Cameco Corporation (CCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody. This is Orest Wowkodaw with Scotiabank. I'm one of the metals and mining analyst here at Scotia. I cover the mining equities, including Cameco and I do the fundamental analysis on most of the commodity markets at Scotia, including radium. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's my great pleasure to have Cameco back with us today for a fireside chat format. From Cameco today, I'll be asking some -- hopefully, some tough questions here, although I'm sure you won't find them tough, Grant. But we've got from Cameco, Mr. Grant Isaac, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Cameco. And it's maybe a bit of a preamble here, but I'm not sure really since the Fukushima disaster more than 10 years ago that uranium has been in the news and [ nuclear ] has been in the news this much, just given what's happening in the world today. And I thought maybe that would be a good place for us to start. And just before I get into the first question here, I just wanted to let everybody know in the audience that if you do have any questions here for Grant, please enter them on the chat box, and I'll read those, and I'll ask those questions to Grant later on in our session today. So I'd love to get your questions. If you have any burning questions for Cameco and Grant please do drop them in the chat box.

And just maybe to start off, Grant, I'd love to get your perspective on a couple of things today. I feel like the last time we caught up a few months ago, everything has changed yet again for uranium and nuclear here. And maybe this is a market where, I think, especially a lot of journalist investors have really not had to pay that much attention to over the last 10 years. It was a long bear market, probably the longest of any of the commodities I follow. And I feel like we've moved right from bear market to bull market. It feels like overnight, I know it isn't but it feels like it. But love to get your perspective just on how we should think about these recent geopolitical events, namely the Russian war and Ukraine? And how this might potentially impact the markets for things like uranium for conversion and enrichment. And I know that's a lot to start with. But I think giving a bit of an understanding of how those are all linked together and the implications maybe is a great place to start for everybody today.

Yes. Happy to do that, and thank you very much, Orest. We really welcome the opportunity to do this. I obviously, congratulate the work that you've been doing on the nuclear space. I think you were one of the first to identify the clean energy trend that was going to capture nuclear and uranium. And so we're grateful for that. I'm just reminded that a long, long time ago, like in February, ages and ages ago in the uranium space. You heard us say in our Q4 disclosure that we were in what we described as the early innings of an incumbent's recovery. And that was due to a favorable demand and supply conditions. And you've done a great job outlining those demand and supply conditions and they're still here, and they're still real, and they were driving a renewed interest in contracting. And we called it early innings because, of course, we weren't seeing replacement rate contracting yet, but we were seeing the early indicators that suggest, there, we're pivoting to a security of supply-driven contracting cycle. And we've had a bunch of success that allowed us to move to our next stage of supply discipline, which we'll probably get a chance to talk about it a bit later. But now since that time, those favorable fundamentals have collided with an unprecedented geopolitical realignment that's going on in the nuclear fuel supply. And what it's done right across our entire sector. It's a stark reminder that while uranium is a commodity, yes, it is. It's not a commodity in the classic sense of a commodity sold into a spot market, sold to a metals exchange, sold to a smelter and then forgotten about. It's in fact, a product. Uranium is a product for which there is no substitute. It has no substitute. It's its own product. It's sold under long-term contract and then those long-term contracts are combined with a bunch of key services, refining, conversion, enrichment, fabrication, that together fuel 100% carbon-free electricity. And so it's a reminder of just how integrated that front end of the nuclear fuel cycle is. It's a reminder that, that front end has been highly globalized over the years. Giving rise to what we've been calling for some time, the origin disconnect, where the product and its services were available in -- from jurisdictions that weren't consuming a lot of it, for example. And that the jurisdictions that needed a lot of it didn't have the capacity to produce the product and the services. And we've all been suddenly reminded of that with the geopolitical events. And it's also a reminder that markets actually work. If you give them time after years of persistently low prices, we now are confronted with a bit of a front-end crisis and the productive capacity isn't there to respond quickly. Primary production isn't poised to snap up and deal with the spot demand. And then as you look at the various service stages, the converters, the enrichers are not poised to suddenly increase their supply in order to deal with these geopolitical uncertainties. And so then hopefully, it's a reminder of why we do what we do as Cameco. Why we have the mining assets we do? Why we're geographically focused the way we are? Why we're more than mining and involved in the fuel cycle? Why we have these licensed facilities and believe that they're so important? And why we remain leveraged to 2 markets that when they move they tend to move quickly. So a lot of that has come our way just in the last few weeks on top of the already favorable fundamentals. And I know you want to drill down into some of the specific geopolitics, but let me pause there and see what question that takes next.

Sure. Maybe we could start with just your view on the uranium market itself. And maybe you could just educate us all. My understanding is Russia is not a big producer of uranium itself. But it has obviously, its fingers in a significant amount of Kazakh production. So I think one of the questions I've been getting is with potential sanctions and bands from Russian material, how are utilities thinking about Kazakh material right now?

