Agnico Eagle Mines Limited Aktie

Gold company by market capitalization. And that would be Agnico Eagle Mines. And from Agnico, we have Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Jamie Porter. Jamie, I see you coming up to the stage, and I believe you're going to make a few initial remarks. So I'll turn the podium over to you, and then I believe you'll join me at the chairs for a chat. Good morning.

Good morning, everyone. So I will start the presentation today with an overview of Agnico. I'll talk about our strategy and how we believe it's led to strong value creation over the last several decades and how we expect it to continue to do so in the decades ahead. I'll touch on our first quarter results, talk about the strong start that we had to the year from an operational perspective and obviously, a phenomenal start to the year from a financial perspective with the gold price environment we're in.

I'll briefly present our recently announced proposed consolidation in Finland, where we've -- through the proposed acquisition of Rupert Resources, Aurion Resources and the Fingold joint venture. We've consolidated a 2,500 square kilometer land package in what we believe is the most highly prospective ground in Northern Europe.

And lastly, I'll touch on our key value drivers. And that, I believe, is a key differentiator for Agnico. We currently produce 3.4 million ounces a year, but we have 20% to 30% production growth in the decade ahead, and we're excited to look forward to delivering on that.

So I will be making forward-looking statements as part of the presentation today. So I'd encourage you to refer to Slide 2, our cautionary notes disclosure. So just by way of overview, Agnico is, as Lawson mentioned, the second largest gold producer in the world. Our targeted production this year is about 3.4 million ounces. We operate 10 mines across 4 different countries.

So while we are a global mining company, we consider ourselves to be a regional miner. We focus on regions where we see the geologic potential and political stability to operate multiple mines over multiple decades. A great example of this is our footprint in the Abitibi, what we call the Abitibi in Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec. There, we operate 5 mines that reflect almost 2/3 of our production, and they're all within 300 kilometers of one another.

We believe that regional consolidation creates a competitive advantage by having those mines in close physical proximity to one another, we gain a competitive cost advantage. In the Abitibi, we are the employer of choice. Our employee turnover rates are less than half of the industry average, which keeps our costs down. We have long-standing supplier relationships that we've developed over decades. We've been operating in this region for over 60 years. In many cases, we helped our suppliers initially set up their business.

We're also the largest mining company in Canada, which means we benefit from economies of scale given our purchasing volumes. Lastly, we're able to benefit from tremendous synergies associated with that physical proximity. We can share people, technical resources, parts supplies and even equipment between those 5 operations.

It gives us a tangible competitive advantage that we see in our cost structure. Our costs are $300, $400 an ounce below the industry average, and it's because of this regional approach. And the results really speak for themselves. We go back over the last 20 years, 2005, Agnico was producing 240,000 ounces a year from one mine, the LaRonde mine in Northern Quebec.

Fast forward to 2025, producing 14x that amount of gold, just shy of 3.5 million ounces from 10 operations. So that's great gross gold production growth. However, what's most important is production per share. And over that period, we've increased production per share by a factor of 3. Very few of our peers can say that. And what that means is that we're delivering more exposure per share to investors, and that's really why they're investing in gold equities in the first place.

And obviously, with the increase in the gold price, our EBITDA per share over that period has increased by a factor of 18. And it's reflected in our share price. If you look back again over the last 20 years, our compound annual growth rate in the share price is approximately 13%, double the XAU and significantly outperforming the S&P. So very strong historical performance over the past 2 decades, and we expect that to continue.

So I'll briefly touch on our first quarter results. As I mentioned, a very strong operational start to the year. We produced about 830,000 ounces in Q1, which was actually ahead of our budget, and we were below budget with respect to costs. Record realized gold price in the quarter of $4,881 an ounce, the highest we've ever experienced, driving significant increase in financial results and earnings.

We had record EBITDA for the quarter, record earnings per share. By controlling costs, we're effectively able to pass on the benefit of higher gold prices to investors by directly returning capital through our share buyback and dividend and by indirectly improving the company through the strengthening of our balance sheet.

We repaid $1 billion of debt in 2025, amassed a $2.9 billion net cash position at the end of March. So the balance sheet is in the strongest position in the company's history. We've got the financial flexibility and strength to be able to execute on our long-term strategic plan. Now we did have a very significant cash tax payment in the first quarter, $1.3 billion related to 2025 and $0.5 billion related to the first quarter of 2026, which drove our free cash flow slightly lower.

We were about $730 million for the quarter. We returned 51% of that to shareholders through the dividend and the share buyback. We bought back $150 million of stock, paid a $225 million dividend. In subsequent quarters, we expect our cash taxes to normalize at around $0.5 billion a quarter, which means free cash flow will be closer to $1 billion to $1.5 billion per quarter, and we'll be doing 2 to 3x what we did on the share buyback in Q1.

So significant growth in direct shareholder returns expected through the remainder of this year. So with respect to our recently announced Finnish consolidation, effectively, what we're doing here is looking to combine the acquisition of Rupert Resources and their Ikkari project with Aurion Resources and the Fingold joint venture, consolidating again, this 2,500 square kilometer package of land in what we believe, again, is the most highly prospective area in Europe.

We've been operating in Finland for 20 years. We operate the Kittila mine. It produces about 210,000 ounces a year. We started in Finland 20 years ago, acquiring Kittila when it had 3 million ounces. We now have 10 million ounces of reserves and resources in front of us. And over that 20-year period, we've produced 4 million ounces. So we've created significant value in Finland over the past several decades, and we see the potential to really double down on that with this proposed acquisition.

Over the next 18 months, we will be drill testing the property boundaries and the depth extent of this land package and looking to move forward, freezing the scope of the Ikkari project and start the permitting process. We see potential production by 2034 of up to 300,000 ounces a year from Ikkari, which when combined with Kittila, will give us 0.5 million ounces of annual production in Finland. And with that very prospective land package, we expect to be able to improve on that and add mine life for decades to come.

Now I'll end on just an overview of our organic growth pipeline. We like to say that the company is in the strongest position in its history, certainly is from a financial perspective with virtually no debt and almost $3 billion of net cash and growing, but also with respect to our development pipeline. We have what we call our key value drivers. These 5 projects collectively represent 1.5 million ounces of potential annual production growth.

These are relatively low-risk projects. They are expansions of existing mines or new construction in regions where we know how to operate, where we've built mines in the past. I'll start with Detour Lake. Detour is currently the largest gold mine in Canada. It's producing 700,000 ounces a year. We are looking to go underground to access higher grades and ultimately ramp up production by 2030 to approximately 1 million ounces a year.

At 1 million ounces a year, Detour will be one of the top 5 or 6 largest gold mines in the world, and I'd argue one of the most profitable. At current spot gold prices at 1 million ounces a year, Detour will generate $3 billion a year of after-tax annual free cash flow. So this is a unicorn in our industry, a massive operation that will generate significant annual production will do so for decades and decades.

At Canadian Malartic, we are transitioning from what's the second largest gold mine in Canada, an open pit mine that's processing -- that has historically processed 60,000 tonnes per day of relatively low-grade 1 gram per tonne material. We're transitioning to an underground mine at 1/3 of the volume, but 3x the grade. So our production stays about the same at 550,000 to 600,000 ounces a year, but we're opening up 40,000 tonnes per day of excess mill capacity.

We have a plan through the addition of a second shaft and the development of 2 satellite deposits to fill the majority of that mill and get production from Canadian Malartic up to 1 million ounces a year as well. So between Detour and Canadian Malartic, 2 million ounces of annualized production, again, long-life assets that are going to go for decades. Upper Beaver is located just down the street, about 14 kilometers away from our Macassa mine in Kirkland Lake.

It's currently considered an advanced exploration project, but we're looking to make a construction and move forward decision on that next year. That will add up to 210,000 ounces a year, again, right in our backyard, starting in 2030, 2031. Our Hope Bay project in the northernmost part of Nunavut, we're actually planning to announce a construction decision on that next week.

We're going to have investors and federal government officials at site to -- for that announcement. This will be our fourth mine that we will have built in Nunavut, has the potential to produce north of 400,000 ounces a year for over a decade. And with the exploration potential that we see there, we think it will be going for decades and decades. When you combine that with our other operations, Meliadine and Meadowbank and Nunavut, we see the potential to get production from Nunavut as a territory to north of 1 million ounces a year.

So we're looking forward to that next week. And lastly, we have a 50-50 joint venture with Teck Resources on the San Nicolas project. It's located in central Zacatecas. We're updating the feasibility study on that project and looking to move it forward ultimately pending permitting.

So we're very excited about this platform. Again, 1.5 billion ounces of total annual production growth potential here. And this excludes the proposed acquisition of Rupert and its Ikkari deposit. It excludes other projects in our portfolio such as Hammond Reef, which is a potential development project in Northern Ontario that we see having the potential to add up to 300,000 ounces a year.

So we have tremendous growth. We've got the balance sheet and financial strength to be able to execute on this in any gold price environment. And we're looking forward to delivering value per share as we have in the past and in the decades ahead.

With that, come join you, Lawson.

Please do. Thank you very much, Jamie. That was a fantastic presentation, very comprehensive. But I mean, I think where I'd like to start is on your capital allocation framework. You've indicated on recent calls that you have the ability to do it all, meaning invest in high IRR growth projects, consider repaying at least 40% of free cash flow and continuing to build the balance sheet. But if you could rank those in terms of priority, how would you do that? And then what could possibly lead you to change that set of priorities?

Yes, it's a good question. I mean I think -- and I have said that many times, in the current gold price environment, we can do everything. I think our #1 priority would be to continue to invest in our organic growth pipeline. I mean these projects are projects that we were looking at $1,800 gold and had a 15% approximate IRR at $1,800 gold.

With Hope Bay being the one exception, it was slightly lower. So at current gold prices, these projects have a 30% to 60% rate of return. We are looking to do everything we can to aggressively move them forward and bring that production growth into reality. So I would say that would be priority #1. Priority #2, again, in this price environment would be returning capital to our shareholders. We've significantly delevered the balance sheet over the past several years. We've gone from a net debt position a few years ago to $2.9 billion of net cash at the end of Q1.

I anticipate we'll be close to $5 billion of net cash at the end of this year. So excess cash beyond that, we're returning to shareholders. Our target this year is 40% of free cash flow. Based on current gold prices, that will represent a return of at least $2.1 billion to shareholders this year, which is 50% higher than what we did last year.

And when we look forward into 2027 with the balance sheet that strong, we won't have a need to further add cash to the balance sheet, which means the percentage of our free cash flow, which goes -- is returned to our shareholders could increase substantially.

That's exciting. So a follow-up question on that then would be between buybacks and the dividend, why emphasize buybacks? I mean, is there room for the dividend to potentially increase as well?

So Agnico has paid a dividend for 43 years and has had to cut it once and we don't want to have to cut it again. So the idea behind the dividend is that it's sustainable even in a much lower gold price environment. And we use the share buyback as a tool that we can flex depending on, obviously, the gold price and our corresponding profitability.

So that's the way we look at it. I think we will continue to increase the dividend. It went from $800 million a year to $900 million a year, so a 12.5% increase this year. And there's scope for it to increase, but not by 50%. I think it will be marginal sustainable increases over time such that, again, even in a much lower gold price environment, we'd be able to afford it and not have to look at cutting it.

What about the concept of a special dividend?

I think that's something that's certainly not out of the question. Again, when you look forward to 2027, current production levels and gold prices, we're generating $8 billion a year of operating cash flow. We're spending this year, if you factor in proposed spending associated with Hope Bay, maybe $3 billion in capital.

So that leaves $5 billion of free cash flow left over. That's going to be similar in 2027, and that could be returned through the dividend. I mentioned we're going to keep that on a relatively modest to the share buyback or through a special dividend, and we'll evaluate it based on the gold price at the time.

Okay. Great. I'd like to move the conversation back to Finland. Thank you for touching on that. Great overview of that transaction. Frankly, what you've done is Finland has become a single-asset part of the portfolio for you guys to a consolidated district play.

What should we be watching over the next 12 to 24 months for investors to get some confidence, certainty and a more clear picture in terms of what that's ultimately going to become in the long term?

Sure. So I mean, we're very happy with what we got. With the Ikkari deposit, we see having the potential again to be developed into a 300,000 ounce a year mine that when combined with Kittila will represent 0.5 million ounces of annual production in Finland. In terms of next steps or catalysts along the way, we have already closed the acquisition of B2Gold's 70% interest in the Fingold joint venture. That's complete.

We're looking to close the Aurion Resources and Rupert Resources transactions in either late Q2 or early Q3. Guy, our Head of Exploration, is here in the room. He's basically started drilling already. We'll be spending $20 million a year over the next 3 years on further drill testing, the property boundaries where the previous operators couldn't -- it didn't make sense for them to drill.

And we'll look to optimize the layout of the proposed projects. So we'll figure out what makes the most sense. We -- now having all 3 of those properties together, we can unconstrain the open pit and maximize the value out of that pit. And by the end of 2027, I think we'll be releasing an updated study that will show what we're going to permit and what we're ultimately planning on doing.

Perfect. You also emphasized the need for external M&A to compete with internal projects. I think it would be really helpful if you could just characterize the framework for what the bar is on M&A and how you think of that more specifically?

Yes. I think similar to what Natasha said on behalf of Newmont, the bar is pretty high because we have a number of very high-return organic growth projects already. So any external M&A opportunity would have to compete for capital with the projects that we already have, which I've mentioned many of them are 30% to 50% to 60% IRR, very high-return projects.

So I think we'll continue with the Agnico strategy, which is focusing on regions where we currently operate. We'll look for opportunities to add value. But the reality is we're in a very fortunate position of not having to do anything because we have that growth. We've got minimum 20% to 30% growth starting in 2030. We've got Ikkari and projects like Hammond Reef on top of that. We can afford to be very patient and very selective.

Okay. So when you talked about your growth, I was thinking very impressive for a company of your size. There's 5 assets, potentially a 6th with Hammond Reef and potentially more that haven't been surfaced yet. When you think about the current bench strength at Agnico, do you guys feel you have the resources necessary to drive that growth? Are there any limitations that you worry about internally?

Yes. No, it's a great question. One of the things that I think differentiates Agnico is that we build our own mines. So we have a 240-person strong construction team, and we oversee any expansions or new construction. We will use contractors and consultants, but we manage them rather than handing them the project to build and then the key is thrown back at us at the end of it.

So that team is busy right now. But if you look at a lot of what we're doing, a lot of our growth is coming from -- is being managed by the mine site operations teams themselves. For example, at Detour, we're basically ramping underground to get some higher grade, but we have an operating team there that's overseeing that project. Similarly at Canadian Malartic.

So I would say, again, the execution risk associated with a lot of our development pipeline is relatively low risk. We have the capacity in Finland, we have a team there that had the excess capacity to be able to run with that project development without it being a drain at all on our corporate resources, our team that's working and focused on Nunavut, Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec.

So we're in great shape now. I think we could do Hammond Reef and Ikkari. Beyond that, we could potentially become a bit stretched because we do want to maintain control and make sure that when we say we're going to do something, we can do it, and we can get our construction development projects completed on time and on budget.

The 20% to 30%, I don't think that included Hammond Reef. I think there's some other options within the portfolio that might not have been considered within that 20% to 30%. How would you frame the blue-sky upside potential for growth over the next decade?

