Cerrado Gold Inc. (CERT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Cerrado Gold 2024 Year-end Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael McAllister, Vice President, Investor Relations with Cerrado Gold. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'd like to note that this call may contain forward-looking information that is based on the company's current expectations, estimates and beliefs. Please review the Slide 2 and any other forward-looking information contained on Slide 2 of today's presentation as well as in the company's annual information form, which is publicly available on SEDAR+ at the company's website. The accompanying presentation for today's call is available for download from the home page of the company's website at cerradogold.com. The accompanying press release is also posted on our website and on SEDAR+. Please note that all dollar amounts mentioned on today's call are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. As the operator noted, following management's presentation and remarks, there will be a Q&A period to follow. Joining us on today's call are Mark Brennan, our CEO -- Chairman and CEO; Cliff Hale-Sanders, our President; Jason Brooks, our CFO; Carl Calandra, Vice President, Legal Counsel; David Ball, our Vice President, Corporate Development. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Mark Brennan. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Mike, and thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us on what is our inaugural financial -- quarterly financial call that we'll continue now to replicate as we move through future quarters. 2025, '24 have been tremendously transitional periods for Cerrado. '25, obviously, will be an extremely transitional year for the company. For the first time in our operating history, we're now in a stable state [indiscernible] for the next 3 years, producing approximately 55,000 to 60,000 ounces per year of gold at a very healthy cost, which generates a lot of cash and cash flow, which has had a really strong impact on our balance sheet. We are now in a very strong financial position, where we've cleaned up a lot of the existing debt that we had on our balance sheet previously. We're now in a position where we're generating very strong cash, and this cash is now going to be used to really drive growth initiatives. The first growth initiative is going to really come, first and foremost, from our MDN operation, the Minera Don Nicolas operation in Argentina. Basically, what we're looking at is a project that has been transitioning to a heap leach operation over the course of the last year. We're now looking to ramp that operation to the 4,000 to 5,000 ounce per month run rate at a all-in sustaining cost targeted between $1,500 and $1,700. With gold prices today at $3,200, we generated a lot of cash from that operation. The second element that we have aside from expanding our production will be driving the life of mine and our resource growth. We have recently initiated a new initiative for exploration at Minera Don Nicolas with a very senior executive who -- explorationist, who has tremendous success globally, but also on the Deseado Massif at Hochschild's San Jose project. We anticipate to see drilling an aggressive drill program starting in the second -- in the third quarter in June. And our expectation for this program will be to add approximately 300,000 to 800,000 ounces over the course of the program. Would we need to be successful with this, they would dramatically expand our resource and life, which would give us a really strong long-term picture to continue our expansion in Argentina. And I'll remind people, we started this operation during COVID. We took it from 20,000 ounces to the current level of 55,000 ounces. And we see this as a project which is still very nascent and deserves a lot more exploration that we're expecting to fulfill and follow through with. So we expect to see some really good news coming out of Argentina on the exploration side as we move forward. Our second growth initiative is going to come from Lagoa Salgada. Lagoa Salgada, we announced an acquisition of Ascendant Resources and their Lagoa Salgada project. This is a project that is a multi-commodity product, which based in Portugal, it has feasibility study completed. However, there's been a lot of work which has been going on, which is really seeing some strong, strong growth and the economics. And this is coming from improved metallurgy, which has increased the grades, which has improved recoveries. We've seen an increase in resources. And we really expect that when a feasibility study is completed on this project in the third quarter that people will be very surprised at the strong, strong foundation that we have here as a new asset. It will continue to be a gold -- we'll continue to have a gold focus at our company. Even with the inclusion of Lagoa -- with Lagoa having a current spot price is 42% of the revenue base will be silver and gold. We will still have 81% of Cerrado being gold focused. So we're still continuing our gold focus as we develop Lagoa Salgada. With Lagoa, we expect a construction decision in the fourth quarter. And the way that our cash flow is building and the way that we see our assistance with funding, w have the U.K. export credit agency who are looking to help us with our funding of the project with the Santander Bank of Spain. We anticipate that we will be able to drive this project with minimal dilution and look to be in production sometime in second quarter of 2027. I'll remind you, on a feasibility study that was completed in July of 2023, this project drove about $75 million of cash