B2Gold Corp. (BTO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold. It is my pleasure to welcome you and to call to order the 2020 Annual General Meeting and Special Meeting of Shareholders of B2Gold Corporation. Our Chairman, Bob Cross, typically chairs the meeting. He is recovering from successful hip surgery. So rather than watch and be up here standing on one leg wincing, we thought that I would step up -- step in for him. Bob is on the line and listening. Unfortunately, out of an abundance of caution to proactively deal with potential issues arising from the unprecedented public health impact of coronavirus disease 2019, we are hosting the meeting through this virtual platform, accessible to all our shareholders who will follow the procedures described in the management information circular for the meeting to participate, submit questions and vote, regardless of physical location. Please ensure you remain connected to the Internet during the course of this meeting. I will act as the Chairman of this meeting, and I appoint Roger Richer, Executive Vice President and General Counsel and Secretary of the company, to act as recording secretary of this meeting; and Anita Basi of Computershare Investor Services, Inc. to act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present at the meeting today are my fellow directors: Bob Cross, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan, Bongani Mtshisi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, Robin Weisman, and Liane Kelly. The other officers of the company with us today include Mike Cinnamond, Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer; Roger Richer, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary; Tom Garagan, Senior Vice President of Exploration; Dennis Stansbury, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Project Evaluation, Bill Lytle, Senior Vice President of Operations; Ian MacLean, Vice President, Investor Relations; Dale Craig, Vice President of Operations; Eduard Bartz, Vice President of Taxation and External Reporting; Brian Scott, Vice President, Geology and Technical Services; John Rajala, Vice President, Metallurgy; Neil Reeder, Vice President of Government Relations; Dana Rogers, Vice President of Finance; Randy Reichert, Vice President Operations; and Randall Chatwin, Vice President, Associate General Counsel. Now for the business of the meeting. Notice of this meeting was filed and the notice calling this meeting together with the management information circular and proxy form was mailed to the shareholders on May 11, 2020. I've received a copy of the declaration attesting to the publication and mailing, and the recording secretary will arrange for the declaration to be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered shareholder. I propose that we waive reading the notice of the meeting unless anyone specifically requests that it be read at this time. The recording secretary has notified me that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting property constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer may be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. I propose that we deal first with all the routine business requirements and then terminate the formal meeting and carry on in a less formal manner by way of an opportunity for questions from registered shareholders and proxy holders about the company's activities or operations after presentations from management. As this meeting is being held virtually, I would like to set out a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. [Operator Instructions] When reading on a question, I will note the name of the registered shareholder or proxy holders submitting the question. In order to deal with all questions in a timely fashion, questions of a similar nature will be answered once, and duplicative questions will not receive response. Questions on the formal meeting items will be addressed as each item is tabled. It would be appreciated whoever have questions and comments of a general nature were deferred until the question period after the presentation. If we are unable to address your general questions during that time, a representative of B2Gold will reach out to you following the meeting with a response. Voting on all matters at this meeting will be conducted by electronic ballot. To allow sufficient time for voting, the polls for all matters being voted on will be open following these introductory remarks and closed at the end of the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, you will see the ballot open on the virtual interface, requesting you to start registering your votes. For any motion duly brought before the meeting not included in a circular, the polls for such matters will be opened and closed as I deem necessary or desirable for the orderly and expeditious conduct of the meeting. I remind you that only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or user name will be able to see on the screen all motions being brought forth at this meeting, and will be asked to vote on each business item. I'll remind you that if you are a registered shareholder and you have already voted by proxy, you do not need to vote again unless you want to change your vote. If you plan to vote at the meeting, you may choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait to cast your vote until after an item is discussed. Once discussion on all items of business before the virtual meeting is concluded, I will give registered shareholders and proxy holders one final opportunity to enter their votes on the open polls if they haven't already done so and then declare voting closed on all resolutions. To vote, simply click on your for or withhold or against as applicable. A confirmation message will appear to show your vote has been received. To change your vote, simply change your selection. If that's for me, I'm in a meeting. When the polls closes the votes submitted on each resolution item will be recorded through the virtual meeting platform. Totals in favor or against or withheld, as the case may be, for each resolution item will be tallied once the voting is completed. Once the polls are closed, I will report on the outcome of the motion. The final results of the polls will be reported in the scrutineer's report and will be posted on our SEDAR profile. I now declare the polls open on all resolutions, including the circular. The first item of business is the presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2019, and the auditor's report on the financial statements as required by the British Columbia Business Corporations Act. The financial statements were mailed to shareholders on May 11, 2020, and are available on SEDAR. Extra copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. Three representatives of the auditor are attending the meeting today. If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions for the auditor, Len Wadsworth, Tristan Shaw and Melanie Matthews of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants are available to respond. The next item of business is to set the number of directors.

Mr. Chair, my name is Roger Richer, and I am a registered shareholder, and I move that the number of directors be set at 9.

Are there any questions or discussion on the motion? If there are no questions or discussions, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. [Voting]

The next item of business is the election of directors. The 9 persons proposed by management for election are listed in the circular. All of them have indicated their willingness to serve as directors for the ensuing year. In accordance with the company's advanced notice policy, nominations for directors other than those proposed by management must have been given to the secretary of the company by May 13, 2020. As most such nominations were received, management's nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election. Could I please have nominations for management's proposed directors?

Mr. Chair, I nominate the following persons for election as directors: Clive Johnson, Robert Cross, Robert Gayton, Jerry Korpan; Bongani Mtshisi; Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, Robin Weisman and Liane Kelly.

I would ask for a motion that the 9 persons nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until determination of the next annual general meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed.

I so move.

I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer's report -- and that the scrutineer report on the results, if you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. [Voting]

The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants. Management proposes that it be reappointed until the next annual general meeting. May I now have a motion that the auditor be reappointed and that the directors are authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor?

I so move.

Are there any questions or discussions on the motion? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. [Voting]

The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution approving the amendment to the restricted share unit plan. The background behind this motion, a summary of the proposed amendments and the proposed form of resolution are set out on Page 9 of the circular. The Board of Directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution approving the amendment to the restricted share unit plan. To take effect, the resolution approving the amendment must be approved by a majority of the votes cast through the virtual meeting platform or by proxy. May I have a motion to approve the amendment to the restricted share unit plan on the form of the resolution set out on Page 9 of the circular?

I so move.

Are there any questions or discussion with respect to this motion? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. [Voting]

The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution on a nonbinding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. The background behind this motion and the proposed form of the nonbinding advisory resolution are set out on Page 9 and 10 of the circular. In addition, a detailed discussion of the company's executive compensation program is set forth in the executive compensation section of the circular. The Board of Directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution on a nonbinding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to the executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. As this is an advisory vote, the results will not be binding upon the Board; however, the Board will take the results from the vote into account as appropriate when considering future executive compensation policies, procedures and decisions. May I have a motion to approve, on a nonbinding advisory basis, the form of the resolution set out on Page 10 of the circular, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation?

I so move.

Are there any questions or discussion with respect to this resolution? If there are no questions or discussions, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. [Voting]

That concludes the matters to be voted on. For those registered shareholders and proxy holders who have not voted on all the resolutions for which the polls remain open, please do so now as I will shortly close all such polls. [Voting]

The polls on all such resolutions are now closed. I direct the scrutineer to provide a report on our results of the polls. I now have the preliminary results for the matters set forth -- the preliminary results of scrutineer's report for the matters set forth in the circular. Based on these preliminary results and the scrutineer's report, I declare that the number of directors of the company has been set at 9. As the majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated, the 9 persons nominated have been elected as directors of the company. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants has been reappointed as the auditor until the next annual general meeting and the directors be authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor. The resolution to approve the amendments to the restricted share unit plan of the company has been carried, and the resolution on an nonbinding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation has been carried. After the meeting, upon receiving the final scrutineer's report on the polls conducted during this meeting -- sorry, I direct the recording secretary to attach the report of the scrutineer's to the minutes of the meeting. All of the business for which this meeting was called has been completed. Following termination of the formal part of the meeting, registered shareholders and proxy holders who wish to ask questions or make comments will be invited to do so. May I have a motion to terminate the meeting?

I so move.

