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

[Operator Instructions].

Thank you very much for joining us today, everybody. We just finished our AGM and now we're going to go into our corporate update. We will, of course, be making a number of forward-looking statements today. So please do visit our website to read more about the company and our continuous disclosure documents. It is my pleasure now to turn the floor over to our Chairman, Ross Beaty.

Thank you very much, Susan and welcome, everybody, to the 2024 Annual General Meeting of Equinox Gold. This is our sixth meeting. We've been in this company at the beginning of 2018. So we've been doing this for over 6 years, and it's been quite a ride. So I'm going to go through some general slides today more than anything to talk about what we had promised everybody we're going to work on in 2023, the online report card, and then talk about where we're going in 2024. So a year from now, I hope I come back with the same successful results that we experienced in 2023. Just getting started. This slide kind of starts the -- it tells the whole story of the company's growth. And it almost leads me brute when I read that percentage. We've gone from probably just sort of an idea. We had a number of exploration properties to become a very large diversified goal for us. During the last 6 months, 6 years, we acquired 1 mine and 2 companies. We built 3 mines, sold 2 mines, created 3 new spin-off companies, and we're now commissioning one of Canada's largest new gold mines, all in pursuit of our mission to become one of the world's largest gold producers. And when you try to do these things quickly, one might ask, why are we going to quickly? The first reason is the scale comes, it's going big. It's a value-creating proposition by itself. And we're also going to realize that when it happens. But frankly, it hasn't quite happened yet, but I think we're very much on the cusp of it now. Well, we will trade at a premium, we will trade at a superior valuation to inventional metrics price in cash flow price net asset light those endpoints. When we get there, and we're very, very pleased to get in there now. So when you start seeing the big idea, you obviously, without large financial bids, you have to grow by acquisition. It takes too long to grow by discovery, developing projects, typically in a mine might take 20 years these days for Discovery to do an operation. And I said we didn't have that time personally, and I know our senior management who joined me when we started this like Greg Smith, didn't have that decision to do that long run. And to go quickly into a large company, slowly by itself, you get into different as you have much more liquidity. You have access to newer pockets of capital; you have access to bigger shareholders. So it's a good thing to do. And you can only do that by acquisition, and that's why we have been a very acquisitive company. Just to follow through the story, we started with no production in 2018. We bought the Mesquite mine at the end of that year, and we've spun other series of proper assets we had that were not in the core of the business to build in a large gold company. In 2019, we built the Horizonte mine, and that was a successful startup on time on budget, and that's been a very big contributor to our company since then, and that's in Northern Brazil. And in 2020, we acquired Viceroy, which brought us 4 lines in Brazil and a big line in Mexico. We also built a small-scale kind of like Phase 1 line at Castle Mountain, which we had acquired at the very beginning of our business at 2018. It came with the deep startup of Equinox. And that was built as a sort of a small mine to maintain our permits there, but really the learning experience, I guess, but our very large scale in we're going to build in due course on the same site. Then in 2021, we sold 1 of the 4 mines of Brazil we acquired through Legal. We then acquired another company that had a real stone deposit in Ontario, all of this in to make a better portfolio. When you have a limited capital base, you're just starting up, you count it for really expensive big mines. So it took us a couple of years. They got the scale and the financial resources to be able to acquire a real leading deposit in Canada, and that expiration was on for 15 years and was pretty ready to build. We have the capacity at the time and we need to detour our premium gold. We spun out some noncore assets to the premium gold management team that's in Nevada, gold onset package. They've done a pretty great job with it. And then we started construction of Greenstone. Again, I want to emphasize the idea with Greenstone was to add quality to our portfolio, more scale and allow us to really become a long-term low-cost goal bridge because the mines we acquired had relevant low cost, both Mesquite, short life, relatively high cost mine and the Leagold mines, relatively high cost mines. We didn't pay a lot for them. I think it's fair to say. We got premier gold. We've got this gold processed, but we had to build it. So we've been in kind of a status staff basis from the standpoint of production growth for the last 2 years, while we focus on building this great mine in Ontario. We have 60% interest and in just a couple of weeks ago, we acquired the ballots or we are impressed we announced that we're proud of the balance, making it a 100% on patent. And so when you look at this pipeline, in 2018, we produced 25,000 ounces at the end of the year. 2019 with legal 2020 and '21, we rapidly scale up production of these remaining reliable assets. 