Yes. So the blue sky potential, I think, is significant. You look at our 5 key value driver projects, they collectively represent 1.5 million ounces of annualized production growth. You've got Hammond Reef, which could produce 300,000 ounces a year by 2032, 2033. And you've got Ikkari, which could produce 300,000 ounces a year by 2034, 2035.

So you add that all together, you're north of 2 million ounces, but that's not all going to be incremental. We will have depletion at some of our existing mines. Meadowbank, for example, which was scheduled to be closed this year, we see the potential to extend well beyond 2030, but at a lower rate of production. So production is going to drop from 500,000 ounces a year down to closer to 200,000 ounces a year.

Similarly, at Goldex and perhaps some of our other operations, we could see a production decline. So I'm not going to say that's incremental production, but could we be well north of 4.5 million ounces, assuming all those projects go as planned in a decade? Absolutely, it's possible.

Folks, if anybody has a question, if you put up your hand, we'd be happy to address it. Perhaps while you're all thinking about that, I might touch on Hope Bay. We're expecting an update on that next week. And you're also hosting a group of investors and analysts to site next week as well. I'll be there as well. Thank you for including me.

How do you think about protecting the returns on an asset like that? I mean, actually, in our model, I mean, the returns on spot are well north of 50%. But then there's a lot of execution risk. Of course, there's diesel prices, there's cost pressures in the current macro environment. How do you think about protecting that?

So I think the best way for us to have certainty on the return that we're going to generate from an investment like that is through detailed engineering. Like we have purposely waited to announce construction of this project until we got to about 60% of detailed engineering.

Our experience building 3 mines in Nunavut has dictated that that's how you make sure you have a really good grasp of the capital and construction cost and can give yourself the best possible chance of getting a project completed on time and on budget. So that's been the focus is getting that level of detailed engineering up to 60%.

Again, we've built 3 mines in Nunavut. We have a lot of experience. The first one was a bit of a challenge. The second and third ones were done on time and on budget. So -- we have the logistics and procurement expertise to be able to get things done properly up there, and we're confident in being able to do so.

Obviously, diesel headwinds currently, that's a factor across all of our operations, not only our construction projects. But the one thing I'd point out is we're fortunate in that we are not -- we're only generating our own power in Nunavut. Across the rest of our operations in -- majority of our production comes from Ontario and Quebec, where we're on the grid and it's nuclear hydroelectric power.

So our diesel consumption per ounce of production is about 100 liters. Most of our peers are at 140 or 150, which means we're less sensitive and exposed to higher diesel prices.

Look, it doesn't look like there's any questions in the audience. So before things wrap up here, I really wanted to ask about Detour Lake. You highlighted it as one of the major producers, taking you to 1 million ounces at that particular asset, becoming one of the largest gold producing mines in the world. Nevertheless, I mean, based on what we've heard recently, particularly in Q1 results, there's clearly a lot of optionality, both with the underground and other potential expansion scenarios. How do you think about the potential for that mine to continue growing beyond 1 million ounces?

Yes. And that's something that we're studying internally now. I mean we have a plan to ramp up Detour to 1 million ounces by 2030. At that ramped up 1 million ounce per year rate, we're processing 29 million tonnes a year of ore. It's a massive mine. But we're permitted to 32.8 million tonnes a year.

So we're evaluating internally the economics around expanding the mill and potentially processing more earlier. Just given the fact that we have a multi-decade mine life there, it may make sense to bring some of that production forward and maximize value, which could increase production to north of 1 million ounces a year. But that study is still in the early stages, and we'll likely provide an update on that next year.

Fantastic. I think that's a great place to leave it. Thank you for being here, Jamie.

Thanks, Lawson.

Good morning, everyone. We'll get going. Thank you for coming. Welcome to the Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders of Agnico Eagle Mines Limited. I'm Sean Boyd. I'm the Chair of the Board of Agnico. And as is our tradition, started by our former past Chairman, Jim Nasso, who's here with his lovely wife, Jackie. We now will invite some Agnico representatives to welcome all of us to the meeting in some of the local languages where we operate.

And we'll start with Leona Aglukkaq, our Board member, to offer a greeting in Inuktitut.

[Foreign Language]

Thank you, Leona. And now I'll call on [ Alexi Rasical Rowell ], stay [indiscernible] with your dad. So Alexi's father worked for us for a number of years in exploration, [ Mark Rowell ]. So Alexi will greet us in French.

[Foreign Language]

Thank you, [ Alexi ]. And Spanish, Ana Luisa De La Rocha Palma.

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language] Ana Luisa. In Finnish, Jussi Saaskilahti.

[Foreign Language]

In Cree, we have one of our miners from the Detour Lake operations, John [indiscernible].

[Foreign Language]

Thank you, John. And then Anishinaabe, Jordan [indiscernible].

[Foreign Language]

Thank you, [ Jordan ], and thank you all. Next, I would like to acknowledge that today, we're meeting on the traditional territory of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat. This territory is now home to diverse First Nations, Inuit and Metis people and is also part of Treaty 13. I would also like to acknowledge that many of our activities take place on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples around the world. We recognize these peoples as being the traditional custodians of these lands, and we reaffirm our commitment to work with them to establish mutually beneficial cooperative and productive relationships.

As announced in the corporation's management information circular, we're conducting this as a hybrid meeting in order to allow registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders to participate in person and online. And this meeting was called for 11, and it's past that time. I ask that the meeting now come to order. And I would like to now acknowledge the head table and the other directors of the corporation who are here with us today and some other guests.

Seated with me at the head table is Ammar Al-Joundi, our President and CEO and also a Director of Agnico; Jamie Porter, Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Vollmershausen, Executive Vice President, Legal, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Thank you, gentlemen. And seated near the front are our other directors, kindly acknowledge when your name is called, our Vice Chair, Jeff Parr, our Lead Director, Jamie Sokalsky; the Honorable Leona Aglukkaq, Martine Celej, Deborah McCombe and Merfyn Roberts. Thank you all.

And unfortunately, our other directors, Elizabeth Lewis-Gray, wasn't able to join us in person from Australia and also John Gill and Peter Grosskopf could not unfortunately be here with us today. In addition, seated near the front are some of the participants in our Dr. Leanne Baker Scholarship and Development Program. You've already met and heard from Alexi and Ana Luisa. In addition, I'd like to introduce Laura Minera Carreon, Ashley Mathai, Felicity Davy, Felicity-Jayne Borysenko, Olivia Palmer and Tannis Croteau.

So some of you know and have known Leanne Baker, and Leanne was -- had a very accomplished career. And as a result of that, she was an excellent role model for those women starting in the industry and pursuing a career in the mining space. Leanne was a big contributor to the Agnico Board. She was a close friend to many of us. And I'm sure, and we know, that Leanne would be extremely proud of the program that was set up in her honor, but she'd also be even prouder of the participants that have come through the program and the current cohort. These are an example of the outstanding talent we have in the company. And it shows you that our shareholders and employees are well served by the leadership that the participants in the program have shown and continue to show and will show in the future. So congratulations, and welcome to the program.

In accordance with the bylaws of the corporation, I'll preside as Chair of this meeting. Mr. Vollmershausen will act as Secretary of the meeting. And with the consent of the meeting, Shirley Tom and Kate Stevens of Computershare Trust Company of Canada, that's the corporation's registrar and transfer agent. They'll act as scrutineers of the meeting. After the formal business of the meeting, I'll provide some informal remarks. Ammar will present a corporate update, and we'll follow that with a question-and-answer period. In order to get things moving, Mr. Vollmershausen will move all the motions. Mr. Al-Joundi will second all the motions with respect to the business of the meeting. As this meeting is being held both virtually and in person, we'll just set out a few procedures just so we can manage that properly and have an orderly meeting.

So in order to set that up, we'll turn it over to Mr. Vollmershausen to go over the procedures.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will now outline the procedures for the orderly conduct of this meeting. Participants may also refer to the virtual meeting user guide, which included instructions on how to attend, vote and ask questions at this meeting and is available under the corporation's profile on the SEDAR+ website and on the corporation's website.

For those participating online, questions in respect of a motion can be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder using the instant messaging service of the virtual meeting portal. Questions that relate to a specific motion must indicate which motion they relate to at the start of the question, and they must be submitted prior to voting on that motion. If questions do not indicate which motion they relate to or received after voting on the motion, they may be addressed during the general Q&A session at the end of the meeting.

For those of you here in person, you will be given the opportunity to ask questions in respect of each motion. When given the opportunity, please raise your hand to indicate you have a question. Once acknowledged, please clearly state your name and identify yourself as a shareholder or proxy holder prior to asking that question. For those participating online, voting on all matters will be conducted by electronic ballot. If you have submitted your vote prior to this meeting, there is nothing for you to do unless you wish to change your vote.

Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have not previously voted or who wish to change their votes will be asked to vote on each item of business the virtual meeting portal by accessing the vote tab. To vote, select your voting direction from the options shown. Please note, we will only have a limited amount of time to vote. For those participating here in person, we will conduct the vote on all matters by ballot. All registered shareholders and proxy holders have been provided with color-specific ballots for each resolution. You should record your vote in respect of each resolution on the applicable ballot when so directed. The scrutineers will collect the completed ballots towards the end of the meeting.

With respect to Q&A, for those participating online, questions may be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder using the instant messaging service of the virtual meeting portal. If several questions relate to the same or similar topic, the Chair may group the questions and state that we have received similar questions. For those here in person, you'll be given the opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A session at the end of the meeting. When given the opportunity, please raise your hand to indicate you have a question. Once acknowledged, please state your name and identify yourself as a shareholder or proxy holder prior to asking the question. We will try to answer as many questions as we can that are submitted online and asked here in person.

The Chair has broad authority to conduct the meeting in a manner that's fair to all shareholders and may exercise discretion in the order in which questions are asked and the amount of time devoted to any particular question or a shareholder. If we are unable to answer your question during the meeting today, we will endeavor to respond to you after the meeting.

Thank you, Chris. I confirm that I have received a sworn affidavit of an officer of Computershare Trust Company of Canada stating that the notice of meeting, the management information circular and a form of proxy have been sent and made available to each shareholder, each director and the auditors of Agnico Eagle. The affidavit has been signed by Computershare, and I direct the Secretary of the meeting to keep a copy of the affidavit with the minutes of the meeting.

With the consent of the meeting, I will dispense with the reading of such notice. Scrutineers have advised me that prior to the meeting, proxies were received from holders of a sufficient number of shares to constitute a quorum. I therefore declare the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. I direct that the formal report of the scrutineers be annexed to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule.

The first item of formal business is the presentation of the audited financial statements of Agnico Eagle for the year ended December 31, 2025, and the auditor's report on these financial statements, both of which have been previously made available to the shareholders of the corporation. If anyone would like a copy of these financial statements, additional copies are available here today. I now place before the meeting such financial statements and the auditor's report. Questions regarding these statements will be entertained at the end of the meeting during the Q&A session.

Next item of formal business is the election of directors of the corporation. The articles of the corporation provide for a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 15 directors. The Board of Directors has determined that the total number of directors to be elected at this meeting shall be 11. I now declare the meeting open for nominations. May I have nominations, please?

I nominate as directors of Agnico Eagle Mines Limited, the Honorable Leona Aglukkaq, ,Ammar Al-Joundi, Sean Boyd, Martine Celej, Jonathan Gill, Peter Grosskopf, Elizabeth Lewis-Gray, Deborah McCombe, Jeffrey Parr, Merfyn Roberts and Jamie Sokalsky, all as named in the management information circular dated March 19, 2026, and move that they be elected directors of the corporation to hold office until the next Annual Shareholders Meeting following this meeting or until their respective successors are elected or appointed.

May I have a second for the motion?

I second the motion.

Thank you. Under the bylaws of the corporation, any additional director nominations for today's meetings were required to have been received by no later than the close of business on April 1, 2026. As no such nominations were received by the corporation prior to that date, there are no further nominees eligible to stand for election today.

Accordingly, I now declare the nominations closed. You have heard the motion, which has been seconded. Is there any discussion? Anything online? No. There's no further discussion. I will ask the meeting to vote on the motion. For those participating virtually, you may now vote online. If you voted prior to this meeting, there is nothing for you to do unless you want to change your vote. For those here in person, you may now vote on the motion by ballot. You should record your vote in respect of the election of directors by making an X in the box entitled for or withhold as the case may be in respect of each of the proposed nominees on the blue ballot and by signing and printing your name in the spaces indicated on the ballot. The scrutineers will collect your ballot later in the meeting.

The next item of formal business is the appointment of auditors of Agnico Eagle for the current year. It is proposed that Ernst & Young LLP, chartered accountants, be reappointed as auditors of the corporation to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders of the corporation or until their successors are appointed and that the auditor's remuneration be fixed by the Board of Directors of the corporation. May I have an appropriate motion?

I so move.

May I have a second to the motion?

I second the motion.

You have heard the motion, which has been seconded. Is there any discussion? Anything online? If there's no further discussion, I will ask the meeting to vote on the motion. For those participating virtually, you may now vote online. As we said earlier, if you voted prior to the meeting, there's nothing for you to do unless you wish to change your vote. For those here in person, you may now vote on the motion by ballot. You should record your vote in respect to the appointment by auditors by marking an X in the box for or withhold as the case may be on the yellow ballot and by signing and printing your name in the spaces indicated on the ballot, the scrutineers will collect your ballot later in the meeting.

Next item of formal business to consider at the meeting is the nonbinding advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive comp. May I have an appropriate motion?

I move that the resolution approving on an advisory basis, the corporation's approach to executive compensation as set out in Appendix B to the management information circular dated March 19, 2026, be approved.

May I have a second to the motion?

I second the motion.

Thank you. You have heard the motion, which has been seconded. Is there any discussion? Any in the room? Nothing online. If there's no further discussion, I will ask the meeting to vote on the motion. Those participating virtually, you can now vote online. Again, if you voted prior to this, there's nothing you need to do unless you wish to change your vote. Those here in person, you may now vote on the motion by ballot. You should record your vote in respect of the resolution approving on an advisory basis, the corporation's approach to executive comp by marking an X in the box entitled for or against, as the case may be on the purple ballot and by signing and printing your name in the spaces indicated on the ballot.

As that concludes the voting on each of the motions today, for those of you here in person, would you kindly hold your completed ballots in the air for the scrutineers to collect. Those participating online, please ensure you have entered your vote through the virtual meeting portal. While the scrutineers collect and tabulate the results of the ballots taken, we will adjourn the formal business of the meeting. We'll announce the results of the voting when we reconvene.

And during this short adjournment, I am pleased to present the Paul Penna Award. This is the 19th year of the Paul Penna Award for community service. And as many of you know, Mr. Penna was the founder of Agnico Eagle, and he was widely noted for his philanthropy and his concern for the well-being of his employees, but also the larger communities and the communities in which we operate. There's a picture of Paul in the old Royal York Hotel at the library room, a dashing figure. And he loved nothing better than to host his shareholders at the annual meeting. This was the highlight day of his year, hosting a dinner the night before with his retail shareholders and coming and presenting the story.