Based on the preliminary results, I declare the motion carried and the formal part of this meeting is now terminated. I would ask people who have any questions to perhaps wait until we finish the informal presentation, which we'll begin now. After that, we can answer, hopefully, all of your questions. Thank you for your attention for the formal part of the meeting. We're going to give you a little review and presentation of 2019 and talk a little bit about how we're doing so far in 2020. What's on the screen right now is a cautionary statement, Slide #4, and this is a very detailed slide that basically says that certain things that we're going to say here today will be forward-looking and therefore may be subject to change. Slide 5 shows you where we are around the world. Of course, Vancouver being the head office, our 3 producing mines in Mali and Namibia, Fekola in Mali, Otjikoto in Namibia and the Masbate mine in the Philippines, and our development project in Colombia at Gramalote, and also some exploration development projects in Burkina Faso. Just want to take you through a few highlights. I'm going to -- Bill Lytle is going to get up and talk to you in not too exhaustive detail. We'll give you some color and flavor for how we're doing in operations, how we've done in 2019, and Mike's going to come up and talk about the financial side, how we're doing financially and how we did in 2019. 2019 was an extraordinary year for B2Gold. For the 11th year in a row, we had record gold production. We produced just under 1 million ounces of gold in 2019. We also realized production from Fekola, Masbate and Otjikoto. All exceeded -- all 3 mines exceeded the upper end of their respective 2019 production guidance range, so tremendous performance. Our costs remained low. Consolidated cash operating costs at $512 for 2019, which was below our guidance. Consolidated all-in sustaining costs of $862 per ounce, and this was in the middle of our -- basically in the middle of our guidance, between $835 and $875 per ounce. Consolidated gold revenues from continuing operations was $1.156 billion, an increase of $105 million or 10% over 2018. Consolidated cash flows from operating activities of $492 million. Net income attributable to the shareholders of the company of $293 million or $0.29 a share. Adjusted net income attributable to the shareholders of the company of $238 million or $0.23 a share. The Fekola mine exceeded 1 million ounces of total gold production, 1 year ahead of the original production schedule. You'll hear Bill talk about the Fekola, the dramatic success that, that project has been as a great mine to start with and what we've done to dramatically increase the value of Fekola to our shareholders through exploration and expansion of the facilities. The expansion study we came out with in the PEA during 2019 clearly suggested that -- made a lot of sense, was a bit of a no-brainer to expand Fekola. But part of that was possible because of the way we built Fekola in the first place, which is what we tend to do, build mills that have the potential to expand at very low cost, if you believe you have the potential for exploration success. And Bill will speak to that a little bit as well. We also started construction of Fekola solar power plant. Sure, Bill will touch on that. This is going to be, as far as we know, the largest hybrid solar and heavy fuel oil plant in the world, and it's our second. We built one at -- a few years back in Namibia at the Otjikoto mine. So on the cutting edge of green technology in our industry and generally as well. We're very excited about those projects and the benefits, the environmental upside and the financial upside. During 2019, we amended our shareholders agreement with AngloGold Ashanti, who's our joint venture partner on the Gramalote Project in Colombia. It's a 50-50 joint venture. With this new agreement with AngloGold Ashanti, B2Gold was appointed manager operator of the Gramalote Project. You'll hear a little bit from Bill. We're getting pretty excited about Gramalote, and we'll be producing a full feasibility study in the first quarter of next year. We are very positive on the Gramalote. It could very well be the next mine that we build. We'll have those results in the first quarter of next year, and Bill will tell you some of the reasons why we like it. We also came up with an updated preliminary economic assessment for Gramalote which showed some good economics, which, once again, Bill will speak to as well. We did sell the -- or we'll change our ownership structure for our Nicaraguan assets, the El Limon and La Libertad mines in Nicaragua. Those are the first 2 projects we started out with from 12 years ago in B2Gold. The El Limon Mine was an underground mine which needed quite a bit of work. We improved that dramatically and had great exploration success, turned it into a good mine with a long mine life. In La Libertad mine, we built a new mill there and once again enjoyed great performance and exploration success. Nicaragua was a great country for us to be in. We were very successful, and it was very good for Nicaragua as well over the 12 years or so. But we decided last year that the Nicaraguan assets were a little small for the kind of projects that B2Gold has moved on to and the kind of size of the mines that we're building. We like Nicaragua. We love the people in Nicaragua and have great employees there. So we found what we thought was an elegant solution, which was for us to move on to the bigger projects that we have been building and hope to continue to be building and developing, but let another company step in called Calibre Mining into Nicaragua. So we've ended our interest in the Nicaraguan assets into Calibre. It's around a $100 million deal. But we did it becoming significant shareholders of Calibre, around 34% of the shares. We really care about our people, and it was very important to our -- for our legacy and for our employees, 2,000 employees in Nicaragua, that they were taken care of and had a good future going forward. So it worked very well because Calibre was an exploration company that aspired to be a mining company, and they put together a very impressive, in addition to the good exploration team, they put together an impressive group of executives with good experience in mining, construction and production. So all of our employees switched over to Calibre. So it was really an elegant solution where they continue, and then Calibre is doing a good job and we're happy to be a 34% shareholder. And we're very confident they will succeed with the Nicaragua mines and will continue to advance the projects and the company. So we're happy to be shareholders of Calibre and they have, I think, a very similar corporate culture to us when it comes down to CSR and the way we treat our people. They're very much of a similar mind. They've been involved in exploration in Nicaragua for over 10 years. In the fourth quarter of last year, we did something we've always aspired to do, which is to declare a dividend for our shareholders at $0.01 a share. We were thinking of looking at that dividend at the end of this year, probably in the fourth quarter, to consider whether it was appropriate to increase it, given the dramatic increase in our cash from operations and our free cash flow. Things have gone so well, and of course, the gold price helps. But things have gone so well that we've actually announced today that we are doubling that dividend to $0.02 a common share. That seems to be very popular with our shareholders. And the whole objective of the strategy of the company will continue to be to grow the company, taking some of the cash flow that we earned for the hard work of producing gold and use that cash flow to find more gold mines and build more gold mines, but use a portion of it to reward our shareholders by paying a dividend. That's our strategy, our philosophy, and I'm thrilled that we're taking steps towards that very rapidly. Mike is going to talk about our financial position, which is exceptional. We have been paying down a lot of debt. We paid down $220 million of debt in 2019. Based on our current assumptions, we're on track to be net debt free by the end of June 2020, this year. That's a great place to be. We also continue with a tremendous exploration program at Fekola since -- when we acquired Fekola, it had about 4 million ounces in gold resources. We've doubled that now through exploration success, which is one of the reasons why we've gone through 2 significant expansions. The second one's happening now of the Fekola mill. And Tom is going to talk a little bit later here about some of the reason why Tom and his team are so excited about the additional exploration upside around Fekola and also in the Anaconda area some 20 kilometers north, and some of the other exploration projects that we're excited about. We've always done very well on exploration in our history, and the cheapest ounces will always be the ones you find. And we'll continue and have a great success around all the mines in finding additional gold while making significant discoveries elsewhere as well. So those are some of the highlights, and the guys will flesh it out. I don't want to steal their thunder with some of the things they're going to talk about. But I just put this slide up because we always do, and this is our growth profile for the last 12 years. It is sort of remarkable to think back to just a little over 12 years ago. We created B2Gold as a private company. The founders had put up some of our own money to create the company just 12 years ago. So no production, no market cap. It's been quite a journey over the 12 years as we've acquired a project after project, built mines, acquired Masbate and dramatically improved the mine, and continued on this remarkable path of growth and now see us as a 1 million-ounce-a-year producer, with a market cap today of around CAD 7 billion or over USD 5 billion. A remarkable story of success, and we're going to look a little bit into 2020 today as well and talk to you about the plans going forward. When people look at the slide, and I get asked a lot, and we've done a lot of marketing lately, being -- all being it virtually, but a lot of marketing with institutions, some of them generalist funds who probably never have thought about a gold company before considering buying some exposure to gold in this rather volatile world that we live in today. And I'll get asked -- people ask sometimes what -- is there a secret sauce? What's the real reasons behind the success? And I do think the keys, and I think we've really come to realize that right now, going through this coronavirus, I think the real key is our experience and culture. And the experience factor of our group, their remarkable experience, and you think it's something like 280 years that the executive team have worked in the gold mining industry, but not just in the gold mining industry, but in the gold mining industry together, 280 years. And that's experience in everything from exploration to permitting to negotiating deals to dealing with governments to CSR, ESG, construction, production, finance, reclamation and all of those things. So we have been very good at being able to go around the world to different places and understand the culture of the country we're in, respect the culture we're in. And it comes down to -- we talked about it a lot, but I really think the keys to our success to this point and the keys to our success -- remarkable success during the COVID-19 pandemic is largely because of this experience factor. When you build gold mines in the past, when we were Bema Gold, in the Far East of Russia, where you made 400 kilometers of ice roads every year to get your equipments in for you have a 5-month window. And we've done all sorts of remarkable challenges logistically and otherwise, all over the world in various countries, looking for gold or building mines. But the culture is at the heart of it, that culture of fairness, respect and transparency that we try to live with every day. I think it's paid dividends dramatically in our ability to grow the company so rapidly, yet so well and so responsibly, but it really pays dividends. I think particularly at a time like this, there's a great trust relationship between B2Gold, its employees, the communities in which we work and the governments, both local and federally, in the countries we work. We've been able to continue to do extremely well in all levels of performance, focused on safety and health initially, as always, the top priority during the last 4 or 5 months in dealing with the COVID epidemic, and you'll hear more about that from Bill. So what -- I think the secret sauce here is about experience and culture. And those 2 things together, they equal trust, and we have a great trust relationship. All the countries we work in, they don't have a safety net. They can't just print more currency and dish it out to their citizens. There were some unreasonable offside media lately criticizing the gold mining or the mining industry for forcing people to work while we stay home and work from home, but forcing people to work for profit and for our gains and the gains of our shareholders at potentially their expense of their health. In our case and many other companies, that couldn't be further from the truth. The responsible way that we've been able to continue to run the mines at the request of the government and our employees, we all have something in common. We all want to keep mining if we can do it safely. These governments desperately need the revenue from taxation. The people desperately need the jobs, and everyone was on the same page. That's trust. That's mutual trust, and it's having a goal. And I think working together so well with these governments and people and employees for so many years has allowed us to accomplish that. So if anyone tries to tell you that we're being irresponsible by continuing to mine, you can tell them it's the absolute opposite of that. There are certain people that would like to see no mining in the world. Well, I hope they're ready to go back and live in caves because until we're ready to do that, we need certain metals in the world, but we can do it responsibly. And our company and many others are a proof that it can be done responsibly. Just want to talk a little bit, before I hand it over to Bill on operations, about this performance and how it compares to the rest of the sector. This slide shows you our production growth from 2016 to 2019 is quite compelling, especially given the rest of our competitors. What we did was really contrarian. You've heard me say it a lot. Contrarian in the sense that we were building mines and doing deals and building mines when really very few were doing it over the last 5 years or so. And now we really benefit from that with Otjikoto, Fekola and Masbate as well. So we were contrarian. We stepped up and we decided to maintain our long-term corporate strategy, which was to continue to build the company through accretive acquisitions and exploration success, and dare to go and build mines when building gold mines was very out of favor, mainly because of, sadly, the failings of so many others in attempting to build gold mines. It was unpopular. But we did it because we believed it was what our shareholders wanted us to do on the longer term. So we're up 87% in terms of gold production from 2016-2019. And if you see from many of our competitors, they were negative or marginally higher. In terms of -- it's been rewarding to see over the last year and also into this year, the results of what we have we done in terms of the mines and all the work we've done be reflected in the value of the company. And I've been predicting a re-rating on B2Gold's share price for years. I was way wrong in my prediction of when, but I was ultimately right, I suppose. I didn't believe you could build a mine like Fekola and not have a dramatic impact on the value of the company and therefore, your share price. But it was a stubborn market and we are contrarian. It took a long time. So in 2019, we were up about 34% from the start of the year to the end of the year in terms of our share price and our market capitalization. And since that time, we're up about another 34%, so up almost 70% between the first of 2019 to today, seeing a market cap rise to over USD 5 billion today and CAD 7 billion today. It's been great to see that. Now obviously, that's got something to do with the gold price, but it's not all about that. We were well positioned because of the heavy lifting we did when it was unpopular to benefit from this. And it is interesting to note that the average mining analyst target prices over the next 12 months for B2Gold is around CAD 9 a share. So we continue and are very focused on continuing to grow the company. In terms of long term, that's what it's about, in the long term. I mentioned we were founders of B2Gold, and I was one of the founders of Bema Gold a long time before that. And the goal of both of those companies was to be international, pursue -- be driven by geology, not necessarily geography, and try and go around the world and build significant companies that become producers that are very responsible and very profitable. And this slide is pretty dramatic. It shows the last 10 years from '09 to today and B2Gold share price, with an actual increase of 1,415% if you bought the shares at that time 10 years ago. So one of the more remarkable growth stories in our sector, and we're very proud of this accomplishment, and it's really nice to see it finally reflected in the marketplace. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Bill. I'll make just a very few summary remarks at the end, but I'm going to hand it over to Bill Lytle. Bill's our Senior VP Operations who has done a fantastic job with a great team and continuing to build on the engineering team. Bill has been with us for a long time. He was involved in Bema in Russia in the Far East of Russia, helping us do the Julietta mine and the Kupol mine in Russia. So he's been with our group for a long time and has really risen up through the ranks over the last number of years, and is doing an excellent job as Senior VP of Operations. And the results basically speak for themselves, but I'll Bill speak to them.