2022 was sort of a bumpy year. We had a tough year in some of our label mines in Brazil and Mexico. But we were going with the construction all through that Europe on similar to 2023. So our production had a flatline in those years, but all of a sudden now worth an absolute cost starting production at Greenstone, and this is going to be kind of in the worst of Chairman model, the great way forward to discovery. We are going to make a great leap forward in many ways in gold production, quality of jurisdiction, Northern Ontario is about as good as it gets in the world, and most importantly, lower costs, which will have full in effect, a much, much better free cash flow generation and ability to deleverage, the adverse some of the debt that we've accumulated to acquiring these assets of building these lines and has raised sale on in the future as an insured well costs very large ad gold is. That's the mission we've done since day 1, and we are very much on the edge of achieving that. So that's kind of the history. It's like I said, if you look at what we've done, it's pretty -- I think it's pretty impressive. And we couldn't have done it without this fabulous theme we have in this fabulous sport. So today, the snapshot of where we are today, 7 mines almost a couple of weeks from 4 countries, the big new Greenstone mine, diversified portfolio, large gold production, and most importantly, lower costs as we get Greenstone to what is a relatively high possible portfolio that we've had today. Next, I think this is a snapshot of our great Board of Directors. I already sunk their phrases in our Annual General Meeting today, but I'll do it again today right now. I just conveyed to all of them, we have of all of our shareholders if I may. My great appreciation for the dedication to this company. This Board is diversified, it's smart. They're all skilled in different things, and they're all committed to the company. An example of this is last October when we had an offer to take 5 days on revolver lives into 2 or 4 months and have input from them on their own experience, so what they might be doing there differently or there differently. It was a great tour and I just want to convey to our shareholders just a dedicated them and helpful our Board is. Great appreciation to them all. And I'd say the same thing about our management team. I've been in this game a long time personally, and while the other companies that I built up with the health of thousands of other people, SaniSilver also has a Servian management team. I really want to say that Equinox, our shareholders can be kind of doing that we have a wonderful, wonderful team. Otherwise, they are smart and dedicated. They're also very nice people. They are people that you will enjoy that give you a lot of passion and days aren't perfect and celebrate the great things we do when days are better. So again, I understand each one of these people and all of the -- we have about 8,000 people now Greg in our company, all the people at our sights at our operations of communities that we work in. The support we get from governments are indigenous relations across the board everywhere we work. My great appreciation on behalf of our shareholders who we should hear one of you and all the people who report to you. Thank you. Okay. The next slide here. This is really kind of what I'm proud about. You never know that today, we actually had a rather crappy first quarter. We have altered disappointments on different ones of mine. It was one of those quarters. Sometimes you have great quarters, sometimes you don’t and the key is to not look at 1 quarter, so look at the whole year and actually where we're going, which I think is a much, much -- very, very happy story. So a year ago, these were our cards. We described these and are meeting exactly 1 year ago, we were going to, first of all, build greatly on time and on budget. Now I think you might remember a year ago, I expressed this prevalent about the wall of DUCs out there to every single gold analyst, the great many shareholders, and then institutions. Everybody said we're going to blow our budget. We're going to explore our schedule at Greenstone because every other gold company in Canada is only one in the last 5 years ago have done that. It's just been a terribly bad record. But guess what? We ended the year in 2023. We were on site. We were on budget for construction. And what a great success. I convey all the appreciation of the whole Greenstone team and our management team. On-time on budget for the first call for in May. Well, it's May now. And you might say, when is it good enough? Yes, too soon. Very soon. We will have me out today, and it's a tough start-up, I can still build things that we can pump a low and don't work and stuff like that. So that's how the flow is on, but there's nothing material for the custom start-up, and we hope to definitely make a big announcement in a week or so. So basically, complete, and then the whole of expat operation is going to be a joy, I think, for actually, but I think it will be decades. That's one of the largest low-cost gold mines. I'll get into a little bit more detail Second thing, of course, you want to do is achieve guidance. We didn't have to any of our guidance, but we hit the low end of our guidance, which is the way it looks. And we had a pretty good year on operation on the other side of the mines we have our cash to site, and we achieved our all-in sustaining cost beds. We've replaced our reserves and we grew our resources. That's a core objective for any global money