Equinox Gold Corp. (EQX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Equinox Gold virtual investor reception. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the meeting over to Rhylin Bailie, Vice President, Investor Relations for Equinox Gold. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Anastasia, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today for our fourth annual investor reception. Normally, Ross would hold this reception in Toronto, but of course, because of COVID, everything has been on virtual this year. Today's reception corresponds to the release of our 2021 production guidance, which we put out this morning. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today. So please take the time to visit our website and our continuous disclosure documents on SEDAR and on EDGAR. I will now turn the reception over to Ross Beaty for opening remarks.

Thank you very much, Rhylin, and good morning, everybody. I, first of all, want to apologize for this dreadful facial fuzz I have on. It's my second wave COVID beard, and it's coming off the second I get the jab. So I don't expect you'll be seeing this hopefully too much longer. You'll also, I think, have noticed this week that I announced my retirement from Pan American Silver after 27 years since I founded it in 1994. The time was right, and Pan American is now a major global mining company with great management and outstanding mining and growth assets. It's just good governance, I think, to have managed succession, and I didn't want to stay beyond my best beyond date and -- or best before date I should say. When we started Equinox Gold at the end of 2017, though, I was very public in saying this was going to be my last company out of the 15 or so that I founded over the years. My very first company was Equinox Resources, which went from 1985 to 1994. And this will be my last company, I said that when we started Equinox Gold and I remain feeling that today. I certainly don't want to be working on this company for the next 27 years. So this time, I'm going very quick and very hard to build a major global gold company. My message today is so far, so good. This is our third anniversary -- or fourth anniversary, I should say, of our founding at the end of 2017. And I think you'll agree with me when we go through today's guidance and today's discussion that we've done a pretty good job of hitting our milestones that we set out at the very start. So every year, we do this report card. We provide a guidance, of course. We'll do that again today. We did this a year ago. And it's almost -- for me, it's almost -- I almost lose breath talking about what we did this year because we did so much. It was just simply a spectacular year. Christian is going to discuss the 2021 targets in a short while, but I wanted to go over what we said we wanted to do a year ago and what we actually did 1 year hence. Let's start with operations. We said we were going to produce 425,000 to 465,000 ounces of gold, and we actually hit about 477,000 ounces by the end of 2020. Our aim for cost was in the $975 to $1,000 per ounce range, and we expect to hit that guidance very resoundingly. We had acquired Leagold at the end of 2019 or we had announced the deal. We actually wrapped that deal up in about March of 2020, and that added 4 producing mines and a big development stage project, the Santa Luz project in Brazil. We said we wanted to build Castle Mountain and start production by the end of 2020, and we hit commercial production on November 23. And of course, it was a very, very difficult year across the operational base because of COVID, but we managed to run all of our operations without impairing the health and economic well-being of our employees. On the development front, again, we had a number of very ambitious targets for development. We wanted to advance our Castle Mountain phase 2 expansion. We're very much on track for that, and that should be announced very shortly in 2021. We said we wanted to commence construction of the fifth mine of ours in Brazil, the Santa Luz mine, and we did announce that on November 9 and full construction is currently underway. We wanted to advance the Los Filos expansion projects, where we have many, many opportunities for growth. While we did update the mine plan, reserves and the CIL design, we're going to be targeting announcing those results in Q1. We did have a hiccup midyear when the community -- the Carrizalillo community blockaded the mine for several months, and that certainly slowed us down at Los Filos. But on the whole, the expansion projects are being well engineered and well underway, and we're going to be able to tell the market what's going on there very shortly. And of course, we have very exciting potential at Aurizona in the Aurizona mine in Brazil underground, underneath the open pit. And we expect to have a very long-life underground mine there someday. To confirm the economics, we did a lot more drilling. We completed a positive preliminary feasibility -- preliminary economic assessment there, showing good numbers, good rate of return, good NPV. So that's going to continue along the development line. And on the exploration front, we explored everywhere we had opportunity to. We expanded the Mesquite mine. We tripled the -- sorry, doubled the mine life. Extended the Aurizona mine life. We upgraded the underground Aurizona resources, as I said. So we had all of these operational development and exploration milestones, pretty much hitting every single one. We also made a lot of progress on the sort of corporate and market front. As everybody will know, we -- the reason we acquired Leagold was to bulk up, build scale. And we did that for all sorts of reasons, having to do with better multiples, better liquidity, and we absolutely hit those targets. You will have seen when we started the Leagold deal, we were trading at around $6 or $7 or $7 or $8 a share. We hit $18 during the course of the year as the market really embraced that transaction. We strengthened our balance sheet, refinanced our debt with about $500 million corporate credit facility at lower interest rates. We focused on -- of course, on keeping our employees and our staff healthy. We had a good year on the environmental incident side, on the health and safety side. We commenced something that's very, very important for all companies today, which is ESG reporting. And we should be having updates on this all through 2021 as well. And of course, we've maintained a healthy treasury. We have a very low general and administrative costs relative to other peers in the industry. We're trying to be a frugal company and a lean company. And we have a total liquidity today of more than USD 600 million. Of course, the market increased as we got bigger, and we increased our trading liquidity dramatically from an average trading liquidity of about $3 million in 2019 to more than $40 million, and in fact, it's quite a bit higher coming out of 2020 into 2021. We have been added to the GDX, the GDXJ, the S&P/TSX index and the FTSE Small-Cap index. And we significantly increased our institutional ownership from 29% to 55% of our common shares. In terms of growth, of course, we had a massive year of growth, but it's also positioning us for even more amounts of growth coming ahead. We have completed the Leagold deal late in the year. Exactly 1 year after we announced the Leagold deal, we announced the acquisition of Premier Gold Mines. It's a great outset, a great bolt-on company