Okay. I know that Clive just had this slide up, and I think it's really appropriate. To start with, if you remember my thesis last year during the 2019 AGM where we were talking about 2018 and before, I put forth the concept that we had delivered on our promises and exceeded expectations. And I showed a lot of graphs very similar to this, showing how we ramped up and how we continued to perform and outperform expectations. Today, I'm going to talk about 2019 and I believe that I will show quite conclusively that, that trend continues as far as exceeding expectation. But 2019 was an interesting year for B2 in the sense that we weren't building something, we weren't ramping something up. We weren't commissioning something. And so we talked amongst ourselves on how do we show really what we did, and it really revolves on the operations side about value engineering. So today, I'm going to present to you not only, of course, our outstanding results for 2019, but also how we created value in 2019, not only for 2019 but also going forward into the future. Additionally, I'm going to talk about the first half of 2020. I know the whole year's -- the whole AGM's supposed to be about 2019, but I think it's important to understand really what you're getting when you get B2, about how we actually manage in a time of crisis. And this is not only for operations. Ken Jones, our Director of Sustainability, will be talking later on, on environmental and sustainability. Ninette Krohnert, our Director of Human Resources, will be talking about HR. So overall, globally, I want to put forth the value engineering concept. As Clive pointed out, record production in 2019, Fekola mine outperformed, had very high throughput or record throughput. The Masbate mine expanded. We expanded the Masbate mine and commissioned that in -- at the beginning of 2019. The Otjikoto mine was up 10,000 ounces over where they were in 2018. And of course, Clive talked about how we rationalize the sale of the Nicaraguan assets. As I said, in 2019, we took a look inward and how do we improve our existing operations. And that was led by our Director of Projects, Peter Montano; Randy Reichert, VP of Operations; and John Rajala, the VP of Metallurgy. One of the key things we did in 2019 is we fast-tracked the PEA into detailed design and ultimately into construction during the course of 2019. And this played a key role when I talk about 2020 and how we're doing and how we're getting where we are today. It was that decision to really put forth the effort to go from a PEA all the way into construction in 1 year which is the basis of that. In particular, we actually ordered our mining fleet to expand to double the mining fleet of Fekola in June of last year. At the Masbate mine, we expanded the mill. This allowed us, even though we're getting into harder material deeper in the pit, this allowed us to up our throughput or to maintain our throughput and keep us at 200,000 ounces a year. And at Otjikoto, we took a look at how could we improve the economics. And so we looked at -- took a look at some of our higher strip years later on and decided that it was more economic to develop an underground mine. Not only does that give us, in the short term, additional ounces, and we'll talk about that and we get to Otjikoto, but it also offers us some real upside for additional down plunge exploration at Otjikoto. And last but not least, we'll talk a little bit about development projects, that being Gramalote. Gramalote is a 50-50 joint venture with AngloGold Ashanti which we took management of in January of this year, and I'll talk about how that has progressed throughout the year. This just quickly shows what our projections were for 2020. The fact that we're talking about 1 million to 1.055 million ounces per year for this year, as of today, I'm happy to say that we still maintain that guidance. And as I said, when you're talking about operations, you can't talk about operations in isolation. It was actually very poetic that Clive, one of the first things he said was that health and safety above everything. We don't actually practice that, and he didn't tell me he was going to say that. But right here at the beginning, I wanted to highlight our health and safety track record. If you look at some of these statistics, 88% reduction in lost time injury frequency rate, 83% reduction in injury severity, these are pretty, pretty significant numbers. But the one that is really kind of surprising or really kind of amazing to me, if you look at the last one, this year, we've had one lost time accident for the entire year. This against the backdrop of COVID-19, the pandemic, where we've had people remaining on-site for long periods of time, it really speaks to our systems that we have in place and the dedication of our employees to maintain -- to ensure that each and every day, employees go home safe to their families. And I wanted to put this slide up because I wanted to talk about -- everyone always asks, what does that mean, this reduction in LTIFR? What is it -- how does it compare to the rest of the industry? And so we actually looked at some of the publicly available data to see where we would place. And the reality is, we would be definitely at the top of our industry, if not the top of our industry. There's 2 areas that are highlighted in green, one is for 2019, if you include all of our operations to include the Nicaraguan assets. Now if you pull those out, with our current 3 operations, you'll see that we're down at a frequency rate of 0.1, which is really industry-leading. Now I'm going to turn my attention to each and every operation individually. I wanted these slides -- at the beginning of each slide, I just wanted to commend and thank the people that are on the ground there, Mohamed Diarra, who's the country manager in Mali; and Ray Mead, who's the General Manager at Fekola. Typically, they would be coming here to give this speech, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they weren't able to make today. So I'm giving the speech in their stead. But I need to recognize upfront that it's really these guys are the ones that are leading the charge. Starting again with health and safety, if you look at Fekola, they've had a great run. They -- remember, this is -- this actually has 2 additional items. One is the COVID-19 backdrop but also, we have a major construction project going on there. And so construction is where a lot of times, you do things which are nonroutine and they have the potential for accidents. So we've had one lost time accident at the Fekola project and 0 lost time accidents during construction, 275 days LTI-free. Additionally, we've taken the additional steps now of training the Malian workforce into an internationally recognized management system. So we've gone through -- we've gone from commissioning into now creating a robust system which helps protect our employees. I wanted to quickly maybe take a look back because I think it's important to understand where we've come from in this project. This project was designed originally back in 2014 and when we started construction in 2015 as a 4 million tonne per annum project with a resource of 4.38 million ounces. And we have now -- we expanded that during construction from 4 million to 5 million tonnes per annum. And then in 2019, we made the decision, we did a value engineering proposition where we looked at the overall operation, the overall enterprise, and we did an enterprise optimization where we looked at mining, milling, tailings disposals, social issues, environmental issues and basically tried to optimize the entire facility. And what that study did is it actually indicated 2 things: one, that we should expand the mill because we had additional capacity. So we made the decision to expand to 7.5 million tonnes per annum. But it also brought forth the proposition that we should immediately double the size of our mining fleet and bring some of the ounces forward. So both of those were approved by the Board, and we started construction at the end of last year, and now we're into this year. If you look at what the expansion looked like in aggregate, the mining fleet expansion was supposed to be -- was supposed to drive the ounces for 2020. We had to have -- by the end of Q1, we had to have the mining fleet in operation. That -- because of that, we ordered, as I said earlier, the equipment in June. The mining fleet ordered -- was ordered and arrived early. So we were able to put the mining fleet into production a little bit early. And I'm happy to say that the first phase of the fleet has been operating now for almost 3 months, and the second phase of the fleet is on-site now and under commissioning. So that is actually ahead of schedule. The processing expansion under the direction of John Rajala and the guy on-site, [ Tom Carter ], that remains on schedule. When the COVID-19 outbreak hit, we talked to all of our construction personnel and gave them the opportunity, would you like to stay on-site, knowing that it could be a longer shift, or do you want to go home? Almost to a person, they decided that they would stay. And so all of the material equipment is on-site, and all of the pieces are in place to finish that by the end of Q3. Additionally, as part of that, we talk about expanding the tailings facility. That's not necessarily because of the expansion, that's because of the expansion plus. John Rajala always talks about the fact that what we're really designing is we're not designing 7.5 million tonnes per annum, we're designing plus whatever we think the optimum is plus 1.5 million tonnes per annum. So with that in mind, we didn't want to get caught offside not being able to place our waste. And so we opted to do a double tailings lift this year. That has been completed materially ahead of the rainy season, ahead of schedule and under budget. And then the last part of -- the last component of it is the solar plant. The solar plant is something that is not necessary to support the expansion. The solar plant was designed by Dennis Stansbury, really to look at reducing our costs long term. And so we started it. It's got very good economics, but we felt that during the COVID-19 pandemic, because we went to an island facility, which I'll talk about in just a minute, we needed the extra space. So we actually halted that temporarily, and as soon as the expansion of the mill gets completed, we'll bring those guys back on-site and within 3 to 6 months, we'll be back and have that up and running. And then last but not least, you're going to see some slides on production. But they don't include some of the opportunities on the upside, some of the exploration success which I know Tom is going to talk about. So I'll just leave those alone for now. So if you talk about how are we doing, 2019, we had a record year there, 455,000 ounces. But 2020, we remain on track to beat that and then some. So we've projected 600,000 to 620,000 ounces. We've maintained that guidance despite everything that's happening in the world. And how did we do that? So when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred, the Malian government indicated to us that we were considered an essential industry. We worked with the union, we worked with the communities, we worked with the people on-site and came up with the plan. And that plan revolved around creating an island-type situation where all of our employees would basically be tested, get on-site, be isolated, be quarantined on-site. And then when we do a shift rotation, they would be tested when they come out and the next group would be tested when they'd be going in. We have taken the step of purchasing our own PCR COVID-19 virus testing equipment, which is arriving on-site hopefully next week. So operationally, on the mill side, no change, recovery, no change. The grade has been very good. And as I said, we continue to project that 600,000 to 620,000 ounces for the year. Just briefly on -- B2 sometimes actually at these AGMs has a very long CSR where we talk about the very positive things we're doing for the community. And because of COVID-19 and the fact that we couldn't get everybody into Vancouver, we've kind of shortened that. But I think there are a couple of projects, which really -- which are new which really deserve some attention. And one is the signature project, which is being led by the Malian CSR specialists there on the ground. The concept is, is in Western Mali, there's a huge population of artisanal miners. All right. And this includes everybody from grandparents, parents, all the way down to kids. And so we're looking for ways to move these people out of this dangerous artisanal mining activity, illegal activity, into something which can not only create a future for them, but it can also create food security for the region. And so what we've done here is we've developed what we're calling the Integrated Rural and Agricultural Development project. And so that's an agricultural development of almost 500 hectares, where we're talking about not only crop growth but also husbandry, poultry, all the various levels, integrated levels of agriculture. This, of course, will create jobs, but it also will create value for the land which is there and create food security for the population. Our initial estimates, we've completed a preliminary feasibility, our initial estimate is more than 2,000 people will be employed collaterally from what we're doing at the mine in this project. The concept is we'll have the feasibility done by the end of this year, and we're going to move right into construction of that Phase I for next year. Moving on to the Philippines. Once again, you can't really talk about what we're doing here without talking about the key people that are in country, that being Cris Acosta, who's the President there. He's in Makati in the Philippines. And Dan Moore, who's the General Manager on-site. Just a quick time line of where we've come from. Just so you remember, we started this out in 2013. Once again, we've done some value engineering where we replaced a SAG mill early on. We have continuously succeeded the budget there. And then as I said, we actually expanded the mill in 2019 on schedule. Talking about health and safety, the Philippines has had an amazing run. They've got a very good staff there. They are now running up onto approximately 560 days without a lost time accident, which in any company would be amazing. In B2Gold, that's actually right now our second best record if you -- behind Otjikoto. So very proud of what they're doing there. Looking at the project history development, talking about value engineering. This used to be a contract mine operation. We felt that we could do it better, so we purchased their equipment and we moved to owner operation, and it has -- our mining has definitely improved. We upgraded the mill. We expanded the mill in 2019. And what we're talking about is 200,000 to 210,000 ounces this year. This, we see going on for quite a number of years. And after that, we'll be able to process low grade stockpile. So we have a long mine life left at Masbate. We do -- we're in the process of permitting Old Lady and Blue Quartz right now, which are the next phases that we'll see over the next couple of years. Just looking at operating in time of crisis. So the Philippines was hit very hard by the COVID-19 outbreak and they went to a full self-isolation. But once again, they did declare mining an essential industry. And we worked with the governor within our province to make sure that we can continue to operate. We worked with -- we work with a voluntary staff there to continue operating. We did, for a short period, reduce the mining or stop the mining while we ensured that we were able to bring fuel on-site. As soon as that happened, we fired up the mining equipment and continued to operate. So there, we continue to project 200,000 to 210,000 ounces. We have looked at that short-term period of when we were mining to make sure it didn't impact our long-term ounces, and we see no change to our annual guidance there. Ken will talk once again more about -- Ken Jones, our Director of Sustainability will talk a little bit about what we're doing on the CSR or on the COVID-19 side and on the CSR side. But it is important to know that in the Philippines, food security for the island was once again the critical issue. And so we did, very early on, commit with the governor not only to work on medical supplies, but also to provide food packets to all the families within the region around Masbate. We continue a very exciting project, which we talked about last year, this reef ball project we were rebuilding the reef in a protected area just outside the island of Masbate, and that included more than 2,000 plugs and almost 1,500 direct corals planted in 2019. So Otjikoto is being run now by Eric Barnard, who is the acting General Manager; the Country Manager and Managing Director is Mark Dawe, who previously was the General Manager for the site or was managing the site. Just a very quick time line of how we got to where we're at. This one is interesting. So this was a precursor to what we did at Fekola here. We started out at 2.5 million tonnes per annum. And then when we finished and commissioned, we immediately started talking about expanding the plant. And so we went from 