Coeur Mining Inc (CDE) 2017 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Coeur Mining Third Quarter 2017 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. (Operator Instructions) And please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Courtney Lynn, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Coeur Mining's Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Our results were released after yesterday's market close and a copy of the press release and slides for today's call are available on our website. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that our press release and some of our comments on the call may include forward-looking statements, from which actual results may differ. Please review the cautionary statements included in our press release and presentation as well as the risk factors described in our 10-Q and latest 10-K.

I will now turn it over to Mitch Krebs, President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Courtney, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to participate in our call. Production and cash flow were both up, costs were down and we reached some very important milestones at 3 key long-term projects that should deliver high-quality organic growth in the fourth quarter and in the coming years. The third quarter financial results were negatively impacted by a few items worth mentioning up front. Number one is our exploration spending was up nearly threefold, which I think is a real positive given the success this drilling is having. I'll talk more about this in a few minutes and give you our rationale for why we are allocating more capital to our near-mine drilling efforts.

The second item is the average gold grade at Kensington was lower than we had anticipated and I'll talk in a few minutes about why this was the case and what we see at Kensington in the fourth quarter and how we plan to achieve the low end of our guidance range for 2017. The third thing is we experienced operating difficulties down at our San Bartolomé mine in Bolivia that we've discussed with you on prior calls. It's mostly driven by a shortage of water due a lack of rainfall over the past 2 years. I'll give you some additional details on what we're doing about these challenges we're facing there in Bolivia. And then the last thing is we booked a $14 million quarterly income tax expense on our income statement, which was a substantial increase from prior periods. And it was mostly driven by noncash changes in the company's deferred tax estimates down in Mexico.

If you're looking at the slides, and you have them in front of you, please go ahead and flip to Slides 7 and 8. Our 2 strongest performers during the quarter were our Palmarejo and Wharf operations. Palmarejo's production was up 25% and costs were down 14% based on higher mining rates from the new Independencia underground mine and from higher overall grades. Palmarejo has now achieved combined average daily mining rates of 4,500 tons per day from Guadalupe and Independencia, 1 quarter ahead of schedule. Palmarejo's quarterly free cash flow was $13 million, bringing in the year-to-date free cash flow to $65 million. And production remains on track to increase by about 50% in '17 compared to last year to between 6.5 million to 7 million silver ounces and between 110,000 and 120,000 gold ounces.

Meanwhile, out in South Dakota, Wharf's quarterly gold production increased 21% and costs declined a little bit compared to the prior quarter, resulting in another quarter of strong free cash flow totaling $12 million. And that brings the total for the first 9 months of 2017 at Wharf to $27 million. Wharf is now sustaining an annualized mining and crushing rate of over 4.5 million tons a year, which is about 25% higher than when we acquired the operation in early 2015. We are reaffirming Wharf's previously improved full year production guidance of 90,000 to 95,000 gold ounces and cost guidance of $700 to $750 per ounce.

With the completion of the 10-month $38 million leach pad expansion project at Rochester during the third quarter, production levels are now rising as we head toward the end of the year and enter 2018. Third quarter production was lower as we transitioned over to the new Stage IV pad and Rochester's unit costs ticked up slightly given that smaller denominator and also higher diesel costs. And it also reflects the residual effects of record rainfall earlier in the year, which led to lower mining, crushing and stacking rates and also higher blasting and cyanide costs. As a result, we have raised Rochester's full year cost guidance, but maintained the silver and gold production guidance for 2017.

And up at Kensington, we mined development ore from the new Jualin deposit earlier than planned and expect to start processing this higher-grade material in the fourth quarter, which is a major accomplishment. However, the mine did experience lower-than-expected average gold grades during the quarter. The average grade has been about 18% lower than last year, mostly due to some variances between our model and actual grades in some new areas we've been mining. Kensington has also been hampered by paste backfill rates that haven't been able to keep up as we've increased Kensington's mining rate to nearly 2,000 tons per day. This has limited our ability to access and mine some higher-grade stopes during the first 9 months of the year. The paste backfill system has now been upgraded and isn't expected to be an issue going forward.