for us, adding another country, a solid, ready-to-build asset in Canada, good management team, some tremendous upside at multiple assets, including the new company that Premier is going to start -- Premier management is going to start, which is called i-80. So all sorts of opportunities there. And we strengthened our leadership team, bringing in new people, some new diversity on our Board, 2 female appointees on the Board. And we're, again, trying to have not only the E and the S, but also the G in the ESG mandate, which is so critical today. So it was just a fabulous year, and I look forward to another incredible year this year. If you look at this slide, it really says it all. This is sort of a 5- or 6-year growth record of Equinox Gold. It includes current production. You saw in -- you see there in 2018, we produced about 25,000 ounces in that year. In 2019, we produced about 175,000, 180,000 ounces. We added the Aurizona mine that we built. In 2020, we added the Leagold transaction, and we completed construction at Castle Mountain. So we ended the year that we just announced today -- sorry, we announced earlier in January, 477,000 ounces of gold production. Next year -- or pardon me, this year, we're on track for between 600,000, 650,000 ounces, as we guided today, and Christian will talk more about that. But then you can see those next couple of years is spectacular growth that we have in front of us, getting us to more than 1 million ounces of gold production a year and north of that and upward from that. So this is a -- I think it's a growth profile that's really unparalleled in the gold industry, a company coming out of nowhere, starting at the beginning of 2018, impressive growth, and I'll explain why we're doing this in a few minutes. Let's really talk about gold because if there's any reason that we're going big quickly, it's because I'm extremely bullish on the macro outlook for gold. I think we are living in a time right now where in my -- I've been running public companies now since the mid '80s. For 35 years, I can't think of a time when we had a more bullish macro outlook for higher gold prices. So in that market, you just can't be big enough when you're trying to build a gold company. Every single dollar the gold price goes up, magnifies your value gain if you're a bigger company. If you produce more gold, if you have more gold reserves and resources in your capital assets, you're just worth more, and I think the market today rewards that. It also rewards scale like it's never done before. There is so much more trading liquidity and value recognition as a company gets bigger, as it becomes lower risk, as it develops a better balance sheet, as it can withstand turmoil in markets. So typically, these larger companies trade for higher multiples. And so the very active getting bigger creates wealth by itself. So we had a very ambitious goal when we started Equinox Gold to go big fast, and I have to say, I think we're hitting it extremely well. And we're also getting the gold market right. One of the reasons that I was so keen on building a big new gold company is because I feel we're in really a secular bull market for gold that's got very, very long-lasting fundamentals. Just look at what's happening today. You have this secular uptrend. It began in the first quarter of 2016, and it's very much intact today. I wouldn't be surprised to see gold blow through its previous high of over $2,000 an ounce later this year or sometime this year and go to new highs. Of course, not all markets go straight up. There will be corrections, and we're having -- we've had a correction for the last few months. But we're back in an uptrend, and I think it's strong, and it's going to continue. If anything, it's much stronger than I would have expected a year ago before COVID hit. But with all of this incredible stimulus, these expansionary economic plans of government to try to juice their markets, get things going again, pumping money into the system, devaluing their currencies, that is a perfect scenario for an asset like gold that for 5,000 years has held its purchasing power against all fiat currencies. This is one of the great strengths of gold. It maintains its value relative to paper currency and typically increases its value relative to favorite currencies that are being devalued and debased as governments just go banana's borrowing money, inflating their balance sheets themselves. So we've seen this just explosion of stimulus, and I think gold was a big beneficiary of that last year. And it's not over, and it's going to continue to be a big beneficiary of that this year. You have negative interest rates, negative real rates in most -- for most bonds are negative now. And particularly, if inflation picks up. I mean why anybody would hold bonds today is beyond my ken. It's -- why hold an asset that you have to pay people to borrow from? It's nuts compared to other assets like gold, which I think have this tremendous long-term store value. I think we're going to head to higher inflation times at some point in 2021 as well. I just think it's unavoidable as more people have more devalued money and tend to get it into the economy, into the system. All of a sudden, they're going to realize, wait a minute, building products are crazy higher, food is more expensive, everything is more expensive. I'm going to start buying things and buying more and more, and that's what juices inflation. And I think you're going to see some signs of that this year, which will be very, very, very good for gold. And of course, I think all of this is in an environment where gold and the U.S. dollar have typically traded inversely to each other. As the U.S. dollar gets stronger, gold tends to get weaker. That's been a 50- or 60-year trend. And the reverse is true too. And I think we're now -- the U.S. dollar is weakening, and it's going to be weakening against gold. Gold will appreciate against the U.S. dollar. I see that trend continuing for a long time. And in all of that macro reality, the other reality is that very few investment funds actually hold gold. So to the extent that the gold case can be made for generalist investors, as it was Q2 last year when gold sailed through $2,000 an ounce, I think you're going to see another great -- glorious running goal at some point in 2021, 2022. So that's the demand side. But on the supply side, a lot of people forget about the supply side. Gold supply for mines is actually decreasing, and this comes after you see that gold price chart. Gold has actually done pretty well since 2009. It's actually done very well. In this environment, you'd expect a lot more gold production. It hasn't happened. Gold production in 2019 and 2020 was actually down from previous years. Why is that? It's because exploration funding has been constrained over the last 4 or 5 years. Reserve replacement is slow, but more fundamentally, it's just tough. It's a tough business. It's very tough these days to build new mines. It's tough to get social license. It's tough to get countries to agree on reasonable taxation rates. It's just a tough game. Things that would have taken -- mines that would have taken sort of 5 years to build from exploration through to development 10 or 20 years ago, today, they take 20 years. So it's a very different world. Supply is constrained. Demand is growing. It's a perfect formula for gold prices to stay higher for longer. So I think it's the right time to build a major gold company, and we're doing that. As I