So what we'll do is we'll go through the slides, and we'll bring up our award winner. Our winner is Hunter Davis. I had the opportunity to meet Hunter ahead of time. I thought he was security for the room. A big man, looks like a policeman, and I can tell a policeman because my dad was a policeman. So you can pick them out of a crowd very, very easily. So Hunter has done an exceptional job in his community. He works in asset protection at our Detour Lake mine. He is an exceptional individual. He's made significant contributions, as we said, to the community since January 2020.

Hunter has served as an auxiliary police officer with the Cobourg Police Service in Cobourg, Ontario, just down on Lake, Ontario, contributing almost 1,000 volunteer hours in support of the community. His service spans food security, public engagement, crime prevention, emergency response, delivering lasting social and economic impact to the city of Cobourg. He's participated in touch of truck events, which creates positive approachable interactions between police and the community. He supports community toy drives. He's led 35 Cram-a-Cruiser events, collecting food for the local Northumberland Fair Share Food Bank. He also supports people at their most vulnerable, participating in searches for missing people and participating in door-to-door canvassing activities.

So Hunter service reflects the enduring spirit of our founder, Paul Penna. We wouldn't be here without the foundation that Paul created, that strong foundation and base of not only working hard and delivering for shareholders, but also being focused on the benefits that we all have to give back and contribute to communities, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. So for these reasons and more, we are proud to announce Hunter as the winner of the 19th Annual Paul Penna Award. Hunter, thank you for your community service, your inspiration to your colleagues. I'll now -- Hunter would like to say a few words or speech.

Thank you, everyone. I just want to say thank you to Agnico Eagle for making this kind of possible. I look forward to continuing this in the future. Thank you.

So in addition to Hunter, the beauty of the Paul Penna Award is it really focuses our entire employee group. We have 18,000 employees, and it focuses our attention on the work that many, many hundreds and thousands of individuals are doing in the community. So in addition to our winner Hunter, we have -- there are several regional finalists that were selected from the nominations we received in each region. So there's a lot of really good work that's being done. So each of these years, regional winners and finalists really demonstrate the spirit that Paul had in terms of community, giving and community back and -- each year, Agnico donates $10,000 to the charity selected by the Paul Penna winner and Hunter's charity of choice this year was the Northumberland Fair Share Food Inc. So thanks for that, Hunter.

We can now reconvene the formal part of the meeting to proceed with the remaining business. The Secretary has advised me that the scrutineers have tabulated the results of the ballots conducted earlier, both online and in person. I'm pleased to report that the election of each of the directors, the appointment of the auditors and the nonbinding advisory vote on approach to executive compensation have each passed. If any shareholder is interested in the exact number of votes cast with respect to each of these motions, they may obtain particulars after the meeting by contacting the Secretary. We will also issue a press release and file a report of the voting results at this meeting on SEDAR+.

So as there's no further business that may be properly brought before the meeting, I will now ask someone to move and someone to second a motion that the formal portion of this meeting now terminate.

I so move.

May I have a second to the motion?

I second the motion.

I declare that the formal portion of this meeting is now terminated, and we'll now move to the corporate update, followed by a question-and-answer period. And before we begin the presentation, it's important that we caution you that it may include and will include some forward-looking statements, and these statements are based on management's current expectations. But are naturally subject to assumptions and uncertainty and risks and changes in circumstances and certain factors may cause the corporation's actual results to be materially different from the expectations expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The corporation is not under any obligation to update the forward-looking statements in today's presentations. Please see the disclosure included at the beginning of the presentation for additional details on that.

So I'd have trouble -- I used to be able to read that. I can't even see it now. It looks like a blur. So what we'd like to do is talk about -- I'll talk a little bit about concept that in addition to generating above-average returns for our shareholders for an extended period of time, one of the benefits, as we said earlier, is that on top of delivering for our shareholders over the long term, one of the real benefits and privileges of our jobs at Agnico Eagle and our employees on the site is to provide important benefits to communities and build value and create opportunity within communities. And we do that by focusing on a regional strategy, which certainly works for our shareholders, and Ammar will talk about that, but it also works on creating community. And this is just simply good business, but it's something that we perfected over the years, and we're proud to be able to do. And we do it in Finland, we do it in Mexico. We do it in Australia, we do it in Canada.

But I'll use a particular example here today because of the upcoming announcements around the Hope Bay project, I'll talk a little bit about Nunavut. And Nunavut is timely because of its significance in this country, Canada now and what it means in terms of the future for Canada as long as we work together and responsibly develop the opportunity in a way that uplifts the community. So we see our role. It's interesting how having been here for over 40 years, there were many portions of that time where mining was sort of off to the side. It wasn't considered that important. It was viewed in some instances as an industry which created harm, et cetera. And I think that's partly on us as miners. We didn't do an effective job of communicating the benefits that we see every single day when our employees are running their business and growing their businesses.

And so it's funny how we find ourselves now, given where the country is, given as the country and our leadership looks at opportunities to create value and build the economy, mining is back in the forefront. And given that we're the largest mining company and have been in business in Canada for almost 70 years, we're in a perfect position. And when you add on our expertise in the north and what we've been able to do in terms of building the size of the business, but also contributing to the community, we're also in an enhanced position to make a difference, not only to the country, but more importantly, to the community. So as we -- we've always looked at mine building as community building. That's extremely important because we're working with our partners in the community. And in fact, our employees live in the community.

But in the instance of Nunavut, given the size of our business, the importance of our business, the location of Hope Bay, this has become more than community building. It's become nation building. And so when we look at the opportunity of Hope Bay, which we'll talk about in a month, there's no better example of what this country can do and needs to do and how we can sort of collectively work together and do big things in the north and make important things happen for communities. Hope Bay is going to demonstrate that in a few weeks when we all go up and announce what we're going to build there.

And if you recall, the original thesis was that we would pick that project up when our federal government said they did not want a Chinese-owned mining entity to own it. Agnico picked it up within a couple of weeks due to some good thinking and some hard work with the theory that it would grow. And we've invested a lot of time with our people and hard work on rethinking, but also drilling this here. And the theory proved out, it grew. And so it's going to be an important production base. Our sense based on what we see geologically, but just really based on our experience of having done this before, that type of property package suggests to us that it's a multi-decade large business. It's going to generate benefits not just for Agnico and its shareholders, but also for the communities, our indigenous partners and also for Canada.

And so what we'll be talking about when we go up there in the north, and we will have members of government, members of community, our indigenous partners there. We'll not just be talking about the financial benefits that will flow from this mine, but we'll also talk about Agnico's investments in housing, where we're helping the Nunavut government logistically build modular homes. We will talk about Agnico's additional investment in food security, where we fund -- currently fund programs which feed thousands and thousands of young Nunavummiut when they show up for school each morning. And we'll also talk about the investment Agnico just made in the new University of Nunangat, which is expected to see its first cohort of Inuit students in 2030, and Agnico announced last week in Ottawa that we're going to invest $10 million in the new university.

And that's an outcome of our former Chairman, Jim Nasso, who understood the importance of education, saw a void, wanted to enter the conversation, suggested back in 2015 that we should invest $5 million. With inflation, it became $10 million. So we announced $10 million last week. And that's an important initiative because there's nothing more important, not just education, but hope for young people, particularly in the far north that they can stay at home and continue their education and develop into the leaders that are needed to drive that growth and build those businesses for the benefit of the communities in the north.

So this is our formula because this formula delivers on the promise that we made to our shareholders and our employees and the communities in our mission statement, build a business that drives those above-average returns to our shareholders, but also makes it an important place to work for our employees, but also does great work in the communities and brings those communities together and helps to uplift the communities and our people really drive this. And without our people, it's one of the things being in the position that we're in, senior executives, the one thing we've said over decades is you never have to worry about what our people are doing in the communities. In fact, we sit back and we can be proud knowing that they're doing the right thing in the communities. So we're very fortunate. We'll just mention the Arctic Edge. This is the second year, and this is something that has been driven by our communications group and our team.

We established a podcast to allow members of the Inuit community and the Nunavut community to tell their stories. And the stories are compelling. There were 10 podcasts, there'll be 5 podcasts this year. It's worth a listen to develop a perspective. And what we wanted to do is showcase the resiliency, the strength and the potential of not just the communities, but the young people in the North, and this will do that. So if you have an opportunity, please check it out.

So I'll turn it over to Ammar. He can get into the share returns, et cetera, to demonstrate we're delivering. But I also want to take the time to thank Ammar and his team. They're exceptional executives. They've done a tremendous job of continuing to build on the foundation and build a fabulous business that's not only generating for its shareholders, but is positioned to do more in the communities as we think about Canada and what Canada needs to do.

So Ammar, over to you.

Well, it's always a pleasure to be here. I know this is our AGM. But when I look around, this is mostly family. These are mostly friends, coworkers and really the family of the company. So it's -- I think 11:40, there's going to be lunch, it's Friday. And I know all of you are hoping that my speech is going to be as short as Hunter's speech. But it will be a little bit longer than that. I've got a few slides, but I want to -- again, because really this is family here, I want to talk a little bit and build on what Sean said about the company and what we're all about. So in 2010, I interviewed for the job of CFO at Agnico Eagle. I had 2 interviews. First interview was over a cup of coffee with Sean Boyd. You just saw Sean. And very quickly in that interview, I decided, look, I could work for this guy for the rest of my career. He's that type of person. I was 46 years old.

My second interview was a lunch with Sean and Jim Nasso. And they talked about the business, and they talked about the potential and what they were doing. But true story, what they talked a lot about was Nunavut because this is 2010 in Agnico, it just made a big commitment and it was brand new. And most of the lunch was about Nunavut. And it wasn't about how much money we're going to make in Nunavut. They used the phrase nation building. This is the opportunity for Agnico Eagle to really contribute to Canada and help build the nation. That's what I remember from that 16 years ago. And Sean and Jim are saying the same thing 16 years later. And we have made a difference. We are roughly 25% or 30% of the GDP now of Nunavut. And in May, we'll be announcing probably [ Tanya ], you have to cover your ears, but a big investment in Nunavut.

And it hasn't stopped there. Sean is the Chairman of one of the biggest companies in Canada. He does a lot of work in that role. But really, what he's been doing for the last couple of years as an individual as much as a Chairman of our company is spending time, Canadian politicians with the people who set policy to promote the North. $10 million investment in a university, breakfast for every child and Nunavut. These are initiatives that aren't sort of complicated corporate initiatives where we sit down and talk about things. These are things where Chairman says these are the right things to do. I'll give you one more example, and then I'll jump into the work stuff, but don't worry, it's not that long.

It's a true story a few years back, I was in -- I happened to be in Rankin Inlet in Nunavut. And I was staying at the sort of one hotel there, and I went downstairs at about 7 in the morning to get a cup of coffee, and there's a TV in the lobby. Those of you who have been in that hotel know what I'm talking. And it was on the news was that the water supply in Iqaluit had just been contaminated. I think an old diesel tank had leaked into the water supply. It was on the news. And basically, that's a big problem for the major city up in Nunavut. And as I'm watching the news, and this is brand new, I got a call from Sean, again, sort of 7 in the morning. He says, what are you doing? And I said, no, I'm working hard, of course, what do you think I'm doing? But he said, are you watching the news? I said, yes, I happen to be watching the news. He said, as the flight -- because we have flights every day from Montreal to Val d'Or, taking our people, taking goods up to Nunavut.

Has the flight left from Montreal yet? I said, I don't know. But we'll find out. And if it hasn't left -- true story, that tell our people to go to all the Costcos in Montreal, buy all the water they can, put it on -- take our stuff off the plane, put that on -- put the water on the plane and fly it up to Iqaluit. So probably within about 6, 7 hours, we had water up in Iqaluit, where the Canadian government was still trying to figure out what to do. Now that's stuck with me because I like to think I'm a good guy, but I was watching the news never occurred to me. And so I think a lot of people talk about culture, but I think Agnico Eagle and our Chairman and our previous Chairman walked the talk. Well, with that, let me jump into our business.

So if you take a look at this chart, this is over 20 years. So in any 1 year, I would come up and say, well, we've had a great year or if we didn't, I wouldn't mention anything. But it's hard over 20 years to look at something and say, why are you double the industry average over 20 years? Our compounded return is about 13%. The gold equity index is about 3%. Interestingly, we're 50% higher compounded year-over-year than the S&P. I don't think a lot of people would know that. And I think a lot of people don't know that gold has outperformed the S&P compounded over 20 years.

So how does that happen? One has to sort of sit back and say, how do you make that happen consistently for 20 years? And I'll talk quickly about our strategy and why I think it works, and some of you have seen this before. But that's okay. We should be talking about the same strategy. It's a consistent strategy. Really, it's the same strategy we've had for almost 70 years, which is where a lot of our peers, and I always preface this by saying our peers do a great job. They're very smart people. They just have a slightly different strategy. Most of our peers will be -- will consider themselves global gold mining companies. They will go anywhere in the world to build a gold mine. And that -- there's a certain logic to that. If you want to be a big international miner, you sort of -- there is a logic to say, well, I've got to go where the ore is. I get that. That's an okay strategy.

Agnico's strategy is different. Agnico's strategy has always been a regional strategy. We'll go anywhere in the world, but only to certain regions. And those regions have to, of course, have the geologic potential, but they have to have the geologic potential for multiple mines, not just one mine. And it has to have the political stability to allow you to operate multiple mines over multiple decades. Now Agnico has been doing this a long time before I got there. And as I was honored to get hired as the CFO and then President and eventually my current role, I reflected a lot on this because I had worked for other very good mining companies. But what was the secret sauce at Agnico? And to me, this just makes a lot of sense.

If you ask yourself what makes yourself a good miner and you assume people are equally smart, equally hard-working because there are a lot of smart, hard-working people out there, what gives you a real competitive advantage. And that is in our business, you know the ground better, you know the suppliers better? Do you have less turnover because you've been the employer of choice for 50 years. You know the contractors better. I could go on and on. But what I'm really saying is I think this gives us a real competitive advantage. And I think, frankly, some of our peers are coming to the same conclusion. So in the world, if you think about as we assess where are the best places in the world based on geologic potential and political stability, we think it's Canada. We think it's Australia. We think it's Mexico. We think it's Northern Europe. And there are a few other places that we would look at, but these -- they fit the bill.

Although I do have a question for you, Sean. When we respectfully ask people in all the regions we work to introduce and say greetings in their local language, why didn't we do that for Australia? It's a [indiscernible], bad joke, sorry. So if you take a look at how we've grown our business on the right, impressively, over the last 20 years, Agnico has grown gold production by a factor of 14. So we can hold our heads up high and say, look, we've grown this business exceedingly well. But the truth is we don't get paid to grow the business. We get paid to grow value for our owners. By definition, our owners have a position in shares. Our job isn't to grow the company. Our job is to grow value per share. And one of the ways we do that in our business is growing production per share.

Buying things is not hard. Growing production is not hard because you just buy companies. Growing production per share is very hard. And over that same 20 years, we've grown production per share by about a factor of 3. That's pretty good. That's hard to do. Our peers' production per share over the last 20 years is down 50%. Our production per share is up by a factor of 3. And honestly, that's why we've got a 13% compounded annual growth rate when our peers at around 6.3%, at least in my opinion. We've grown our EBITDA per share by a factor of almost 20% and increased the dividend by a factor more than 50. So the strategy works.