Let's just do a quick walk through the fuel cycle. Uranium is the product. The next step that we often talk about is conversion, where the oxide turns into a gas form because that's the basis for enriching it. Enrichment is the next stage of the fuel cycle. Russia has about 52% of the global enrichment capacity. They have about 1/4 of the U.S. market. They have about 1/4 of the Western European market and then other markets as well, plus it enrich for their home market. And then you have the fabrication step before it arrives as a fuel bundle. So if that's the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle, it's just really important to remember that while really it's the enrichment stage that is the focus of Russia, enrichment only enters another country by being attached to a product. So when you say that you're not going to welcome Russian enrichment into the Western markets, you're also not welcoming the product that it's attached to. It actually creates a problem with the feedstock, the UF6 isn't there. So that canister of enriched uranium product is actually what you're stopping. So it's not like the Russian service is applied in the United States, it's applied in Russia. And it's sent over on the product, which is UF6. So even though it's the enrichment complex where the Russians dominate, it does create the knock-on effects up the fuel chain, and that's what we're seeing today. And we're only beginning to scratch the surface of those effects. The question does not seem to be if Western markets. And by western markets, I mean North America, I mean Western Europe, I mean Eastern Europe, bringing all the way down to Slovenia. I mean parts of Asia. Western markets, I don't think the question is if they're going to exclude Russian material. I think the question is, is actually when and how fast. And really, you see 2 options. You see legislative proposals and a lot of political support like in the United States, for example, by [indiscernible] bipartisan support to ban Russian enrichment, Russian nuclear fuels right now versus, I think, an industry position that says, you need to let us ramp down over a period of time, shortest period of time possible in order to ensure the continuity of our nuclear power plants, make sure that we're not caught out with no material. But nobody is saying, you should let us continue to consume it. So really, it is a question of the speed at which the western markets untangle from Russia. And when we look at the determining factors for that, there's a number of them. The good news about nuclear power plants is unlike coal shipments to a coal-fired plant, if you stop shipping coal, you're going to stop producing power very quickly. If you turned off natural gas to a natural gas plant, it's going to come down very quickly. No U.S. utility is going to shut down its reactor tomorrow if Russian EUP can't come in the market. This is why utilities have inventory. But what we're going to go into is a period of very rapid destocking, those in-process materials, those inventories will be consumed as part of a response of moving away from this material. And it's not just the utilities. It's the in-process material with fabricators. It's the enrichers and their in process material. And then as utilities are drawing down their inventory, they're procuring more. And so the first turn of that is they typically turn to their existing contracts and they look to flex up. The flex up is great news. They flex up with the fabricators. I want more fuel bundles coming my way. They flex up with the enrichers. So this is great news for the uranium space, isn't it? Because as enrichers have more of their capacity tied up, it eliminates any ability for them to underfeed. They now need to go and replace the feedstock that they have been selling into the underfeed. And then to the extent that they flex up their full capacity and utilities need more, they're now going to overfeed. And overfeed is code for they need more UF6, they need more uranium that's converted. So you see the knock-on effects don't just exist with the utilities, you see the intermediaries looking for material. So destocking leads to restocking, probably at higher levels, which is net demand in our industry and net demand in various stages of our industry, and that's pretty important. And then the next thing you see is the term contracts start to move because now they're replacing the acute short-term needs and now they want to layer in the volumes that are sort of the origins that they're looking for, the jurisdictions that they're looking for. And we really haven't begun to see that in a big way. So early innings of an incumbence recovery, early innings of untangling from the Russian market, for sure.

And how -- like I just don't understand, I guess, how this market is going to work. If Russia has circa 50% of the enrichment capacity globally, where is -- how is the world going to make up for that shortfall? Do you have a sense of how much excess capacity can ramp up or restart in the U.S. or other Western markets to be able to handle some of that?

There is not enough capacity in the Western markets to replace Russia overnight. That's why it has to be a function of, there has to be some destocking. And that destocking is going to provide some stop gap material. You may even see some of the strategic inventories that national governments hold be utilized in sort of an assured fuel capacity, but the solution is more contracting with Western capacity. That's how you're going to replace it. So utilities will destock, it will create net demand as they restock to a higher level, but it will drive those term contracts, which underpin capacity build. You've seen this before with Cameco. We don't plan our capacity to meet spot demand. I think about our giant neighbors down the road here, [indiscernible] the spot price of Potash is up, and so they're under pressure to increase production today to capture that spot price before it comes off. That's not our game. Spot prices up in uranium, spot price is up in conversion. Actually, we don't rush forward with our production plans. We say the market's going to destock, so it's going to keep those prices tighter and it's going to give us the time to lock those values into long-term multiyear contracts which then become the basis for investing in more productive capacity going forward. That's the pathway for the Western market to turn its back on Russian supply. And it will take time. It will take investment, and that investment is going to require higher prices, and we just love the leverage we have to that scenario.

And I realize it's early days of given the geopolitical events here. But what kind of messages are you getting from utilities that have over the last sort of 10 years, become fairly dependent on Kazakh supply. How are they thinking about that moving forward? And whether you're noticing a shift in terms of weaning or increasing the mix to producers like you versus, call it, just buying the cheapest pound out there.