said earlier, the market rewards scale and diversification. And when you have an environment like we've created here with Equinox Gold. In a very short period, we've come out of nowhere. We've built this great base, this tremendous, solid base, financial base, operating base, management base with upside all over the map. We have upside in our tremendous production growth story. We have upside in our huge reserves and resources. We have more than 25 million ounces now in reserves and resources. That's an incredible capital base to build on for future years. It allows us to continue this growth for many, many years. We have all of this exploration upside in all of our assets, and we're going to hit those this year. We're going to be completing the Premier acquisition in about a month, maybe 1.5 months. That's going to build value. We have all of -- we have all the money we need. We don't need to finance anymore. We've got tremendous operating cash flow and a great balance sheet. So I just see us being able to hit all of these targets we set ourselves out and increase our multiples as we get bigger. So today, we're trading for around 0.55x net asset value. We'll be going up to 0.8, over 1, and I'll explain that in just a second as I show you some other companies to sort of understand where I think we're going to go. Now just a word about ESG. Christian is going to talk a little bit more about this, but I just have to say it's just something we believe in. It's a profoundly important thing that, number one, we have employees that go home safely every single day that we look after. We have communities that support us, that work with us. National governments that we pay fair taxes to and we work with constructively. We don't damage the environment. We try to minimize our environmental footprint. Of course, no mine is a pristine thing. No mine is free from some environmental damage. It's inevitable, just the subdivisions, roads and railways, every other part of human existence damages the environment somehow. But we can minimize it, and we're working very hard to minimize it with good tailings management, good waste control. Everywhere we operate, this ESG commitment is real. Now we did have a problem this year. We had a blockade at one of our mines. It was -- quite frankly, I'm very puzzled this happened. I can't -- I just don't really understand why it happened. It may have been a legacy thing. It may have been something we did, I don't know. But the dispute is almost completely over. We're still flushing a couple of things in the agreement. It's not yet signed, but we're still -- we're working very hard with the community on this, and it should be signed, and the mine is back in operation. But we work very hard to avoid these things. It really means a lot to us to have the S in the ESG -- in the ESG subject, the S is social, and we really try to focus on minimizing social problems, working with the communities. It's very important. So it was very disappointing we had this problem at the Los Filos mine. It's really set us back some months. But hopefully, we'll go into the future with a much better track record of social relevance at that mine and at all of our other operations. So Christian is going to report more on this in his section shortly. So this title is kind of a silly title. But really, Equinox, I think, is the growiest gold company in the world. I mean I don't know of any other gold company anywhere with our growth track record. I keep talking about growth. There's nothing magic about growth particularly, but I do think it adds value per se. And if you can do it successfully -- and I have to say, it's one thing to say you want to grow. It's a very different thing to do it. It's a tough game. Acquisitions don't come easily. But I think so far, we've demonstrated that we look for value and not simply growth. We are actually trying to build value here for shareholders over the long term. This bubble chart, though, if you look at it, it shows those sort of gold dots, which are Equinox Gold's production estimates. So in 2020, we produced about 470,000 ounces, as I said. So that put us in that particular group of companies at that gold production level. As we get bigger, as we produce more, for example, 2021, we'll be about 600,000, 650,000 in that range, as we've guided today. And then 2022, around 900,000. 2023, 2024, closer to over 1 million ounces. As we go to the right on that side, we also expect to go higher on that slide. We have a higher price to net asset value ratio. And so we'll see how this plays out, but I'm very convinced that the Equinox Gold is trading at the low end right now and is going to end 2021 trading much higher, both on a relative basis and an absolute basis. And so I really look forward to that happening and reporting to you all a year from now on how we've done once again. My last slide is -- my section here is going to be really just transferring the call over to Christian. But none of the stuff we've done, building a major company out of nothing in 3 short years, it can't be done without people. People are the #1, #2 and #3 part of the success of a company. And I just want to take my hat off, and I hope every single shareholder and interested party here on this call today appreciates just how smart these guys are, how good they are and how dedicated there to building value for our company. We have Christian Milau at the helm, our CEO. Right beside them, almost literally is Greg Smith in the office, Greg Smith, our President. Greg handles all of our strategic development, our business development. They're both [ superstar ]. And then Doug Reddy on the operating side, Doug joined us from Leagold midyear last year. Very, very happy to have him, and he's really adding some incredible depth and strengths to the operating team. And he's leading all of the development plans, all of the construction operations and of course, current operations at all of our mines. And then we have Peter Hardie, who -- again, he's sort of an unsung hero. He sits in the back, and he just makes sure that our money is sound, that our operations are well managed financially, that we have enough capital to do what we're doing. Again, a tremendous asset to the whole team. Another person who's very much part of the senior team, but in the background more is Susan Toews, who is our General Counsel. And I can tell you that none of what we have done really across the board from our applications to the New York Stock Exchange for listing to the -- all the financings we've done, the reorganization of our debt, all of the transactions, the mergers, the acquisition we've done, none of them could have happened without the strength of Susan in the -- yes, as General Counsel, handling all the deals. And then, of course, you know Rhylin Bailie, I'm sure, who does all of our IR and public relations. She's the superstar on the IR front, and she's doing a wonderful job, too. And of course, these people simply just -- they're just the tip of the iceberg. There's 6,000 people in Equinox that work in our whole team, and each and every one of them is working to build value for our business and for our stockholders. So with that summary of 2020 and my little discussion about gold here, I'm going to turn the call over to Christian who's going to get into the weeds a bit and talk about specific operations, the guidance and some other things. And then we'll come back for questions, and I can carry on a little bit more. So over to you, Christian.

