Hecla Mining Company (HL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Next, we have Rob Krcmarov, President and CEO of Hecla Mining.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks to the European Mining Forum for having us here in Zurich. I'm Rob Krcmarov, President and CEO of Hecla. I've been in the chair for 18 months now. And I'll tell you that the more I've learned about our business, the more I realize that we're building something that's really quite unique and special. I want to make the next 15 minutes or so making that case. We are headquartered in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. And we are the largest silver producer in Canada and the United States. Now I will be making some forward-looking statements. I'll also be talking about non-GAAP financial measures throughout. Reconciliations are in the appendix and on our website and our 10-K filings as well. A few numbers to ground you. NYSE ticker is HL. Market cap, around about $13 billion today. We've got a very strong trading liquidity. 670 million shares outstanding. Balance sheet at year-end, we had $241 million in cash, $262 million in long-term debt. I'll say had because debt was retired last week. So now we're basically debt-free. We've got a fully undrawn $225 million revolving credit facility and a $75 million accordion on top of that. Balance sheet is in the best shape that it's been for years. Ownership, around about 78% institutional, 22% retail. Ten analysts covering us, on the left of the page, including Cosmos and others who are here. There are six things I really want to talk to you today and keep in mind as we go throughout. So firstly, our silver legacy. Oldest precious metals on the New York Exchange, longest listed mining company, 135 years. I think that basically shows that we've got a demonstrated track record, that we're able to operate through every commodity cycle manageable, through depressions, through everything. And it speaks to our resilience and culture. The next is we're in the best jurisdictions, every mine, every project, U.S., Canada, full stop. And I think in the world that we're living in at the moment, I think that really matters enormously. We've got peer-leading silver exposure both in revenues and reserves, and I'll show you some data on that in a minute. So when silver moves, we obviously move as well. As I said, reserve dominance. Our average reserve mine life is nearly double all of our peers. Again, I'll show you some data on that in a minute. We've got real project momentum. We've got a pipeline that's at a genuine inflection point at the moment, and I'll be specific about that coming up. Cost excellence. We are the lowest cost producer in the peer group. And obviously, with the silver leverage, it's a very powerful combination. So I think this map in one image tells you our jurisdictional advantage in a single image: Greens Creek in Alaska, one of the world's premier polymetallic mines; Lucky Friday in Northern Idaho, last year, it smashed all production records, and it's a real transformation story; and Keno Hill in the Yukon, the largest primary silver mine in Canada. And we've also got a growing exploration portfolio, and it's anchored by some really exciting projects in Nevada, which I'll come back to. So one jurisdiction premium. Really no political risk. I think that's really increasingly rare in this industry and worth more now than it was 5 years ago. This is a chart I keep coming back to because I don't think it gets enough credit. The silver peer group average reserve life, shown in that dash line at the bottom, is around about 7 years. We're at 13.3, so nearly double. And it's not just the company average. Each one of our individual mines, shown in blue, it beats the peer average on its own. So Greens Creek, 12 years; Lucky Friday, 15 years; and Keno Hill, 13. So our weakest asset exceeds the industry average. I think another thing worth flagging here is this chart is also sorted out from left to right by gross profit. And our best earning assets, they're all silver mines. They're not gold mines. And so that's the sort of portfolio that we've built. Long mine lives obviously mean that you have planning certainty. You have visibility over the horizon. You can see what's coming at you. It creates genuine optionality and a lower cost of capital over time. That's a real structural advantage. This bubble chart basically tells the same story visually. X-axis is silver equivalent grade. Y-axis is reserve mine life. Bubble size is the scale of the reserves. So more reserves, larger bubble. Blue is U.S. and Canada. Gray is everything else. And you can see all of our mines in the upper right: high-grade, long-life best jurisdictions. No other company in this peer group has 3 assets in that part of the chart. That's our portfolio. So for investors in this room, this slide really matters. Q4 2025, 59% of our revenue from silver. Strip out Casa, that was our gold mine in Quebec which we sold recently in Q1 this year, and that