2.5 million to 3 million tonnes. After that, the mill has operated so well, we're currently running and budgeting at 3.4 million tonnes per annum. Looking at health and safety, as I said, an absolute stellar year, stellar 2 years from Otjikoto. They're now 2-plus years LTI-free. They have implemented through -- there's a health and safety manager by the name of James White that we hired. They've implemented Western best practices there. And what you can see is a pure culture shift away from kind of maybe the historical African mining mentality to a Western health and safety mentality. Just running through very quickly. Some things I already talked about, the first 2 bullets, we talked about expanding in pouring gold, then doubling the 3 million tonnes. What we're really talking about now is how do we get to the next step. What happens next, right? This is something that for the next 10 years, you could run a steady state, and it'd be 165,000 ounce operation all day long. What we talk about is we talk about a couple of things for value engineering. One, we talked about changing the open pit to an underground where we can get some of the higher grade ounces in to be blended with their low grade stockpile. We also installed a solar plant there. As part of the underground study, it came back -- it came back positive at the end of 2019. And so we're in the process of implementing that. Looking at Otjikoto once again, operating in a time of crisis for 2020. What you can see is in Namibia, Namibia has yet to really be hit by COVID-19. Very early on, they recognized that it could be a real problem for their country. I think right now, there are about 20 cases or maybe even 25 cases at this point within the country, but they realized because most of their people are located in informal settlements without access to water and basic hygiene conditions, that they needed to really step on it. And so they put a quarantine in place where they shut down the major population centers. That has recently been lifted. But nonetheless, we continued to operate. We did shut down our mining fleet for a while -- or we didn't shut down the whole mining fleet, we shut down our waste stripping mining fleet and continued to mine ore, and we continued to process mill through the mill -- process tonnes through the mill. The reality is that we continue to project what we guided at the beginning of the year, 165,000 to 175,000 ounces. I put this slide up just because I wanted to talk a little bit about the value engineering. And this is really kind of -- it comes through crystal clear on this one. If you -- so you look at the graph, you can see in 2015 is where we started production. If you remember, the feasibility for Otjikoto had something like I think it was about 130,000 ounces over 12 years, that was the mine life. We're now 5 years into it, and we're projecting really through 2029, so another 10 years of mine life. So 15 years. But more importantly, if you look, the first discrepancy between the upper and lower bounds there, that's where we expanded the mill and that's where we increased the recoveries from what the feasibility was of 95% to 98%. And then if you follow the green line, so the green line is really what we were projecting when we submitted our 2019 annual information flyer, which basically, that didn't include the full underground development. The yellow line is what's going to happen when we implement the underground development. So we're talking about really starting in '22 -- 2022 from going between -- from 165,000 to more than 200,000 ounces per year. As you would probably notice, that line cuts off at 2024, and that's because I can't show you what we think is going to happen with a resource, right? So there is the potential down plunge to continue this. That would be -- continue to be processed with the low-grade ounces through 2029. Namibia is known for their CSR initiatives. So I'm not going to -- we talk all the time about some of the amazing things they do, but they really run the full gamut. And they get a lot of attention on some of their environmental issues, things like Rhino Gold Bar coin -- or Rhino Gold Bar, where we donated 1,000 ounces to save the Namibian black rhino, but that's not all they do there. They have a very strong CSR department which looks at environment, health and safety, development of small to medium enterprises, and talking about how to improve the lives of everyday Namibians. Now the last project I'm going to talk about is not an operational project, it's a development project. And this project is currently being managed by Dale Craig. Dale Craig is the VP of operations who voluntarily put his hand up to go down and manage this project, and it's really important because one of the things that B2 does is we're very flat-structured. It allows us to make decisions relatively quickly. And we know we've got a guy on the ground who knows what's going on. I think everyone is aware of where this project is located. It's located in the Antioquia region of Northwestern Colombia. Clive likes to always say that if you were going to pick one spot in the country where to build a mine, this would absolutely be the place. It's a project that's been in our books for a long time, and it was previously managed by AngloGold. They did a lot of good work. They spent 10 years developing this thing. And then at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, we agreed with them that we would become the manager. We would complete the feasibility and if it's positive, that we would be the people going forward to build and operate this. So in 2020, we commenced -- at the beginning of 2020, we began to look at the feasibility study. We immediately completed a preliminary economic assessment. That economic assessment was positive. We ran it at $1,350 gold with an 18% IRR. But I put up the graph here, which shows what would happen if it's kind of at current gold prices. This is a very robust project, and we continue to develop the feasibility study. There's a couple of things about this which is interesting. I know that it's gotten kind of a bad rap because people talk about maybe it's too low grade, 1 gram per tonne. But the reality is you can't just look at it as a low-grade deposit because this thing has a very good stripping ratio, this thing has very good metallurgy. It has very good infrastructure. The power costs we're talking about are somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.07 a kilowatt hour versus more than double that for some of our projects in Africa. So when you take all that into effect, we feel very strongly that this has a very real potential to be our next project. And so we continue to develop the project. Right now, we're in the process of running through the various sections of a feasibility study. Obviously, the key is to drill off the resource to indicate it so we can complete a feasibility study. But we've also made very good progress. In front of COVID-19, we were able to get our metallurgical samples out of the country. So those are at the lab in Canada. Most of the metallurgical testing work has been done. We are currently engaged with Lycopodium out of Australia to do the mill engineering. That process remains on schedule. The mining fleet size has been sized. We've tested a lot of the other assumptions that AngloGold has had. And to date, I'm happy to report that we don't see anything which is -- which we see as a critical flaw so far in the feasibility study. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike Cinnamond. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Bill. Well, I think -- maybe to start, I think you've just heard an overview there of some operations, and operating results are in great shape. So I'm going to paint a picture now also of the company and its financial health, which I am pleased to report is in very good shape with excellent liquidity. I'm going to run over '19 results, again, just summarize them again, you've heard a little bit from each of the speakers so far related to that, then talk a bit about our guidance for 2020 and how we've done so far in Q1. And then finish just with a bit of a discussion as to where we are balance sheet-wise, net cash-wise and debt-wise. So firstly, on the production side, for 2019. 2019 was a record production year. In total, 980,000 ounces, that's a record annual total for the company. I should point out that, that includes 11,000 ounces being our attributable share of Calibre's results once we restructured the company in late 2019, as Clive has already discussed. And that being our range, our guidance range was 935,000 to 975,000 ounces. So 980,000, we came in above our overall range and it's the 11th consecutive year that the company has grown, production-wise. And again, if you look at the individual operations, they all beat the upper end of the range, Fekola, 455,000 ounces; Otjikoto, 177,000 ounces; and Masbate, 217,000 ounces. And when we take that record production and apply it to the operating results, you can see it reflected in the excellent cost results. So firstly, cash costs. On a consolidated basis, it's actually $512 per ounce produced or $519 per ounce sold, and that beat the low end of our consolidated range for the year, $520 to $560. On the all-in sustaining cost side, we came in at the midpoint of the range. So -- and that reflects the low cash cost that we saw but also some higher royalties than we originally budgeted because we originally budget for a much lower gold price when we started in 2019, but we ended up realizing almost $1,400 an ounce. So royalties flow into the overall all-in sustaining cost total. So in the end, we came in midpoint of our range, between $835 and $875. Revenue-wise, $1.3 billion for the year. That includes our share of Nicaragua as well for the whole year and sales of 943,000 ounces at almost $1,400 an ounce. And that in turn translated into excellent record cash from operating activities, $492 million. And that was $1,400 an ounce basically for the year. We're seeing even better prices, obviously, as we go through this year. And should comment as well that it reflects where we are in our strategy. If you recall, we've mentioned a few times before, when we were building Fekola, we made a deliberate decision to do it using cash flow from our existing operations and debt and not to go to the equity markets and dilute the company. So now we -- Fekola's up and running, and as you've heard, is running very, very well. And that, along with the excellent results from other operations means that we're in the second phase of that strategy, which is generating very strong positive cash flows and reduce in overall [ debt load ]. Just move forward on just, again reiterate, I think Bill has already talked about the consolidated guidance for the year, but just to remind everyone. So for 2020, we gave the guidance just over 1 million to 1,055,000 ounces, led by Fekola, at that close to 590,000 to 620,000; Masbate, 200,000 to 210,000; and Otjikoto, 165,000 to 175,000. Now we should point out, and we mentioned this in our -- when we -- in our Q1 results, that includes -- that overall consolidated range does include between 45,000 and 50,000 expected ounces, attributable ounces from our share of Calibre's results. Calibre actually announced at the end of Q1 that they were shutting down their Nicaraguan operations for a while, just to try and get ahead of the COVID pandemic down there. And -- but we're still maintaining that guidance even though there is some uncertainty as to when Calibre will start up again. I think they have announced something recently. And the reason we're still maintaining our consolidated guidance is that we did so well in Q1 that we think we're well ahead of the game. And we think we can achieve that 1 million-plus guidance range with or without further Calibre ounces in the current year. Cash cost-wise, $415 to $455 per ounce on a consolidated basis. That's basically $100 less than we saw in 2019. And then all-in sustaining cost, $780 to $820. So not quite $100 an ounce less than we saw in 2019. And we have got to remember that there are some significant capital campaigns in the current 2020 year, including some deferred stripping activities at both Fekola and Otjikoto. Projected revenue for 2020, $1.7 billion, that assumes a gold price of $1,700 an ounce for basically the last 3 quarters of 2020. And if we assume that same gold price then, we're expecting to generate cash flow from operating activities this year somewhere around the $850 million mark, which will obviously be another significant record for the company. And then just to check in and see how are we actually doing in Q1 versus that guidance. Well, I think the answer is we're doing very well. It was a record quarter for us. 264,000 ounces is a quarterly production record for the company. Again, a reminder, that includes 14,000 ounces being our share of Calibre. And it also included a record quarterly production from Fekola of 164,000 ounces. Fekola knocked it out of the park in terms of grade. And also it's benefited, as Bill discussed, from getting that expansion fleet up and running early. Masbate had budget, despite, as Bill mentioned, being down for a week, approximately a week due to fuel shortages at the site, only down temporarily and up and running fully again. And Otjikoto benefited from good grade coming from Wolfshag. And again, when you look at that, solid production in terms of the operating results, cash cost-wise, $389 per ounce produced or $405 per ounce sold, well below budget and below our guidance range for the year. All-in sustaining costs even more significantly below budget at $721 per ounce, almost $100 -- or basically $100 per ounce lower than budget and well below our guidance range. And that all-in result reflects the lower cash costs, as I mentioned, but also the timing of some CapEx. There was some CapEx that we expected in Q1. Due to timing differences it's pushed out to later in the year, but do we still expect to incur it. Revenue-wise, another quarterly record, $380 million, based on gold sales of just under 240,000 ounces at an average gold price of just under $1,600 an ounce. And as you all have seen in the gold price since the end of Q1, I mean, it's been $1,700 per ounce and above. It's very encouraging, and that translated for the quarter into $216 million from operating activity. So again, well on our way to that estimate of $850 million for the full year from operating activities. And the final thing I wanted to comment on, and I think Clive alluded to it at the start of this presentation, was just where we are financially debt-wise and balance-sheet-wise. So we started the year with $200 million on our revolver and approximately $60 million outstanding on various equipment loans. And that was a significant 2019 -- our -- the start of the year was a significant debt reduction already. We've repaid approximately $220 million by the end of the year, to '19. And for the current year, with the significant cash flow from operating activities, it was our goal to be debt-free, to have paid off or certainly to have paid off the revolver by the end of the third quarter. So where we actually got to so far at the end of Q1 and where we are today is we did pay off $25 million on the revolver throughout the course of Q1. But then as we saw the impact of the COVID pandemic around the world, we decided to make a precautionary draw on our revolver. So we drove -- in early April, we drew down $250 million. I'd reiterate, purely precautionary measure, just till we saw how things would unwind around the world and at our individual operations. And as Bill has testified to, the operations have run very well, barely missing a beat all the way through. So that $250 million just got reinvested with our lending banks. And it’s our expectation that at some point later in the year, we'll certainly have the option, if not the -- we'll certainly have the option, we think we probably will repay down that revolver. But we continue to watch the cash situation and just how COVID unwinds around the world. Again, as Clive mentioned, where we are by the end of June. So when we drew down the revolver, that $250 million, we have $425 million currently drawn and outstanding. By the end of this month, we expect to be in a very solid cash positive -- net cash positive position, so putting ourselves in great shape if we do choose to pay down the revolver at some point during the rest of the year. The other thing I'd mention on the debt side is we do have a planned draw on a CAT equipment loan of approximately $40 million. CAT has been a great partner of ours as we've gone through various activities at different mine sites. And with the Fekola mine expansion and the significant expansion in the fleet, it's our plan to draw approximately $40 million later in the year. At the end of Q1, we had $208 million cash and cash equivalents, and we continue to generate positive cash flow, again, with these excellent gold prices, $1,700 plus. And again, as Clive had mentioned, we did pay our first dividend at the end of 2019. We paid another one in March 2020, and we've just announced our next dividend to be paid at the end of this month. Thank you. And with that, I'll pass the podium on to Tom Garagan, our Senior VP, Exploration.