Great. Thanks, Ross. I have to reiterate, yes, it really is a team effort, and that's what makes it a lot of fun here, too. It's a great group of people and really dedicated as owners of this business as well. And as Ross mentioned, we're creating this diversified platform to grow from, and we're on our way to becoming a larger gold mining company. And here on Slide 12, I think this is a really good indicator of now where we stand. This is a diversified platform. The 4 countries are well represented, and we're really focused on expanding these assets. So we've got about 1/4 of the value in, call it, the reserves, resources as well in each of these 4 countries. Even though they're different scale assets, all of them have growth. Not any single region is exclusive of growth here. Even Mesquite that people doubted we could grow has extended its mine life. So we're really excited about the platform, and we can continue to grow it and evolve it. And as Ross said, we produced just under 500,000 ounces last year. We'll do 650,000 or so this year. That's almost a 33% increase, moving towards 900,000 ounces in 2022 and 1 million and beyond that period of time. And really, that point, at the end of 2021, as we move into 2022, is a really exciting point when we're getting very close to that 1 million ounce mark, which was a goal we set a few years ago. Looking at the more specific guidance here on Slide #13. It's a big investment year. We're pretty upfront about that. This year is a year that we're actively and consciously investing in almost all of our assets. We're exploring. We've got a multiyear exploration platform in place now. We're putting about $400 million of capital into our assets. So we really expect to start to reap the rewards from that later this year. We don't even need to wait until 2022. And our balance sheet is in a really strong place, as Ross alluded to. We believe that investing in this balance sheet and some of our operating cash flow back into the business has really attractive returns. And dividends are just going to have to wait a little bit longer here. We'll certainly have them on the horizon, but in the immediate term, we can get some very good returns from reinvesting. And when you look at the overall production guidance, 600,000 to 665,000 ounces, it's more back-end weighted. About 30% of those ounces will come out in Q4, about 55% in H2. Our cash costs are about $940 to $1,000 an ounce. They're slightly elevated this year. There's slightly more conservative assumptions on the FX rates, fuel costs and consumables. As well, the all-in sustaining cost is a little bit higher. We're really putting some sustaining capital investment into our mines to really set the platform for 2022 and onwards. And what you'll see on the all-in sustaining cost is a lot of that investment goes in, in quarter 1 and 2 and a little bit into Q3. So that as we move throughout the year, you'll see a quarter-on-quarter improvement generally across the mines as we start to reap the rewards in the later part of this year. The one line that really sort of sticks out, obviously, it was impacted most from previous expectations was Los Filos, as Ross said. We lost, give or take, 9 months of 2020. We had a quarter where the COVID suspension by the Mexican government had us down and not operating. And then we also had about 3.5 months, maybe 4 months of that community blockade, which was resolved there in the end of December. So we lost a period of stripping and underground development to access higher grades in both Guadalupe open pit and the Bermejal underground. So we're having to do that this year. So we've had to defer and push on that cost. So we're operating at a more elevated cost and a slightly lower production profile than we want to get to. And so the longer-term goal is 300,000 to 400,000 ounces a year at $1,000 an ounce or below. So we're going to put the investment in this year, and then we'll be moving towards that kind of goal starting in 2022. Looking individually at the assets, I mentioned Los Filos here. And looking at it a little more closely, I'll touch on the actual situation there and the current update. We put it back into operation in late December. As Ross said, we've virtually agreed most of the items in the new social collaboration agreement with the community leaders. The 2 sticky points that I mentioned, I think, on the last webcast were employment and contracts related to the growth in this business and the areas of growth that we'll have, particularly Bermejal underground. Those areas have been actually resolved verbally, and we're just in the final discussions over dispute resolution mechanisms. Not an easy topic, but that's a key thing for us in the future. We want to know that we have a long-standing partnership with the community there as well as the other 2 communities that are in the region to make sure everything is fair and everything is buttoned down before we start investing in Bermejal underground and the CIL plant. So basically, 2021 is a transitional year. Slightly lower grades. The grade for the open pit is about 0.75. It's not 1 and above, which it will be once we get into Guadalupe as our main source of ore. So we're still reprocessing some materials, still mining from the Los Filos open pit. We're also going to be moving to open up the Bermejal underground once we get started there. So late in the year, we'll be getting higher grades from that. So this year, from the Los Filos underground, our grades are more in the 3.6 gram range. They will go slightly higher as we get into Bermejal late in the year and into 2020. But it sets us up for a strong 2022 of 300,000 to 400,000 ounces and around $1,000 all-in. So we're going to be excited to get towards the end of this year, where this mine hopefully should be in a great place to launch into 2022. And as you look at the production of 170,000 to 190,000 ounces this year, again, it's back-end weighted as we open up those higher-grade sources. So about 1/3 of the ounces come out in Q4 and about 60% in the second half of the year. And we'll have a little bit of exploration here, about $5 million. So it's a bit smaller. We've got a long life of 10 years already. Looking at Mesquite. Again, I think in the last call, I mentioned it's just had a great, great performance. Scott and the team have done a great job of extending the mine life there. Tom has done a great job of turning the asset around. And it will have a similar year to 2020, about 130,000 to 140,000 ounces. Again, similar to Los Filos, it will be back-end weighted. We'll have about 40% of the ounces coming out in Q4. So very heavily weighted to Q4. And the big activities this year, we'll be stripping Brownie, which is the open pit. The $30 million put into that as well as expanding the leach pad, and we see that as a really great problem. We need more leach pad space because we've extended its mine life. And basically, there will be about a $200 per ounce impact from those 2 individual items that'll be increasing the costs on a temporary basis. At Castle Mountain, this is the first full year of operations. 