company, period, you have to replace your reserves or you ultimately grow business. And so we've got a great exploration group in all of our mines, internet office, and I think that's been another successful result where we did achieve that. And then finally, we've got all this growth, we've got all this internal growth. Really aside Greenstone, we have the Horizonte mine, wherever going to go underground, and decals underground mines for many, many years to come. We have Phase 2 at Belsa Mountain, does deliver about 200,000 ounces a year, up from maybe 25 we produce right now. And wholesales, this is the one I'm really looking forward to it the most because it will mean that we have a really new relationship with our communities. We'll be able to implement a new plot better, a project for each plant that will allow us to increase production and run that mine for a long time. So in 2023, what we did there was we implemented all kinds of operational improvements and we invested a dialogue that is so very important. All of this met last year, we had reasonably good performance in our stock price. We outperformed all the usual peers, I guess, and the [ Boldt ]. I will say this is partly because of over the year, people got less worried about Greenstone construction at was going to be on time, so we had a nice pick up there. But we have had this wall of gold in 2022 and some problems in some of the mines, which I think made us just crazy oversold in 2022. But we ended the year in good performance since the end of the year in 2023 -- this 2024, I mean, we've had a reasonable pickup in equity performance driven very much in large part by the gold price. It's rather extraordinary to move the gold price in 2024. So this is what Greenstone is going to deliver to us. Why it's so very important to the story today and for the next 15 years or 20 years. Obviously, it's going to have just the 40% of Greenstone that we're acquiring now, it's going to be at about 140,000, 150,000 ounces a year to the company, including over the whole life of the mine 144,000 ounces. It's going to decrease our cash cost significantly who all saw the quarter we just reported this morning yesterday afternoon, but we have high cash costs. They will trend out anyway during the year because we're going to have better production over the next 9 months or other set mines. But adding beds on or the next is really going to drop those stacks mature. I'll come back to that in a minute. It will also significantly increase our free cash flow, our EBITDA just at 40% at $200 million a year, the gold price, of course, and we offered in the past, which should be late in 2024. Obviously, it's a very rare opportunity to get a world-class mine like this in Canada is on 100% by a company like ours. It's one of the only large gold deposits in the entire world. It's not held by a major mining company in the top 10. So it's really positioned us in a very rare group. It increases our golden balance significantly. It increases our scale, as I've already talked about, and it gives us some great opportunities in terms of expense. These are just a couple of graphics on the production, the cost reduction, the increased EBITDA that this additional oil-cost gold production will give us. The black is the current production forecast before we acquired the 40%, adding that extra 40% in green decency causing our gold production this year to just shy of 800,000 ounces and next year close to 1 million ounces the year after the same thing. Then the blue line is the cash cost before 40%, you can see anyway how our cash structure is going to decline significantly. And then it becomes even more in that extra 40%. So it was a very critical acquisition for us. We were asked a lot, and we have been up over the last 2 years. As we were building this, everybody wanted, well, what else are you going to do another M&A or you plan to do, you're looking at this on you that company. And we said, "No, we're building Greenstone. That's going to deliver more than we could probably get from any other acquisition. And we have 40% that we will provide to a partner." Brian owned it. We have no idea when they were going to sell, but we knew they were on some. And we also had an idea whether we were going to be the buyer. They actually ran a competitive process possible. We just hope that we have the connection, we do well, the relationships, and the ability to pay the price that is expected which ultimately we did. You can see this slide on the right in front of me, the graph on the right, the earnings reform, interest tax depreciation, and amortization of that extra 40%. It's really a very material add to our cash. And it will enhance our diversification, adding to a top-tier blended administration in Ontario, Canada, which will derisk some of the production we currently have in Brazil and Mexico and even in the U.S., the Western U.S.. We're California's largest corporation by far. And we have a large plant in Mexico. We have 4 plants in Brazil. We love those jurisdictions. Mexico right now has been wobbly. It's a government that's not great out of mining. And just because of that, that's why we had the diversification to say that Canada is going to be great forever. In which case, it's restored in Brazil. But to date, Canada is seen as one of the world's leading stations, particularly in Ontario, and we're absolutely delighted to be there. We've had total support from the additional communities that have been sold to the government of Ontario, the local future is just being great. We contrast after the challenges