Yes. The globalization of our industry was really well entrenched several years ago, as you know. And then we started raising the issue of origins and the origin disconnect. And then we saw some formal examinations of that, the Section 232 investigation by the Trump administration in the U.S. followed by the Nuclear Fuel Working Group. Folks started turning their attention to the fact that there was this big disconnect between where the products and services were needed and where they were produced. That was already underway. We attributed a lot of our contracting success from the beginning of 2021 through to our Q4 to the fact that there were utilities that were looking to contract with licensed permitted capacity that was Canadian origin that would fit into anybody's critical minerals definition. So we've already seen that. I think the events in Kazakhstan in early January, we're yet another reminder for the utilities. That's 45% of the global production of uranium coming out of that country. Now our partner, Kazatomprom, did a fantastic job maintaining production continuity through that unrest that went on at Kazakhstan, but it did make an impact on the market. It was a reminder that there were a lot of eggs in 1 basket, in 1 country that had gone through some turmoil. And now we have the situation of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, the efforts to exclude the Russian components of the nuclear fuel cycle, actually have knock-on effects to the whole central Asian supply because, as you know, historically, that's been highly integrated into the nuclear front end in Russia. Most of that Kazakh material that used to come out to the western markets went north onto the rail line out through St. Petersburg. Well, if you don't have shippers sailing into Russian water, you're not picking up material in St. Petersburg. Yes, there was Kazakh material that was going out into China, but China was a bit of a hotel California for physical uranium. There really isn't a model to transship it across China and export it out the other side. And I know a lot of counterparties wouldn't take that risk that the Chinese will let it in, but they might not let it out the other side. And then that would be obviously a critical problem. Kazakhs have been working really hard on a third route that goes through the Caspian sea across Azerbaijan out the port in Georgia into the Black Sea, very difficult right now. As far as we can tell from a logistics point of view to get that material moving out of that corridor, very difficult to find charter legal liability insurance or an underwriter that will underwrite cargo loss as long as the Russian Navy is sailing around the Black Sea assaulting the Ukraine from that body of water. So there are challenges that aren't just linked to Russia. So a lot of people right now are sort of saying, well, it's either -- it's a discrete choice, there's either a ban or there's not a ban. Well, Actually, the utilities and the policymakers in the West are not the only factor here. You [ see ] Russia propose that maybe they'll put in a voluntary export restraint. They've come to the conclusion that nuclear fuels are obviously a pain point for the Western markets to why they haven't been excluded yet. So maybe a way to inflect economic damage on Western markets is to restrict the access. So it's not just in the western hand, it's not just a band, and then we have the secondary effects of the supply chain is breaking down. The supply chain is becoming uncertain. So we were already seeing those origin issues. We were already having success as Cameco with those origin issues. And then this geopolitical problem has just taken it to a whole new level, break forward leverage to it.

Do you have a sense of -- I mean, of the Kazakh production, do you have any kind of sense or ballpark figure, how much of that Yellow Cake ends up being, call it, upgraded or rich by Russian capacity versus just being exported as Yellow Cake?

Yes, it's a great question, and I'm not sure I have an easy answer for it. I think the easy answer is virtually all of it that left in the Western markets went through Russia. But in terms of the amount that ended up in the EUP, for example, that the Russians attach their enrichment service to. Well, you know that the Russian joint ventures, that material is going back to Russia. And so that would roughly be about 35% or 40% of that Kazakh supply that would have been tied up in some way in that Russian front end because remember, it wasn't like the Russians would offtake UF6. They would bring in the oxide and they would spit it out the other end as enriched uranium product, destined for fabrication. So it all kind of got tangled together. And now that we have sanctions, now that there are secondary sanctions on financial transactions, it's trying to pick it all apart and figure out which -- what should you avoid and what can you still transact with? And we're just finding a lot of utilities are saying, I'm just not even taking the risk. And so we've seen some RFPs in the market that have broken the favor of noncentral Asian supply in the last couple of weeks, which just clearly seems to be -- I'm not exactly sure what the rules will be, but they can probably change and my best strategy is just to avoid it.

Okay. I mean, one of the, I think, big takeaways from these recent geopolitical events is just that I think a lot of Western Europe has sort of woken up that they need to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. So beyond all these sanction issues, there's also another, I think, big positive here in the sense that it seems like nuclear is getting yet another [ lease ] on life in parts of Europe that maybe had chosen to put it behind them. Can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities you see from a growth perspective in nuclear in Europe? And that's maybe something I didn't think I'd say ever again. But it really seems like it's part of the broader climate change puzzle here. And mix with the Russian events here, there definitely seems to be a sea change on how nuclear fits into this.

Yes. There's no doubt that we've seen a reckoning in energy policy globally, haven't we. I mean policymakers, I would say, forgot over the years that appropriate energy policy actually balances 3 things simultaneously. Your energy needs to have an affordable levelized cost. Your energy needs to be clean or as clean as possible. And your energy needs to be secure and reliable, which is code for not beholden on anyone. And what we've seen in jurisdiction after jurisdiction is policymakers have forgot that it's a balance. And some have pushed all the chips into the corner of what's got to be clean. Well, it was clean to the point where they lost affordability and they lost security of reliability. The Texas weather event would have been a perfect example of that from 2 years ago. In Germany, it's the opposite problem. They pushed everything into the Energiewende project with gas being the transition fuel and lost their security of reliability, lost their levelized cost of electricity and really haven't made emissions gains anyway. And as policymakers return to, okay, I've got to balance all 3 things at the same time. Jurisdiction after jurisdiction, policymakers say, I wish somebody would invent a technology that gives me good cheap levelized cost of electricity, a technology that is clean and a technology that's secure and reliable. Well, we actually already invented it. It's the nuclear power plant. Okay, nuclear. I was just recently in the U.K. and Boris Johnson, all back in, believer on nuclear. Germany reversed a long-standing opposition to nuclear being seen as green in Europe, which led to the pathway for the EU taxonomy. And they've even talked about at times, maybe they keep some reactors running. But if not, at least having an open mind on advanced nuclear reactor. So it is jurisdiction after jurisdiction that has sort of figured out that there are risks to losing that balance and nuclear is taking its place back in the energy policy box for sure, and we welcome that.