number now is nearly 73%. So look, where we sit on that scatter plot, we're that outlier on the right, high silver revenue, higher silver reserve concentration. So if silver leverage is what you're looking for, we are the most direct way to own it. So what does that leverage look like in practice? At $75 silver and $4,500 gold, close to where the market is today, projected 2026 cash flow is around about $600 million. At $100 silver and $5,500 gold, which is where we were not that long ago, that grows to approximately $850 million. And that cash is being deployed with discipline. Our debt has been retired, as I said. Record exploration investment is underway, and the reason for that is to try and generate value and create options for us. And our project pipeline is funded. Each of those builds value in a different way, but together, they compound. This shows our production trajectory. So last year, we produced about 17 million ounces. 2026 guidance is 15.1 million to 16.5 million ounces. And I want to address that step down directly because most of you are going to ask why. It's essentially a single asset, single grade story. Greens Creek, that's our cornerstone asset. The grade bumps around. It is a complex ore body. Some years, we're mining higher-grade zones, others lower. And the mine sequencing this year takes us into a lower-grade zone. So this is a normal function of how underground mines work. The grade varies year to year as you work through the ore body. Lucky Friday and Keno Hill, they're both broadly flat year-on-year. And again, the long-term grade profile at Greens Creek is unchanged. It's not a reserve quality issue. Our medium-term target, as you can see on the far right, is 20 million ounces, Two primary drivers for that. One is Keno Hill continuing the ramp-up and the other one is a potential restart in Nevada at Midas. And there's also additional longer-term potential at things like Aurora and additional expansion in the future at Keno Hill. We have a permit limit of 440 tonnes per day. The mill is capable of doing 600. That's going to require another phase of investment capital and more permitting. So that's for the future, but there's real growth potential there, and then a couple of tailings reprocessing opportunities that I'll talk about shortly. I think Midas is worth spending a moment on, and you can see a picture of the mill there. I think it was built by Franco-Nevada. It was operated by Newmont for a long period of time. It's a good quality mill. We did some engineering studies, two, actually. And the more thorough one at the end of last year suggests maybe around about $50 million to get that back up to operational condition. So largely paid-off mill, needs a bit of refurbishment. We've got an empty tailings dam that just requires some minor repairs. So the story is we've got a nearly fully permitted facility, 1,200 tonne per day mill, tailings infrastructure, surface facilities, utilities in place. And our 2025 exploration program was pretty exciting. It identified a couple of new structures, new veins, both very high grade. So the path from here is really aggressive exploration in 2026. If that continues to pan out, resource definition and technical studies in the next year or 2, then a go, no-go decision and production perhaps 3 to 4 years beyond that. So realistically, potentially an operating mine in, let's call it, the next 5 years or so. And very low capital intensity, as you can see. We've got the mill and the empty tailings dam. And I'd say this, having spent a couple of years of my career previously at Barrick, I know Nevada very well. I spent a lot of time there. And I do know this geological setting well. I think the belt that holds Midas and Hollister as well as over in the Walker Lane that hosts Aurora, they're both very highly prospective and definitely underexplored when you're looking at modern exploration techniques. Aurora itself has its own on-site 600 tonne per day mill. Our Head of Exploration, he's always been going on about how excited he is about Nevada, about Aurora in particular. And I said, "Kurt, you need to focus more on Midas. That's where we have the mill." He says, "Yes, I know, I know." I finally went out there 10 days ago and like I get it now. I was walking around on surface, and I saw line kilometers of epithermal veins, really good vein textures, mineralization everywhere. So very excited to drill that this summer. All-in sustaining costs in 2025, $11.28 per ounce. And you can see where the rest of the peer group sits. Most of them are north of $20. And I think this really reflects the grade of our ore bodies, the efficiency of our operations and also, obviously, the byproduct credits that we get from our polymetallic mines. And that low cost, it really keeps you alive in a down cycle. And at current silver prices, it's really, really generating some exceptional margins. This is our capital allocation framework. It's prioritize safety and environment, obviously, first, then sustaining and growth