Kensington's results during the first 9 months now puts a lot of pressure on the team during the fourth quarter to deliver on the full year production guidance of 120,000 to 125,000 ounces of gold. However, we still expect mining from the high-grade Raven and Jualin zones to lead to significantly higher grades in production levels and lower unit costs to finish the year. Despite this expected strong fourth quarter we are anticipating, at Kensington we decided to bump up its full year cost guidance range by $50 an ounce to reflect the higher year-to-date unit costs driven by these lower-than-expected gold grades we've seen.

As I mentioned earlier, our San Bartolomé mine continued to experience challenges during the quarter. Persistent drought conditions in the Potosí region of Bolivia have reduced our ability to run our mill to only about 75% of the available time, 6 days a week. In addition, ore purchases have been limited because of reduced third-party mining activity taking place on the Cerro Rico mountain, which typically represents a major source of higher-grade ore. As a result, we reduced our full year production guidance a couple of weeks ago. We've raised our cost guidance range and we made the decision to reduce San Bartolomé's workforce by 23% during the quarter, resulting in a onetime severance expense of $2.2 million. This decreased headcount is expected to reduce our operating costs going forward by nearly $4 million a year or about $0.90 per ounce.

Given that San Bartolomé is our highest cost operation with the shortest mine life in our most challenging jurisdiction, we recognize the drag it is creating on company-wide results. Therefore, we are evaluating a handful of alternatives for San Bartolomé and expect to have more to say at year end. Despite these ongoing headwinds, year-to-date free cash flow from San Bartolomé has actually been positive $7.3 million.

If you don't mind flipping to Slide 10 in the presentation, we can talk more about our exploration activities. You'll note, we continue to invest aggressively, especially at Palmarejo and Kensington. These results we're seeing justify these higher spending levels. At Palmarejo, we currently have 7 drill rigs turning.

Looking at Slide 11, you can see all the different veins and structures we've discovered and are now drilling. We continue to see excellent results from the Nación Vein, which is located about halfway between the Independencia and Guadalupe mines. We expect Nación to be transferred over to the operations group next year to start the transition of this discovery into a new mining area at Palmarejo. We are also seeing impressive results from the La Bavisa vein, which is located 500 meters northeast of the Independencia mine. The majority of these new veins have been discovered just in the past year.

At Guadalupe, definition drilling is underway at the new Zapata, Madoro, and Antena veins, all located just 200 meters to 600 meters west of the Guadalupe mine's infrastructure. Two new veins, not shown on Slide 11, called Jacobo and Portales, were discovered in recent drilling just east of the Guadalupe mine. Similarly, our drilling north of the Independencia mine has discovered the Reforma and Hidalgo veins, which intersect the Independencia structure about 400 meters north of the current underground operation.

Our capitalized resource conversion drilling at Guadalupe has focused on Block B. While at Independencia, underground and surface drilling has focused on resource expansion to the south of the current mine and uppermost portions of central Independencia where we've seen the best grade thicknesses from Independencia since we started drilling there. A year ago, we were just drilling the Nación resource and beginning to mine Independencia. Since then, our exploration initiatives at Palmarejo have achieved the goal of generating new discoveries, which should translate into an extended mine life over time.

At Kensington, shown on Slide 12, we are now up to 5 drill rigs, including 2 on surface that are focused on Jualin resource expansion and 2 drills underground that are focused on resource conversion at Jualin vein #4. A fifth rig is focused on resource expansion over at the Raven vein. As a result, we are generating a lot of drill core during the second half of this year, which is the main reason we are targeting an updated technical report for the end of the first quarter of '18, so we can incorporate as much of this new information as possible into an updated reserve and resource.

At Kensington Main over the past year, we have infill drilled in zones 10, 12, 41 and partially drilled the deeper blocks M and L. To expand the resources at depth, we are currently developing drill stations underground to access and expand the resource of the new Block L, located in lowermost Kensington Main. There's still a lot of drilling to be done at Kensington, which has suffered from a lack of exploration funding over the years. In addition to these near-mine drill programs, we've also been actively pursuing external growth opportunities that meet our M&A and return criteria. We believe the acquisition we completed last week of the high-grade Silvertip mine in northern British Columbia satisfies all these criteria and we are very excited about what Silvertip can bring to our overall portfolio and growth profile.