And I used to -- 6 months ago, I would have said when investor would ask me about the growth profiles for nuclear, I would say, well, China has got massive growth. Rest of the world might stay flat. It feels like China is also reaffirming its commitment to growing its fleet, maybe you could speak to kind of where you see that fleet in terms of growth in the years ahead, what kind of implications that would have for you?

Yes. I want to do a bit of a tour around the various markets that we have to kind of give you an idea how we look at growth. But the first thing I want to remind is that in the past, growth in nuclear is always that hockey stick. It was always waiting for new reactor programs to be built. And they were coming. And of course, that was the way the Japanese challenge was solved. A lot of reactors were under construction. They ended up going into commissioning. We filled in that pothole of lost demand from Japan to the point where by the end of 2018, every reactor that got restarted in Japan was almost like a new reactor as opposed to just coming back in and filling that pothole. But there is a growth story out in that window, and it's pretty exciting. You are seeing China commit. You saw India commit the other day. On the SMR side, you saw Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and New Brunswick yesterday announced commitments to nuclear. Out into the future, that's great as utilities are thinking about procurement in the longer run. They are thinking about those growth reactors. But let's remember we're actually seeing absolutely near-term growth. The [indiscernible] units that got saved in Illinois. That's almost immediate demand into the market. In fact, it's better for the uranium market to save a reactor that you thought was going to shut down. Diablo Canyon in California. If you asked me this time last year, if you asked me this time 6 months ago, was there any chance that Diablo Canyon would continue to run? I would have said no, I just don't see it in the California. I'm not sure that's the case anymore. So saving reactors in the near term is a near-term shift in demand. Medium term, France coming out and confirming that about 1/3 of their fleet was going to run from 2025 to 2035 all those life extensions were granted. EDF wouldn't have been uncovered for all those reactors, but they wouldn't have been 100% covered either. So now you have midterm demand that suddenly shows up. So it is a full cycle demand story from the short term, all the way through to the long term. And of course, this geopolitical just drives the wedge on short and medium term because there's a serious replacement challenge that has to occur. So very exciting. But as we tour around, we always sort of looked at North America as kind of flat to slightly net up. The refurbishments on Ontario, the new builds in the U.S. We're kind of replacing the smaller reactors that were coming down. So on balance, on a gigawatt basis, just kind of flat. Now we're talking about saving reactors. And so now it looks like we are going to see an increase there. Europe, we were seeing quite a significant net decrease in Western Europe. We're going to have to reevaluate that as reactor programs are being saved in the near term and investments in longer term. Eastern Europe is an exciting market for us. The Eastern European market from Ukraine down through Slovenia has been looking to delink from Russia for a very long time. Those have been captive markets for almost their entire history. And now that project has just accelerated on a huge basis. So growth for us in the Eastern European market is pretty exciting. And then we already talked about China is really reaffirming its commitment to that clean, levelized, secure nuclear power. India, others. Yes, it's a pretty exciting demand story, almost right across the board.

Maybe shifting gears a bit. We've seen also a new dynamic enter the uranium market over the last year or so. So -- and this is this inventory hoarding that's going on by third parties. I mean, Sprott Physical and others have been consuming millions of pounds of uranium, taking it off the market. Can you maybe speak to the impact that you're seeing? I mean prior to sort of all of these entities starting to buy, you were the biggest buyer in the market, obviously, to meet your contracts. Now you have all this competition in the market per pound, but I'd love to get your sort of perspective on how these players are changing the market.

Yes. You know that in the past, I haven't been the biggest fan of financial entities in the uranium market. Because in the past, yes, they were always that marginal buyer that was helping drive a spike, but then they were the first seller to help take the value off before we could lock that value into multiyear long-term contracts. But with the entrance of Yellow Cake and the entrance of the Sprott vehicle, is completely different behavior than we have seen before. If I think about that Sprott vehicle, in particular, the at-the-market feature really translates immediate investor interest into uranium purchases, which then tightens the spot market, which we said wasn't very deep. And I think they've proved it with their purchasing power which then has an impact on the uranium price helps them trade at a premium to their NAV and then they can issue trust units and buy more in the spot market. So there's quite a mechanism there that all then goes into a non-redeemable trust, which is a very pure way to play the thesis that uranium is not yet at production economic pricing. I mean if you believe looking at the global cost curve, which, by the way, is now more expensive in a world where you're going to exclude uranium from some jurisdictions, then the uranium price still has a ways to go and what a direct way to play that discovery of a production cost price than to invest directly in those share units. So I've switched my view. I think they've played a very interesting role in the market. They've injected a degree of transparency and liquidity into the market that the spot market hadn't seen before. And not to our surprise in any way, turns out the spot market was particularly thin, and it responded very [ clinically ]. There was a lot of price elasticity to their demand. So I actually welcome the involvement now. I welcome that direct translation of investor interest into uranium purchases. Everybody saw them coming from a long ways away. Utilities could have tried to get in front of them. They didn't. Sprott kind of operates with an open [indiscernible]. At the end of every day, you can see where they're sitting relative to their NAV, what they bought, what their underlying cost is. That's about as transparent as it gets and yet they sit there with a strategy to hang on to a bit of cash and they enter the market when they see a little bit of weakness. And they've just kind of put the silliness, the trader dumping and offering off of material, they just kind of put that on hold. And we've begun to restore production economic pricing again in the uranium space. It does have a ways to go. So it's a very important role that they play, and I certainly have welcomed their contribution. I would just say, I heard a little bit that, oh, well, there's -- we don't have to worry about the Russian supply because there's these inventories sitting there with financial holders. But I would just remind folks that, that story of replacing Russian enrichment is actually a story where you need more enrichment and you need more conversion. And remember, that product, if it was ever used for strategic inventory uses is this uranium oxide. So it still has to go through the value-added service business.

