mesquite stacking is it’s typical of the operation where you do your big pushbacks followed by periods of stacking and then leaching and recovery.

Wayne Lam: Got it. And then maybe just last one at Greenstone. Can you give us a sense of timing of spend through the completion of the project into next year? And then how should we kind of think of CapEx into Q4, given the spend this quarter seems to be quite elevated and to date, it looks like it’s pretty close to the full year guide.

Greg Smith: Sure, Wayne, this is Greg speaking. So to your point, we’ve spent about $270 million of the $270 million of the $277 million that we planned for the year. For the most part, this is a timing issue. The overall budget in aggregate is still valid. What we’re seeing at this stage is a fairly rapid deceleration in construction burn and that is everything from obviously, the installation of equipment, but also just a number of people on site is starting to drop fairly significantly. Most of the major work in terms of construction is coming to completion here, including the tailings facility, which we said Q4, but really, we’re weeks away from that being entirely complete. So most of the big burn that we had through 2022, 2023 is now coming off pretty significantly.

There’s about $140 million at 100% left to spend. In total, 60% of that related to us, it should be about $85 million. I think for the rest of 2024, we’re going to be in that sort of $30 million to $40 million range. And then obviously, we’re moving into hot commissioning here in Q1 and as quick as we can to gold production. So we’re – no change to the overall budget. Things are moving quite quickly at Greenstone. And like I said, the overall burn is now coming off quite significantly and really the spending is starting to orient more towards just mining.