30,000 to 40,000 ounces. So it's a smaller first phase. All-in sustaining costs are a little bit elevated this year because we're going to do all of the leach pad expansion basically for phase 1. So basically go in one big shot, cover it off. It will have about a $250 an ounce impact for the year. And then going forward from 2022 onwards, we'll see the all-in sustaining costs revert more to the normal expectations there. Small exploration of about $1 million because we've already got a 16-year mine life here. Turning to the Brazilian assets on the next slide. Aurizona, a similar year to 2020, 120,000 to 30,000 ounces. The big change here is there is a little bit more fresh rock coming in. About 23% of the ore feed will be from fresh rock versus 14% in 2020. We did have to defer about 8 million tonnes of stripping. So our stripping campaign is fairly large this year at $27 million due to that deferral from 2020. We think we're much better positioned during the rains. And actually, so far this year, I think we're 30-or-so percent ahead in terms of stripping in January. So a really good start to the year on that front. That stripping campaign is about $215 an ounce. So again, a sort of temporary elevated cost related to that specific item. And we'll spend about $15 million on the TSF raise. Aurizona will continue to get exploration dollars, about $7 million in exploration, land acquisition and a study. The underground PFS should come out in the second half of this year. We hope to add to the reserve and resource as well with continued drilling, and we'll also be exploring some targets around the 25-kilometer mark from the current line. So should be an exciting year for Aurizona. Fazenda and RDM, somewhat of a similar year as to this prior year that we just completed in 2020 in terms of production. The big change, I guess, really comes at RDM, where we're expanding the pit. We got the pit expansion license late last year, and now we're going to put all the effort into this. And our mining contract will be moving a lot of tonnes this year. There's $35 million going to be hit in terms of the waste stripping. So that will have the impact of opening up new ore sources and getting to some better grades for future years. There will be about $10 million of exploration between Fazenda and Santa Luz, and that's a 70-kilometer greenstone belt between the 2. We're really excited about that district for us. As Equinox, we're fairly new to this. Doug obviously has lots of experience here, and we really like what we see there. So we're going to put some money towards it, really make a big effort to extend those mine lives. RDM will get about $2 million of exploration. And then Pilar, sort of more of a steady as she goes, similar to last year, sort of the elevated cost, it's a smaller mine. We'll put about $2 million into exploration there. Looking at the growth and development projects on the next slide. This is where the real excitement comes. Los Filos, as we said, this will be a 350,000 ounce producer for, well, at least a decade, probably a few decades to come here as we get it expanded. We're just doing the new updated study for the 8,000 tonne per day CIL plant. That should be done around the end of quarter 1. So I'm going to say that will be released in the first half of this year. And the thing that I'm really excited about there is that the reserves and resources currently see a 10-year mine life, but I really do see an opportunity to add to that mine life in that study and maybe 1 million ounces plus could be added. So we'll be excited to get that out and share that with you in probably the early part of quarter 2. And then later in this year, based on the back of that study and getting the agreement signed, et cetera, we will be able to start CIL plant construction, which will get us up to that full-scale expanded mine. And then Santa Luz construction, it's ongoing. It's going well. We're probably about 1/4 of the way through already. Hopefully, start mining around the end of quarter 1 here, and we'll get a good update out with some photos. Remember, it's just a low-CapEx, $100 million build that will be done by the end of this year. So it's a pretty quick process. A lot of the infrastructure is already there, and the team from Aurizona, a lot of the senior members are there rebuilding this mine. Castle Mountain expansion. We're just updating the feasibility study there. That should be done around the end of quarter 1. We'll get that out to you in the public markets. And again, we've got a 3.6 million ounce deposit, 16-year mine life, and we only see upside in that, and we hope to be adding to the reserves and the mine life in that study. Then we'll be starting the permitting around midyear. We are assuming it's about a 3-year permit process to amend that permit, and then we can construct and get that mine up and running at about 200,000 ounces per year. Looking a little more deeply into the capital here, I do want to highlight the key items. It's a big expenditure year at about $400 million. The key items that jump out, obviously, in the sustaining capital front, we're doing the open pit waste stripping and the underground development, which will be about $22 million in total. We will be rebuilding the fleet and acquiring a bit of processing equipment. That sets us up for this growth and the ability to mine more and to basically expand this whole region effectively around Los Filos. Mesquite has that big Brownie strip of $30 million and the leach pad expansion of $10 million. We're also leasing a new truck fleet. It would have cost us $40 million of capital, but we're leasing it. We've extended that mine life. It originally had a 2.5-year mine life, it still has about a 2.5- to 3-year mine life after having mined out 2.5 years. And Scott's goal, I know at the end of this year, is to still have a 3 to -- maybe even up to 5-year mine life as we go into 2022. So we still see that upside. We've made the real commitment to invest in it, and it's really going to pay off, we think, in the near term here. Castle Mountain, the leach pad expansion is about $9 million. That's for all of phase 1. So that's the big push this year, and then you see the real benefits of that in our costs next year. Aurizona, the big waste stripping program I mentioned and the tailings dam lift. And when you look at the nonsustaining capital, the big items are really around Los Filos, where we're going to be opening up the Bermejal underground for about $48 million, Guadalupe open pit for $10 million and some of those fleet rebuilds and new equipment for another $25 million. Mesquite, it will all be about exploration on the nonsustaining front. That will be about $9 million. Castle Mountain, it will be about the feasibility study and the permitting for about $7 million. And Aurizona, really small but mostly related to exploration. And then the big pit expansion in RDM for about $35 million. So that sets us up really for a platform of 900,000 ounces in 2022 and 1 million ounces beyond 2022. So really a key investment year for us. Looking at the actual more near-term topical events here. Obviously, the Premier Gold acquisition was announced in December. Just to refresh, we'll be acquiring Premier's interest in the Hardrock asset or project, which is a 50% stake. Orion will be our partner there. We'll have the Mercedes Mine coming in, in Mexico. It's about 50,000 ounces a year with expansion potential. The Red Lake assets, being Hasaga and Rahill-Bonanza. And also we'll be completing a $75 million financing on the back of that underwritten by Ross, and we hope to finalize that around the closing of the transaction in March. The exciting other part is, obviously, we've been quite key in helping support new companies spun-out of our platform. Solaris has had a great start. It's moved from about a $50 million market cap up to about $600 million. Ewan will be taking the Nevada-based assets of Premier, spinning them out, hopefully list it right around the time of closing. And currently implied in the Premier share price is a value of almost USD 250 million. So they're getting real buy into that story already even before the completion of this merger. And the Premier vote will be on February 23. The antitrust in Mexico COFECE, we're hoping in March. We don't have an exact date on that, which will drive ultimately the closing in March and spin out of i-80 Gold. Quickly flipping through the Premier assets a little more closely. Remember, Hardrock is in Ontario, great infrastructure, right along the Trans-Canada highway. It's almost a 5.5 million ounce deposit. We'll have about 50% of that. Orion will have the other 50%. In the long term, they are our financial partners. So our goal would be to own a bit more than 50% eventually. And our attributable production will be over 200,000 ounces, we'll have half of that 414,000 ounces. We've got community agreements in place. It's permitted for construction. Feasibility is updated. Exploration ground is nearby to extend mine life. So that initial [ 40-year ] mine life is just to start. And we're really, really pleased to have the project team. Eric and his team there in Ontario have built a number of Agnico Eagle Mines in more remote locations than this in Northern Canada, and they're ready to go later this year. Looking at Hardrock versus other open pit deposits, one of the highest-grade deposits in Canada, about 400,000 ounces a year. So a good, chunky production base. It's fully financed, and it's