So as this is the AGM for 2025 and a reflection on 2025, what did we do in 2025? Well, first of all, we had an exceptional run-up in the gold price. And I'm proud to say that not only are we creating value by growing production per share, but we're also delivering the leverage of gold price increase to our owners. In 2025, the gold price went up $2,000. Our costs went up about $70. So we were able to deliver in the neighborhood of 97% of that increase to our owners. And that's something that we should be proud of, and that's something that comes from the work of our teams. And through that high gold price, good production, good cost control, we returned almost $1.5 billion to our owners through dividends and share buybacks, while at the same time, we paid down almost $1 billion of debt and ended the year with $3 billion of cash on our balance sheet. You can look at all the numbers in the charts, they're all exceptional. Of course, a big part of that was the increase in gold price. But I do think that we should be proud that as the gold price went up, we continued to control our costs. We continue to deliver the production. We did it safely. We did it responsibly.

And we're going to continue to grow value for the company. I'd just highlight a few of the deals that we've done over the last 5 or 6 years that have contributed value. In Quebec, we bought the second half of the Malartic mine, Canadian assets of Yamana. We bought the first half of that in 2014. We bought the second half in 2013. In Ontario, we merged with Kirkland Lake, a great company with some great assets. And we are building the Upper Beaver mine. We're looking at Hammond Reef. We're expanding Detour Lake. We're upgrading Macassa. At Nunavut, as Sean said, we acquired TMAC from the Chinese. And since then, the team has done an exceptional job, and we're going to be announcing some good news in about a month.

But the chart on the right is kind of interesting. If you take a look at how we've created value with those acquisitions, there are many ways to express this, but a simple way to just look at the additional gold that we found that [ Guy ] and his team have found since the acquisitions. Since the acquisitions of Canadian Malartic, the total gold, and I'm not supposed to add up all the numbers, but between family, I will. Chris, you might want to cover your ears. We've grown from a total of 12 million in all categories to 34 million ounces, including what we've mined, an increase of 22 million ounces. I mean there's not a lot of mines in the world that have 2 million ounces. Detour has grown from 19 million ounces to 47 million ounces. Those 2 mines, growth alone is 50 million ounces. That's a lot of value added. And Hope, we really just started that journey. That is going to be a world-class -- I can't give numbers yet, but a world-class mine that's going to run for decades.

And then finally, I'll end with the growth story hasn't stopped. We've got 2 lines here. On the top line, you have Canadian Malartic, which we think we'll be able to get to 1 million ounces a year. We have Detour, which we think we'll be able to get to 1 million ounces a year. We've got Upper Beaver that we're building, although we haven't announced that we're building. We have Hope, and we have San Nicolas. Those mines alone will produce between 1.3 million and 1.5 million additional ounces of production over the next 10 years. Now there's going to be some depletion from other assets, but those mines will allow us on a net basis, grow production by 20% to 30% over the next decade. And at current gold prices, we'll be able to do that and probably buy back shares at the same time.

So it's one thing to have grown from 240,000 ounces to 3.5 million and increased production per share when you start with 1 mine. That's tough, really tough to grow production per share when you're starting at 3.4 million ounces, and we're going to be able to do that. And then finally, below, between the Finnish platform that we're consolidating, Hammond Reef, some additional optimization at Detour Lake, some other assets that we own. We're not talking about these publicly, but we're working on them, and we're going to continue to grow.

So with that, I just want to thank once again everybody for attending today. I want to thank everybody who I work with because I really do work with the best people. And then Sean, I know this because he's the Chairman, I might be sucking up to the Chairman, but I mean it. Sean, thank you not just for being a great Chairman and building a great company, but for what you're doing for Canada, building Canada. Thank you.

Thank you, Ammar. Thank you so much. Now it's time to take questions from our shareholders. and proxy holders. So those of you online, you may submit those questions online. There's an instant messaging service on the virtual meeting portal. So use that. For those in person, if you want to ask a question, just raise your hand that indicate you have a question. But once you're acknowledged to ask the question, then please clearly state your name and identify yourself as a shareholder or proxy holder prior to asking your question.

So there's one from there.

I'm Paul Durnan from Burlington. I have 2 questions. First of all, what about getting some rare earth metals as a byproduct of what you're doing? Or maybe that's a totally different piece of geology, I'm guessing on that.

Well, that's a good question, and it's timely because Agnico has had a small team of experts over the last 3 years or so, looking at the critical metals landscape. That's a challenging thing to do when you have such an important gold business. You don't want to distract from that gold business. So we've been very, very careful in how we've moved that initiative forward. But I think it's important to say, I'm actually the Chairman of Avenir Minerals, which is the critical metals small group at Agnico. And -- the thing that we are so laser-focused on is making sure there's a clear separation. There's no gray areas. Everybody knows what they're doing. And where this is headed is that we're launching this vehicle so that it can be self-sustaining, self-funding, be able to access its own capital and it's on the way to doing that.

So we see that as a minority-owned subsidiary of Agnico as that company does its deals because what we don't want to do is hamper that company. If it's too close to Agnico from an equity perspective, then things will stick to Agnico. There will be a lack of clarity on that vehicle. Those are very smart and talented people that have worked with Agnico for a long time that are now taking on this initiative. So we'll be crystal clear. But that won't take away from the focus of the Agnico team. We'll be focused on building the big business. But that critical metals group will continue to move that initiative forward in a way where Agnico becomes a minority owner because they brought in additional equity and additional ownership interest in that group.

Okay. Just another quick question. Why are you not in Nevada with the other biggies? Is there reasons for that?

I missed that. What was that?

You have no presence in Nevada.

Nevada?

Yes. Is there a reason why you don't want Nevada?

Well, I think you have to look at the history and where companies operate and where companies have expertise. I think that as Agnico was building its business and focusing on the LaRonde mine, a world-class deposit in Quebec, we had 2 major large gold companies that were focused on Nevada. And when Barrick and Newmont were focused on Nevada, Agnico was focused on Northern Quebec, and we had a revenue base of $50 million. And so we were quite small in the big picture. And by the time we got to the stage where we could take a keen and more serious interest in Nevada, a lot of the big large deposits were taken.

So what we did is something different. We look closely at Nevada, and we look closely at Nevada joint venture with Barrick and Newmont. And we looked at it from Barrick's perspective and their percentage interest in that joint venture. And we said -- and this was a few years back, we sat around and said, well, isn't that interesting. Barrick is sitting on a joint venture interest that produces 2.1 million ounces to Barrick's account. It has 80 million ounces of reserve and resources, something like that. And we thought we have an opportunity to create something better than Barrick's interest in the Nevada joint venture. And we have an ability to do that in Canada. We have an ability to do that from Detour down through Kirkland Lake across the Val d'Or. And that's essentially what we set out to do, and it's essentially what we've done.

If you look at what we have from Detour to Kirkland Lake with Upper Beaver and Macassa across to the east of Val-d'Or with Canadian Malartic and Goldex, and LaRonde and at Detour in there, we've got production of over 2 million ounces that's growing. And in that region, we'll have -- we have 2 of the top 10 gold mines in the world that have the potential to be 2 of the top 5 gold mines in the world from annual production going to 1 million ounces. So we actually created something in a way that added tremendous value to our shareholders with a lot more geological potential to come. So that's the way we focused on it.

Any other questions? Any online, Chris? This one here. You got to ask a question to Ammar; the CFO, maybe Chris.

I'm [ Dale McDonald ]. I'm a proxy shareholder.

Yes. Can you speak up a bit?

I'm Dale McDonald. I'm, I think, a proxy shareholder. I just own some shares, not very many. But I'm accumulating a few for my grandchildren. And they are excited as I'm doing this for them. But they don't understand the high price of the share. You can only buy -- I'm a small individual, I can only buy maybe 5 shares for each of my 9 grandchildren. It doesn't give them any excitement. But if the share -- if you split some of the shares up so that they were valued less, they would have higher numbers and there'd be a lot of excitement in my family. But that's just maybe a silly question, but that's the question I have.

Well, that's a different way to frame that question. We've never had it framed that way. We're asked that question a lot. We've never ever sort of split our shares over time. We understand some of the benefits. We just tend to focus less on the overall value proposition. Splitting the shares in itself doesn't really add to increased valuation, you may be able to spread it around a little bit and break it up a little bit. But maybe Ammar and Jamie on the financial side of whether that actually makes sense. I'm trying to push questions over there.

Yes. No, I'd echo Sean's comments. The fact that splitting our shares actually doesn't really change the overall value of the company. That said, we have seen our share price triple or more over the course of the past few years. So as that -- as the share price continues to go higher, it's something that we'll potentially look at. There might be a way to make shares more accessible if they were lower in value. I believe most brokerage accounts, you can actually buy fractional shares as well, which is I know it's not as exciting to buy 0.3 of a share, but that's always an option.

I have a suggestion. You're welcome to bring your shareholders or your grandchildren as shareholders to the annual meeting and future annual meetings. You're welcome to do that. We'd welcome them here. We're glad to have them. They can see the excitement Ammar has in the business and the team has in the business. And if you let us know they're coming, we'll ramp it up a bit. We'll get [ Guy ] up here and he can start waving his arms on Hope Bay.

They are age 3 up to 20.

That's good. That's good because that brings the average age down. I've been coming to these meetings since 1983. I know I'm getting old, but I look out there and there are some shareholders I've seen here for 40 years, you're getting older, too. Any more? There's one here, middle.

My name is [ Robert Bill ]. I'm here with my wife, Deborah. We're shareholders, long-time shareholders. It's nice to see you again. Thank you for a great presentation. Thank you for a wonderful stewardship and leadership of this fine company. We've been shareholders for a long time, and I'm proud to say we knew Paul Penna, and we were friend. At one point in the conversation just this morning, the CEO and President commented about capital expenditures on the assumption of -- I think you said something like at current gold prices.

And I just wanted to see if you'd be open to sharing any views you might have with regard to global instability, socioeconomic situations around the globe, et cetera, et cetera, central bank buying, what you might think the direction of gold could be and how you forecast your CapEx based on that because I think as our CFO said, there's been quite a climb in the price of gold in a blink of an eye really. And so I wonder how that affects your planning. But any comments on that would be appreciated.

Thank you for the question, and thank you for being a long-term owner of the company. I'll answer the second part and then go to the first. The second part being, given the unpredictable and cyclical nature of the business you're in, how do you plan for that? The answer to that is we have a strong balance sheet because who knows where things are going to go and don't have a lot of debt. We have virtually no debt. We have net $3 billion in cash. So one is a very strong balance sheet; two, try to have low-cost operations so that regardless of where the gold price goes, you're still generating a lot of cash. And then three, have other options to be able to deal with the variability. And we do all of that, and there's a lot of work goes into that. So I think we're quite well positioned there.

The first part of the question is where is gold going to go? Of course, I don't know. But I would say the following. I would say in the near term, the big driver for gold is what's happening overseas. And you may -- it may seem counterintuitive that a war happens and gold goes down, but that's really related to a view -- I'll go very quickly because I could go on forever. If this war gets worse and oil gets cut and shipping gets cut and supply chains get hurt, it will be inflationary. And if it's inflationary, governments will raise interest rates, they raise interest rates, gold goes down. That's what's driving it right now, and that's why you've seen all the volatility.

Long term, I don't know where gold is going near term. But long term, while I don't know where it's going, I am very constructive on gold. I'm constructive on gold because governments are spending money like crazy. They're not stopping, in fact, accelerating. And at the same time, the U.S. dollar, which used to be the reliable thing central banks could buy, they're now worried that they're going to get sanctioned if they do anything. So they're saying, why would I put all my money in U.S. dollars? I better get some gold. So near term, right now being driven by what's happening overseas to no small extent, near term, hard to predict. But long term, I'm very constructive.

Any other questions? Any online, Chris? None online? Okay. So it's not lost on all of us. As we look out in the crowd, we see our employees, we see suppliers, we see service providers, we see shareholders. And some of you have been involved and played an important part in our success. We acknowledge that. We recognize that, and we thank you all for the contribution you've made in helping us make and build this fabulous company.

So thank you for your presence today. Thank you for all the help over the years. We invite those of you in the room to join us for lunch. And thank you for those that also tuned in online. We really appreciate your attendance and your support. So at that, I'll conclude the meeting. And again, I look forward to bringing you new news on new developments as we continue to grow the business. Thank you very much.

Good morning. My name is Vincent, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Mines Limited Q1 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Vincent. Good morning, and thank you for joining our Agnico Eagle First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. I'd like to remind everyone that we'll be making a number of forward-looking statements, so please keep that in mind and refer to the disclaimers at the beginning of this presentation.

Next slide, please. We're pleased to announce a solid start to the year with production slightly above budget and with costs in line with our guidance. This solid operating performance, coupled with exceptional gold prices has allowed Agnico Eagle to announce yet another quarter of record net income driven by record operating margins.

We are reiterating 2026 production guidance with production expected to be weighted approximately 48%, 52% between the first and second halves of the year. We're also pleased to reiterate our cost guidance for 2026. This is no small task given the uncertainties and pressures in the market over the past several weeks.

As you will hear on this call, this has been a strong quarter across all of our businesses. Solid operations, strong progress on moving our growth pipeline forward, continued exceptional exploration results and as mentioned, another quarter of record financial results. My team will go through all of this in more detail in a moment, but let me outline and summarize what I believe are the 3 key messages that are important to take away from this call.

One, as mentioned, we're off to a good start to the year with solid operating performance, delivering record operational and financial results. Record mill throughput at Macassa, record development rates at Meliadine, record pit tonnage at Detour. We're delivering these solid operating results while doing an excellent job controlling costs, leveraging off our relentless focus on cost control while benefiting from certain structural cost advantages that derive from our business model, including, for example, in both Ontario and Quebec, where we produce the majority of our gold, all of our electricity is either hydro or nuclear and really not exposed to changes in fuel and diesel prices.

With regards to Nunavut, where we do generate our own power through diesel, we've got a lot of that diesel hedged both by necessity because we have to bring the diesel up in advance through a short barge season, and we have it stored up there, but also by some very smart and proactive hedging by our treasury department with regards to diesel exposure.

We've also got the benefit of lower employee turnover and the reliable supply chain that comes from being the best customer for decades in the safe regions in which we operate. Two, we continue to strengthen our financial position and to increase returns to shareholders. This quarter, we paid a $1.3 billion 2025 tax catch-up. We distributed $375 million to shareholders. We invested almost $400 million into our high-quality growth projects, all while increasing our cash position by almost $250 million.

At these gold prices, we will increase our share repurchases, and we are increasing our normal course issuer bid to $2 billion. And three, and perhaps the most important takeaway, we continue to aggressively reinvest in our business into the best pipeline in the industry, into projects that deliver exceptional returns at relatively lower risk, and we are making steady progress in many cases, ahead of schedule. Dom and Natasha will spend some time talking about the projects they're moving forward to increase production at Agnico Eagle by up to 20% to 30% over the next decade, including Detour to 1 million ounces, Malartic to 1 million ounces, Hope Bay, Upper Beaver and San Nicolas.

In addition, with the expected consolidation of our Finnish platform, we now see a path to further growth that comes from building a 500,000 ounce a year multi-decade platform in what we believe to be the most prospective land package in Northern Europe. Guy will spend some time going over some of the continued great exploration results he and his team have generated focusing on Detour and Malartic, but he'll also spend a bit more time talking about this Finnish land consolidation and what he and his team see as a long-term potential well beyond the Ikkari project.