Slide 13 provides a brief overview of Silvertip and what we're doing there now. In addition to being one of the industry's highest grade mines, Silvertip offers near-term production and cash flows in a mining friendly jurisdiction. Over Silvertip's initial 7.5-year mine life, production is expected to average approximately 10 million silver equivalent ounces per year at an average all-in sustaining cost per silver equivalent ounce of $10.50 to $11.50 and generate average annual EBITDA of about $70 million. Silvertip should provide a meaningful boost to our overall production levels, our cash flow and our margins and help to further reduce our unit costs.

Over the next several months, we will be investing in underground drilling and development at Silvertip to convert resources into reserves and expand the size of the resource, which hasn't received much drilling historically. In addition, we will be upgrading surface infrastructure and mobile equipment and plan to put Silvertip in production by the end of the first quarter of 2018 and start the ramp-up to production rates up to 1,000 tons a day later in the year. Because of these additional activities, we are revising our 2017 full year CapEx guidance range by about $10 million to $120 million to $140 million and our full year exploration guidance range up by about $3 million to $5 million to $32 million to $36 million company-wide.

On another note, I'd like to provide a quick update on our recent work at La Preciosa. You may recall, we kicked off in an internal effort late last year to take a fresh look at that project. We spent about $5 million earlier this year to drill 110 holes totaling about 26,000 meters to try to increase the amount of higher-grade underground mineralization, to try and reduce the strip ratio for the open pit component of the project, and to try and add additional material to the overall resource. We achieved 2 of those objectives, with the overall average grade increasing about 22% to 123 grams per ton. And the strip ratio declining by about 50% from 16:1, down to 7.5:1.

However, the estimated CapEx our internal team has developed at this point, combined with a $17 silver price, make the rate of return unattractive at this time. We'll keep pursuing opportunities to try and find a way to make La Preciosa an attractive project, especially focusing on the upfront capital component. In the meantime, we'll maintain our overall return on invested capital discipline and only fund growth investments that can generate the best risk-adjusted returns and that can enhance the quality of our portfolio of assets. Slide 14 lays out how we think about our capital allocation priorities.

And now turning to Slide 15 to wrap up. Overall, we're looking at a very strong fourth quarter, especially from Rochester and Kensington, and believe we're well-positioned heading into 2018 to deliver high-quality cash flow and production growth at lower costs. We plan to provide a drilling update in early December with more details on the positive results we're seeing from both Palmarejo and Kensington. And Silvertip should also provide several near-term catalysts as we transition into production ramp-up starting in the first quarter. We plan to file several new technical reports in the coming months that will provide additional updates on some of our key operations.

I'd like to thank our team for their hard work on all of the different initiatives taking place across the company. I'd also like to welcome our 181 new employees in Vancouver and at Silvertip and thank them for everything they're doing to get the mine ready to start up.

That's the extent of our prepared comments. Let's go ahead and open it up for any questions.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Joseph Reagor of Roth Capital Partners.

Couple of questions on Silvertip first. I guess, first, you just mentioned the 180 employees that are there. Can you give us kind of an idea of what we should expect for like cash outflows there in the fourth quarter? Whether it's exploration, capitalized expenditures or anything you guys are going to drop through G&A, et cetera, for the employee overhead costs?

Yes, sure. Fourth quarter, we expect to spend about $14 million of capital expenditures. Of that, $2 million is capitalized drilling and then expense should be about $7 million in the fourth quarter and of that, $2 million is expensed exploration.

Okay. And then can you give us an update on how the permitting amendments are going there?

Yes, we have submitted an application to provide an additional bridge, during which time we'll be submitting an amendment application that would allow us to sustain a 1,000 ton a day mining and processing rate. We expect to receive that in the third quarter of next year. Between now and then, we'll continue to operate under a kind of a short-term bridging permit that the site has had and we expect to continue.

Okay. And then shifting gears a bit. On guidance, obviously there's a lot of questions this morning about confidence level that we are getting on the guidance. Most specifically, cost guidance at San Bartolomé and Rochester tend to be leaning towards the higher end of guidance. And then specifically Kensington, the production guide, what it implies is about a minimum of 40,000 ounces for Q4. Could you give us additional color as to what you guys are doing to bake the cost in and the production guidances and what your degree of confidence is that you guys will be within that -- inside that revised guidance range?