that we've got in places like Mexico. And I believe this extra ad to now 52% of our net asset values are really coming from Canada. I think we all feel much more comfortable in terms of management and our share ownership, too. Okay. Where does this go? This is the slide I think that -- I saw the same slide last year. So we don't perform last year, that's fine. We're going to do this again. I'm going to -- we're going to do this game. We're as soon as we kind of get over this Q1 got a message I'm going to say, which has got a noise and executor not all come to we get resell fem Q2, Q3, Q4 should be better, much better will and we're going to start bridging the gap because right now, we are along the cheapest gold stocks in the universe and we have the fast the highest growth profile we have among the highest production, and we have [ longisrves ]. And believe me in those metrics will count event. I'm not sure when I expect later this year, but they will come and they -- that will be driving our value proposition for all of our shareholders. I've already talked about Greenstone. Why is it important? 400,000 ounces in the year, 14-year mine life, one of the highest great large old at Golden anywhere, large reserves, large resource. It will become one of North Canada's largest gold mines. And here, you can also see the little blue triangle there is the -- what that is, is it's the average grade -- the head read going into the mill of these big overages. You can see Datalertic. We know the Mr. MetaBank certainly Greenstone, Cote, and Blackwater are all much lower grade in Greenstone and the use is going to be a lower cost production. And you can see on this slide here how it ranks in world, Goldman exploded in the lower quartile of bol cash cost, and that's going to drive the whole cash bus all-in sustaining cost structure of Equinox Gold down further and further. Lots of opportunity. I'm not going to talk to these slides particularly, but I just want to see if you're interested in the mine life or the expense potential beyond 14 years, have a look at these slides better, you're typically related tech in the interested both the underground deposit retirees. And then the next slide is the belt. We have about 100 kilometer belt full of known gold mineralization, old mines. I mean in like the Brooks band line, for example, where we already have 600,000 of high-grade gold resources, those kinds of things over time and what can explore more, and I'm sure we're going to have these add to the Greenstone mine production for the very long term. So it's a prolific belt of all producers, our exploration teams, and got to work as soon as they down on this as soon as we actually have a little bit more cash relief that we're going to spend our deleveraging and turns of mine exploration team to expand the line or increase the mine life. Okay. We've announced this already our pro forma 2020 guidance, including the 40% of Greenstone that we're acquiring will deliver about 780,000 ounces of gold plus 4 months. Obviously, I hope it's on the bus side. But anyway, that's going to be our guidance for all 8 lines and the cash cost is going to be in the range of $2.85 to $1,590 on subsidiary cost of 585,555 to $1,675. Don't forget this is a relatively similar calculation to create dustfree cash flow. It's the gold price, that the gold production lines our gold production times are all-in sustained. So the margin is what we have left over for nonsustaining capital for dividends, debt repayments and for corporate Opera. Okay. So talking about what we inflate we call these the growing small companies in the market. It's because we have all this growth in products. So we don't have to buy anything. We are on in order to build anything new, specifically other than what we already have in our portfolio. for big growth process. Greenstone we've already talked or as one in mind, this sheet of underground mineralization below the steps that we're going to start working on this fall or winter, early next year, in to go underground, open it up, and start supplemental feed to the old production we have already. We auto 20,000 per for a long life. Altamont, Phase 2, that allow book 200,000, and that's in the middle of the permitting phase right now, which we have been working on for 3 or 4 years, and we are going to work on for, I think, another couple of years , that’s the best guess right now. And then, of course, building up so that we reach [indiscernible]. It is set up in Las Vegas. It's a brownfield site. We have all the permits we need to -- in terms of the land. We just see that the environment in tax payment and the permit for the new construction. The last we take another couple of years. And then we'll see. Most -- that's been a bit of a problem, Charles for us since we acquired it. I would say you're not all of ours because during Colin, was very hard to manage some of the social issues there. But we worked very hard on that. And really, we need a new social contract with the 3 communities at silos. Maurice and I were down there just last [ ween ] of the community leaders. We opened up a health clinic there. We're going to open up a water treatment plant, the small -- sorry, a water plant people pola lot of this fall. Really, I think we're creating a new dialogue with the 3 communities that we need to work with so much and get out of this is sort of very high-cost contracts that we've had to live with that we inherited from the previous operators. We have to read with that. We call it oils 2.0. And I can't guarantee we're going to do that. I