capital. People do sustaining capital and, in lean times, they tend to do the absolute minimum. We're not in that environment now. We can reinvest in our business and make sure we set ourselves that well for the future. And then growth capital, real exploration, not just reserve replacement. We already have very, very long mine lives. And so we're looking at making some transformative discoveries. Hopefully, we're seeing the first steps of that maybe later on this year at Aurora and at Midas. Balance sheet is really strong, making strategic investments and shareholder returns. The debt's gone as of last week. As I said, we've got a fully undrawn revolving credit facility and the accordion. That's real financial flexibility and the opportunity to be, well, opportunistic, I suppose, if quality assets become available. As cash builds and individual projects clear our investment hurdles, shareholder return enhancements will move up the priority order. Safety is the foundation of our success. I don't say that as a cliche. Safety is core to everything that we do. Our total reportable injury frequency rate improved last year. I think we can do better. Our focus for 2026 is on fatality prevention. It's been a long, long time, fortunately, that we've had a fatality, and we need to make sure it stays that way. Every metric we hit on, production costs and cash flow, really starts with people going home safely. And as I've always said, a safe mine is a productive mine. Safety speaks to housekeeping. It speaks to planning, making intentional decisions, and that's why I pay attention to it. There's a business reason for it as well as the personal human one. Let me just briefly touch on a couple of our operating mines. Greens Creek, Admiralty Island, Alaska, that's our cornerstone asset. Since we acquired this, it's generated $2.4 billion of cumulative free cash flow. I mean that's extraordinary. And look at that compounding curve on the upper right. It's one of the most profitable silver mines on earth and it keeps performing. 12-year reserve life, long history of reserve replacement, so much so that we're actually building tailings storage that goes well beyond its reserve life. That's how much faith we have in this thing continuing. In 2025, we produced 8.7 million ounces of silver, nearly 60,000 ounces of gold, met or beat guidance on both metals. All-in sustaining costs, negative $2.36 per silver ounce for the full year, best 15th percentile of the global silver cost curve. And at the moment, we're advancing something that I find really, really quite compelling and quite interesting. It's something that we haven't just invented recently. We've been working on this for a few years now, and that's really a commercial scale assessment of tailings reprocessing opportunity. And you can see the tailings there. It's dry stack tails. It's basically a pile of sand sitting on the surface. You can see it there. And that contains roughly 50 million ounces of silver and almost 600,000 ounces of gold at very good grades. Just the combined silver-gold grade equivalent, it's about 4 grams equivalent sitting on surface, already mined, already crushed. Meaningful quantities of lead, zinc, copper and nickel, critical metals as well, approximate in-ground metal value of about $6.8 billion. So if we can capture 10% to 30% or more percent of that, I mean, this is a really potentially meaningful project. As you can see, we're at Phase 4 metallurgical study. We've already done 3 earlier phases. Very encouraging results. This time around, we've sent a much larger sample to EnviroGold, our partners in Australia. And if this reprocessing works, which is looking like it's going to work, at commercial scale, the next step would be a pilot plant and then obviously scaling up and doing that. I think the benefit of doing something like this, it's not only harvesting the potential cash flows from recovery of the metals. It also reduces storage costs because we'd be taking tailings off of the site. And that means that reclamation obligations will be reduced, new cash flow stream, and we're effectively monetizing what's now currently a liability. And as I said, there's always that critical minerals dimension. And so for investors thinking about things like supply chain resilience and the energy transition, I think this is a real option and it's embedded in an asset that we already own, we're already operating. Another thing that I haven't really spoken about, we need to do a fair bit more work around it, there's a very strong pyrite concentrate market. And so that's another option that we're looking at the moment. More on that later on this year. Lucky Friday, Silver Valley, Northern Idaho. 5.3 million ounces last year, a new production record. I mean, you can see by the decades, historically, it's been bouncing around 2.5 million to 3 million ounces a year. We implemented this very new innovative mining technique called underhand closed bench mining. It's changed the game for everything. It was primarily driven by safety, but you can see productivity now. We're basically forecasting an average of well over 5 million ounces a year for the next decade and probably beyond. 