flow for the first 5 years. W expect that the economics coming on this project will be significantly higher and significantly better than we saw in the previous feasibility. So from that perspective, we're very excited with Lagoa. Lagoa, just like Minera Don Nicolas in Argentina, is a very nascent asset with very limited exploration drilling completed to date where we see lots of potential for a significant upside. The resource at the company at Lagoa is currently about 27 million tonnes, and we see the potential for multiples expansion on that resource. So we're very, very excited. Again, even based on the previous feasibility study, this will be one of the lowest cost producers of zinc equivalent metal in the world. So low cost, strong fundamental growth with a tremendous upside on resource growth. The third asset, by no means, is Mont Sorcier in Quebec, which we are very, very excited by. This project is currently in the feasibility mode. We expect to complete a feasibility study by Q1 of 2026. We expect to see extremely robust economics, following on from the past year's work where we've done metallurgy to bring the project to a DRI, high-grade, high purity iron ore product, that will have substantial cash flow potential as we move forward. But that's a project for the future. The focus in the short term will certainly be on MDN in Argentina as well as Lagoa Salgada as we look at that construction decision in the fourth quarter. So we are now, for the first time in the company's history, in a very strong financial position with repetitive cash flow. And we continue our aggressive growth story where our real focus is to drive very strong cash flows. With that, I'll go into the -- we'll start looking at the presentation, as Mike mentioned, is on the company's website. And I'll introduce Jason Brooks, the company's CFO, to go through the initial pages.

Thanks, Mark, and thanks, everyone, for joining this morning. As Mark just said, I will go through the financial highlights of 2024, starting with production. So production for 2024 was 54,494 gold equivalent ounces, which was in line with our guidance, as compared to 52,230 gold equivalent ounces in 2023, which is a 4% increase year-over-year. In Q4, we had production of 10,431 gold equivalent ounces as compared to 15,744 in Q4 of 2023. Now as Mark just alluded to, that is as we're transitioning away from less CIL ounces and we're ramping up our heap leach, that was the main driver of the difference in ounces in Q4 2024 versus Q4 2023, with over 50% of our ounces produced in Q4 2024 from the heap leach operation. Moving to EBITDA. Our 2024 adjusted EBITDA was $24.4 million as compared to $17.7 million in 2023, which is a 38% increase. In Q4, our adjusted EBITDA was $4.5 million as compared to $2.4 million in Q4 2023, an 88% increase. Primarily, the increase in EBITDA is we got the benefit of a [ $61 ] million more revenue in 2024 as compared to last year, which was driven by $377 per ounce gold realized higher as the metal prices went higher during the year. And as we all know, that trend has continued into 2025. Additionally, EBITDA was benefited by a $2 million decrease in G&A. However, that was offset by a $9 million increase in costs during the year. Moving on to all-in sustaining costs. We had all-in sustaining cost of $1,651 per ounce in 2024 as compared to $1,427 in 2023. That increase, again, is due to the cost I just alluded to. And primarily, that's higher labor costs in Argentina, which is a result of the inflationary pressures that we faced during the year. On a quarterly basis, all-in sustaining costs were $1,953 per ounce as compared to $1,594 per ounce in 2023. And that metric is higher in 2024, again, due to the production, which we just spoke about in 2024, those ounces were driven primarily from the heap leach operation as that ramps up to 4,000 to 5,000 GEO ounces per month as compared to the CIL production in 2023. Moving to the balance sheet. Certainly, an obvious strengthening of the balance sheet in 2024 as compared to prior year, specifically a $54.5 million improvement in working capital. That working capital improvement was driven by a $38 million increase in current assets as well as a $16 million decrease in current liabilities. Now those assets increased primarily due to the increase in cash. As you can see on the balance sheet, we're up to $26 million in cash at the end of 2024, and that's due to the sale of our Brazil asset, which I'll talk about in a moment. The current liabilities decreased primarily due to a decrease in payables. We've made a concerted effort to pay down liabilities and debt during the 2024, which is evidenced in our balance sheet. I'd also mention, in addition to the improvement in working capital, there is a reduction of $20 million of long-term debt during the year. And finally, in terms of proceeds, we received proceeds of $34 million due to asset sales and option payments during the fourth quarter and $49 million for the full year. That $49 million is broken down into $45 million from the sale of our Brazilian asset to Hochschild, as well as $4 million from our option agreement on the Michelle property in Argentina. Now in addition to the $49 million we received in 2024, we have the potential to receive up to $25 million further. $15 million of that $25 million is guaranteed from the sale of our Brazil asset, Hochschild, with $10 million expected in June of '26 and $5 million expected in June -- or excuse me, in March of 2027. The further $10 million is a potential payment from the option agreements should Cerro Vanguardia opt into that Michelle property in future years. And with that, I'll turn it back to Mark.