spoke exactly the same way in January this year to a presentation do -- so I think we're going to do it. But if we do it, the flip side is we will significantly expand production of those states adding about 120,000 ounces a year, decrease our cash costs at laceless currently are reasonable, but we're going to drive that even more and much more importantly, extend the mine life by about 10 or 15 years. It's a great ore body. It needs not new to maximize recoveries today. We're getting about 50%, 55% recoveries on gold. It's very low grade, it's fine and a deep leach, but in the future, I will see us is a higher-grade underground mine. And we have a lot of resources there. But to maximize recovery to make that mine really efficient and not waste a lot of that gold, we have to get 90% record 50%. And that is required this new mill. So our basic approach to the communities is to say, you know what, the large-scale service mine is pretty much over. It's not entirely over, but it's certainly late stages, then got it for 15 years. The future of this mine is more underground mining and higher new mining, better recoveries, but to do that, it's going to require this. So we require new investment by us, which will guarantee jobs for 10 or 20 years. All the global people who are generally working in unended suppliers. It also is centered on a new social contract that set. So we're very hard at work on that, and we're hopeful that will be successful in 2024 in the proceeding side. So we're very active on it right now. For all of this, coming back to what I said ready-to-start is going to drive a revaluation about [ pores ] gold as a senior producer, not as a mid-tier, not as a junior but as a senior producer, which is what we'll get to when we exceeded 9 ounces of full peer at lower cash costs. Obviously, scale liquidity, diversity, or cause more deleveraging, less depth, all of these cities together, build that case for a better price to net asset value multiple 0.7 for today is sort of 1.3%. That's why scale matters by itself in the--. Just a short slide here on how we are aligned. Obviously, I'm a large shareholder on site, we have every one of our senior managers who are significant shareholders relative to their own network, and yet beyond that, we have a breadth of shareholder base, incredible liquidity, we trade an average of 3 million or 4 million shares a day just on the U.S. exchange and another $1 million or so in Canada. And Greg, when we did the $299 million equity financing recently, how much of that was [indiscernible]

I think it'd be 3/4 for institution, maybe 1/4 was retail.

How many different institutions?

[ 30 ].

So big institutions and then the rest are across Canada and the U.S., so very much in line with shareholders. If we do well, we all as well. mean, here's our targets reported for and we're certainly on track for this so far. We're 5 months into the year already absolutely on track. And I won't be here from now we can say we're going to come in place.nub1, #2, and number 3 are Greenstone. Obviously, that is critical to us, and we are on the cost of lysate gold production. We really want the attaboys I said, but it's going to be in May. It will be in May. We were assured by our General Lavery yesterday and a bunch of us are heading out there next week to confirm that. So ramp up commercial production in Q3 and then probably get to 90% through. But by the end of the year. That's our base plan. That's what you do here. Operations, obviously, renegotiate the community agreements I've talked about, hit our guidance, and continue use. We do have a growing reputation of excellence and responsible to environmental and social performance and an impact within just a second because they need to well on that a little and continues to be this amazing program that I will say, we've had a tremendous relationship with [ Remodel ] Investment company who supported us at finance and also some define horsepower during this asset optimization program to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. Where do we go last year to $60 million in savings -- $5 million, $52 million and what's your target for this year? $60 million. So these are real savings, and it's just better thinking better operations, it's very impressive exploration of probodies replace reduce in services, development, Arizona, Gobelin, MSCs at the end of its life. It's been [indiscernible] produced more than 5 million ounces for 30-plus years. And we wanted to continue. So we're doing a bunch of work on permitting. We don't have scolioter. We have to get permits and sometimes that's round cell can all of our -- we do it quickly. Eventually, it decom but it's a challenge cookie. Those are the changes that kept it's been a great mine for us since we acquired it securely. We acquired it, by the way, 6 years ago, with a 3-year mine life has been run restructure. So it's been repaid its original cost multiple times. It's been a great mine. Okay. A couple of words on the gold bar, and I'll try to make this relatively brief. I've been very, very bullish on gold. That's why I supported Greg as a team when we started promos, that's why we put it together. Because for me, it's my last company, I love Silver, Cartoon American, and I just sort of wanted the last company. And was boson gold. And because I wanted a public company at equity we bill it, big gold for that if you build a big value with big gold production, big reserves, and resources. You get big banks in the bot. If the gold risk goes up. And that's what's going on because we're having this remarkable started -- are $1,500 on -- and then it went down to 1250 or 1,200 right away. That was a bit worrisome. Senate's been on this car. And the tariff if anything, is getting stronger right now. We had a kind of a 2021 2022 as sort of basin around $2,000, $1,800 in that range, but it's not a wonderful run. Nobody really knows when it's going to either out. It will eventually. But Goldman Sachs, a pretty big firm, pretty well known. They just put out a report a week ago losing their production for gold in 2024 is the end of the year, $2,700 to $3,000 an ounce, which is nice to hear. Now why is that? Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, there's no real reason growth should go down. You had no big discoveries. No, there was a little bit of production growth last year, but really, it's been 10 years in the gold market has been almost set in sub -- so if you have an increase in demand and you have started to buy within you have a frontonasal go. It's odd. I think most people who are bold on service, and this -- I'll come back on this in a minute. Most people who are going in service that say no should perform fully in a high-invest environment. It should perform fully if there's a strong dollar. But in fact, gold is doing really well in that environment. This all starts really started with the use by the United States certain is in the U.S. dollar as a weapon after Russia and Ukraine. And that certain pentane saying they want to diversify away to the U.S. dollar to opening up to them. And one of their diversification strategies was gold. So the Chinese central bank has been the largest by far buyer of gold in the market regardless of this rather negative macro higher agent space and a strong U.S. dollar and intact, right? So all of the gold pundits and the gold, the ash fines, and all these smart rocket scientist investors, they don't get against the high gold because they knew the tie-in dollar strong could typically bar you got. So this on all of those equities and they went short. But the Chinese and the meters and the bolts and the Caltex and a whole pile of Sanbank were buying gold as a long-term store value, which is precisely what it's been for 5,000 years. Gold is a long-term store value that's expert second and third use, it protects investors from fluctuations in governments and created people to a crazy fall type causing paper gross value, gold keeps its value. So in the face of all that negative is on all bind experts, Guess what? Goldman is against that trend. And fundamental to gold cation volumes increased. Investors switched asset losses. We also had some retention for us, which is always helpful a little bit. But it's mostly been the central bank buying. And now in 2024, it looks like the big driver is also a lot of retail volumes, particularly in China, foley love all -- they can buy it now in small amounts, but small amount to 1.3 billion people abide. That's one of the big drivers to pull this year. Southern Bank is still book how the numbers come out from mobile center banks just a couple of days ago. China is still buying. They were big buyers in Q1, and all of that is starting to be an [indiscernible]. What's going to change? I mean is inflation going to go up? No, inflation is coming down. Inflation has been our biggest entity in the mining because unfortunately, although the gold prices increase our revenues, our costs have also done, right? Everything over the last couple of years since 2021, 2020, a lot of co-related supply chain stuff. But generally, tenpin is really negative to almost everybody, but particularly money comps -- so case, fuel prices as the Brazil and Mexican prices have been relatively strong. That hasn't helped us, so labor pots are relatively up. But I see that slowing down. I think Doug would say probably see costs might come down a little bit to presold other mines. Diesel pressures are going to come down a little bit if the oil base drops and it's in antibiotics at the same time as revenues go up, it should be a happy world. So as I said, it's not likely to go up. That's a bushel. Interest rates -- pardon me, interest rate industries are likely to go down, polish for gold. AR, it's probably going weenies no longer tightening. It's when it weakened, that's for gold. Glomnes, it's going to keep going, going to stop. That's bullish for gold. So I just don't see why gold would good -- it's a bit of a while to most and found a lot of people. But that's -- the [ oligos ] pretty good read. So I could go Sandler has already been a lot better and the future market will show that. We are looking at doing some colors right now where you've got a book price 2,200 to 3,000. Yes, about that. So we can sell a goal right now, stay for the next 12 months with the floor, it doesn't cost anybody to do this. I'd be offset by cost and we got to form 200 sum. Never in my career has anything like that come close out with those companies. So it's a great trend to build. And those numbers are telling us, but many, many people think both on is on why this is important for us is because how is gold price to go up. We have what we call leverage. That's exactly why we started the company and try to get big. The more gold production you have, the more reserves and reserves to be out in your books, the greater your value. And that is -- it's not a linear equation. By the way, it's sort of an exponential one. So the leverage side is as gold goes up 5%. We should have a 30% increase in our operating margins. That's leverage. And that's why we should be performing at a much higher rate. We