Thank you. And maybe shifting our attention a little more to Cameco now. Given -- I mean, the last couple of quarters, you've been announcing some pretty big recontracting pounds numbers. And now you overlay to these geopolitical events here as well. Can you maybe give us a flavor on what you're seeing in terms of utilities. Like, is your phone ringing off the hook these days from utilities saying we want Cameco material, and we're running low on inventory to begin with, but the mix is shifting towards players like you.

Yes. We have been very active off market. You've heard me talk about that for some time. We've just learned from being in every transition in this market since it's been a commercial market that utilities, when they do switch over to that security of supply, it just increases those direct approaches. The way we maintain leverage as Cameco is through 3 main tools. Obviously, we have a bunch of committed sales contracts, and many of those are market related. And so they rise with the price. But also remember that utilities tend to be procyclical with the flex options in their market-related contracts. So not only is the price rising, you're actually able to sell more volumes. And so you pick up that leverage. The second bit of leverage is, well, when those flex options are exhausted, utilities then turn to existing suppliers and say, well, we've already got a purchase order, can we just add more volume to it. And -- of course, it's a different pricing dynamic and only incumbents with contract portfolios, capture that business. And then, of course, the third piece of leverage is the pure leverage. All the pounds we haven't sold yet, we're still in supply Yes, we're bringing McArthur back, but not to full capacity. We are planning on toggling Cigar back, but we're still strategically patient. We're still supply disciplined. We are not looking to be sold out. And all those pounds we haven't sold yet are suddenly worth a heck of a lot more than they were when we started our supply discipline strategy. So what we're seeing in the term market is we're seeing tenors increase. Utilities previously were taking very small bites out of the term market. They were coming and they were looking for 2 to 4 years or 2 to 5 years. Why? Because they wanted the carry trade. They wanted to benefit from spot pricing held on an interest rate carry. But now we're seeing 2 to 7 years, 2 to 10 years. So tenors are blowing out. And as they blow out really, those contracts go to primary producers because the carry trade isn't available out in that window. We're seeing time frames increase. Whereas utilities were really focused kind of in the middle point of this decade, we're now seeing utility interest into the end of the decade. We're seeing utility interest through the next decade. So tenors are increasing and the time frames that material is being looked for is increasing and volumes are going up, not just because more years are added but bigger bites are being taken out of the market. And now we add to that origins matter. So we definitely are seeing a hunt for origins that would be on the western side of the Russian-Ukraine conflict, so origins [indiscernible]. And it's not just utilities. I talked about the role of the intermediaries and in particular, the enrichers. The biggest RFP in the market right now for conversion is from an enricher, looking for 2,000 tons of conversion per year for the next 5 years, suggesting to me there's a very significant short in the intermediary phase of our industry. Those are enrichers looking for conversion, at the same time, their customers are looking for conversion. So yes, it has changed. We're the only converter in North America at the moment, our phones are ringing.

And when you announced the strategy to bring back McArthur on a partial basis and then take down Cigar parcel basis, like the combination of your -- where you're going to ramp to was still going to leave Cameco, I think about 40% below kind of your installed capacity across the portfolio, including your second-tier assets. With the price environment having moved materially here, how are you thinking about this excess idled capacity? And what conditions do you need to see to start thinking about ramping these back up?

The principle we operate on is that Tier 1 assets are not destined for the spot market. Ours is a market where if we were consuming 300 million pounds of uranium per year, the spot market would still be small and discretionary. It is not where real value is created. Yes, during times of spikes, you can take advantage of very short-lived high prices, but real full cycle value comes from taking that spot pressure and translating it into multiyear contracts, where you're pricing in that tension for a long period of time. This means that we plan our production in response to where our contract book is building. So we need to see more utilities step forward, contract more uranium, contract more conversion, that will give us the cause to revisit our current production plans and then perhaps talk about producing more at McArthur, not limiting it at 15, for example, but taking it up to 18 where it had been. And remember, it's licensed to 25. Our plan was to bring Cigar back to 13.5 to extend the life of Phase 1. And maybe that's not necessary, but the contracting comes first. We are not front running the demand development in this industry with supply that's either exposed to the spot market or building an inventory because that has proven time and time again to be a colossal value transfer from investors in uranium mines to utilities. We don't do that. We hope others have learned their lesson.