ready to go. Looking on Page 21 here, the other assets. Mercedes Mine in Mexico, it's 50,000 ounces. Its all-in costs will be around $1,000 an ounce. The expansion potential is there towards 80,000 or 90,000 ounces. That mill is capable of doing about 2,000 tonnes per day. So we'll get a good chance to look at that as the acquisition completes. Hasaga in Red Lake, we really do like it. I know Scott spent a bit of time looking at it. There's a bit of excitement around that property. And then the Rahill-Bonanza is also in Red Lake, but it's a JV with Evolution, sort of sandwiched there between Evolution's ground. So obviously, a very prospective piece of property. And I've already talked about the i-80 Gold assets being spun-out. We'll own 30% of that. We'll support them on their initial financing, and we really think Ewan could create some real value with focus on basically Nevada-based properties. There's 3 of them there. Stepping back now, looking at the larger picture here. And I do like this slide. It really puts us in there amongst our peers. And if you look at the right 3 hand graphs, we're moving towards 1 million ounces plus a year of production, 15 million ounces of reserves, 28 million ounces of resource. And those are going to grow this year. Castle Mountain, Los Filos, Mesquite, Aurizona, all have great potential to grow this year in terms of resources and reserves. And then you look at our growth, top of the peer chart, as Ross said, we're the growiest company here at 70% plus. And then you look at our multiple on the far left. And our job really here as a management team is to execute this year and over the next 12 to 18 months, show that we can execute on these growth projects and deliver that value in that rerating. And we really believe we should get that rerating towards that 1x multiple, which is a big move in the share price. And we're really excited about this year and moving towards that exciting 900,000 ounce a year in 2022. Looking at the balance sheet. Ross alluded to it, we have $600 million of liquidity. That's about $400 million of cash. $200 million available on a revolver. Very low leverage ratio. On a basis -- on a bank debt basis to EBITDA, we're at almost a 0 ratio right now. There's lots of potential to finance whatever we're doing. Operating cash flow continues to grow year-on-year, and we also have about $250 million in our investments in Solaris and i-80. So really, really strong balance sheet puts us in a great place to make the decisions that are necessary to grow the business, not to capital constrain our assets. And then looking at 2021 objectives and turning to the future here. As Ross said, HS&E, health and safety, ESG, are really important. I'm going to touch on that in the next slide. So I'll just mention that here. We plan to meet our guidance, obviously. That's one of our key objectives here, setting realistic guidance, even in these sort of challenging markets where we've had these COVID environment. Our development is probably one of our key boxes here on this slide. It's all about execution this year. Los Filos feasibility, advancing the expansion. Castle Mountain feasibility, commencing the permitting for the expansion. Santa Luz construction. Hardrock construction may be commencing at the end of basically the Santa Luz construction period, so there's not much of an overlap there. And then getting the prefeasibility study out in Aurizona underground. So we've got good discrete teams there with some good oversight from corporate. We believe that each of those is almost a stand-alone team, so we can manage those multiple projects as we go. Exploration, Scott has a $36 million, $37 million program this year. That will be multiyear focused, mostly on assets that have shorter mine lives. But we're really excited about what we see there, and finally now, he's getting the capital to go and look at those assets more closely. And then corporately, we're closing the Premier Gold transaction. We're going to look to integrate the team there. We'll also be supporting our investment companies in Solaris and i-80, and we'll still keep an eye out on the market, as we've been opportunistic in the past. It's a little bit lower priority. We're more focused on our inward sort of growth and development, but we're certainly not going to turn a blind eye to the market as well. So an ambitious year, a busy year going forward. And as Ross said, ESG is really a critical component here on the next slide. And we've taken stock of where we're at as a combined company since the Leagold merger. We've been able to hopefully articulate things that we're doing well. There's a few areas we're not doing so well where we haven't set baselines yet. We selected standards to report to World Gold Council. We've joined MAC. We're really getting up the curve in terms of our reporting standards that we want to be meeting. And also, we've got our initial ESG ratings. Our goal is really to improve those this year. And a lot of it's about disclosure. Our website now has quarterly updates on ESG metrics. We're increasing disclosure that we'll be putting out quarterly. We're looking to put out our first annual report as well this year. So really a step change in terms of disclosure coming. And a couple of the key focus areas, which really tie into a lot of our projects and that we're excited about. Areas around greenhouse gas emissions has become such a critical topic. But we're looking at all of our projects, our fleets, ways that we can manage that, setting our baselines and targets and seeing how we can improve. We're looking at filtered dry stack tails, particularly in our new projects, some of our Brazilian assets, where it's very sensitive. We're looking at hydroelectric power, solar power in a couple of our projects. We're also looking at new truck fleets. Mesquite is a great example. Our emissions will reduce. Our costs will reduce. The efficiency, the repairs and maintenance will reduce. So all of those actually are good, smart business activities, but they're also great for, hopefully, our ESG platform and our long-term sustainability. And then looking at the governance piece. As Ross mentioned, it's certainly an important piece, and it's really dear to my heart as well. Management think of ourselves as owners of this business. We sit here with you the shareholders as significant owners in our own right of this business. And with Ross' ownership and our own, we have about 8.5% of the shares. So all the decisions really impact us personally. So we have a long-term view here. We do have to manage quarter-to-quarter, but a lot of our decisions, and particularly this year with all the capital investment, is about setting up a great long-term platform. It's not just about delivering numbers on a quarter-by-quarter basis. It's about actually putting together a business that will see us through the ups and downs over the cycle. So what we've seen this year, and you can see in the donut charts there, is a real evolution. As Ross mentioned in our liquidity, it's up significantly to sort of that $50 million mark. We're much more diversified geographically. We found that actually the COVID environment and the electronic Zoom-type meetings and that have allowed us to reach out to Asia, to Australia, to places we had not been to before. And we think we've gained some traction and gained some new shareholders in those places as well. So we're pretty excited about what we've been able to do. I am looking forward to shaking hands hopefully 1 day again with people in Europe and the Americas and Australasia as well. And then really the last concluding slide. In summary, I just want to say thanks to the team for a great year in 2020 and support of the Board and for you the shareholders. And really, 2021, the focus will be on execution. There's big investments. We plan to deliver on all those targets again. And 2022 will be a really exciting year. And I just don't see how we can't get this rerating if we can just execute this year over the next 12 to 18 months. It's going to be fine when we have the 8 mines and 4 projects in place and 1 million ounces of production with a strong balance sheet in a gold environment that seems to be extremely supportive here. So I'd like to just turn it back to Ross before we go to questions.

