Hecla Mining Company (HL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, everyone. I'm Rob Krcmarov, President and CEO of Hecla Mining Company. And thanks to the Denver Gold Group and Cosmos for moderating and all the volunteers here for putting together such a wonderful show. I joined Hecla nearly 2 years ago. And before that, I spent the bulk of my career at Barrick in various leadership roles, really focused on value creation. Hecla is the largest silver producer in the U.S. and Canada, and I want to spend a few minutes really talking about why -- we think this is a really compelling time to own our stock. Certain and the actual results could differ. I'll also reference some non-GAAP measures like all-in sustaining costs and free cash flow and full reconciliations are in the appendix, and I encourage you to have a look in our SEC filings. So why do we call ourselves in North America's premium silver producer? It really comes down to these 6 things. First, 135-year legacy. We are the longest listed mining company on the New York Stock Exchange. As I said, we've been around for 135 years. And I think this speaks to our resilience because -- we're generally thoughtful. And for me personally, being a part of a 135-year history, I take that quite seriously because there are generations of miners and people who have held our stock that we're responsible for and accountable to. Second, we operate in the very best jurisdictions. Every one of our operations in all of our projects, they're all in Canada and the United States. And so as someone said last week, we don't have to worry about Coors corruption or cartels. Third, we're silver focus, peer-leading silver exposure, both in terms of revenue as well as reserves. Fourth is our reserve dominance. And in fact, we -- our average reserve mine life is 72% longer than the peer group average. Fifth is the project momentum. We're servicing some real value through some really robust organic projects, and I'll get to those in a moment. And sixth is cost excellence. We were the lowest cost producer of our peer group in 2025. That's on an all-in sustaining cost basis, and that protects our margins. So if you put those 6 things together, you're really getting a company with scale, with longevity, financial discipline, and sitting in the best jurisdictions in the world for mining. And what that all boils down to is really longest-lived lowest-risk pure silver story in the sector. Our growth is organic by design. Every project and every mine that we sit in, obviously, we already own, we understand it deeply. So there's no new geological risk. There's no integration risk -- there's no bidding war on someone else's discovery. We stage the capital for all of our projects and mines as each project earns it, funding the next phase only once it creates our investment criteria. And that doesn't mean we've closed the door on acquisitions. Obviously, if the right opportunity meets our criteria, we'll look at it. But our growth, it really just doesn't depend on it. We have a healthy organic growth business. And I think that's what makes Hecla the premier silver producer in North America. Our 3 operating mines sit in the upper Northwest part of our continent. We have Greens Creek in Alaska. Lucky Friday in the silver value in Northern Idaho, that is a tremendous district that's produced 1.2 billion ounces. I think it's really underappreciated the silver potential there. And that's not far from our head office in quarter Lane. And our newest mine is Keno Hill, which is up in the Yukon. So around those, we also hold a deep portfolio of exploration projects. in Nevada, Montana, Colorado and Washington State. And so together, this makes us the largest silver producer in the United States and Canada. Is one way of seeing our advantage here. This is perhaps a little bit complicated slide, but let me explain the key point here is that Hecla's average reserve mine life is 13.3 years, again, 72% longer than the industry peer average, which is around about 7.7 years. If you have a look at the chart across the bottom, the solid lines, the solar blue and the solid grade. They're the silver mines and the ones in white gold mines. And our reserve base, as you can see, simply runs deeper and longer than any other silver producer. And that means there's a lower replacement risk. It's more predictable long-term production. We can plan long term. We have stability, and we can see over the horizon longer than anyone else. So it gives us more clarity so that we can make capital allocation decisions. This chart plots our minds by jurisdictional risk on the Y-axis and the silver equivalent grade on the x axis across the bottom. So obviously, you want to be in the top right-hand corner. The size of the bubble reflects the scale of the asset. So you can see where our 3 assets sit. Really, I don't think any of our peers can put that combination together across their own portfolio. And I think this chart really matters beyond -- I think this matters just beyond this chart here. So lower jurisdictional risk, it means that security in our future cash flows -- and our production, it means that -- and I think that's one of the reasons why we Hecla deserves a premium valuation. As I said, we don't have to worry about things like Coors corruption and cartels. In the second quarter of 2026, silver made up about 68% of our Q2 revenue from silver. And that's the highest exposure amongst our peers. In the first quarter, it was above 2% -- so if you want silver exposure in your portfolio, this is about as pure as it gets. And I think as you can see on that -- on the Y-axis there, our reserve base tells the same story. It's very, very heavily weighted towards silver. And so with oil prices, obviously, being topical and making headlines, it's quite a discussion point. I think it's worth investing our exposure to it. Fuel really made up 3% of our consolidated Q2 2026 costs -- and so swings in oil prices, they barely affect us. Later is really our largest and probably most predictable cost input, and that's the one that we watch most closely. On 2025 all-in sustaining cost basis, Hecla sits at the low end of the silver cost curve we were the lowest cost producer in our peer group last year, and that's really an advantage that's tied closely to the quality and the grade of our mines. We're guiding to 15.1 million to 16.1 million ounces of silver pricing in 2026. From there, the nearest upside comes from 2 projects at Greens Creek, the pyrite concentrate circuit and the tailings reprocessing project. More on that in the next slide. Being further out, we see a real path to being a plus 20 million-ounce silver producer the medium-term growth coming from the continued ramp-up at Keno Hill and the potential restart of Midas -- of the historic Midas mine and any satellite resources in Nevada. Longer term, there's more potential upside from a possible Keno Hill expansion. We have a permitted mill constraint at 440 tonnes per day, but the actual mill itself is capable of significantly more than that, probably close to 50% part of that. So that's longer term. And then there's also the Aurora deposit. That's one of our VPs favorite projects. He's very excited about the potential there as well as Hollister in Nevada. So this is basically a multiyear, multi-project pipeline. In every answer that's organic. Like I said, we can control it. We can control the investment decisions. And it's really meaningful growth potential that's stacked on top of an already long-lived stable production base and long reserve life. So let me give you a bit more color on our 3 organic growth projects. At Greens Creek, the pyrite concentrate project, that's potentially going to produce something like about 1 million to 1.2 million ounces a year and about 10,000 to 15,000 ounces of gold once that's fully ramped up. We're