Our strategy remains focused, focused on safe, responsible mining, focused on operational excellence, delivering reliable, low-cost production. We have the best land packages in the most prospective and safest gold jurisdictions in the world. We have a path to industry-leading production growth over the next decade. Our execution of delivering this growth remains on track. And at these gold prices, we think we can deliver this growth and reduce share count at the same time.

Now before I turn the call over to Jamie, I need to spend a moment on safety. Tragically, we've had 2 fatalities over the past 5 months. This is not acceptable. I recognize and I accept that the responsibility for the safety of our people rests ultimately with myself and with my team. We've mobilized our teams to reinforce across our company and at all levels and to all employees, our commitment to not only deliver on our guidance, but to do so safely and responsibly. There is nothing more important than the safety of our people and our communities, and we commit to do better.

With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Jamie Porter, to review our first quarter operating and financial results.

Thank you, Ammar. As highlighted earlier, we delivered another strong financial quarter, driven by solid operational performance and continued leverage to higher gold prices. We had several record financial results during the quarter, including adjusted net income of approximately $1.7 billion or $3.41 per share and adjusted EBITDA of just over $3 billion. We generated about $730 million of free cash flow in the first quarter.

This is particularly impressive given that we paid roughly 50% of our expected 2026 cash taxes totaling $1.8 billion in the quarter, of which $1.3 billion had been previously disclosed as related to our 2025 tax liability. First quarter gold production of approximately 825,000 ounces was actually slightly better than planned with the lower production year-over-year reflecting mine sequencing at LaRonde, Macassa and Fosterville.

With the first quarter representing about 24% of the midpoint of our annual guidance and production weighted to the second half of the year, we're well positioned to meet our full year production targets. Total cash costs were $1,093 per ounce and all-in sustaining costs were $1,483 per ounce, reflecting higher royalty costs associated with a significantly higher realized gold price, lower production volumes as expected and a stronger Canadian dollar compared to the first quarter of 2025.

Importantly, costs continue to trend within our full year guidance ranges of $1,020 to $1,120 per ounce for total cash costs and $1,400 to $1,550 per ounce for all-in sustaining costs. While we continue to monitor cost volatility, including diesel prices and foreign exchange movements, we believe our regional operating model, local procurement strategies and disciplined hedging program provide meaningful mitigation against potential cost pressures.

With respect to diesel prices, our 2026 cost guidance assumes an average diesel price of $0.78 per liter. Direct diesel consumption covering mobile equipment and on-site power generation in Nunavut is estimated at approximately 108 liters per ounce of gold produced, representing roughly 7% of our total operating cost base. We believe that our exposure to diesel price volatility is below industry average, reflecting the fact that the majority of our gold production comes from underground mines, which are generally less diesel intensive than open pit mines.

Further, the majority of our gold production is from mines located in Ontario and Quebec, which benefit from access to non-oil-based grid power. Overall, our sensitivity to diesel prices is estimated such that a 10% change in diesel prices results in roughly a $6 per ounce impact on annual total cash costs after taking into account our hedge position. We do not currently anticipate any disruption to our procurement strategy for fuel or other key consumables, and we remain comfortable with our full year cost guidance.

We turn to Slide 5. We are in the strongest financial position in the company's history. We continue to deliver meaningful returns to our shareholders alongside further balance sheet strengthening and disciplined reinvestment in the business. During the quarter, we returned approximately $375 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, representing roughly half of free cash flow.

As previously announced, we intend to renew the normal course issuer bid in May on substantially the same terms with an increased limit of up to $2 billion. And at current gold prices, we are still targeting returning approximately 40% of annual free cash flow through dividends and buybacks. We will also look for opportunities to offset dilution from the proposed Rupert Resources acquisition, including potentially returning proceeds from portfolio investment sales through additional share repurchases.

In parallel, the balance sheet keeps getting stronger. At the end of the first quarter, our net cash position increased to approximately $2.9 billion, giving us one of the strongest balance sheets in the sector. This strength was recognized recently by Fitch, which upgraded Agnico Eagle's long-term issuer rating to A- with a stable outlook.

At the same time, we continue to reinvest in the business, advancing our 5 key pipeline projects that are expected to underpin long-term production growth of 20% to 30% over the next decade. We are exceptionally well positioned in the current gold price environment with a continued focus on disciplined capital allocation and long-term shareholder value creation.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Dom.

Thank you, Jamie. Good morning, everyone. In my section, I'm going to talk the update on operation and project for Quebec, Nunavut and Finland. For the first quarter, a good start led by Malartic and Meadowbank on the production, and we are in good position for the full year cost and production. An important milestone in the first quarter at Malartic, where we took the first stope at East Gouldie via the ramp approximately 1 kilometer underground. Why it's important? Based on the 2023 study, we're going to mine there up to 2042. But based on what we know now, we're going to be mining there up to 2060, most probably. Most probably, I will not be the COO at that time, but we have a good bench that's going to take it from there.

So it's very positive. And on the shaft sinking, I'm going to talk a bit about that next slide, shaft sinking and also production hoist, it's also going well. The plan is to bring that ore to the surfaces via the shaft mid-2027. Everything is aligned.

On the continuous improvement, an important milestone achieved at LaRonde. They were working on that since a couple of years to do autonomous hauling. So it's a good example of leveraging the synergy into the region using the LZ5 expertise. So what is that autonomous hauling? We are taking the ore from the 3.2 kilometers underground up to 2.9 kilometers without drivers.

So this is a real example of a positive impact using technology. Instead of operating, let's say, using 4 trucks and 8 operators, for day shift or night shift, those guys in the current situation, they are able to operate effectively 10 to 12 hour per shift just by the time to go underground. Using the technology, we're able to use 2 trucks operating by 1 person, 1 night shift, 1 day shift, so a total of 2, and we're able to operate on a 20-hour basic. So it's a clear example of using technology to improve productivity and very good job done at LaRonde on that.

Also in Finland, what we did, we took 3 and 4 people -- key people from each site from mainly Canadian operation. I mean the GMs, the key guys in the continuous improvement, the VP. We bring them to Finland to see what they did there. It was the first time for most of the people, not just to see the reindeers, but also the Finland site. And it was about how they did it in Finland, the mindset on continuous improvement, their leadership and the tools they were using. And it was also a very good opportunity to build a relationship and sharing best practices through our key people into the company.

Guy is going to talk about that, but very happy also about the Ikkari, what's going on is very positive for the Finland team.

Next slide. On the growth project, at Malartic, the ramp and shaft, as mentioned going well. The pilot hole for the first -- for the second shaft is done down to 1.8 kilometers underground. No issue related to that. And the study continue on the Shaft 2 and Marban and the Wasamac study. It's progressing well, and we're looking to give you an update in September later this year.

At Hope Bay, look to the picture. So we are in good position. That was our goal. We are in a good position to potentially announce the construction in May with the Board. So the camp is ready. The fab shops are ready to welcome the construction team. The mill is empty, ready to go. And we are in good position for the engineering. That was one of an important goal. So we're going to be over 50% that guarantee and give us confidence into the cost into the schedule.

We're going to give you more detail at the visit at site for the lucky ones that are coming because we're going to have [ Muscat ] on barbecue, charcoal barbecue. So this is -- the team is working on that. That's going to be a good thing. Before giving the mic to Natasha, the visit at Hope Bay, you're going to see the picture over the first 10 years. But we're going to most probably be there for many 10 years. And that's what Guy is going to show you into the car shaft, what is our vision on to the region.

And also, the last 2 years, we focused on infilling the patch, the new deposit and to be ready for that study. But Guy is also gearing up to restart treasure hunting into the Hope Bay site eventually more next year and the years after. So on that, I will pass the mic to my great colleague, Natasha.

Thanks, Dom, and good morning, everyone. I'll cover the operational highlights for Ontario, Australia and Mexico. So the regions delivered good performance to start the year. At Detour, they hit a quarterly record in tonnes mined, but they also had a record mill throughput for the first quarter with the lowest turnover -- quarterly turnover that we have seen since the mine began open pit operations.

Over at Macassa, the mill here also delivered record quarterly throughput as a result of the ongoing optimization initiatives as we ramp up that mill towards over 2,000 tonnes per day by the end of the year. Now despite this progress, total mill tonnage was below plan this quarter, and this was mainly a function of challenges we faced with our old paste plant while commissioning the new one, which we expect to be fully operational in Q2.

At Fosterville, they also performed very well this quarter. There was a significant step change in productivity, and that's really due to ongoing mine optimization efforts. Improvements this quarter were seen in both development and stope cycling. And it was the same with Pinos Altos. The team there continues to work very hard on initiatives to safely extract the most value from their assets.

Now in terms of initiatives this past quarter, Dom spoke about our knowledge sharing trip to Finland to help other sites understand their continuous improvement journey and really inspire them to do the same. And of course, it was really great to network, to gain alignment to collaborate with other sites. And another good example of collaboration between sites and really maximizing the value of our assets and of our infrastructure was between Macassa and LaRonde.

I just want to take a quick second to recognize both teams here. They worked very closely together over the last few months. And with a coordinated effort, they were successful in receiving the approval to allow ore from the AK deposit to be transported and processed at the LZ5 facility.

At Macassa, we also successfully completed the installation of the LTE network underground. The connectivity is expected to support a range of optimization initiatives, including the implementation of a dispatch system and enabling the site to obtain short interval control. And this can enable us to make decisions quicker, to become more agile, to become more productive and as a result, further optimize our costs.

So these are just a few examples of our ongoing productivity focus and our operational improvement initiatives.

Moving to the next slide. I'll give you an update on the projects in Ontario and Mexico. The Detour underground project, that plays a very big role in the plan for the complex to be a 1 million-ounce producer annually. We're still in the early days of this project, but we're making very good progress, and we're advancing on schedule.

We continue to advance the exploration ramp and have achieved just over 820 meters of development, reaching a depth of about 147 meters. We also began excavating the overburden for the conveyor portal, which is near the mill and progressed work on the camp extension. And to complement the planned bulk sample, we initiated a high-intensity drill program in an area being considered for mining as early as 2028, and Guy will speak to this program shortly.

Over at Upper Beaver, there have been a lot of progress made this quarter with both the ramp and the shaft advancing ahead of schedule. The ramp has advanced over 500 meters in the quarter and has reached a depth of 108 meters. The shaft sinking, which commenced in the fourth quarter of last year, has already reached a depth of 382 meters.

And similar to Detour, to complement the planned bulk sample at 760 level, the high-intensity drill program continued during the quarter.

Now with respect to San Nicolas, we're waiting on the regulatory decision for key permits. But in the meantime, we're continuing to advance the engineering of the critical infrastructures, which will help further derisk and build confidence in our execution strategy. We're also continuing with the drilling activities focused on condemnation drilling and geological evaluation near the planned mine area.

Finally, I'd like to close by just recognizing the teams at our operations and our projects for their very disciplined execution in the first quarter and for their continued focus on advancing our optimization initiatives and our key projects as we move through the year.

And so with that, I'll turn the call over to my friend, Guy.

Thank you, Natasha, and good morning, everyone. Pleasure again to be able to report on progress we're making in exploration as obviously, this is one of the key components to be able to deliver that 20% to 30% growth that we are promoting. We had an excellent quarter in terms of diamond drilling, completing 25% or nearly 360 kilometers of drilling of our overall budget of 1.4 million meters for the year, having 127 rigs in operation on mine site and key value driver project. We continue to advance in our journey in exploration to make drilling safer and more productive while maintaining a unit cost in the same order than the last couple of years, aiming to offset inflation with gain in productivity.

Going to specific projects on Slide 10. In Malartic, 35 drill rigs are in operation, completing 75,000 meters in Q1, 16 underground, 13 on surface in proximity to the Odyssey infrastructure and 6 at our regional target, including Marban deposits across the 3. At Odyssey, as mentioned by Dominique, the shaft and the ramp development are progressing ahead of schedule and the first stope is currently being mined at East Gouldie, which is quite exciting, considering the discovery hole in East Gouldie was made just a couple of years ago in 2018 and that we are already there with the ramp in the shaft because of the great collaboration between the various teams to turn it from a discovery into a mine in such a short period of time.

This is impressive. We continue to get strong exploration results at East Gouldie with 6.7 gram over 36 meter on Level 105 in the center of the ore body and also in the internal zone between Odyssey North and Odyssey South with a new structure that returned 9 gram over 53-meter core land. Although we do not have a full understanding yet of the true thickness of that structure, it continued to show the additional upside we see both in the internal zone at Odyssey North and South and in East Gouldie that keeps growing laterally.

And on the adjacent Marban project, lateral exploration drilling continued to the west and to the north of the proposed open pit, while we are, at the same time, advancing with the condemnation drilling program to confirm the potential location of surface infrastructure.

Now on Slide 11, at Detour Lake, 9 rigs completed close to 40,000 meters of drilling in the first quarter, in line with our budget. Drilling was continued to focus on the Western extension of the ore body to the west of the open pit, where we are contemplating to initiate mining underground early on, utilizing the exploration ramp.

Some strong results such as 8.9 grams over 14 meters at 190-meter depth and 10.7 grams over 10 meters at 500-meter depth shows a strong potential for high-grade underground mineralization over a large area that extends over more than a kilometer now adjacent into the west of the open pit, where the exploration ramp is currently being developed.

Briefly, at Hope Bay, as mentioned by Dominique, we've had a great quarter in terms of drilling on ice, thanks to the team's great winter drilling program. We started early. We've completed north of 33,000 meters of drilling as of the end of March, and a full update will be provided on the May 19 press release along with the project announcement we've been talking.

And finally, on Slide 13, in Finland, I would like to provide some color on the recent announcement we made with an offer to acquire all of the outstanding share of Rupert and Aurion Resources, along with the 70% interest of B2Gold and the Fingold JV. It was a great job by our corporate development team and legal team. With these 3 combined transactions adding to our current landholdings, we will be consolidating close to 2,500 square kilometers, consistent with our corporate strategy of focusing on regional hub, leveraging our 20 years of experience in exploration, permitting, mine construction and operation with a strong social license to operate in the most fertile greenstone belt in Europe.

By combining the Finnish workforce of Agnico along with the workforce of Rupert and Aurion and removing property boundaries, we will aggressively explore in the near term, the immediate and lateral extension of the Ikkari deposits as well as the multiple occurrences that were identified on the Fingold JV and the large land position owned by Rupert and Aurion.

Personally, it reminds me a lot about Kittila mine acquisition in 2005. At the time of the acquisition, there was approximately 2 million ounces down to less than a kilometer. And 20 years later at Kittila, it grows down to and still open at depth below 2 kilometers with a global endowment of 10 million ounces, considering past production reserves and resources known so far.

I see a similar potential on the structure at the Ikkari deposit and as these mineral system are similar to our Canadian greenstone belt that have demonstrated extended vertical geological fertility. By this transaction, we are aiming to deliver in Finland a platform for multiple mines over multiple decades, similar to the 3 regions in Canada that are Quebec, Ontario and Nunavut, where we will be leveraging our regional expertise.