Thank you, Christian. I don't have any further comments at all. I think you did a great job running through things. We have -- we're going a little bit longer this year than we did last year because we have a lot more to talk about. So I think we've done that, and I think it's time to turn the call over to anybody who's got questions. Thank you all for joining us.

Perfect. Thank you. Operator, can you please remind our listeners how to ask a question?

[Operator Instructions]

Thank you very much. I'll take a question from online. The first question comes from Ryan Thompson, who's our analyst at BMO. Please provide an update on the Los Filos CIL plant. Does 2021 capital guidance include that capital? Or is it expected in 2022?

Yes. I mean I can take that one. No, it does not include the capital for the CIL plant build. We'll get that actual capital number in total out with the study around the end of quarter 1 and we'd make a construction decision on that some point, call it, maybe early Q3 at earliest, I think, in our Board meeting there. And then we'd indicate what the capital spend would be for this year, but it will only be for a partial year if we get going later in this year.

Thank you. Another question from Ryan. Does the company expect to spend significant CapEx in 2021 at Hardrock? Or will construction kick off in 2022?

Yes. That's another good question. Let's get the acquisition complete. The guys there have a good budget and basically have been setting up the project to go and do some early works. So I think you'll see certainly some modest spend over the next 3 to 6 months as they get the project ready for that kind of official construction start. And I think you could call official construction sort of in the second half of this year as we also get Santa Luz complete. So the idea would be Santa Luz is basically done physically later this year, you're kind of launching into the spend of Hardrock later this year, and once that's done, you'd have Castle Mountain. So there's a nice sequencing of our projects. I don't really want to speculate too much in the exact spend for this year, but it could easily be in the $50 million to $75 million mark, but that's not official guidance yet.

Thank you. We'll take a question from the phone, please.

The next question comes from Kerry Smith with Haywood Securities.

I just had a follow-up on the Los Filos negotiations, Christian. So it sounds like the issues that you had around contracting out and employment you've settled verbally, it sounds like. And is it that won't get actually formalized into a document until you agree on a dispute resolution, so the dispute resolution is kind of the last step here then?

Yes. I mean it's probably actually a little further longer than that. We do -- everything as they get sort of settled, they do end up in a written agreement here. But until you have the final signature, I'd say it's not absolutely final. And really the key last outstanding item at the moment is dispute resolution mechanism, and it's an important item. So we're sort of saying it's not completely done until it's done. But I am very pleased to see the employment and the contracts have been, I think, reasonably negotiated where it leaves some fair distribution among the various communities as well.

And in the agreement that you had previously with the community, I presume there was a dispute resolution mechanism. Is the likely outcome of this dispute resolution to be fairly close to that? Or are they looking at completely revamping the dispute resolution mechanism and it's a completely new negotiation? Like I'm just wondering if it's kind of an amendment to what you had or if it's something much more detailed than that.

I think the whole thing is kind of an amendment to a social collaboration agreement we still have in place and exists. I'd say the whole thing is kind of an amendment. It isn't a complete revamp of everything. Obviously, we're trying to have it as workable as possible with as much sort of mediation third-party involvement to allow dispute mechanism resolution to happen in a very sort of transparent way. Obviously, the communities would prefer or the leaders would prefer to have as much control over that decision-making as possible, and we'd probably prefer the same on our side. But something that's fair that allows sort of almost a mediation style or at least a grievance process that can be managed is much preferable. People have asked, is there a chance of a blockade in the future? There's -- you can never say never, but I think one thing that we've done here is we've taken the long road of actually trying to resolve this so that there's a way forward that's fair to everyone, that it's clear, that it's well understood. And again, we're not agreeing to things that in principle or ethics, we can't agree to here, and we're not just sort of increasing benefits so that we sort of pay them to get back to work here. We want a resolution that works for us over the longer term.