Yes, I'll start, Frank, fill in the blanks that I miss. But just to go down the list, San Bartolomé is a little bit of a wildcard because of the weather impact. Certainly, we hope for more rain as they enter the rainy season. But the main driver to costs there in the second half -- well, in the fourth quarter now, is really some third-party ore that we anticipate hauling from an operation that's actually quite a ways away from San Bartolomé, but contains some very high grade ore. And we anticipate that stream of high-grade third-party ore purchases to help boost production and help bring those unit costs into a level there that will allow us to achieve the full year cost guidance at San Bartolomé.

Rochester, yes, probably on the high end of the guidance range, but we're confident that with these new ounces coming off of the new Stage IV pad plus some cost-reduction opportunities, we're not hauling out any waste anymore like we were in the second quarter to get access to some higher-grade gold in the pit. So we feel like our costs at Rochester should be admittedly toward the higher end of the guidance range, but within that range. And then yes, at Kensington, I mentioned in my comments, it's going to be a big push in the fourth quarter. There is a good plan in place to accomplish that. It leans heavily on ore coming out of that Raven zone, which is narrower, higher-grade. We've mined in there periodically over several years. We've got, we think, a pretty good handle on grade performance out of that. They will be dropping stopes to allow us to process some very high grade ore out of Raven that will supplement what we mine from Kensington Main to give us that grade kick that we'll need to achieve that kind of a production quarter. But the plan we have faith in, the team we have faith in, and that shows us achieving that kind of a quarter and allowing us to clip the low end of that guidance range of 120,000 to 125,000 ounces.

Our next question comes from Mark Mihaljevic of RBC Capital Markets.

I guess I'll kick it off on the exploration side of things. Obviously, lot of interesting things going on down at Palmarejo. So just kind of early stages, can you just give us a sense of how the widths and the grades of Nación and some of these other veins have compared to Independencia and Guadalupe?

Hi, this is Hans Rasmussen, Exploration VP. The Nación vein is looking very similar to Independencia in both thicknesses and grades. We're seeing a couple of, what we call clavos so far in the drilling, which are the thicker portions of the deposit and fortunately, one of those is in the northern part closest to our infrastructure. La Bavisa is still really early in the drilling, but we are seeing some pretty good thicknesses, similar to Independencia, not quite as good in the gold range, but still early days on that one. The other ones are very early also around Guadalupe and the best out of that batch around Guadalupe is Zapata. In Zapata some of our early holes actually get thicknesses that were comparable to what we're seeing at Independencia, not as thick as Guadalupe, but still respectable. And I'd guess that will be the first one to show a resource in the coming year or so.

Mark, its Mitch. Just to add on to that a couple of things. When we bought Paramount, I guess, now couple of years ago, who had the property package next door, that allowed us to consolidate ownership of several of these structures that were kind of split down the middle previously by the property boundary. Nación is a good example. On their side, it was called Dana. So now it's Nación and Dana have linked up to become 1 continuous structure. Similarly, La Bavisa, that's actually on the east side of that former property boundary. So a lot of these new things sit very near our infrastructure at Guadalupe and between Guadalupe and Independencia, but some of them are also a product of that acquisition that we made a couple of years ago.

I guess, moving over to Silvertip. As you guys have kind of started to take the reins there and started putting some money in and getting your people on the ground, are you still pretty happy with everything you are expecting? Have there been any surprises that you've been seeing kind of -- as you really take over the keys?

Yes, Mark, this is Frank. We -- earlier in this quarter we have been pretty engaged in activities there as you might imagine. And we are working through a very disciplined process. We are running it sort of like a project in regards to permitting and people, and resource modeling, and so on. And everything has been going pretty well according to plan so far. Nothing much to report on there in a negative way. We're in the process of this week starting to commission the mill on some materials that are available sitting at the surface and expect that to go fairly well. And it's gone according to plan so far.