And on that, I will return the microphone to Ammar for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Guy, and thank you, Jamie and Dominique and Natasha and everyone else on our team. Really exceptional work, really tremendous results, well done. As you can see, we continue to work hard for all of our stakeholders, and we'll continue to build off the same foundational pillars that have defined our strategy and that have served us very well over the past almost 70 years.

We will focus on the best mining jurisdictions based on geologic potential and political stability. We'll be disciplined with our owners' money, making investment decisions based on technical and regional knowledge, creating value through the drill bit and through smart acquisitions where and when it makes sense. We are uniquely well positioned with a quality project pipeline, leveraging existing assets in the best regions in the world where we believe we have a competitive advantage.

And we will continue to be focused on creating value on a per share basis and on being leaders in our industry in returning capital to shareholders as evidenced by over 43 years of consecutive dividend payments and increased share buybacks. We have a clear and executable strategy to create tremendous additional value per share for our owners well into the foreseeable future with manageable risk, leveraging off existing infrastructure and regional competitive advantages. We have the assets, we have the projects, we have the resources and we have the people. We are making it happen right now. We will stay focused, and we will not be distracted. Thank you again for joining us on this call.

And for many of you, thank you for decades of trust and support. We will always work hard to maintain that trust, and we will never take it for granted. Operator, may I ask that we now open up the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] First question comes from the line of Lawson Winder from Bank of America Securities.

We'd like to start off with the Finnish acquisition, and we haven't had a chance to ask you guys about this in this type of forum since the announcement. And Guy, thank you very much for the picture you've painted and for the color on getting to 500,000 ounces. But can you help us understand what are the sort of value creation steps over the next 12 to 24 months to get to a better understanding of what that ultimately looks like. So resource update, study, when do you expect permitting to start? And just any other considerations on that sort of time line thinking? I appreciate it.

I can start, but maybe Dom and Guy can jump in on more details. The first thing, Lawson, and by the way, nice to hear your voice, the first thing Lawson really was to consolidate all of this property. There's a lot of potential. They're good properties, but they were individually constrained and so that's why it was very important for us.

And as mentioned, our entire team, but in particular, the corporate development team and the legal team did a really good job in allowing us to consolidate all of this at the same time. It's really first and foremost, and then I'll pass it over to my colleagues about consolidating what we think is the best land position in Europe.

Thanks, Ammar. Lawson, Dominique speaking. Maybe I think what on my side, I need to do is to freeze the scope of that one, let's say, without the boundaries, where we should put the mill, the tailings and revamp the schedule, the study based on the new acquisition. And the exploration guys are all excited to add, but we're going to need to kind of try to kick that project for a first start but also to get some flexibility, maybe, for example, at the mill to make sure -- it's always a challenge to get enough detail into the study to push that into the permitting. And that's what we're going to focus by staffing the study team and eventually the construction team.

So maybe in complement, Lawson, Guy speaking now. As we discussed in the press release, our plan by removing the property boundary is to have sort of an updated view with the current information by the end of 2027, where we're going to have sort of a better picture of what the optionality that removing the property boundary offer on both the optimum pit design and location of infrastructure.

And while we're going to right away, as a matter of fact, start drilling once the acquisition is completed because we know as well that property boundary was also constraining the drilling close to the property boundary. So -- but that's our intent. By the end of 2027, we should have an idea of the kind of a revised concept based on the current information, while we're going to continue to drill and maybe look at other iterations.

So maybe like you can refer to what we did in Malartic. We're going to be providing most likely a first version of what it could be and then keep drilling and adjust based on what we're going to discover.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just a follow-up from me with respect to the Detour Lake underground drill results. There were some really, really substantial intercepts, of course. With the drilling you've done to date, has your understanding of what the Detour Lake underground can be, has it evolved and changed in any way in the past, let's say, 12 months?

I mean is it starting to look like it could be a much bigger system? And are you possibly reconsidering what the ultimate development plan might look like Detour underground?

Well, I would like -- to me, the area west of the pit is very similar to what was historically mined on the ground at Detour that we are now mining with the pit closer to surface. So obviously, we are showcasing a couple of great results. On average, we think that, that area will be anywhere between maybe 2.5 and 3.5 grams, something like that.

And obviously, when you put those some spectacular results along with some others that are in a 2, 3-gram over 20, 30 meter. So it's in line with our expectation. It's aligned with what we're actually just firming up the model of that zone. As you know, we are mindful of the history at Detour. In order to selectively mine a high-grade ore, you need a ton of drilling, you need the right drill spacing. When we are getting there with the ramp, we're going to be soon being able to drill it more aggressively from underground as well from the exploration ramp. So it is shaping up as we thought. It's always an area that I personally liked a lot west of the pit.

Lawson, just to add to that, it's Natasha, by the way. Just because of the -- we do have a study team looking at this and looking at different iterations as we proceed with the exploration program. But with the combination of the exploration success and the high gold price environment, there is definitely optionality here at Detour.

So it's fairly early stages, I would say, but the team is looking at different trade-offs for potentially a higher milling capacity, a larger underground, potentially another pushback at the pit. But again, very early days.

Your next question comes from the line of Fahad Tariq from Jefferies.

In the quarter, there was an announcement about a Nunavut collaboration agreement with B2Gold. Can you maybe just talk about the thinking behind that and what you hope to learn from their operations at Goose?

Well, we -- it's Ammar here. I'll start and then maybe Dominique or Jean can comment. In general, we always like to try to work with our colleagues and our peers. We have a lot of experience in the areas we operate. We think we have some competitive advantages, but we're not so naive to think that we know everything.

So any time we get an opportunity to work with our peers to see what they're doing, we take advantage of that. I think our owners would want us to do that. And also from B2's perspective, they're good people. We know them well, and they think that we do a good job where we operate, and they want to see if they can learn a little from our operations as well. So it's just the kind of stuff that we want to do in the industry. I think that's probably enough on that.

Okay. And then maybe just one for Jamie. I noticed the buyback pace slowed down quarter-over-quarter in the first quarter. Is that just a function of the pretty significant cash tax payment. And can you just remind us of the minimum cash you'd like to keep on the balance sheet going forward?

Yes. No, that's exactly right. I mean we said we put out our guidance in February that we'd be targeting returning about 40% of our free cash flow through a combination of the dividend and the share buyback. Our free cash flow was lower in Q1 as a result of the cash tax payments.

So I think our -- the percentage worked out to closer to 50%. It was $150 million of shares repurchased in the quarter, which was half of what we did in Q4. That will ramp up certainly in Q2 and through the rest of the year as our free cash flow is expected to be higher.

In terms of minimum cash balance, I mean, I think we're comfortable where we're at now with $3.1 billion of cash, $2.9 billion of net cash, between $3 billion and $5 billion I think that's a good position to be in, in terms of just giving us financial flexibility to be able to execute on our strategy. But yes, definitely higher share buyback activity expected through the remainder of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Wolfson from RBC Capital Markets.

I appreciate the additional disclosure on the energy sensitivity side of things. I had a question in terms of the Hope Bay project update later this month. Looking at the current market for prices, there's obviously been a high degree of inflation. How are you thinking about incorporating some of those input prices for that project update and thinking about maybe the near-term impact versus what otherwise would a long-term, much more reasonable price be?

Josh, it's Ammar here. I'll start and then Dom will jump in. In my experience, the most important thing in building projects is to get the engineering done and to have the execution plan well laid out. We have seen some inflationary pressure, but actually, it hasn't been that bad.

And the team, as Dom said, I mean you looked at the picture, the camp is going to be there. The backup power is there, the mill building, half the mill building is there. Water treatment is there. So we're coming to this with an advantage of infrastructure in place, which allows us to execute.

I mean it's all about execution, but also exceedingly important is the amount of engineering the team has done, which allows them to get a much better control overall on execution and, therefore, on cost. Dom?

Yes, Josh, we -- in May, we're going to give more detail on the economic. That that's going to be obviously positive economics. And our assumption are based on the long-term view, we're going to give you some sensitivity to understand how that could impact, and we don't know the future.

But as Ammar mentioned, we're -- I'm very comfortable where we are right now. We've been mining in Nunavut over 17 years, and we've built already 3 projects with Meliadine, Meadowbank and in Amaruq. So that's -- it's a good time for Nunavut to add another -- it's going to be over 400,000 ounces per year, and that's going to bring us to potentially 1 million ounces per year into the Nunavut platform.

Great. And then another, I guess, 2-part question for Malartic. I mean first question there is what drove the grade improvements this quarter? And I guess we saw something similar last year. Should we expect to see it going forward.

And then second part is just on the September update that you referenced. Given that we had expected, I guess, the shaft project completion not really until year-end and then a larger update in the second half of next year, how should we be thinking about what information is disclosed ahead of that completion in September?

Yes. Just for the grade, it's a question of sequencing mainly into the Barnett pit. That's the -- that's the only thing that changed that. And I will let Jean-Marie to answer on the second part.

Josh, yes, in September, the plan would be to provide an update. So the last update really for Malartic was in June 2023. What we want to reflect in September is the update in the reserve resources that we've seen over the last few years and also start giving a better idea in terms of how the second shaft, Marban and Wasamac start to fit together, start giving ranges around what we think it will cost and operating.

But you're right, the studies will be later in the year, but we should be able to provide a very good picture of what Malartic will look like to get to the 1 million ounce per year.

Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Major from UBS.

Ammar and team, first question on the Finland acquisition and then around the kind of balance sheet and capital returns. First question is, was there a reason for using Agnico shares rather than cash specifically?

And then I guess the second part, you alluded to exceeding the 40% cash flow payout potentially in order to reduce the share count following the acquisition. Can you give us a sense of kind of quantum you could be at $3 billion to $5 billion of net cash quite quickly through the year. Should we expect that as a limit to the cash balance you'd want to hold and how that would flow through to the buyback?

Well, thank you for the question, Ammar here. I'll answer the first one, and maybe, Jamie, you can answer the second question. With regard -- it's a very good question on why we use shares instead of cash. And the answer is we wanted to use cash and they wanted 100% shares. I think their view and rightfully so is Agnico shares are good shares to have, and they wanted 100% shares.

We used full cash on the other deals. And I think Jamie, as part of his answer to the second, can also incorporate how we hope to offset a little bit of the share issuance through the rest of the year.

Yes, absolutely. So I think in our disclosure, Daniel, we referred to potentially increasing repurchase activity based on the sale of some of our portfolio investments. So if there's opportunities for us to do a little bit more based on our views on valuation, we will do so.

With respect to kind of minimum cash balance, where we are now, I'd say, is we're very comfortable. And as the cash balance increases, we'll look at even more activity under the share buyback. But I'd say the minimum target is 40%. We may be able to exceed that based on either our free cash flow performance or the proceeds of the sale of some of our investments.

Okay. And then my next question is on San Nicolas, actually saw Teck in Anglo American yesterday and discussed the project a little bit. But I mean it feels like it's somewhat subscale at 50% for either yourselves or the other partner. Have you had any discussions around the ownership of the project? And would you be keen to consolidate if the opportunity arose?

Yes. I think we would look at it. We still think it's a good project. I don't want to forecast what our colleagues and our partners are thinking. But obviously, if they said, "Hey, would you want to look at it," we'd look at it.

Okay. Great. And then just one quick one, if I could. On Finland. I noticed Boliden deferred a pushback at Kevitsa because of the change in the taxation for the mining sector in Finland. Can you just give us any color about how you're seeing that landscape with respect to Kittila and the new acquisitions?

Yes. Yes, there's tax change in Finland. And this is included into our evaluations as well as our life of mine at Kittila. Yes.

I was just going to add, the industry is lobbying the government to look at potentially changing the structure of those taxes to make certain additional things that are deductible to offset the impact. But all that was factored into our modeling.

Your next question comes from the line of Bennett Moore from JPMorgan.

Congrats on the record quarter. I guess following the land consolidation in Finland and as you continue to think about the company's next leg of growth beyond the early 2030s, where does Australia fit in this picture? Do you see similar opportunities around Fosterville?

Well, thank you for the question. Actually, I was just out in Fosterville about a month ago. And I mean it's such fantastic people but we spent a lot of time on some recent I would say, very good exploration results in and around Fosterville. I think as some of you know, we've consolidated some land. That part of Australia was the original gold rush. And nobody is really focused on it for decades. And it's still very early, but I was quite pleasantly surprised with some of the results they were getting and the enthusiasm they had.

Now we get questions all the time about the rest of Australia. We think Australia is a great place to mine, not just for gold. But I mean, you know us, we are very careful about what we do. We're very disciplined. And right now, we are -- we continue to be focused in Australia at Fosterville and the team we have there and the opportunities around that.

Then I think it's been about 6 months since you launched the Avenir business. So just wondering how this is progressing, what sort of new opportunities the team may be evaluating. And then maybe if you could also comment on what sort of critical mineral opportunities there may be around the Lapland Greenstone belt as well.

Well, I mean, it's a good -- I'll ask Guy to talk about sort of base metal and critical metals in the Lapland belt because there are some. Just with regards to Avenir, it's a really enthusiastic team. They are looking at a lot of things.

What I would say is that they are naturally narrowing down what they're looking at and becoming more focused. It's an exciting business to be and in. It is a separate entity. We are supportive of it. And just to repeat, we're not obliged to do anything, but it does give us an opportunity to see things that are well considered.

And maybe, Guy, you can talk about non-precious opportunities in Finland.

Yes. So yes, so in addition, obviously, of what triggers our primary interest, which is the structure around the circle line and the main break. We also know that it's the same -- to the north of that, that's the same rock package that hoists basically the given the Kevitsa in the Sakatti deposit that are nearby that are nickel, copper, PG and even at the old Pahtavaara mine, there was some evidences of massive sulphide that are potentially kind of a sign. So we have all of the ingredients.

But for us, we see that as potentially an add-on and our primary focus remains to fully explore for gold. And if there's something else because there's the fertility of the rock is there, we'll see.

Your next question comes from the line of Anita Soni from CIBC World Markets.

I just wanted to ask a little bit about the cadence of the production ramp over the course of the year. So I think you said that in Q2, it will be similar to Q1 production. And in Q1, there were, I guess, a couple of challenges with Kittila coming off of the shutdown and then the weather just impacting the restart there.

So what are the things that are kind of offsetting in Q2 if Kittila is going to ramp back up. And I would assume it's the Caribou migration that I should be modeling. And then going into the back half of the year, what are the things that are ramping up. It's the AK project, right, at Macassa?

Anita, it's Ammar here. It's -- honestly, it's more just mine sequencing and where we are on the plan. There's -- you've got a good point on specific items that were in the first quarter. There are always -- and we try to spread it out through the year when we have maintenance, when we have shutdowns, we try to, as you mentioned, exactly right, there's always the uncertainty of the Caribou season. But I think our team is really quite exceptionally good at taking all of that into account and projecting through the year.

We don't typically give 48%, 52%. We decided we wanted to do it because we just wanted people to know that actually everything is going quite well. And as mentioned, the first quarter was actually a little bit above budget. So there's nothing in particular. It's mostly just mine sequencing and various other elements that come into it.

And then just from a longer-term capital allocation question, a lot of those questions have been asked and answered. But I just wanted to get an idea of as you think about the cash balance increasing, where do your priorities lie in terms of capital, just rank them again in terms of capital return to shareholders. And I mean, the balance sheet is pretty strong at this point, and you're accumulating a lot of cash. So where does reinvestment into the business now fall into the -- has it moved up over the capital return to shareholders?