Okay. Thank you, Jason. And again, really just very, very proud to see our 52% reduction in net debt levels over the past 12 months, which also represented a 64% reduction from the peak debt levels in June of 2024. So thus the working capital improvement, as Jason mentioned, of $54 million in the last 12 months. So it's been a tremendous transition year, putting us in a very strong position moving forward. Milestones that we anticipate going forward, we will see the Ascendant shareholder vote on May 6 in the next week. The expectation is that we will see the transaction closed by the end of May, subject to the favorable vote by shareholders. Further, we expect that Lagoa Salgada to see the receipt of the Environmental Impact Assessment permit for the Lagoa Salgada project. We expect that sometime by the end of May as well. We will report our Q1 financial results for MDN in the last week of May, and we expect to see a very strong and significant high-value targeted drilling program commencing in June where we'll start to see results filter through in Q3 of 2025. Further, we expect in -- by early in the third quarter, late second quarter, to see an updated feasibility study for the Lagoa Salgada project. As I mentioned, the previous project economics we had in the PA were an NPV of $146 million, with the IRR about 39% after tax. We expect at a minimum to see a $175 million in NPV, and we're hopeful that potentially we'll see that north of $200 million. So very, very optimistic with the new developments that we're seeing at Lagoa Salgada. On the back of that feasibility study, we see a construction decision in Q3 -- late Q3, early Q4, with the project moving into construction in the first quarter of 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, we also see a feasibility study to be completed for the Mont Sorcier high purity iron project. Again, we published a PA in 2021 with an NPV of USD 1.6 billion. We anticipate that the numbers in the feasibility study will be equal to the project economics we saw on the PA is our expectation. In summary, I just want to highlight the fact that we have a company that has steady state production coming out of Argentina. I think we can -- as per the PA that was produced in the third quarter, our expectation is that we have 3 to 4 years of production at that 55,000 ounce per year level on the basis that there's no exploration success. We are also going underground in Q2 and late Q2, and we expect that we'll be producing revenue out of the underground operations in Q3, Q4. The reality here is that it's very nice for us to be driving additional revenues from the underground operations. However, what we really want to do is go and explore the underground potential, which is where we've seen most mines on the Deseado Massif really gain the traction in terms of bulk and size. So from that perspective, we're very, very optimistic to look at the underground program at MDN to drive further production growth, which we hope will be a feature moving forward for the company. So we have the very strong short-term potential coming out of MDN. We're also looking at near term, medium-term production coming out of Lagoa, which we're very, very excited by. Again, this looks to be a very significant project that's only going to grow. And then in the longer term, we have the optionality with Mont Sorcier, which we're very, very excited about the dynamics of that project. It's a very large, very substantial project that could generate the equivalent of 300,000 ounces of gold at a very attractive price, giving very, very strong returns. So combined with our well-funded balance sheet and financial position, which I believe is only going to get better between now and the end of the year. We feel that Cerrado is in a very, very good position for future growth, and maximizing shareholder value. We believe that we are now -- as we move out of this transitional period, shareholders and shareholder value will start accreting at a higher level than where we are today. And that's focused on the fact that we currently see an NPV of about $111 million based on the PA that was published in the summer at MDN with a $150 million NPV over Lagoa Salgada. Combine those two, and I think that you've got a situation in our view, in my view, that is undervalued compared to our peers. The same applies for our cash flow. So we are keeping our heads down. We're working hard. We're bringing production. We're looking at growth opportunities, and we feel that there's a very, very strong future for Cerrado moving forward. With that, that concludes the management presentation portion of the call. And I guess, operator, we would now like to open the call to Q&A from participants.

[Operator Instructions] There appear to be no questions. I'd like to hand the conference back over to Mark Brennan for any closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone who joined us today. As previously mentioned, a recording of this call, along with the presentation, is available or will be available on the company's website at cerradogold.com. We thank everyone for joining us today. And with that, operator, please end the call.

Thank you. This brings to a close of today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.