I'd say the team has done a really good job leading up to the closing last week of coordinating closely with JDS Silver, which has helped us get kind of a running start since the closing, which was only, hard to believe, a week ago. But I think there's a real positive energy up there. Folks are excited. We've all been spending a lot of time in British Columbia and we're excited about being a part of that mining and business community out there. Great First Nations relationships and a lot of support from the provincial government. So we are excited and can't wait for the first quarter next year.

I guess, kind of on that note, what type of ramp-up are you expecting there? Because obviously the mine was in operation for a bit under JDS's control. So what type of time line do you think it will take for you to get up to nameplate and how much work will go into that?

Mark, this is Frank again. As we've stated, we plan to begin operations there in the first quarter. It will be a ramp up. It will be lower tonnages in early days, something in the range of 300 tons to 400 tons per day. I'm expecting that by the end of the year we would have ramped up to the 1,000-ton per-day rate. That's subject to getting that permit approval that we need to go higher, but we don't see any issues with that at the moment either.

That was helpful. And just one final one from me. I guess, obviously, it's a bit of a weird quarter tax-wise. So just wondered if you could provide some guidance for what we should be expecting for Q4. Again, assuming numbers come in according to the guidance that you outlined.

Yes. Mark, it's Peter. And I would say in terms of the fourth quarter, you are right. Third quarter was a little wonky, which is often the case when we see a pretax number that's effectively breakeven. And so we ended up seeing what was on a relative basis to that pretax income a pretty significant, primarily deferred tax entry. But in terms of Q4, given that we are projecting relatively strong fourth quarter across the whole portfolio of mines. I think our sort of average, using the sort of average rate approach in terms of that tax rate would be the logical way of approaching it, which would be in the 30% plus or minus range.

Our next question come from Justin Stevens of Raymond James.

Bunch of my questions have been answered already but I have got a few left here. So the Palmarejo CapEx was a bit lighter than what we were expecting. Is this sort of what we can expect going forward there?

Yes. You know, you've seen what our guidance is for the year. We'll probably come in on the low end of that range. The majority of the savings on capital has come through development, capitalized development underground. We have not had to do as much as we thought we would have to produce against guidance for the year.

When you say low end of the range, Frank, you mean CapEx, not production?

CapEx. Yes.

Speaking of that, there was a negative development in CapEx of $1 million there. I was just curious if that reclassification of some previous development CapEx to the sustaining line or what?

We are all looking at each other here in the room. Let us get back to you on that.

Just seemed weird, to see a negative $1 million spend for CapEx.

Yes, let us circle back.

Leases.

Yes, it's likely capital lease. I'll get you an answer on that.

Okay. That would make sense. So take it over to Rochester, what can we expect sort of ballpark for placement rates there in the fourth quarter?

Well, pretty close to what we've achieved this year so far, which has averaged about 48,000, 49,000 tons per day.

Okay. And are there going to be any expected lingering impacts of the rough weather that you guys had earlier in the year carrying forward into 4Q or is that going to be sort of all wrapped up?

No, as Mitch mentioned earlier, we struggled with some pretty severe weather in the first quarter and fell behind on mining rates in that quarter. In the second and third quarters, we've come a long ways to catch up as much of that as we can. On top of that, mining this 1.5 million tons of waste to expose a couple of benches in the open pit that carry some pretty decent gold values. That was timed to be the first materials going out onto the Stage IV expansion leach pad, we just completed that project. And that material is under leach now, and that's all working out quite well. But there'll be a deficit to the year on the total tons mined, but you see what our guidance for production is and we're confident in that.

Okay. And over at Kensington, just we haven't really gotten too much out of -- for color on Raven. Can you give any sort of expectation for tons or grades there in the fourth quarter?

Sure. We've spent a lot of - - a good portion of this year developing over there, requires that, because of the mining method that will be deployed. It is close to shrink stoping. It's a little bit of a hybrid between that and longitudinal mining. So lots of vertical development. We've developed 4 of 7 levels through the course of the year. We're at the stage right now where that material just needs to be drilled out in panels, shot, and it will all be taken out in a pretty large bulk tonnage. Should be in excess of 40,000 tons that will come out there in the fourth quarter. On the grade side, we see ranges on Raven that it goes between 0.35, 0.40 ounce per ton (multiple speakers) we've made in a while.