should be traded at a much harder rate than we are today. We did okay. This is the range of January '23 to April '24, and a lot of that turned off a peak was because we just sold 55 million shares to new investors, and that's always been to digest, and it will be through the sort of the objection period in a month or 2, I think. But that's kind of one of the reasons that some of after relative to some of our peers, one perform everyone. And it's been a pretty satisfying why because we have a leverage. That's why. And on the right here, you see this really crazy, strange, disconnect. It disconnected in the oil, which is the gold price and the blue, which our average prices of gold producers widens. This is the GDX Gold Miners ETF. So it's not just to [indiscernible]. This is the entire industry not the biggest all producers in the world. The second we get sold through in the world. Until about 2 months ago until orally had a stent run, they were trading where they traded 5 years ago. The was run like we did. And then we came right back to where they were even though folks go up significantly in that period. So not these companies have had the benefit of this running more. Now the margins are small. Well, how long are the sites likely to launch? It's going to be a month. Is it going to be a year? Nobody knows. But my guess is these don't last forever. This relationship has been odd for 18 months or even maybe media a couple of years just the cranes and bolster but it's going to -- things will be first to traditional correlation as it shifts, gold rate should be correlated to the equity price at both. It always has -- it should always be well. But for some reason, it's been the same. It's only going to correct by both coming down but the equity price is going on. And my guidance equity prices are going to go up. We're going to be a happy day for all the product shareholders and, in fact, all shareholders of every gold company on the planet to the country. On the last slide, just a summary rating of why 2024 is going to be a great year for this company. We have this great exposure and increase in exposure. We have Greenfield starting up. I've talked a lot about why that's going to be positive for us. It's happening right now, increased cash flow, lower operating costs. And I'm going to say not only at Greenstone, but it should work through all of our other mines. So Q1 is typically a poor quarter for us at the same last couple of years. Certainly, it's same here. We expect much better production latter part of the year, which will translate to where cost smart cash flow on. And then, of course, Greater into really large bolts on the global stage. So none of this could happen without tremendous support from shareholders, from bankers by bank giving this $500 million bank financing in a very short period of time, we've had support from so many people, and my thanks to all of them. The last thing I'm going to say is this book. We've got a hard copy. We just announced yesterday. We just posted on the website, right? It's called the environmental sold in the company before 2023, building on strong foundations. And it's a very, very detailed, amazing product. And also everybody involved in everybody because -- and I really like our shareholders read just to see what we do on the nonproduction side, on the non-money side. We are good citizens. We have a ridiculously good health and safety record. I mean from a certain amount of experience in the agency, we are among the top performance in the entire industry from the standpoint of helps to remark, we have about 8,000 employees as I said, they have underground mines, ultimate lines, they're inherently dangerous and risky despite all of that, we have so this really, really outstanding safety effort. And I take my hat off to everybody who is part of making that hope it doesn't happen by accident at Topanga. Brisas our HDS Committee shared by Tanker and all of her committee and the work that everybody has. We are good community sets we reward our communities with water clouds with better roads, their communications, better health facilities. We're really trying to work together with people and not in some kind of independent way without connection to the communities that we need to support, and they need this for us to support them. Just one thing after another Andy Slavery discussion here, diversity protection, environmental protection, our commitments, our record. It's a really -- it's a great book, and I really recommend it to all of our shareholders. I hope to be able to do what I do when I just feel good about being part of this time. And I hope all of our employees and our suppliers fill and our shareholders. If you have estimated it's on the website, we just posted yesterday. Please have a look at it. And with that, I think those are other ones take polo other presentations in attesting in today's adulterants. I've already talked about that. And it's a happy story, good people, good progress, how the customer rail transformation. I think I'll just end there.

Yes, a few questions online. Are there any questions from the room before we take the online question?

Sure procurement. Very happy to here. Wonderful presentation or new recite been ongoing for between 4 and 5 years. And so I look back on, let's just say, 4 years ago, day. And our company is [indiscernible] in shareholder value at the same time as gold on is -- now that's a remarkable performance. And I'm just wondering if that's the cost of being a high-growth company or seeing something else going on in our company.