No, fair point. I realize the spot price or the spot market is a fairly small market. But I assume that the higher spot environment is helping the negotiations in terms of the term price. And we are starting to see, I assume some upward pressure on the term price. One of the -- when I think back to the last kind of uranium spot spike from 15 years ago, Cameco got somewhat in terms of its realizations, you got tripped up by ceilings and existing contracts. Are contracts still -- it's been a long time since then. Is your book -- does your book still include fixed, Like even for market-related contracts, are there fixed price ceilings that would limit your ability to realize higher pricing -- or I should say, hyper pricing if we get there?

Yes. You need to think about that book as being a trailing capture of value. And so when we build the book, you're pricing it in the market at the time that you're securing a new contract. And then that constructs up the market with new price discovery and then you capture more value. And so the example I will give is that on market-related contracts, very few of them in our industry are 100% uncovered -- sorry, [ uncollared ]. A lot of the market-related contracts, utilities have lived through spikes in the past. And so they want a ceiling. And when they want a ceiling, then -- okay, well, I'm going to put in a floor for example. But in the last just, I would say, weeks, you've seen that whole collaring shift up. Whereas in early January in a $40 market, a $60 ceiling might have been available with a $30 floor, conceptually speaking, you're sort of probably now pushing 75 or 80 for a ceiling, and you're probably pushing 45 or 50 for a floor. So you've got lots of upside leverage and then you don't have the downside participation in a market where maybe a hyper price is followed by hyper supply, which comes rushing in projects that shouldn't have been available. Now I don't deny for a second that the uranium price can spike. And I would be the first to say this market is as vulnerable to a supply shock as it's perhaps ever been. But at the end of the day, in a long-term industry, you have to navigate by the production -- the global production cost curve. And so what we aim to do in our market-related contracts is obviously if there's a ceiling, we want that high enough that we're going to capture the vast majority of the price distribution rooted in the global production economics. Yes, you might miss a couple of weeks at the top of a spike, but you're going to be protected then if the market over responds to high prices like it did in 2006, 2007. All that Kazakh material came rushing in, didn't have a home, went into the spot market. Fukushima happened and a disaster ensued with respect to the uranium price, which we didn't participate in. Our average realized price outperformed the uranium price through all those years. So we've learned from the past about what market leverage looks like. We baked that in going forward. And between those 3 factors, the market-related contracts that flex up between the additional demand that we get as an incumbent producer and the pounds in a supply discipline world that we haven't even tried to sell yet, this leverage is in front of us.

And should we think about, like as you fill up that contract book over time here, your first inclination is going to be to ramp up Cigar and McArthur. And then once those pounds are sold, then you turn your attention back to some of the idle, call it, Tier 2 capacity? Are you even thinking about the project portfolio at this point? Or is that still like a next decade type of focus?

Here's what's different from last time. When we went through that price spike, '06, '07, and we layered in a lot of contracting and a lot of replacement rate contracting was done globally. Cameco was still in the mode of building out the Cigar Lake to replace the HEU material. We're looking at this contracting cycle through brownfield leverage only. It's about taking McArthur from 0 to something. Our plan was 15, but it ran at 18, could run at 25. We were thinking about bringing Cigar back to delay the decision around Cigar Phase 2, that's brownfield leverage. But who knows. Maybe there's a different scenario there. In a world where the uranium price is responding, obviously, our Kazakh partner might have a different view on running at a 20% below subsoil use. Well, they can run 20% above. So there's flex there if the conditions are right, if the homes are there for us. And then even as we turn to the Tier 2s, remember, Rabbit Lake has been down before. And utilities in the last price spike came to Cameco and said, you've got a licensed and permitted brownfield infrastructure, what does it take to restart that. Similarly in the U.S., those conversations happen before going to somebody with a project that's still in the ground, doesn't have a license, doesn't have a permit, doesn't have any construction going on. So there's a lot of leverage there. There's a lot of growth opportunity for us relative to our baseline. That's brownfield. That's very different than last time when we were building out Cigar Lake. So no, we don't have to turn our attention yet to projects that are still in the ground. Think about Millennium. On the road between McArthur and Key Lake, greenfield mine, not a greenfield mill, pretty nice way to be in a world where the mill is that is usually the bottleneck on uranium production. And then, of course, we have assets in Western Australia, proximate to growing markets, not on the radar screen at the moment. We intend to meet this cycle, capture value from a brownfield leverage strategy that will reward our owners for the strategic patience that they have shown for Cameco over all these years.

Are you concerned at all about competitors like there's some potentially large, call it, greenfield projects owned by juniors in the basin. You referenced potentially the Kazakhs taking a different view on supply. I mean, with the higher price environment, how concerned are you that others may decide to just ramp up capacity in this market or get funded in terms of building a new greenfield.