Thanks, Michael. We'll just talk a little bit about exploration for 2020. We have a budget for exploration for about $50 million. That exploration, despite COVID, has continued on and around all the mine sites. Our early-stage exploration, where we have a budget of about $16 million, has been slowed down a little bit, but we are still carrying on exploration, just to a lesser degree. And that's illustrated here. We drilled close to 90,000 meters this year, and mainly around our major projects, but we have done a little bit in Uzbekistan, and we'll plan to do some later in some of our other sites as the year goes on. I think I just wanted to illustrate a couple of things with the exploration for Fekola, and also I'll do some for Gramalote. Exploration at Fekola has been very, very successful. It's a very prolific area, and we feel that there's excellent potential to continue to grow the ounces there, and I'm going to show you that in a minute here. But I want you to just see that since 2014 or 2015, since we commenced exploration, we've really grown the ounces from around 4 million ounces to over 6 million ounces and produced 1 million ounces. So it's a net gain of around 3 million ounces with exploration. And what I'd like to show you here is that the potential to continue that is very significant. This is a view of the licenses around Fekola. The areas I'm going to talk about is Cardinal, which is immediately beside the Fekola Pit, and also the Snakes area or Anaconda, which is roughly about 20 kilometers to the north of Fekola. Now at Cardinal, hopefully, you can read this on your computer screens at home, but on Cardinal, it comes within 500 meters of the Pit. And I'd like to claim brilliant geology here in finding this zone, but really, it was a private condemnation for -- condemnation drilling for a waste dump for the north end of the Pit that led to the discovery of Cardinal. And it has led to a real discovery. Earlier on, the exploration this year was focused mainly on the Snakes area in Mamba. But as we start to get into Cardinal, we realized that this had some size potential to it, and we have now shifted all our drilling for this part of the year on to Cardinal to try and get a completed resource done by the end of the year As you can see for some of the drilling results, my eyes can't read the screen, but holes such as 126, we had 11 grams over 24 meters, 7 grams over 5 meters, 2 grams over 18 meters, 3 grams over 20 meters. Significant mineralization in any other camp, obviously next to Fekola is not the thick beautiful intersections of Fekola, but it's still significant enough to bear some detailed study. And so we've aggressively put all our drilling onto this for this part of the year. We hope to have a resource by later this year or early next year. And certainly, I know the engineers are already looking at that just in terms of mine planning. And when you look at Cardinal -- this is a cross action through Cardinal, you can see that it's not that steeply dipping, fairly flattening dipping, very amenable to open pit mining, good thicknesses and multiple zones. We'll have more information on this as we continue drilling through the year. But suffice to say, we're pretty excited about it, and as close as you can get to the mill without actually having it in the mill. The other one, we started going the year of exploration with the Mamba exploration as part of the Anaconda group. It was the area that we had seen significant sulfide mineralization and low saprolite below the 760,000 ounce saprolite resource we had. We had, earlier on in the year, expanded the saprolite resource. We plan to complete a new resource on that also, hopefully later this year or early next year. But the drilling in the sulfide mineralization below Mamba has expanded. Initially, we were looking at 400 or 500 meters long. The sulfide mineralization now covers about 2 kilometers of stripe length, which really shows the significant potential of the -- not only the Anaconda area, but Mamba specifically. So we're very optimistic that the 3 million ounces that have been added to Fekola has, with combination of Cardinal and Anaconda, has room for some significant increase beyond those 3 million ounces. And this is a cross-section through Fekola -- sorry, through Mamba, and you can see by the red line, both through the saprolite, which is in brown, and the other colors, which represent the sulfides. And it's a very cohesive thick ore body, will be easy to mine, have a low strip ratio. Hence, the reason for our optimism. Now the other area I would like to just mention a little bit is the Gramalote area. Drilling commenced early this year to bring Gramalote to feasibility level drilling. We were delayed by a couple of months with COVID, but are back now drilling on site. You can see from this map, it's a very large area. We've drilled about 26,000 meters now. As of this morning we have 12 drills turning. We've only lost about 7 weeks of drilling. But with the drilling, the way it's going now, we feel we'll be completed drilling by sometime in August and have a resource completed approximately 2 months after that, sometime in October. In this section, I just wanted to show you as a reminder of what a good ore body Gramalote is. It's needed a lot more drilling to bring it from the inferred to indicated. But as you can see from this intersections on this and look at the red area of this, it's a thick, continuous zone in mineralization, as Bill says, has good metallurgy and a lower strip ratio. And just a reminder of how good it can be within the heart of it, one of the holes here had a hole 226 from this year's drilling, 150 meters of 1.7 grams of gold. Very significant intersection, continuous gold mineralization, and it represents what the heart of Gramalote will be, a very thick, continuous, easily-mined ore body. And with that, I'll leave that over back to Bill. Thank you.

