Coeur Mining, Inc. (CDE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good afternoon. Always fun to be back in Zurich. This third year in a row, Mitch has kind of let me get out and speak to all of you. And I mean it's been just an amazing transformation for this company. I mean, I think folks know the Coeur name well, been around since 1928, New York Stock Exchange listed company. And we've really transformed the narrative about Coeur, and I can't wait to spend the next 15 or 20 minutes or so just walking you through that transformation. I mean when people thought of Coeur before, they thought of short mine lives, they thought about lousy balance sheets. Not necessarily that balanced of a portfolio. Maybe the team was pretty weak, but I'm joined today by my colleague, Mick Routledge, 30-plus years at Rio Tinto, my partner in crime as we've helped transform this company, Jeff Wilhoit, Investor Relations guru, well known to many of you as we've transformed not just the business, but our shareholder registry and even our analysts, for example, that list looked very different 5 years ago and happy to have added Cosmos and Wayne Lam from TD in recent times. So if you need to get up to speed, there's a big selection of folks that you can look to, to get an update. So here's the brand-new Coeur. right? A very unique beast in terms of North America only, 20-plus million ounces of silver, 750,000 ounces of gold and now interestingly enough, 60 million pounds of copper from the New Gold transaction. When you look at this, I mean, what should stand out to you is that absolutely North American footprint. We like to operate in jurisdictions where you heard from Agnico earlier, you can feel comfortable about the investments that you're going to make. That is a key part of our strategy. You look at this, you see a lot of balance, too, right? See that mix between Canada, the U.S., Mexico. That was a big attraction for New Gold was to add a big meaningful chunk of Canadian production. Probably my bias is a token Canadian on the Coeur executive team as well to have added that. And -- and then again, sort of that mix, one of the questions we get, are you still in the silver business? Still 30% of silver -- of our revenue will be in silver. Silver is in Coeur's DNA, always will be and go from there. So again, here's just a summary of kind of what we've been able to achieve in terms of growth. And in particular, I mean, Coeur is now up to a $20 billion market cap on the cusp of some pretty interesting index inclusion as a U.S. listed company. We're pretty unique in that perspective. So right now, there's one gold precious metals company on the S&P 500, that's Newmont. Our objective would be to become that second New York Stock Exchange listed precious metals company on there. We're on the cusp from a market cap perspective. And the other key piece of this is growth in net income, constantly achieving positive net income. We've done that 7 quarters in a row, and that's another key factor. That S&P 500 is dominated by tech companies. And I know they're looking for more materials type of companies like ours. So that will be something interesting to watch. One of the reasons why we did these last 2 transactions, we bought SilverCrest announced in '24, closed it in February '25, did New Gold in -- announced in '25 closed just a couple of weeks back was we always thought we wanted to get bigger, but only if we were going to get better. And both of those assets -- both the company acquisitions made us significantly better. They drove us much further down the cost curve. The mine lives are right in line with what we'd like to have. They're very -- they both were very Coeur-like assets, right? We love to invest in infrastructure, in communities that are -- really know mining and then get after it with the exploration drill bit. Over the last 6 years, we've invested over $300 million and have really tackled those short mine lives. And again, one of the initial pushbacks on the conversations around New Gold was, geez, those mine lives are pretty short, and I'm going to show you in a second here why we're feeling really good about that. I mean $3 billion of EBITDA, $2 billion of free cash flow, that is a big -- that's a lot of money to deliver, and we're really confident about that. And for the first time, we can -- after years of investment, our shareholders can now expect to begin to see returns. So we announced our initial return of capital, and I'll talk about that in a moment. So this slide is a summary of the big announcement that we made on Monday, March 23, after closing the New Gold transaction on Friday, March 20. We debated should we do this -- Jack, we should have called you and asked for your advice, but should we do this one bit of news at a time or drop it all at once. And we had a lot of confidence that our shareholders can handle all this news at once. But in that news release, we talked about our brand-new guidance for the year. So 12 months of Coeur, which we had previously announced and just 9 months of the New Gold assets. We announced 2 brand-new technical reports. We had to be ready to have those done by mid-February, which was sort of the earliest that we thought we'd anticipate having it close. Really exciting news on that front with Rainy River now out to a mine life of 2035. So again, that's not a short mine life by any stretch of the imagination. And then the very much anticipated news about the K-Zone -- excuse me, yes, the K-Zone maiden resource, over 45 million tonnes. Rainy River's throughput rate, 16,000 tonnes per day. That's metric. We've gone metric, by the way, but that's a topic for another discussion, 16,360 a day, let's call it, 6 million tonnes a year, 6 million into 48. You can see we have very much a line of sight to mining at New Afton for the next decade. And I would argue, again, my Canadian bias, but it's one of the best mines in Canada, right in -- just outside the city of Kamloops, great infrastructure, very supportive local community, great indigenous relationships, a place where people want to live and work. And we've had the pleasure of meeting a few of our new colleagues over the course of the due diligence and integration planning and really pleased to have them added in. And then the updated financial policy that we announced. So basically, the 3 things that you'll see us do in terms of what we're going to do with our cash is we're going to continue to invest in exploration and sustaining capital and growth capital. Underpinned by our -- what's in our DNA is return on invested capital and free cash flow per share. That will always be our #1 priority. Number two is to actually build up a balance sheet that's with the liquidity that's kind of in line with our peers. A ballpark number to keep in mind is kind of in that 15% to 25% of your market cap. So we're $20 billion now. Obviously, a little undervalued. That number will go up. And so you see us build up some meaningful cash. We have no reason to be ashamed of building up our cash balance after years of -- I think I signed off 28 quarters. I would say 26 of those quarters, we had less than $100 million in cash. So it will be nice to have that final financial flexibility for when prices do go down, and they will go down. I don't think they're going down anytime soon. But when they do go down, Coeur will be in a position of strength to be opportunistic, which it's never been able to do in its 90-some-plus year history. And then the last piece is a return of capital. So we received plenty of feedback from shareholders, many of you in this room on what to do with our return of capital, wide divergence, as you might suspect, between dividends and buybacks, and we landed on an initial dividend of $0.02 semiannually as well as a $750 million buyback -- there was maybe a bit of a muted response to $750 million, that doesn't seem like enough. I'd just remind everyone, 3 years ago, our market cap was about $750 million. So to have gone there, I think, -- it was a really good start and looking forward to that. So just a couple of highlights on the New Afton technical report. You can sort of see that right now, the mine life goes out to 2031. So again, on balance, that looks a little short. But when you see the size of this K-Zone and where it's at, we're pretty excited. We had the opportunity to obviously be part of the due diligence and had a pretty good sense of where the resource was heading. I think it's fair to say, Mickey, you can back me up on this, that this initial resource ended up being larger than we thought as we were doing the due diligence. So we're really pleased on this. We're continuing to have the drill bits going here for the rest of the year. We'll launch a feasibility study towards the end of the year. Once that feasibility study is done, you can go into permitting. A couple of thoughts there. Permitting in British Columbia, when it's a permit amendment is actually relatively straightforward, I think 9 to 12 months. That's what New Afton has done each of the previous times that they've gotten a new permit. So that's one thing to bear in mind is like how much is this going to cost? We don't know. We haven't done the work yet, but the last C-Zone took -- cost about $600 million, just to give you a sense. And so if it's $600 million, it's $1 billion with sort of the free cash flow that we're generating, we're feeling very comfortable about that, and we're really excited about the long-term prospects. And then what I think will be the gem of this transaction is Rainy River. And Rainy River has had a long shadow. I think it was one of the reasons why we were able to get in and acquire New Gold. It's had a long checkered path. $800 million capital turned into $2 billion. They had to sell Blackwater, had to sell half of Rainy -- New Afton at some stage with Ontario teachers, et cetera, et cetera, and they did a fantastic job to stay alive. But we're really excited about the potential at Rainy River. Much like Palmarejo open pit then went to underground. They're busy working and improving their underground mining development rates. They were struggling a bit on their own. They brought in Tyson. That's someone we're really familiar with. We brought them in up at Kensington. So we're really excited. And the other hidden gem here. I mean, they just never had any money to do any exploration. They just had enough -- before Pat got there, I think they had actually given up on the exploration potential. And so they really have come up with a long-term game plan. And again, that's just kind of right in Coeur's -- that's our sweet spot. Take that beautiful 25,000 tonne a day mill and try and keep it fed. And so we're really excited about that. And these 2 assets will be our #1 and #2 free cash flow contributors during 2026, even though we've only owned them for 9 months. So I've really touched base on the updated financial policy. A couple of small things that we did. We've upgraded our revolving credit facility from $400 million to $1 billion, you might say why did you do that? Was it necessary? I mean my experience is when you get offered the money, you take it. And so the standby fees on that $1 billion facility are the same as they were on the $400 million facility. And we're happy to add really high-quality banks to the facility as along with the continuing support of others. And then the other thing that we did was -- we'll talk about this in a second around our capital structure. We have $300 million of bonds. New Gold had $400 million of bonds, and we did an obligor exchange, which essentially makes the New Gold bond Coeur bonds. And that was important to have one indenture, so that does not limit our ability to -- in terms of capital returns. It's going to save us some money as well. So it was kind of a neat transaction. We got 96% uptake on that