targeting first production in the fourth quarter of 2027 and into perhaps the first half of 2028 with about a year to ramp that up. Now that's really low complexity. It's low CapEx, super high returns. So we're very excited about that. Also Greens Creek, we're evaluating the processing of dry stack tails. So these aren't wet tails in a tailings dam. You've seen how they collapse in unfortunately. But this is basically a pile of dry sand that's sitting on the surface. And so what we have there is 10.6 million tonnes holding roughly 51 million ounces of silver, 600,000 ounces of gold plus a bunch of other critical metals. At midyear prices this year, that's worth roughly about $6.1 billion in the ground that's obviously before costs. And so if you do the math and on the tonnes versus the contained ounces, you can see why we're excited here -- that's a lot of metal sitting in a pile on the surface, about a mile from our port that we've already mined once. So an update on that Phase III metallurgical test work that wrapped up in August, and we're waiting on those results now. And at Midas in Nevada, we have a fully permitted mill. It's 1,200 tonnes per day. We have an empty tailings dam. It's got capacity for around about 15 years. And we're planning on doing regular exploration updates through the rest of this year and into 2027 as we evaluate what that's going to look like, what a restart might look like there. But the comments read across all 3 of these projects here is they're all relatively low capital intensity to execute. So let's just dive into a couple of our operations here. Greens Creek is our cornerstone mine -- it's been generating free cash flow for us for multiple decades. In fact, from 2006, you can see in that line chart at the bottom there is generated $2.4 billion of free cash flow. And it's a phenomenal mine. In the second quarter of 2026, Greens Creek produced 2.1 million ounces of silver and just over 14,000 ounces of gold and generated nearly $130 million of free cash flow at an all-in sustaining cost of negative -- has negative $10.71 an ounce, and that's after byproduct credits. It sits in the 15th -- it sits in the best 15th percentile of the primary silver cost curve, and it carries a 12-year reserve life. In fact, it's pretty much had a 12-year reserve life for the last 5 years or so. We're also advancing that pyrite concentrate circuit and the tailings reprocessing that I mentioned on the last slide. Lucky Friday is our second cornerstone mine. UCB mining technique as this mine position really for its best decade in its 80-year history. Now this has been producing more or less semi continuously with few periods of pauses. And really the next decade looks fantastic. We adopted the UCB mining technique primarily because this is a deep and it's a seismic mine, and it was primarily for safety -- but it came with a real bonus. So production really increased. It's almost double what it was in previous decades. And in Q2, Lucky Friday delivered a record 1.5 million ounces of silver that was in Q2. That's not an isolated quarter. If you look back last year, this mine set milling records through our successive billing records throughout 2025, and it closed the year with a record 5.3 million ounces of production. Lucky Friday generated over $87 million of free cash flow at a little over $17 all-in sustaining cost of $17 an ounce. The surface cooling project, which we've been building out for the last 1.5 years or 2, that's tracking for completion this month. That's going to set up our long-term future. It's going to make conditions working underground more pleasant. It is fairly hot. You can assume that there's probably going to be some productivity gains, but you can't quantify that because you can imagine working in a hot environment can be to something that's a little bit more pleasant. It also sets us up for the long-term future. So that as we continue to mine this fabulous ore body at depth, which has not been closed off at all. And in fact, there's been no exploration in the district since about 2011. This is setting us up for future for success. Also, our tailings upon 5. We're building that at the moment. That gives us capacity out to 2044 through a 3-phase plan, and the first phase is due in 2028. The reserve mine life here is 15 years. Keno Hill is our newest mine, that's located up in the new con. That's still going through a phase of investment and ramp up -- in Q2, it produced about 600,000 ounces of silver and generated nearly $15 million of free cash flow. We control a huge land position here, not 88,000 hectares, it's 88 square mile land package. There are literally historic mines and mineral occurrences all over this district, and we're really only mining at 2 of them and exploration continues to confirm the district scale potential here. I think that we'll probably be producing here for many, many decades. There's that much potentially. I'm very excited about that. But right now, our focus is really on completing the strategic investments, completing the permitting and making those capital investments towards our permit limit of 440 tonnes per day. Now a quick look at exploration, which is really core to how we create value and our of creative value in the past from a previous company. We've really turned exploration from an activity that we fund when we can into really a core business that can potentially transform our company. We've given the team a license to hunt for value wherever it lives, whether that's in the ground or in a deal and we're backing that mandate with real capital discipline. And that's meant upgrading. We've built our team out. We've added more technical talent and also commercially, people who know how to structure a deal and not just find a deposit. This year, we're investing a record $55 million in exploration, $24 million of that goes into near mine. So obviously, extending the life of mine, that's the bread and butter of exploration. And then we're investing a significant amount into our Nevada growth, $16 million there and generative and early stage exploration $10 million there. Let me close on Nevada because I think these projects are still underappreciated by the market. At minus we have a fully permed mill, as I said, we got tailings capacity already in place. This property has historically produced 2.2 million ounces of gold and 27 million ounces of silver at about 0.5 ounce per tonne gold. So that's convert that to metric. That's about 15, 16 grams per tonne gold. So very high-grade historic production. We've already delineated some high-grade resources here. We've had some exploration success, and we continue to build them out. We're also evaluating the potential for residual stope mining back at the Midas underground, which sits underneath the mill. And at Hollister, that's within hauling distance. That's something like about 14 miles away. We're sitting on more high-grade resources. This is also a past-producing mine that's delivered the equivalent of around about 0.5 million ounces of gold at around about 0.8 ounces per tonne. And at Aurora, which is over in the Western side of the state, that hold some of our best exploration targets. It's got an on-site permitted mill about 600 tonnes per day. And historically, it's produced just short of 2 million ounces of gold and 20 million ounces of silver. At mill grades averaging over 2 ounces per tonne. So that's over 60 grams per tonne historic production. And if our 2026 and 2027 drill programs can find more of that, they should really get the market's attention. So stay tuned on all 3 of those. A quick snapshot for your reference. We trade under the symbol on the New York Stock Exchange, strong balance sheet, 0 debt. no long-term debt and broad institutional ownership and analyst coverage. And so with that, I think we've left enough time for questions.