Okay. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to our Director of Sustainability, Ken Jones, to talk about environment and sustainability.

Good afternoon. I'm Ken Jones of B2Gold, and I'd like to share with you an update on our sustainability plans for the company and some highlights of our social and environmental performance. So sustainability in the mining industry has really evolved in the last several years from an area of how do we make mining sustainable to now this message of the mining industry must truly play a key role in the sustainable development of the communities in which we operate and in the countries which we support. And a key part of sustainability has become now environmental, social, governance, risk management and performance. An assessment of the company's risks in these areas, how do you manage them in performance to have a lasting and sustainable company. And ESG factors cover a range of areas, such as sustainable development, human rights impacts, CSR investment, community development, environmental biodiversity conservation. But also ESG is an area of transparency and disclosure for the company and how we report on these performance and risks to our stakeholders. And with our ESG reporting, we've recently updated our website to include an ESG portal. And this is a centralized easy accessible location for all of our ESG disclosure. This is where all of our commitments on social, all of our commitments on community development can be found, our policies and standards. It's the location of our annual sustainability report. And in the future, component reports on climate and energy change or water use or artisanal mining. And truly, then, a location for all of our ESG data for analysts and other stakeholders to access in one place. On our ESG portal, and the key component of our ESG reporting is our annual sustainability report, Raising the Bar. And this is where we, in a concise, comprehensive way, can show our environmental and social performance, how we're contributing to various frameworks, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and then also economic benefits to employees, communities and governments. And this is the type of information shared in our annual sustainability report. Our economic contribution, in 2019, we contributed over $140 million in direct employee wages and benefits, $116 million of which were in the countries in which we operate. In the environment, we have various initiatives to further our water use management practices and reporting practices, our climate change assessment, greenhouse gas emissions. Our people are one of our most fundamental aspects of the company. We employ over 4,200 people around the world. And we try to employ as many local employees as possible. In 2019, over 95% of our workforce was local. High paying, high skilled jobs and we tried to transition as many of these people into senior management positions as possible. And finally, our communities. How do we invest in our communities, how do we engage with our communities and under what principles of protection of their rights do we have? So with all this performance and the good performance that we've been able to report in the last several years, how do we achieve that? So we have in place social environmental management systems at all of our operations, and we have specific standards in place for critical risks, be it resettlement of communities, local procurement, artisanal mining. On the environmental front, how do we manage water, how do we manage tailings, how do we manage biodiversity impacts? And all of these standards are in accordance with international best practice, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, security and human principles, dam safety, cyanide code management, and all these standards are also then audited by independent third parties to ensure that we are truly performing to our own internal stringent requirements. In the environment, we employ industry best practices, be it progressive reclamation, be it closure planning. But one area that's been of highlight in the industry is the increased rigor and its focus on tailings management practices due to the catastrophic embankment failures around the world over the last 5-plus years. We have updated our internal standards in line with changing industry best practices, and we continue to monitor changes in this area. Internally, we've consolidated access to all information for all of our embankments. And we're working on how do we share this information with investors, analysts and third parties. And then we're also currently updating our dam risk analyses and conducting third-party independent reviews of our embankments at our Otjikoto and Masbate mines to ensure that we are up-to-date with best practice. Other industry best practices that are changing and evolving are around climate change and climate change risk management. We've developed a strategy that involves assessing and reducing our carbon footprint. We have renewable energy projects in place at our Otjikoto and in construction of our Fekola mine. In 2019, we produced 13% of our electricity consumed at our Otjikoto mine was from renewable solar energy. And the Fekola mine is in construction right now, the 30-megawatt solar facility. That will more than double our renewable energy resource for 2021. The next step in our climate change risk management strategy is then further integrating climate change risk into policy, into enterprise and site risk assessment, and then carrying that forward to business planning, decision-making and design of our operations to make them resilient to climate change as it comes in the future. And then the last step is then that increased accountability and transparency. And so we will report them on this strategy in external energy and climate reports, and eventually lead to emissions reductions and targets for the company. On the social front, I want to share with you a handful of really key social investments, social programs, initiatives that we have that really share where we do get to make a big change and impact on communities that we work with. In the Philippines, historically, there's been challenges amongst the Masbate province in natural disaster planning and support. So in 2019, we were able to partner with some organizations in the region to provide professional training to over 480 individuals, training in first aid, search and rescue and incident command. And that training proved vital then in the response to Typhoon Kammuri at the end of 2019, significantly helping them to save lives and minimize impacts. And in Mali, we have a significant partnership with UNICEF. It supports vulnerable children, particularly young girls, and associated with artisanal mining. Artisanal mining takes children away from safe spaces for learning. And so the program brings mobile nurseries, mobile learning spaces, accelerated learning programs to these children, and provides additional support for at-risk youth, providing them information on healthy relationships, gender-based violence, reproductive health and in general, education and training opportunities. In Namibia, we also have several education initiatives to help very marginalized communities in the country. In particular, the Save the San program is an initiative with the San Bushmen. The San Bushmen are one of the most marginalized groups in the area, the last integrated First Nations community in Southern Africa, heavily impacted by loss of lands and without access to quality education. And so B2Gold has partnered with a development fund to build 5 remote schools over the next 4 years that will provide one of the most marginalized communities with access to quality education. And lastly, I want to touch on something that's impacted all of us, the COVID-19 pandemic. It's definitely impacted B2Gold and the communities in which we operate. So since February of this year, we have been actively monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak, how it impacts our operations, how we need to then support our communities. And we have provided, in Mali, over $0.5 million for medical supplies and also directly to the government in their COVID response. In Namibia, the focus of our support has been in hygiene, sanitation and food security in the townships around our operations. And in the Philippines, the focus has been on providing basic food and medical supplies and requirements to the villages around the mine. And also, while B2Gold is an international company, we do base ourselves in Vancouver. And so it's our responsibility to support the Metro Vancouver area. And so we've donated over $0.5 million to support 3 local organizations, supporting housing assistance, food, security and health assistance to some of the members most at risk in our community. And that does it for me. That wraps up my update for B2Gold sustainability plans and our social environmental performance. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Ken. I'd now like to turn the floor over to our Director of Human Resources, Ninette Krohnert.