Yes. Not -- obviously, not unconcerned, but the reality is this is the uranium industry. You tell me a project that's come to the market quickly, including ours, quite frankly. It's an industry that is very, very highly regulated for reasons and those high regulations create all sorts of barriers. I think if we think about the Central Asian supply and our colleagues, our friends at Kazatomprom, in particular, I think they've been rewarded from their supply discipline strategy. I think it's been absolutely clear to Kazatomprom's investors including the state investor that actually the dividend that they're able to generate for their owners is higher if the uranium price is higher, not if the uranium price is lower. So this attachment to supply discipline, I think, is real. When they say, look, we're not looking to increase supply until they build homes for their production. I think everybody should listen. I think the days in which they're going to overproduce and dump into the spot market, those seem to be behind Kazatomprom. We just have a lot of respect for their commercial team and the decisions they've been making. So I don't fear that supply the way I might have 5 years ago or perhaps longer. With respect to projects that are still in the ground, look, I mean, if you're looking in Northern Saskatchewan, there's only 1 company that actually mines uranium in Northern Saskatchewan, and that's us. And that development pathway, the licensing, the permitting, the community agreements, the construction and the construction in a world where supply chains have gone crazy and inflation has gone crazy. And then the need to start building contract homes for the production, so you just don't show up and swamp the spot market and destroy the value that was the basis of your feasibility study. It's just going to be a lot more difficult than we think is often presented. So we don't sit and say, boy, we better rush supply into the market, if not real yield market share. We have a value, not a volume strategy, and it pivots around we build the contract homes, and we plan the production accordingly. And the only times we'll be expanding our productive capacity is when we've locked it up in contract homes at high value, and then we'll make those decisions about brownfield and then stepping up to greenfield. But ours is not an industry where you say, well, we got to bring our production in, even though we have no idea where we're going to sell it, just because we're afraid of somebody else. That's been a value destroyer for owners in the uranium space.

Thanks, Grant. I think I'm going to turn my attention. We've had some questions coming now from the investor base. Okay. First question, a question about Inkai and whether you see any potential risk from an ownership perspective I suppose if Kazakhstan kind of gets wrapped up in the Russian sphere. And if there -- we've seen a number of western businesses exit Russia. If it comes to a point where you may be forced to exit Kazakhstan, can you maybe talk about how you would meet any contract obligations that could be tied to that volume?

Yes. A lot of great questions in there. But let me just start with the very last point. We typically don't sell on an origin basis. As you know, our entire dispute with the CRA was based on the fact we bring all of our uranium into a single bucket and then sell it from there. So it's not like we've got contracts that are tied to specific Kazakh supply. So that doesn't create -- we don't have a substitution problem in that sense. So while I said we have a value-based strategy, I meant that in dollars terms, but I actually mean it in ESG terms, too, in the sense of values, and we navigate IR values. And we believe that our Kazakh friends, our colleagues are in a real predicament. And we worry about where they land in this. Obviously, the unrest in Kazakhstan in January provoked Russian troops to go into Kazakhstan at the invitation of President Tokayev. And I'm sure in today's geopolitical situation, that's creating pressure for the Kazakh government to align with Russia on the issue of the invasion in Ukraine. And of course, if that's the decision Kazakhstan as a nation takes, well, then I think we can throw them into the bucket of Belarus and face the sanctions that are against Russia. I think that's the outcome there. And we would find ourselves invested in a country that we were on a value space completely misaligned with. And it would have to provoke a very serious decision about what our investment and our future looks like in that country. But on the other hand, if the Kazakh government says, no, we're not in support of this, we're in support of those countries that are condemning Russia, well, that's an awful predicament as well. Because now President Tokayev becomes the next President Zelensky in the eyes of the Kremlin. And Kazakhstan becomes the next Ukraine in the eyes of the Kremlin. And this is going to -- and this is occurring while we're trying to disentangle Central Asian supply from the Russian supply chain, which will become even harder to do. So Kazakhstan is in a real predicament, gosh, I don't envy the situation the state is in. But for us, there would be a line that would be crossed. And if that line were crossed, then there would be no way we could participate in that asset. But let me just remind you. If that's the scenario we're talking about, we're talking about a scenario where about 12% to 15% of our supply would -- could be lost to us. But 45% of the global supply of uranium would be lost. And so the value transfer back to McArthur and Cigar and Rabbit Lake and the U.S. assets would more than make up for that on a strategic basis. So we've been geographically and geologically diversified, this is why. And so yes, it's an issue that we're watching on a daily basis and we don't envy the predicament. Our friends are in there. And it's absolutely crucial for us which way they decide to align.

Okay. So that's something, certainly, I think we'll all be staying tuned on. Next question has to do with McArthur River. And when I think back a few years ago, when McArthur was closed, Cameco talked about resigning enough long-term contracts, hopefully, with a price that starts with the [indiscernible] in terms of the strategy to restart the McArthur. Obviously we're in a different price environment now, and you've announced the partial restart here. But can you maybe speak to like what do you need to see? Is there a certain level or percentage of forward sales and the contract book or a certain price level now that you would basically wrap McArthur back up to 100%.

Well, it's just -- it's the continuation of building out this contract book. And as we complete contracts, we announce them sometimes quarterly, but let me just remind you that the marketing team operates under a very clear rule, which is a quality contract beats a fast contract every time. So there's no [indiscernible] of a quarter end, [indiscernible] of a half year, [indiscernible] of the year-end. We just try to get the best value capture as we possibly can for Cameco's owners. And so we want to continue building out this contract book. And for us, the planning is always a combination of what's already in the books, plus what's under negotiation in that pipeline. And as we talked about earlier, with the fact that there's now a geopolitical crisis hitting what was already favorable fundamentals, you could imagine the pipeline is not shrinking. And so we have a lot of active conversations going on, not just in uranium, but also in the conversion space. We build out those books and then we plan the production. So that's what you want to watch for. You want to watch for the build-out of those homes. We're not going to produce from those Tier 1 assets to sell in the spot market because the reality is it's thinly traded. And the day we show up with McArthur River into the spot market is the day the price starts to come down. We want that price to stay high, long enough for us to capture that price into multiyear contracts. That's how we create value.