80-year operating history, and this is really an investment in innovation and it's really paid off very well. We're also completing a couple of significant projects. That's the surface cooling project. That's on track to be completed in the coming months. It is a deep mine. It's to make sure that our workers are comfortable and healthy and safe and operating in a pleasant environment. Now obviously, when you're working in a more pleasant environment, you're going to be more productive. I can't quantify that, but it makes sense to pretty much everyone in this room. We're also doing a pond 5 tailings lift, tailings construction. That's on schedule. That will extend the capacity out to 2044, and so that's also well beyond on our current reserve life. We expect this mine to keep going. We've also reinitiated exploration for the first time in 15 years. We've got a shaft that's got deep access. And so the idea is look outboard of that and see if we can add value. We've also looked at some business improvement workshops. Last year, we identified a way that we can cut costs is owner-operated drilling, cutting out the contractor. We can do it ourselves and probably cheaper, pretty straightforward. Mine and mill optimization was another project that's being worked on now, and so expect updates throughout the year. Keno Hill, that's in the Yukon. That's Canada's largest silver mine and our newest mine. It's in the middle of a significant ramp-up. 2025, we produced 3 million ounces of silver. And Q4 last year was the third consecutive quarter that we had positive free cash flow. You'll recall several years ago, we were putting about $60 million a year into this thing. Now it's actually paying for itself, which is very encouraging. The financial case for Keno Hill, when it's at its fully permitted throughput, that's the 440 tonne permit limit, you can see in the bar chart on the right. At just $50 an ounce silver, the mine generates 47% IRR. And at $75 an ounce silver, about today's spot price, that IRR is a really compelling 83%. So definitely worth pushing through and getting there. And we see really significant exploration potential on this asset, and we believe that we could be running this mine for decades. Just briefly. We do have some projects to get through. Most of them require some permitting. It's really about water, waste and tailings, and you can see the list of things that are in progress there. Switching to exploration. In 2026, we're investing $55 million in exploration. That's nearly double what Hecla's invested in the past, and I think it's pretty much an all-time record. And we allocate that across those three categories: near-mine brownfields exploration; Nevada growth, which I'll get to in a second; as well as early-stage generative, and expect to see us a little bit more entrepreneurial, maybe perhaps doing some earn-ins and things like that. So going to Nevada. 3 assets in 2 huge districts: Midas and Hollister as well as Aurora. Plenty of existing permitting infrastructure already in place, and that's really quite unique. We're not starting with a virgin exploration grassroots posture. We have a lot of key facilities already in place and key permits. At Midas, fully permitted mill. Historically produced 2.2 million ounces of gold, 27 million ounces of silver. Historically at very high grades, about 0.5 an ounce gold equivalent. Hollister, nearby. Truckable distance, I think it's something like about 14 miles away. Very high-grade gold and silver as well, and that's within hauling distance. And Aurora, also exceptional historic grades, over 2 ounces per tonne. There is a small 600 tonne per day mill, and it produced 20 million ounces of silver. And as I said, this is the one project that our Head of Exploration, Kurt Allen, really is excited about. So just to wrap up. Six attributes: so silver legacy, 135 years history, best jurisdictions, silver focus, reserve dominance, project momentum, cost excellence. And so what I've hoped that I've shown you today is that they're not just talking points. They are backed by real assets, by real production, real cash flows, strong balance sheet that just keeps getting stronger in this environment, in fact, a debt-free balance sheet. Record exploration investment and a growth trajectory that sees us going to 20 million ounces of silver in the medium term and perhaps beyond that. Lowest cost in the peer group, longest reserve mine lives, double the grade. High silver leverage. Silver is obviously getting the attention it needs at the moment, and I think Hecla is the premier way to own it. And so with that, I'm happy to take any questions if there's time, Cosmos.

Yes. Thanks, Rob, for a very compelling presentation. Unfortunately, we don't have time for questions, but I'm sure Rob will be happy to answer your questions outside.

Great. Thank you.