Thank you, Bill, and good day, everyone. For several years now, our HR departments, our management and our employees have been guided by our approach to people management policy and statement, which sets our standards and defines our principles that we work by, that we live by, that we organize ourselves, manage and respect our workplaces by. So this has served as well to provide a sustainable and respectful work environment for all our employees. We are committed to providing decent work and respect all human rights and freedoms, and this is supported by our policies and practices as well as our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics policies. We participate actively in human risk assessments, and we implement actions accordingly, and we provide human rights training to our employees as well to support our efforts. And through this, we ensure a coordinated and a multi-disciplinary approach to supporting our environment. During 2019, there were 2 major events that impacted local employment as well as our overall manpower, the first one being in Nicaragua with our employees transferring to Calibre, which we were very happy with leading the legacy in the country, as Clive stated earlier. The other major event that is an ongoing part of our operation in Mali is the transitioning of our employees that are currently with labor consultants over to our own B2Gold employment contracts into a direct employment relationship. We've successfully deployed this program, and we have now been able to bring those figures down to less than 50% of employees still with our labor broking companies. And we remain actively involved in managing our employees that are currently still under labor supervisory contracts, right through their employment practices from recruitment through to managing payrolls and taking care of health and safety in all of those environments. At the end of the process, we foresee that we will be taking on 1,800 employees through this process, which we're really excited about. Throughout recruitment and retaining talent, our 4 values remain crucial to us, being fairness, respect, transparency and accountability. And we show that throughout our practices, supporting our 4,217 employees that we had at the end of 2019 and going into 2020 as well. We have a very low staff turnover. Our voluntary staff turnover of just over 5%, which we're very proud about. It shows our intent and our relationships are strong relationships with our employees. We also have a very strong focus on local communities and national employment, as alluded to by Ken. And just to support those environments, we prioritize this specific philosophy -- we prioritize that into our approach to people management. We had that strongly embedded in our local content performance standards, and we have understudy programs in place that we deploy throughout our operations. We have a high level of national employment, 95% throughout the group at the end of 2019. And we're very proud of our diverse work culture, but equally proud of the success that we've had in localizing our workforces. Part of our success, and I guess part of the secret sauce, as Clive mentioned, is that we have comprehensive HR departments in all our areas. And they provide direct support to our employees and management, making sure that we stay compliant, that we stay competitive and that we provide direct support. And through that, we are agile and we are responsive to the needs and the growth and the changes within our very unique environments in which we operate. Developing talent is a crucial part of just operating in any environment. And we are proud with what we do there with all our employees in all our areas. We've had a significant shift to focus on supervisory level support as well as leadership skills training. And we have embedded programs into our operations, and we are continuing to build on those. And this, together with our internship and graduate programs that we have at all our mines as well as our internal hiring and promotion philosophy, really strengthens the localization strategies that we have, the gender diversity strategies that we have. So it really sets us in good state with all our efforts. As far as facilitating healthy relations go, we are quite excited always about how we engage with our employees. We have a very open and frank engagement with employees. And we do it very well, either through unions or through employment committees that get established for various reasons and to facilitate the discussions and dialogue in the workplace. In November 2019, the Masbate operation received a national award as Outstanding Labour Management Committee for Industrial Peace in the Philippines. And this was really because of a very strong commitment that they have towards employee engagement in the area. And also in Namibia, we've had a very strong employment engagement, the rollouts over quite an extensive period of time engaging with our employees. And this has culminated into a culture -- organizational culture program that's called Atushe Vamwe, which means we are one, in one of the local country languages then. And this is really to support the people and culture component of what they are, what they're aiming to do in a country in support of operations and just embedding the strong relationships that we had there as well. Gender diversity has been on our agenda for several years now. We've successfully completed a group-wide employee consultation process that culminated into a diversity and inclusion statement that we're very proud of saying that we were able to implement that this year. It's a road map for us. And through that, we are starting to consider short and medium-term plans that we will implement to ensure that we really follow a thoughtful process, because what we want to achieve, we want that to be sustainable. So we're taking it step by step, looking at the areas that we can improve, that we can build on. And those areas with recognized employment barriers, whether that we identify through employee engagement or through our own policy reviews, we're definitely on the road to building a strong gender diversity. The strong training internal review processes that we've implemented across the company has now been reviewed with the focus on gender diversity, and we will extrapolate from that and build a stronger long-term view on enhancing gender diversity in our workplace. But in the interim, we were quite proud this year as well to welcome our second female member to our Board, and that shows that we are -- we're focused on the topic. We have 12% gender representation by females at the moment. 20% of senior positions are filled by ladies. That brings us to a more current day event, which is the COVID-19 response that so many employers are currently dealing with. Our regions have implemented mitigating actions to be prepared, but also to be agile and to be responsive to the environment while we consider all our national guidelines that are put out in the respective areas. We have ongoing engagement with internal and external stakeholders. We've become so aware of how important engagement is during this time with really so much uncertainty for so many people. We've retained a full staff complement, and we've had no adverse effect on employee pay or benefits, which we are very fortunate for to be able to provide job security for our employees with ongoing remuneration. We've implemented additional health and safety measures for employees at sites and also those returning to office environments to make sure that we follow best practice and provide the necessary health and safety in the workplace. We remain agile as we navigate this, what's often to -- referred to as a very uncertain reality that we're all dealing with at the moment. And we've strengthened our business continuity plans from an HR perspective, but underpinning all of it is the strong and very much paramount focus on duty of care for our employees' health, safety and well-being. Thank you.