Next question here from the investor base. Can you comment -- we had a question on can you comment about the construction delays and increased CapEx related to newer builds for nuclear, and whether that may sour the interest on nuclear in Europe.

Yes. Nothing new about that, of course. Our industry has been plagued whether you look at the new builds in the U.S., whether you look at the new builds in Finland and in France. It has been plagued with cost overruns and schedule overruns that has really undermined the confidence of nuclear over the last several, I would say, even decades. But remember, I talked about energy policy being a balance and levelized cost of electricity is obviously a key component to that. So a project that's run over budget, run over time, undermines the levelized cost of electricity, but now the decision also factors in, is it secure and reliable. So nuclear is being rewarded for its secure and reliable attributes and it's now being rewarded for its clean attributes. And at the same time, we've actually seen programs move away from first of a kind and start to harness economies of scope and scale. The refurbishment plan in Canada has been incredibly well delivered by Bruce Power and by OPG. And actually, the rest of the world is watching what's going on in Ontario in terms of project management in the nuclear space. Look, the Chinese are building reactors in 5 years with economies of scale and scope now that they've gone through the first of a kind. Look at the United Arab Emirates, the [indiscernible] units. That was basically just time lapsed. The first one is now operating. Second one is commissioning. Third one, 75% done. Fourth one is 50% done. It's an absolute case study in how you can deliver nuclear power plants on time, on budget, harnessing economies of scale and scope and now comes the SMR revolution. The prospect that you can take all of the benefits of big nuclear, clean, secure, reliable, levelized cost and begin to bring real manufacturing processes into reactors you can build at a centralized location and then move the components, if not the whole reactor out to where it's going to produce power. It's going to be yet another leg on improving the economy in the nuclear space. So I actually think we're heading into a really exciting period here and shedding the burden of the past of where we tried to build everything as a first of a kind and turned out didn't work very well.

Next question here from the audience. Question had to do with if there is a Russia-Ukraine peace deal, and some of these sanctions get lifted off of Russia, do you still think we've seen a permanent shift on utility sourcing, uranium and other, call it, part of the fuel cycle away from Russian sphere of influence. Do you think it's a permanent shift?

Yes, I do. I look at it in a set of concentric issues. The first is we all have to operate under principles, don't we? The Russians occupied the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in order to create the menace of Chernobyl once again and to frighten the Ukrainians. They shelled an operating nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia power plant. And then threatened blackouts. And at worst, threatened a nuclear accident if the Ukrainians tried to retake that facility. You can't do those things and then be deemed a responsible member of the nuclear power community for a responsible nuclear fuel provider. And so you start to go through, well, what would it take to restore a principal membership in that global community, and it would take regime change. Wouldn't it? I mean, who would trust -- who's prepared to trust President Putin again on such matters. And after regime change, it would take probably very, very significant plans to rebuild the damage done in Ukraine. And then it would take a very sincere reengagement with some of these global [ fora ] that they turned their back on as part of this invasion. There's a lot of multiyear contracting we will do in the time that it would take to restore that kind of responsible membership. So okay, maybe not permanent forever, but long enough to underpin a very successful term contract portfolio for us for a very long time.

I realize we're bumping up on time here. I'm just going to just try to squeeze in 1 more question here from the audience. And the question was, can the Western market really turn its back on Russian enrichment? Is that actually physically possible?

It is physically possible, but over time and probably some combination of destocking, we're going to have to chew through the strategic inventories that are held for this purpose. We're probably actually going to see tapping into some of the national inventories that are for like naval propulsion and stuff like that. Those would have to be made available for a short period of time. So the destocking occurring while enrichers begin to overfeed -- Orano and URENCO begin to over feed, which is code for more UF6 demand begin to expand their capacity. And then in the meantime, things like our Global Laser Enrichment project, you could imagine, are suddenly front and center on the nuclear agenda in the U.S. as a pathway. Once we're through this to establishing long-term commercial [indiscernible] that's resident in the U.S., not dependent on foreign actors. So we can, but it's not without pain, and it's not without price.

Do you think that's like a 5-year type of exercise to build up that capacity in western markets?

It will take time. Remember that Orano and URENCO used the same technology. They jointly own ETC and Richmond Technology Corporation. And because the [indiscernible] price had been so low for so long, remember, that's what gave rise to underfeeding. It was better to sell it as natural enrichment than it was to sell it as -- I'm sorry, natural uranium than it was to sell it as [indiscernible]. There's going to have to be a recapitalization of that ETC. Its capability would need to expand beyond just simply replacing center fuses that currently fail. They'd have to go into a growth mode. So that would take time. It would take investment, and that would take price.

Okay. Well, I could ask you questions all day, but we're really out of time. Grant, thank you so much for making the time today. I thought this is really insightful. We really appreciate it. And from everybody here at Scotia, thank you very much to all the investors on the line today. Have a great day, everybody.

Thank you. Bye-bye.