Yes. Thanks, Anita. I'd say, I mean, reinvestment in the business is always a very high priority, right? The 5 key value driver projects that were that we're advancing our 30% to 60% IRR projects in the current gold price environment. So we want to invest as much as quickly as we can in those. And we're doing that.

I mean our capital spending has increased from $2.3 billion last year to probably $3 billion this year all in, and we'll look to continue to find opportunities to accelerate that to bring that production forward. Beyond that, I'd say right now, in this gold price environment, we're fortunate in that we can do it all. We can afford to reinvest aggressively in the business. We can afford to deliver very strong returns to shareholders.

I mean, 40% is kind of the floor for this year of our free cash flow being returned, I think, is quite attractive, and we can continue to strengthen the balance sheet. Having that $3 billion to $5 billion net cash position just gives us the -- again, the financial strength and flexibility to be able to execute on our business strategy even in a much lower gold price environment. So I don't think our priorities have really changed. We'll continue to look for opportunities to accelerate reinvestment in the business while strengthening our financial position and delivering strong returns to shareholders.

It's a -- we understand the questions. The exact position of cash on the balance sheet is as much an art as it is a science. It's a $100 billion company, whether it's $3 billion or $4 billion or $2 billion, really, that's up to the discretion primarily of the CFO and treasury -- but I just want to make the point having been a CFO myself, it's not like there is an exact perfect number.

What you want to do is look at all the circumstances at the time, make sure you have -- the most important thing a CFO has on his table is liquidity for the company. And so I think Jamie and the team are doing a great job balancing everything.

Next question comes from the line of John Tumazos from John Tumazos Very Independent Research.

Thank you very much for your service to the company. I'm trying to make a back of the envelope concept of the Ikkari mine or Central Lapland new mine coming in 2034. Is a fair guess 15,000 tonnes a day times 2.25 grams times 95% recovery to get to the 500,000 ounces and that, that might cost $1.2 billion when we get to 2034, all those years out.

Yes. It's -- John, first of all, I'd like to thank you for your service to the industry. That's a very nice introduction. It's -- we're still early in looking at that. It's -- maybe we can go through some of the details offline.

I don't know, John, did you want to -- I mean, we got to be careful because these are very, very early, and we're working on it, but go ahead, John.

I can step in. First of all, John, I'm very surprised with your question because I was expecting that you were asking how we were able to put all of this together at once. So a bit disappointed with the question. But on this, listen, 10,000, 15,000, we will have to define it and a function of the throughput, we will arrive with the minimum of, let's say, 200,000 plus, we'll be careful before we will provide any number. but I'm more focused on looking what it will be one day.

And as Guy described, it's a high potential. And I think this is where I would like that we bring most of the attention, what it can be eventually. So we are excited with the consolidation and stay tuned because I think moving forward toward the end of 2027, we'll have more to say. Guy?

So John, what we are referring to in our press release is a platform of 500,000 ounces when combining Kittila and Ikkari together. That's currently and still we need to work if we can make it bigger than that, and we cannot work on the -- but just to make it clear, the 500,000 is just solely for Ikkari. It's our vision of the platform for the time being.

Let me ask another one, if I may. And thank you for the clarification. I was assuming we were only talking about the new property. I was guessing the CapEx and then the consideration for the 3 purchases -- and on the 4.22 million ounces of current resources slightly larger than the 3.5 million ounces of reserves. And $1.2 billion development capital, it works out to $1,268 an ounce acquisition and CapEx to develop. Should we be assuming that the resources are going to double or triple and that that's not the new normal for how much we're going to pay for developing mines.

John, it's Ammar here. And I think this is probably the way that we look at it. The acquisition cost worked out by our internal assessment. And remember, we know this project quite well. We've been there for 6-plus years looking at it.

We acquired it effectively by our own internal models at quite a good discount to NAV, just based on what we felt on our own, what we thought were fairly conservative. So we've acquired an asset in a region we know well that we have been looking at for 6-plus years at a considerable discount to NAV, and we got the rest of the land package for free.

So we're excited about it. We think it makes a lot of sense. I can't get into all of the numbers, except to say in our usual fashion, we did an awful lot of homework before we decided to proceed.

Your next question comes from the line of Tanya Jakusconek from Scotiabank.

My first question is for Dominique. Dominique, I hope that snow will be gone from Hope Bay when we're up there. That picture showed quite a lot of barbecue. I just wanted to ask because we capital increases lately at some of the projects out there, should we still be thinking that $2 billion for Hope Bay would be a reasonable capital for 10-year mine plan that you've been talking about?

Tanya, yes, we see a bit of inflation, but it's going to be below 2.5 for sure. And the thing we need to finalize, we have a very good now, let's say, level of engineering, but there is a decision that we're taking, for example, to fast track Patch 7 and to do more ounces earlier, for example, to start the mill right up at 6,000 tonnes per day, it's going to be a ramp-up, but the mill is going to be designed right upfront at 6,000 tonnes per day compared what we did with Meliadine.

And also, for example, we're looking to add one more wing to keep the drilling ongoing and to let Guy doing treasure hunting onto the property. So there's a decision that we're taking internally that at the end of the day, affecting the initial CapEx, but it won't be a big surprise. It's going to be slightly over $2 billion.

And the changes are not so much inflation. They're more instead of ramping up the mill in 2 stages just because of the economics, you just do it all at once. And as Guy said, do you invest in some peripheral infrastructures so that we can continue to accelerate exploration.

Okay. That's helpful. Over $2 billion slightly because of plant rather than inflation.

Yes, yes, sure.

Okay. Now that I have you on, just 2 quick questions for you. You mentioned the strategy in Australia, which was to focus around Fosterville and drilling that platform to see what you have there. In Mexico, besides San Nicolas, is that -- do you have anything else that you're looking at to expand that platform?

At San Nicolas?

Mexico itself.

Well, it's -- so we are looking at opportunities to expand San Nicolas. But beyond that, Tanya, there's really nothing substantial that we're seeing as an opportunity in Mexico.

Okay. And then my final question, Ammar, for you. It's always tragic to hear about fatalities for everybody in the mining industry. And so my question to you is from your tragic incidents that you had at your mine sites. What have you learned? And what changes to procedures and processes have you put in place from these learnings?

Well, thank you for asking because it is very important, Tanya. Look, I think that we've learned what we already know, which is never ever slow down in emphasizing the importance of safety. And sometimes it's really disappointing. It's the routine things, the things that people do every day that they get too comfortable with. That's human nature, and it is our job to really just push it.

What we did was we mandated a stand down, where we took every employee in at all of our sites, every single one and reemphasized it. We have a very sophisticated and comprehensive safety program like most of our peers. And frankly, it's really devastating to have had those fatalities.

So it seems that it was just routine so nothing that you would have changed, I guess, is what you're saying from procedures and processes.

Well, I mean, I think that, yes, I don't want to get into detail. There's a lot of work still ongoing. These weren't things that -- well, actually, Carol, why don't you jump in, sorry.

Tanya, as you can understand that it's -- any loss of life is a tragic loss of life. In both of these instances, the in-depth investigations are still ongoing. The authorities are involved and the regulatory authorities and so on are involved in these investigations as well.

So we can't share the results of these investigations yet. But certainly, there are learnings around this. We're sharing to the degree possible, not just internally, but to industry peers where there has been something that we can start sharing immediately to make sure that these types of accidents couldn't happen elsewhere.

And really for us, we're really, as Ammar said, reemphasizing just the importance of safe production and making sure that we're following our procedures and always looking for the risks in the workplace and how we can mitigate those risks.

So to that end, we've been looking at major hazards, which are the hazards of things that could actually be a life-changing accident and putting in place critical controls. So we're continuing down that road. And I think that's a really important step for us as we continue on that journey towards zero accidents.

There are no further questions. I'll turn the call back over to Ammar.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And everyone, have a nice weekend. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, everyone. Today, I have the pleasure to present and to introduce more what is Agnico. What are we doing, who we are, but more importantly, what differentiates ourselves. But maybe before I begin, please take -- in my remarks, it's going to be looking forward statement. So who is Agnico? So now we're the second largest gold producer in the world. We have 10 mines in operation in 4 countries. So Canada, Finland, Mexico and Australia, but 85% of the production is coming from Canada with the 3 region, Quebec, Nunavut and Ontario.

We are today on a financial state point of view, last year, we generate $8.8 billion EBITDA. We had a $4.4 billion free cash flow at the end of last year. On that cash flow at $2.7 billion, we finished with net cash balance of $2.7 billion last year, and we give back to shareholders $1.4 billion through share buyback and through dividends. Why -- what differentiates Agnico Eagle to other companies? We don't consider ourselves as a global mining company. We are more a regional mining company. And that's why I think we're able to succeed today where we have our costs or $200 to $300 per ounces less than our peers. What -- why this is important, the regional aspect.

It's the way that we found that we've built the company since many years that we've been able to have a clear and the best way to have a sustainable business. So we -- there is 2 criteria before we go into a region. Is there a geological potential that we could build many mines and to be there for many years? And do we have the political and social stability to be there for many years because that's the way we think we're able to create and to build a competitive advantage where we have a long-term relationship with the communities. We have a good, let's say, our employees are more committed, stay with Agnico. We have a very low turnover. Our turnover, for example, in Quebec is 5% to 6%.

Overall, our turnover is half of the other business. When we look -- we have some sites that deter generation that people are at site. And I'm a good example of that. I've been with Agnico 26 years, starting when Agnico was one mine. And today, my daughter is a mining engineer at one of our mine in Nunavut. But I'm not an exception. That's the common in Agnico to have this.

So that gives us good strength to build our project and to have a good technical base on the knowledge on operation, on construction and on delivering on target. What's the result of that is it's working. When you look to our results, it's working. So in the past 20 years, we've been able to increase the production 14x compared to where we were before.

This looks good, but what is difficult to do is to do it per share. And our focus always remains to do it per share. We've been able to the last 2 decades to increase our production per share by 3x, which is not an easy achievement to do. And we have a growth plan, I'm going to talk later to keep doing that, growing the company without, let's say, in the per share value. When you look also on the EBITDA and when you look at the number there per share, the dividend per share, everything is in the positive.

Overall, Agnico has been better than the S&P 400 and the XAU index. So we have a compounded return of the last 20 years of 13% Again, this -- the success is based a lot on the strategy to grow the company, but on a regional basis. So we try to do acquisition or to increase our productivity in the same region where we are. So that's the future, what we see now. So we're looking to be in the early 2030s, 20% to 30% more production that's where we are today. So right now, in the next coming years, we're 3.4, 3.5 million ounces, for the next 3 years, we're going to be north of 4 million into 2030 plus.

And this is based on the same 5 projects that we were looking and working on when the gold price was at $2,000. So the 2 first ones are to increase the production at the site where we have infrastructure, we have the people at Detour Lake. I'm going to talk more in the detail in the coming, but the 2 first sites is assets in operation. After that, we have Hope Bay and we have Upper Beaver. This is 2 new sites that we're building or we going to build. And the third -- the fifth one, San Nicolas, this one is not counted into my increase because it's more a copper project. So I'm going to talk more today about the next 4 one.

But we're in the strongest position that we've ever been with a good balance sheet, with a good growth profile in front of us and a stable production in all our operations. Detour Lake, so that's a world-class asset. We've been able in the last 5 years to increase the resources, the reserve and resources by 25 million ounces in the last 5 years into that project.So without thinking differently or doing an expansion, we're going to be mining there up to 2060, 2070. That mine was discovered or was in operation in 2015 or 2018, 2019, we just open -- underground at the time. In 2010, that was reopened with an open pit and this is what we're mining right now at 750,000 ounces per year. But now we're looking to go back underground and to take higher grade from underground to replace lower grade from open pit to bring that to 1 million ounces.

So again, this is done with existing infrastructure. The mill we already have underground mining. It's not a secret, and we're going to increase to -- in the 2030s to 1 million ounces per year. This is one part of the growth that we have in our view.

The second one, Canadian Malartic. Since we've moved, we're moving from open pit at 60,000 tonnes per day. Now we're -- in 2029, we're going to be 100% going underground. So the grade is going to triple from 1 gram to 3 gram, but the mill capacity is going to move -- for the mill production is going to move from 60,000 tonnes to 20,000 tonnes per day.

So we're going to keep the same production, 550,000 ounces per year, but we had a great opportunity, 40,000 tonne per day available at the mill. So we've talked about that the last 2 -- work on that last 2, 3 years. There's 3 parts of that to bring that one also to 1 million ounces. The first one, we're looking to have a second shaft because that deposit, it's a world-class deposit. And there's enough room that we're able to extract more for the East Gouldie deposit. So we're planning to do a second shaft that's going to add 200,000, 225,000 ounces per year.

We're also looking to bring Marban pit. It is a pit that we just -- with the acquisition of O3. It is at 15 kilometers away from the mill. So we're going to mine it, truck it to the mill. And we have another project in Quebec called Wasamac. It's an underground mine, 3,000 tonne per day, 100 kilometers, we're going to truck it to Malartic mill. So that's the second part of the puzzle to add more answers in the coming years. Again, on the site, in the region where we know with a low risk. If you combine Malartic and Detour together in the last 10 years, we have been able to add 50 million ounces on resources just by drilling and by bringing new ideas.

So that's really an interesting way to create value. The third one, Upper Beaver. That's a project in Ontario. It is close to -- you could see on the map, you disclosed to our Macassa site. So we're going to have a second mill into that camp. It is a 210,000 ounces per year we're looking for. But that also might also unlock other deposits that we have in that camp in the future, having that mill. So we're doing currently the shaft sinking. That's the same team that did the Macassa Shaft. Shaft #4 doing that shaft and the team doing the construction, it's also -- we do our own construction.

So the site or the development is going as planned, and we're on target on this one. And the last one and not the least, I'm going to talk Hope Bay. We bought that project from TMAC in 2021. At that time, it was 10,000 -- 100,000 ounces per year. It was not enough for Nunavut. So we've put it on care and maintenance, and we've drilled it very hard. And we found a new deposit with Patch 7, which is the best that we have. So now we're looking -- we're targeting to announce the construction of that project in May, May 19. That's going to be 400,000 450,000, on the life of mine, 1,000 ounces per year for the first 10 years, but that's just the beginning.

Why we're announcing it now because it's like what we did at Meliadine. We need to have enough engineering to be -- to make sure that the costs and the schedule are solid. So we're going to be announcing it in May, and we are already over 50% of engineering. The team doing Meliadine from the study engineering and now we're starting to beef up the operation are the same team or part of the team that did Meliadine. So again, even though it's in the Arctic, it is not an easy environment.

It is not our first barbecue Tanya, and we're going to do one also in May. But we're confident on that project. Now we have -- what we see is the first picture, but first 10 years, but we have 80-kilometer greenstone belt that we're going to keep drilling and keep -- most probably keep expanding that property.

So that's the last one I was looking to talk to you with their significant potential there. So that's the way at Agnico, we're creating value. Our focus is really to create value per share, not just to improve production. That has been our mindset, and we could see the results of that, and we're going to keep doing it. So from optimization, from project, we have the best pipeline that we never had with what we have in the middle, but we're also working and looking for what's next what project we should bring into play in 2035.