Our next question comes from Ryan Thompson of BMO.

Just a couple of quick ones on Palmarejo there. Recoveries seemed to be quite a bit lower in the third quarter compared to where the mine has been running, and I'm guessing as a consequence of pushing more tons. How should we think about recoveries sort of going forward? And my second question is just on the drilling you are doing on the new veins there, are they subject to the Franco stream or they outside of the stream zone?

Frank will take the first one and then Hans will take the second one.

Yes, Ryan. To understand what's going on there in the third quarter with recovery, I'll refer you back to the second quarter where you see our tons mined, our grades were a bit lower than we achieved -- quite a bit lower than what we achieved in the third quarter. So we had a very large slug of silver and gold ounces come out at the process facilities. And we had an inventory buildup. So it just didn't make its way out of the plant in that calendar quarter to maintain the recovery. So it was an inventory effect. We're working in the fourth quarter to get that inventory brought down to normal levels and well on our way to getting that done. So you'll see recoveries return to what you've been seeing over the last, say, 4 or 5 quarters behind this one.

Ryan, to answer your question about the stream, this is Hans Rasmussen, the map on Page 11 sort of gives you a feeling for where the definition of the stream is. There is a vertical orange line. That's the original Paramount/Coeur line. So anything on the east side would be out of the streaming arrangement with Franco and anything on the west or left side would be within. Most of the Nación drilling, I would say 80% now or more, is within the Franco of streaming. All of the Guadalupe drilling is and most of the La Bavisa is outside of the streaming.

Okay.

Ryan, just wanted to mention -- I just -- I had these numbers in front of me, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share them in the -- to your question about kind of what's on the east side of the property, to the west side, and how it relates back to that Franco stream. In the third quarter, gold production; 50% of it was out of Guadalupe; 12% of it came from Independencia west, which is kind of our side of that AOI tying back to the Franco stream; and then 39% of the gold ounces came from the east side, which is outside of the Franco AOI.

Our next question comes from Michael Dudas of Vertical Research.

A couple of things. First, on La Preciosa, looks like a great effort made there, characterized -- was it just missed by a little bit or just things that just, in the current environment and given the other opportunities you have, just enough to overcome with an investment near term?

Oh, I'd say, especially as things like Silvertip came along that gave us such a great opportunity to see a higher rate of return, more immediate, with a lot less risk, no construction risk, no development time line, made it, in terms of prioritizing where we allocate capital, something like a Silvertip was a no-brainer compared to La Preciosa. The return on La Preciosa, it's just so sensitive to the silver price and, of course, that upfront capital. I'd say the drilling was very successful. I'd say we still have work to do on that upfront capital to the extent that there is any opportunity. That is what -- a higher silver price and a little bit less capital would push that thing into a category where the rate of return starts to approach the levels where it's actually value-additive versus value-destructive.

Yes. No question. You absolutely made the right call on Silvertip. And then as you characterize after the financing is closed here in this quarter, how you're looking at the balance sheet optimization, where it stands, cash flow allocation, worked -- and given where your tenure and your loans, what you guys are thinking here?

Yes, Mike, it's Peter. I would say that we elected to sort of go down a path of a fairly shareholder friendly approach to acquiring Silvertip by putting in place the $200 million revolving credit facility, drawing half of that. That takes our total leverage pro forma for that to about 2.4x. And that's kind of the upper zone of the area that where we are comfortable. So we like having the additional liquidity available pro forma for the transaction. We'll have about $180 million of cash on the balance sheet.

So with $100 million of dry powder in that $180 million, we think we're in a pretty good shape. But our plan would be to use free cash flow generated next year, once we start ramping up Silvertip and other operations are hitting on all cylinders, to again delever the balance sheet. Those are hard-fought yards to sort of improve the quality of the balance sheet, lower our leverage level, and that's not something that we are going to certainly concede any time soon.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mitch Krebs for any closing remarks.

Okay, well thanks, everybody, for your time and all the questions and we look forward to speaking with you again in February of 2018, hard to believe, to discuss our fourth quarter and full year results. So have a good day and thanks again.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.