Okay. And then, obviously, that same agreement would flow through to the other 2 communities, I presume. Is that how you're planning?

Yes. They're not exactly the same, but it will be similar, yes.

We've got lots of questions on the webcast. So one is coming from an investor in Austria. Can you please talk about Solaris? And then a couple of other questions people have asked are just what are your long-term plans for that Solaris investment.

I don't know if -- Greg, do you want to comment on Solaris?

Yes. Sure, Christian. I mean if you go back through some of the news releases, which you can get at solarisresources.com, you'll see that the company raised a fairly significant amount of money late last year, early this year and are now embarking on an ambitious, I would say, drill program that's in process now and will continue through the summer. I think that there will be a substantial amount of drilling results coming out over the next 12 months. And I mean, internally here at Equinox, we're really excited about Solaris. They've had some fantastic results that were into project to date, and that's being reflected in the recent raise and the increase in activity. So I mean from an Equinox perspective, very happy with the performance of Solaris, very happy with what they've accomplished and what their plans are and certainly remain supportive. I mean longer term, it's hard to say at this stage. I think at the moment, it's fair to say we remain very supportive, and we participated in that last financing.

A follow-up with that, Christian?

No, that's good answer.

Okay. And another question was what do we plan to do with our i-80 investment?

We don't even own it yet. So once we close it, it spins out, I see it as a similar situation with Solaris here. And we think that through supporting them and helping finance that initial financing and really getting them off the ground. And we have some good U.S. experience, too. We think Ewan and his team, and he's in place, I think, a top-notch Board and the team there that he's just announced recently. We can support them over the next few years as well to create some value. And I think you've seen that just from the date of announcement of Premier transaction with us to now you've seen sort of an implied value start to accrete to that investment. And we think it still got further to go. So we'd like it to sort of spread its wings, be free to kind of do its own thing and become a stand-alone company. And I think the focus on those assets and the attention they'll get through Ewan and his team will create that value, where if they were in our portfolio, there'd be 3, call it, individually of the smaller assets in the portfolio and just wouldn't get the attention. So just like Solaris was, we think once this is free and run by a focused team, it will create some value. And we see a sort of similar trajectory as we're seeing with Solaris right now.

We've got a few questions about sort of analyst consensus pricing, which is around CAD 22 right now. They're wondering if that's based on sort of our corporate targets or more based on a gold price valuation. And why is there such a disconnect in the valuation and how are we going to get that gap to close?

Well, I can speculate a little bit on that. I mean I think analysts have been changing their gold price over this past year, and you've seen it going up, although I suspect a couple have come down just recently. There will be a variation in gold prices for sure and some of their targets. And because we're such a growiey company, as Ross said, it does take a lot of work to get up to speed with all of our assets and as we bring in the new ones with the Premier acquisition. I think what you'll see is, at the moment, it's all about execution, as I said earlier. And a 900,000, 1 million ounce plus producer at around $1,000 all-in cost in the long term here or lower really doesn't trade at 0.55 in the multiple when you've got that diversity across the 4 countries, and these are good mining-friendly jurisdictions. So there's no sure thing in life, but certainly a higher valuation, more in line with our peers has got to be our objective. And 12 to 18 months as we get these new mines into production, and then we show the growth, and we increase the our resources and reserves. Certainly, I put my money behind it. I really believe that we can show that value accretion towards the peer level of that, give or take, 1x multiple instead of 0.55. And so it does take a little bit of patience, and this is where, I would say, we're here for the sort of longer term and we're taking sort of the investment commitment this year to get that midterm growth, and we think it will pay off, and it's better to be spending that money currently on reinvesting those assets at higher returns than giving a small yield in dividend this year. But in the future, obviously, that may change.

Goodness [indiscernible] better myself.

Okay. And I guess 2 questions to Ross. The first one is kind of fun and the second one is more serious. So the first one is Ross, what inning of the gold cycle are we in? And the second one is, what's your plan for dividends? Should we hold off on dividends until we've finished all this growth?

Yes. Okay. So I can tell you this for a fact. We are in the fifth inning. We're in the bottom of the fifth and the game is going to go for extra innings. I don't know how many, and I don't know how long into the night it's going to go. But it -- we are a long way from the end of this bull cycle, and I'm very optimistic that it's going to be a party time for many, many years to come. And again, the bigger, the better in terms of participating in that gold price rise. Now the thorn in your question of dividends. Obviously, we want to be a big dividend payer. That is 100% of our long-term mission. You can't pay a dividend until you have a lot of free cash flow. And that means you have -- when you have that free cash flow, there's 2 places to put it. You can give it back to your shareholders through dividends and stock repurchases, or you can invest it in growth and build your capital value. So right now, clearly, we're in this incredible growth phase. We have to put it back in growth. We get wonderful rates of return on these investments when we build them and we can write them from gold resources in the ground to producing assets. So that's the focus of the company right now for all the reasons we've mentioned. But there will be a time, and I hope it's going to be very soon. I don't know if it's going to be next year or the year after or even later this year, when we say, you know what, maybe the gold price has gone up a little bit more, maybe we're generating more cash than we thought we were going to, maybe we have more than we need for our growth operation for our budget. Let's give some back to shareholders. So we don't know when that's going to happen. From my standpoint, it can't happen too soon. But it's got to be a rational decision based on a better place to put that money into the ground to developing our assets or back into the hands of our owners. And I know when we come to it, it's going to be a relatively easy decision, I think, but we're not there yet. I just hope we get there soon, and we get there successfully.

Okay. Thank you. We have a question about -- a couple -- I'm combining these, of course. Do we have any intention of increasing our exposure to silver? And what are their thinking with M&A? Are we going to focus Canada and the Americas? Are we thinking of Ecuador? What are our plans from a country perspective?