transaction. That will be closed here in the next week or so. So here's just some of the staggering transformation that we talked about. And sometimes we kind of have to pinch ourselves. And at times, I think maybe the market still doesn't quite believe us that we're going to deliver this. But you can see that step change in EBITDA from $142 million in 2003 to over $1 billion on its way to $3 billion, negative $300 million of free cash flow. Obviously, that was on the back of the Rochester expansion, $666 million, $333 million, $313 million of which was in that fourth quarter as metal prices really started rising and that number is going to be over $2 billion with only 9 months. There's that capital structure. I remember being here -- vividly being here met with some skepticism. I said we're going to be net debt -- we're going to be net cash positive by the end of '26. And sure enough, we did. I mean that is a balance sheet that people will not remember as it relates to Coeur, and we're really excited about that. And again, this is a number that we're also particularly proud about that return on invested capital. So 26%. Again, that's taken from Bloomberg. That's not a non-GAAP measure. You can go look it up yourselves, that's peer-leading, right? We've been driven by that. Mick and I are compensated by return on invested capital and free cash flow per share. That's in our long-term comp. So that's what we're driven. We use that with our -- all of our conversations and to have achieved that level of peer-leading ROIC is extremely rewarding and really exciting. That's a lot of numbers. We've got 7 mines now, so we got to spread the wealth on that exploration, almost $170 million investment coming. One of the great things that we've done in the last few years is really fix that exploration triangle. You need to have opportunities throughout your exploration pipeline to really make sure that you're continuously replacing reserves and growing your inferred pipeline. We've done a really nice job. East McGrath joined us a few years back and has helped us really get that in good shape. And so the 2 largest allocations of capital are Las Chispas. Again, maybe one of the criticisms, oh, I thought Las Chispas is only going to have a 7-year mine life, and that's it. Here we are year 1, we already replaced what we mined the previous year. And then the other one is Silvertip, and Silvertip is our exploration project in Northern British Columbia. -- where we're investing a lot. We just -- we kicked off an initial PEA last year. That work has wound up. Mick and I are presenting to our Board in May, ask for permission to move to PFS. I don't want to get ahead of the Board. But obviously, with this higher silver price environment, all of the work that we've done, we're starting to get pretty excited. And just to give you a sense of order of magnitude of what that could look like, Silvertip's 11 million tonne resource, 300 grams silver. That's -- if you take 2,000 to 3,000 tonnes a day, that's 6 million to 8 million more ounces of silver. So again, back to that comment about silver is in our DNA. That gets us pushing almost 30 million ounces of silver. So definitely a core part of our business. I'm just about wrapping up here. I don't want to leave without talking about Wharf. Wharf is a little asset that we bought from Goldcorp back in 2015 for less than $100 million. It's always had a 5-year mine life. We spent a whole $11 million on exploration last year. It now has an 11-year mine life. So we're really excited about that. It's an amazing asset, a great story about M&A. Quickly on Palmarejo, there's a lot of lines on here. I'd ask everyone to focus their attention to this area of the East -- it took us many, many years to consolidate that whole land piece, finally was able to achieve that. We're now spending 70% of our exploration dollars over to the east. And why that's important is all that area to the east is not infested by the Franco-Nevada stream that burdens the left-hand side of that picture. So very much keep an eye on that. I mentioned quickly Las Chispas and then everyone always wants to talk -- last 3 years, always want to talk about Rochester. It's kind of nice to go to means now we don't have to talk about Rochester all the time. Mick's got that project on the rails, 88,000 tonne a day open pit heap leach gold silver. It's been a massive impressive project. And Mick and his team did an amazing job building. Everyone who's been on site walks away incredibly impressed. Both companies who we did transaction with did their own reverse due diligence, walked away, very impressed that this is a mine that's going to last for many, many decades in Nevada, arguably the best mining jurisdiction in the world. And again, the number I'd like to point to is this one right here, right? As we've managed that throughput, $80 million of free cash flow in the fourth quarter. Rochester is going to be our third largest free cash flow contributor during the year. So we've got a little bit about guidance. The one area I'd ask everyone to focus in on, we, unlike other companies, we don't just give the guidance by quarter and then let the analysts divide by 4. We give the guidance by quarter to -- it's a little bit more math. I apologize to the analysts or those who do their own model. But it's really important to understand that unlike -- not unlike a lot of mining companies, we are particularly second half weighted at Rochester this year. So I just wanted to that. And with that, I'll stop talking and take some questions from the audience.

Okay. I think we have time for one question. Do we have one question from the audience? No, I'm being told that there is no time for any questions. So thank you very much, Tom.

Thank you.

Okay. That ends the session with corporate presentations, and I want to introduce our keynote speaker, Nicky Shiels, Head of Research and Metal Strategy at MKS. Her bio...