Thanks to Ninette. Thanks to all of our speakers. I'm not going to keep you much longer here. Thanks for your attention. Just want to talk a little bit about the -- we are here for the general meeting, so just talk a little bit about the preliminary results from the votes. We had a tremendous representation by our shareholders, with really quite a remarkable 82.81% of the shares outstanding of B2Gold were voted, which is really extraordinary. I think typical for a public company, you'll often get 40% of the shares voted, maybe 50%. We get this quite often, but it's a great -- we like it. It definitely tells us that our shareholders are engaged. They care enough to vote. And that means they're reading the material. And obviously, it's a very strong endorsement of the Board of Directors and the company. The number of directors, as we mentioned, at 9 was approved, and the directors were all individually approved, as with the auditors and the restricted share unit plan, et cetera, high approval numbers. I want to talk a little bit about the Board because I think there's a potentially disturbing trend here or something that worries me about the future of being a public gold mining company. There's a lot of scrutiny now, as there should be, in terms of directors and management, and are they acting in the best interest of the shareholders of the company. Unfortunately, we've seen many examples over the last 20 years or so in the gold mining industry where you can make a strong argument that perhaps some directors and executives were not, in fact, acting in the interest of all the shareholders. And that came into some understandable criticism and scrutiny. So lately, we've had a lot more attention paid to compensation, paid to Board experience, paid to Board independence and all these things. And there's a couple of companies, ISS and Glass Lewis, that our companies have specialized in recommending to various financial institutions, how they should vote on proxy materials and vote on these various issues. And many institutions use them to advise them on how to vote when they get a circular from us proposing directors, et cetera. And we've had our -- we've had some battles or at least some times where we felt that we were perhaps being shoehorned into a box with other companies when perhaps we didn't necessarily belong. And we've always just asked people to judge us for who you are, don't penalize us for the evils of others, judge us for who we are and what we're doing. So we have, I think, a tremendous Board of Directors, very diverse, very experienced and a group that's been with -- a lot of us for quite a while, some of them founding directors of the company. But there's a trend with a couple of institutions. And fortunately, they weren't major shareholders, but a couple of institutions who -- for some of the directors have voted to withhold their votes instead of voting for. So some of our directors had reprovals, or fors in the 80 percentages rather than the rest of us in the 90 percentages, and I've got some issues with that, to be frank with you. Because one of the institutions, they look at ISS and Glass Lewis, but then they do their own work, which -- that's great. They have a right to vote as they wish. But they are taking a very hard view of independence of directors. And basically, if you look at our situation, this one institution decided to withhold the votes for 3 of our directors who have been with us for a long time. And they withheld the votes because these directors have been with us for longer than 10 years. And somebody just decided that after 10 years, you can no longer be independent. I'm not sure what happens after 9.9. But after the tenth year, you can no longer be independent and independently review management. I found that, to be honest with you, quite absurd. Some of these directors were founding directors of the company. B2Gold, with its remarkable success from 0 ounces of gold production to 1 million ounces a year, from 0 market cap to $7 billion Canadian market cap, has partly been driven by the Board and the Board's support of management's vision for the company. These are excellent directors. But this idea that we're supposed to turn them over, refresh the Board because they reached 10 years, this isn't some old American companies who've had directors around for 20 or 30 years or like some of the politicians. I get that. There should be some limit or at least a view of that. But at the end of the day, that you're arbitrarily going to say someone served more than 10 years, they're not an independent director, I have a real problem with that. Thankfully, most of our shareholders don't feel that way, and most of our shareholders voted for our directors. Similarly, they've decided that if you gain a director or if you take over another company on a friendly basis, as we did, with Auryx and Volta, 2 of the acquisitions we did over time. And each of those acquisitions, we invited one of the directors of the other company to join the Board, Kevin Bullock in the case of Volta, and Bongani Mtshisi, in the case of Auryx. Now we invited them to join the Board because, one, they knew the project that we were acquiring, which seemed to make some sense for continuity, but two, because they're very highly qualified mining engineers, who each specializes in a different area of the world. We thought they'd be great directors, and they are. So some of these institutions have decided that they're not independent either because -- I guess they can't possibly be independent because you took over their company, so therefore, they're indebted to you for life, to management. Once again, I think it's absurd. At the end of the day, it just seems some institutions would rather us have unqualified directors who they believe are independent rather than qualified directors, who are intelligent people, who can actually make a decision, and have made great decisions that have supported the shareholders for 12 years so far and counting. So similarly, anyone who's worked for the company, myself or does work for the company, George Johnson, who was our Senior VP Operations for a period of time and Liane Kelly, our newest Director, they're not independent because they work for the company, that one, I get a little bit more. But at the end of the day, I'm disturbed by this trend of institutions when it reflects their muscles. Yes, they have a right to vote. Yes, they're shareholders. But I don't think they have the right to, shortly before an AGM, call you up and sort of intimidate you by the things they might vote against if you don't look to change your company to the way they'd like it to be. We run our business well. We're not looking for a free pass from anybody. But judge us for who we are and what we're doing. And maybe they should spend more time focusing on running their business than trying to run our business, at the end of the day. B2Gold has been a great success story for many institutions. If you look at some of their other investments over the last 10 years, I don't think you can say quite the same thing. So let's stay in our lane, let's do our job. We're not looking for carte blanche at all. But at the end of the day, for us to continue to run this company, we need to be able to compensate our employees adequately, and we need to have a strong Board of Directors. And we need shareholders who objectively evaluate us. But don't lump us in with other companies that are not as good at what they do or not as responsible. On that note, I do want to just acknowledge that we have -- by the way, we've refreshed our Board of Directors with 5 new directors since we started the company. So clearly, we are refreshing the Board. We're going to continue to add to the Board. We added Robin Weisman over a year ago, who is a tremendous -- she's a well-known, tremendously experienced IFC banker with worldwide experience. She's a tremendous addition to our team. And Liane Kelly joined us most recently. And Liane has got a tremendous reputation in ESG and CSR. She started out as a geophysicist actually, an aspiration in our business, but has evolved into one of the most qualified CSR ESG experts anywhere, and she's been the architect and the driving force behind our response and mining report. So we really appreciate Liane coming on to join the Board, even though she's not independent yet at the end of the day. So I just want to finish up with a little bit of where we're going. Obviously, remarkable year in 2019 and 2020. You've seen what we've been able to do and continue to do even throughout something like this COVID-19 virus, which has had such a wide-reaching impact. We're very proud of our ability to continue to do what we do so well. So going forward, we're going to continue to minimize the impact of the pandemic, which I think we've done an excellent job of. We're going to maintain our high standards of responsible mining, our government relations, health and safety, all the things we've outlined today. And we're going to continue to optimize our profitable gold production. We've got 5 years ahead of us, as we see it, from the 3 main mines. We've got about 5 years ahead of us around 1 million ounces a year. And when you look at Cardinal next to Fekola and the potential -- additional potential for Fekola and also you look at Gramalote, we think that we have the potential and the potential of Otjikoto underground to further extend that 1 million ounces a year for longer than a 5-year period. We're going to continue to look to maximize cash flow. We're going to reduce debt, as Mike talked about, getting near 0 debt. And then we're going to focus on organic growth. We've got the Gramalote projects, which we believe has a great -- excellent potential to become a large low-cost open pit gold mine that fits very well with our criteria. We're not going to build it because we own 50% of it. But we like the looks of that and we will know by early next year. And we're also pretty intrigued by the upside, as you've seen, around Fekola and other things. We're going to continue to look at exploration. We have one of the best gold exploration teams in the world as evidenced by their successes over the last 30 years at Bema and B2Gold. And we'll continue to look at exploration in our own right but also exploration joint ventures with the junior companies. Finally, we will consider the potential for acquisitions. I've said for years that we were not likely to go out and do a major acquisition at B2Gold, partly because we weren't getting the value of what we had at Fekola, and partly because we were busy in the mines that we were building. We like the pipeline, as I've said, that we have today, but we also are looking at the industry. We've had a good rerating of our shares, and that does a little give us the possibility to look around to see if there's any opportunities where we could add value by acquiring a project in production development or late stage exploration. But I must say that we're going to continue to be extremely vigilant and extremely tough on acquisitions in the sense of our standards. We've made many acquisitions over the years that have been -- each of them have been a great success in their own right. We're not desperate for an acquisition. We don't see the need to grow that way in the short term, given what we have on our plate. But I'm just suggesting we're open to the possibility now, if it makes sense, of adding accretive projects to what we're doing. So that's really most of the -- what I wanted to -- thank you. Before I take a few questions, I do want to just thank some people. Obviously, I think that when I look at 2019 and so far in 2020 and what we've accomplished, I really -- how can you do all of this without those remarkable people that we have around the world. And you heard Ninette talk about some of our people and about how proud we are of what we've been able to do. All of our employees around the world, we miss you. We don't get to get out and see people as much as we used to not that long ago. Hopefully, whatever the new normal is will include our ability to get down and see these hard working people. But these people all over the world that have really stepped it up at a time with COVID to be able to maintain the health and safety standards that we set out for this company in 2019, to be able to maintain, that's extraordinary. That takes the dedication and commitment of all of our employees. And I'd like to think it's a reflection, as I said earlier, about the fairness, respect and transparency with which they're treated. I think we get that back at times like this. So thank you to all of our employees. The Vancouver workforce, we had over 100 people in Vancouver. And we called it pretty early to encourage -- to get people to work from home. Everyone has done a fantastic job. They haven't missed a beat. I think it's part of the fact that we've been doing this internationally for a long time. You can't run mines from Vancouver. You have to have great people on site, and they have to be well supported by Vancouver as well. But to the mine managers and the country managers, who would normally be here with us, we miss you guys, too. Incredible leadership and incredible job of what they do, above and beyond given the recent circumstances. To all of the contractors, consultants and bankers and lawyers and brokers that play an important role in what we do, thanks to all of them. I want to -- our executive team, I just -- I'm always amazed by the ability of this team to continue to perform and to grow. It's really remarkable. It's an honor to be your President. The Board of Directors, I mentioned, we've got a great Board, tremendous experience, tremendous support. A lot of things we've done have been contrarian at times, but they've been right, and the Board has stuck by us and believed in our long-term strategy for growing a company like B2Gold. So normally, we have a party tonight. And about last year, it was about 300 people at my home. We'll miss that too. We'll miss everyone who comes and enjoys us in celebrating the accomplishments that we've had over 2019 and to date in 2020. But I must say, it's something I usually say at the party, but I'll say it here, and we're very proud of the culture, as you've heard, at B2Gold, but I think that I refer to it often as the United Nations of B2Gold. At a time in the world where there's powerful people that are trying to divide us and trying to emphasize the differences that may be there between us or exaggerate the differences, maybe B2Gold can be a little example for the world and how we treat people from races, all religions, genders, and we strive to eliminate discrimination everywhere and treat people with fairness, respect and transparency. In B2Gold in 2019, people that worked for B2Gold came from 33 different countries. Think about that, 33 different countries. That's the United Nations of B2Gold. And perhaps in our small way, we can be an example for the world that how we can all get along, and we can respect each other, and how we can work together. Clearly, we have a strong corporate culture. And I guess if you have a culture, maybe a company can have a personality. I think B2Gold has a big heart and a deep soul. So with that, I'll open up for -- to see if there's any questions.

I see a question on the screen here. [ Robert Pritalia ], I believe. Do you have a framework for dividends compared to capital expenditures and exploration, such as dividends to investors of approximately 20% to 40% of free cash flow? That sounds like a Mike Cinnamond question to me.

I think what I'd say is we don't have a firmly established framework based on percentages. What we are doing though is we're very -- we consider it frequently. And we also have a need to balance cash flow that will be used for capital expenditures and growth versus returning to shareholders. So as we noted before, we did do our starter dividend of $0.01 per share starting in the first -- or the last quarter last year. And since then, it was our plan to come back and reevaluate that dividend closer to the end of this year when we got ourself into a net cash -- positive cash position. Because of the positive results of the company that we've seen already this year, we actually decided to accelerate that, as I mentioned. So we have doubled up that dividend now to $0.02 per share as of June. As we go forward, I think the key is that we know there are certain decision points that are coming up for the company. For example, with Gramalote, we're moving forward with finalizing the feasibility study. So we should get ourselves into a decision point early next year to know what we want to do there. And part of that will be to evaluate how we're going to deal with any CapEx that would come with a positive decision to build that operation. So I guess in short, we'll continue to reevaluate that balance between returning cash to shareholders and our needs for CapEx, and that will be an ongoing process as we move through the next year to 2 years and on -- beyond that.

Thanks, Mike. And just to add briefly that, I think I mentioned earlier, the idea is to continue to grow the company, but also as we can grow the dividend. And I think it's a great combination. That's a combination a lot of people are looking for, a lot of generalist ones we talk to these days. If they're going to get into the gold space to get some exposure, they want a well-run company that pays a dividend as well. So we feel we fit the bill there. Okay. Well, there's no other questions. So I would all -- thank you all very much and -- for joining us in this virtual experiment, a virtual reality Annual General Meeting. Thank you. Once again, thanks to all of you for your support and your attention. Thank you.