Thanks, Rob. I think we have time for one quick question. So I'll ask it -- in terms of year-end reserves and resources, any thoughts on what we could expect?

Obviously, we declare our reserves and resources typically in February. We're going through that process right now. Yes, I can't really give you guidance. But in terms of reserve pricing, we do what everyone else does. You look at a 3-year trailing average. You look at analyst forecasts, consensus, you look at the forward curve, you kind of triangulate, there's no real science to it. But we -- I'd say that we have historically been generally on the -- within the gold post, but slightly on a more conservative end, I think we'll be in a pretty healthy position.

And then I guess we have 1 time for 1 more. We don't have time. I'll just take it on off-line. Your balance sheet has transformed over the last year with no debt and a growing cash balance, what are you planning to do with all that extra cash? .

If you look at our peers, they've both got -- most of them have some debt. They've kept debt. We have no debt at all. We're building cash as a percentage of market cap, for example, we don't have as much cash as they do. I want to build up a fortress balance sheet -- and as I've pointed out, we have -- we don't really have a huge wave of CapEx coming in front of us at present. We don't -- our organic projects are low capital intensity. At some point, -- at current prices, we should be bumping up under $1 billion of cash on the balance sheet. Sometime after that, we'd have to start looking seriously about returns to shareholders if we don't have anything material to invest in. But I want to make sure that we stay resilient through the cycles.

Thanks, Rob. I think that gentleman and Tan Sue will track you down to ask his questions but thanks for a very good presentation.

Thank you.