So on the exploration side, on M&A, this is a thing that always looking for to keep building that pipeline. So on that, I will pass it to you, Tanya, for a questions.

Okay. Thank you very much, Dominique. I'm going to open it to the audience to see if there are any questions from the audience. Gentleman over there.

May I ask about your European ambitions. It seems that Europe is quite small now relative to your Canadian assets. And it's been the focus of companies to try to slim down their non-strategic assets. What does Agnico plan to do within Europe? What does it generate in terms of ounces? And what's its ambitions?

Well, we're getting that question, I think, at all meetings. Same thing As in Australia and Europe. Is it noncore asset. We don't see that as a noncore asset because both of the sites have a long life of mine. In fact, in Australia, that's the longest life of mine that, at that site I've never had. But we also see exploration potential at 2 sites, at Kittila and also at Fosterville. So for us, we keep drilling it.

Plus when you think about that, today, they -- both sides are doing around $1 million free cash flow per day. So they are not -- on cost they are more -- they are providing value to us. And both place, in Kittila and especially in Australia, it is really difficult to start a new mine and to build a new mine. So having those assets, it's an added value and it's -- we keep the regional thinking, okay, how could we bolt on that at the same place or around is that we could use, the synergy we have with the team, the synergy we have the infrastructure. So there is no plan to let those go for now.

The gentleman over here.

Do you have any plans in the Dominican Republic?

I think we are maybe involved in a project, I'm not sure. I wouldn't say maybe overall, we're getting a lot of questions are you interested on that one on that one. We are invested in approximately between 60 and 70 projects, which some of them are public, some of them are not. And really, that's the way we've been building the company. Our goal by doing that is to have access to the data, having access to the people, being more comfortable with the region, to get the knowledge advantage. And often, the value of the project is well priced. So you need to see through that. You need to see it through the exploration potential to match the value and to create the value. We're patient. So often, it could be 2 years, 5 years, 7 years, working with the junior company to help them to develop the project. It's good for us, but it's also good for them because we could provide some technical knowledge and help how to develop the project.

So I could get all questions about each project. Again, we have a dedicated team on evaluating projects and also project development. full-time people on that working -- looking to different projects.

Maybe...

Maybe Tanya, maybe to answer, I will be back to the 2 criteria. Could we build many mines as we have the geological potential to see many mines. That's one criteria. And the second one, is it stable socially? Is it stable politically. So even though we could build many mine in Africa, we won't go there.

Maybe just to round off Mexico. You've talked a bit about Europe and maybe just what's happening in Mexico, your strategy there?

Yes. So Mexico, we have 1 mine still in operation, Pinos Altos. There's 2, 3 years in front of us. The team is looking with the current gold price. Could we expand it, because again, we have the thing built and we have the team. We'll see if there's something. But the thinking is to use the workforce and the knowledge to help and to develop San Nic. So we're still into the permitting phase into the study phase at San Nicolas, but that's the plan that we have for more here, let's say, in the future for Mexico.

And maybe if I can keep going on just about mine building in general. Like one of the concerns when I ask the CEOs of all mining companies, "what is your biggest worry?" They say "people. " Right? We worry about the oil today, but just people in general. So maybe you can talk a little bit in -- a bit more in depth about these new mines that you're building. All the people that we need to build these mines. Maybe you can just share with us a little bit more about how each are going to be built and how you move people around your operations.

Yes. Agnico, we build our mine. So we never give or we don't give EPCM. So engineering, procurement, construction and management, the head of all of those blocks is an [indiscernible] person. -- that we beef up from other sites or at some -- we don't have choice with engineering firms and with consultant with contractor. But we have a core team of construction that we're able to move from 1 project to another 1 using the same process using the same way to report how the project is progressing. So that's the way we do that. I'm not concerned because, again, if I'm looking at Canadian Malartic, the team doing a first shaft is going to be the same team that is going to do the second shaft. At Hope Bay, the team that did Meliadine and Amaruq now they are building Hope Bay, Detour, we already have the people.

But that's an interesting question. I think it's a challenge for not just the mining industry. we see a bit less, well not a bit less, we see less quality into the engineering firms. Same thing with contractor we get -- in the past, we're able to get a contractor with 10 years of experience. Now it's not the case. It's more you get a contractor with no experience. So we need to do more training -- but because our regional thinking, we have access more than often to the A team because the contractor likes to work with us, and we know who they are.

So we're not going in an area where we don't know the contractors. We know who they are. So we're able to ask, okay, fine for that project and that guy and that guy because I know those guys are going to drive the construction, for example. At the right pace.

Yes. And with a lot of projects being built in Canada, you always have to fight for labor. So.

Yes. in fact, we're just finishing hoping -- and I was in discussion with the construction of VP 2 days ago, and he was explaining to me the factor they're using on productivity. And the 1 we're using now at Hope Bay is different than Meliadine based on the current situation, based on the -- we have less expertise, less experience. So for example, I'm just giving numbers -- at Meliadine, on paper, you need 1.1 hour to install a pipe on paper. So at Meliadine was, for example, 1.1 hour that you need to put on costs. At whole day might be 1.5 hours. You put into your estimate because we know we have less capacity.

But the price we're going to give to you, which is going to be around $2 billion to build Rob. This is included into our estimate. Same thing with the OpEx at Abe, we're taking the same price we use -- we're doing right now at the milled and underground in the north. So it's an advantage. We have the historical data to cost the projects.

Well, I think we're out of time, but Dominique, I will be coming to that barbecue, I hope on May 20. So Okay. Thank you, Dominique.

Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Judith Elliott, and I'm the analyst covering mining at Raymond James. It's my pleasure today to introduce Chris Vollmershausen, Executive VP, Legal, General Counsel and Corporate Strategy at Agnico Eagle. Agnico is Canada's largest mining company and the second largest gold producer in the world with operating mines in Canada, Australia, Finland and Mexico. The company is advancing a pipeline of high-quality development projects in these regions to support sustainable growth over the next decade, while returning significant free cash flow to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends.

Chris is a key member of Agnico's leadership team and runs the company's global legal, indigenous community, government relations and communication teams, providing strategic legal counsel to the Board and executive team. Please join me in welcoming Chris. Thank you for joining us today. Chris will provide an overview on Agnico, and then we'll transition to a fireside chat, and we welcome any of your questions. Chris, go ahead.

Thank you, Judith, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'd like to introduce Agnico Eagle to the room, who we are, what we do and probably most importantly, what makes us different from some of our other mining peers. Before we get started, as the lawyer, I'd like to point out the forward-looking statements, make sure everybody takes the time to read those, very important stuff. Okay. And so Agnico Eagle, as Judith said, we're the second largest gold mining company in the world, the largest mining company in Canada, currently the fourth largest publicly traded company in Canada.

In 2025, we produced 3.45 million ounces of gold at peer-leading costs. We're approximately $200 to $300 below our closest competitors. As Judith noted, we operate 10 mines spread across Canada, Australia, Finland and Mexico. Those are all what we believe to be premier mining jurisdictions, where assets are organized into what we call 6 regional platforms and about 85% of our production comes from Canada. Financially, 2025 was a record year. We generated about $8 billion of EBITDA and $4.4 billion of free cash flow. This allowed us to end the year with net cash of approximately $2.7 billion, and we were able to return $1.4 billion to our shareholders through buybacks and our dividend.

Today, as I said, largest mining company in Canada. What differentiates us is how we think about our business. We like to think that we're not just a good mining business, but a good business that happens to mine. We don't see ourselves as a global company, but really more as a regional company. Unlike our peers who operate globally and will chase the assets wherever they are, our strategy is to operate only in regions that meet 2 important criteria. One, they must have the geologic potential to operate multiple mines for multiple decades. That part is probably self-evident. But number two, and probably more importantly, is they must have the political stability and the community support to operate those multiple mines for multiple decades.

And that's how we find ourselves in the regions that we're in. Why does that matter? Because operating multiple assets over long periods of time in the same region creates a tangible and durable competitive advantage. With a global workforce of about 18,000 people, the advantage doesn't come from scale. It comes from local knowledge and long-standing relationships. In the regions we are, we benefit from the deep operational expertise and engaged workforce. In some cases, we even have third-generation workers at our mines. Our regional focus also gives us competitive advantage as we enter our next phase of growth.

And does the strategy work? I think the results speak for themselves. As you look at the slide there, over the past 20 years, we've grown total gold production by about 14x. Well, yes, that's impressive alone, what really matters is the value creation per share. Over that same 20-year period, we have nearly tripled gold production per share. Our EBITDA per share is up by 18x, and our dividend has grown around 50x. We have outperformed both the S&P 500 and the XAU Index with a compound annual return of about 13% over 20 years. We think that's quite impressive. And it's not accidental. That's our disciplined regional strategy in action.

What we're most proud of today is we see a clear path to continue growing value per share over the next decade, so 20 years back and 10 years forward. Consistently growing production per share is difficult over long periods of time and it becomes even more challenging as the company grows. Yet notwithstanding those challenges, as the world's second largest gold producer with approximately 3.5 million ounces a year, we see a clear and credible path to continue growing by that potential 20% to 30% over the next decade. Our high-quality growth pipeline has that potential, and that will bring us over 4 million ounces in the 2030s. This growth comes from expanding world-class assets, namely the Detour Lake and Canadian Malartic mine and from developing new mines at Upper Beaver in Ontario and at Hope Bay in Nunavut. These are all located in regions where we currently operate where infrastructure is in place and where we have a clear competitive advantage. This is disciplined growth aligned with our strategy and will create long-term value for shareholders.

So first, I'll talk a little bit about Detour Lake. Detour Lake is the largest gold mine in Canada and one of the most significant global gold assets. The operation was first an underground mine in the '80s and '90s, and then it restarted as an open pit in the 2010s. Over the last 5 years, we've added approximately 27 million ounces across all categories of reserves and resources, growing the resource base from 20 million to 43 million ounces of gold, while at the same time also depleting 4 million ounces. This was achieved at an existing operation with an experienced workforce and green electricity from Ontario. This production is expected to grow from 700,000 ounces in 2026 to more than 1 million ounces a year in 2030s.

This growth will be driven by the addition of an underground component, which will replace lower-grade open pit material with higher ground, underground ore while modestly expanding the mill capacity. With a mine life extending beyond 2050, Detour Lake offers scale, low cost and strong risk-adjusted returns. Next is Canadian Malartic. Canadian Malartic is the second largest gold mine in Canada, second only to Detour, the one we just talked about and another cornerstone asset for Agnico. This deposit was discovered over 100 years ago. It operated as an underground mine from the '50s and '60s and was restarted as an open pit in the early 2000s.

Over the past 8 years, our exploration team has added approximately 22 million ounces of mineral reserves and resources at this mine. Combined with Detour Lake, we have added nearly 50 million ounces of gold at Canada's 2 largest gold mines in just the last decade. Canadian Malartic is going to transition from open pit back to underground. Production is expected to grow from approximately 550,000 ounces this year to over 1 million ounces per year by the mid-2030s. This growth will be driven by higher-grade underground mining, as you can see on the slide, the addition of a second shaft and the development of 2 satellite operations in the region. This asset offers scale, low cost and attractive risk-adjusted returns by leveraging the existing infrastructure we have in place.

The third element of our growth strategy is Upper Beaver. Upper Beaver is going to be a new mine that's under development in the Kirkland Lake camp of Ontario, located only about 20 kilometers from one of our existing assets called Macassa. This project benefits from our strong regional presence and is being advanced through a phased approach. Development is ahead of schedule, and we are accelerating spending to bring initial production forward to 2030. Once in operation, Upper Beaver is expected to produce 200,000 to 220,000 ounces of gold per year and can unlock additional regional exploration potential. And finally, of the projects today, we're going to talk about Hope Bay.

Hope Bay is a redevelopment of a past-producing mine in Nunavut, Northern Canada and represents our next major platform of growth in that region. The project has the potential to produce approximately 400,000 to 425,000 ounces of gold a year, starting around 2030 with significant exploration upside and potential along an 80-kilometer greenstone belt. This would be the fourth mine that we'll have built in Nunavut, allowing us to leverage existing infrastructure, regional experience, long-standing relationships with the Inuit community and deliver, again, attractive risk-adjusted returns.

To conclude, Agnico Eagle is very well positioned to continue creating value for shareholders. We have a clear and credible path to grow production by 20% to 30% over the next decade, supported by our high-quality project pipeline. Beyond that, we see additional upside driven by strong exploration, opportunities to expand and extend our existing assets and further optionality within the portfolio that we continue to review. We're in the strongest position we've ever been, supported by high-quality assets, disciplined capital allocation and our proven regional strategy that works. We're confident in our ability to deliver on this next phase of growth and to continue creating long-term value for you, our owners. Judith?

Thanks, Chris. So now we'll move into some Q&A. Before I get going with my questions, does anyone have anything they'd like to ask? Sure, go ahead.

So you guys seem to have [indiscernible].

So the question, sorry, with such a strong pipeline, how do you balance your projects? And what are key execution risks to look for?

Sure. Thanks for the question. And so I think a couple of elements to that. One is the phased approach we're taking. So for example, Detour Lake under development now for the underground component. When we initially announced that, it was a start with just $100 million to develop the exploration ramp and take a bulk sample. That phased approach allows us to kind of turn it off or on if circumstances change, but gives us that flexibility. Upper Beaver as well, an initial $200 million investment to do an exploration ramp and an exploration shaft with that same sort of phased approach.

Up at Hope Bay, for example, given the logistics there, everything has to come in by barge. So there's already been a lot of preplanning that's been done in order to have the logistics in place and the materials in place. So again, we're confident in that. Probably the largest challenge we face is really on the human capital side. Our estimates are that we're going to have to hire about 10,000 people over the next 5 years in order to build and operate these new mines as they come online. That also factors regular turnover retirements, et cetera. But that's still a lot of people that we need to find, train and hire. So we've internalized a lot of the effort to do that, and we're making good strides, but that's probably the biggest challenge we face.

And I think the other thing that allows us to function quite well as we develop these multiple projects is our in-house construction capability. So most of our peers, when they announced they're going to build a project, the first thing they could do -- they do is go hire a big EPCM contractor, hand over the project to them. They spend 5 years building it and hand over the keys and the company takes over. Our approach is quite different. We have our internal engineering and construction teams that run it ourselves. So that allows us to sort of allocate the people with the appropriate skills across the portfolio to be where they can bring the most value and bring those projects forward successfully.

Yes, go ahead.

Can you talk a little bit about your M&A strategy?

So M&A strategy.

Sure. So I'll start. We're in the privileged position with our internal growth pipeline that we're -- we don't need to do anything. So that's a healthy starting point to have. I think we've shown a track record of disciplined M&A over the years and in particular, sort of the last decade, say. So we come from a good place. Our view is that, first, it comes back to that regional strategy. So we only want to be in places where we're going to have multiple mines, multiple decades with that political stability. And so that's the lens that first off, where we consider where we'll look at opportunity.

Once we're comfortable that those 2 boxes have been ticked, then our view is it's our job to look at everything. And so we look from the most junior of junior companies, all up to the producing peer companies and we really look to have a -- we try to have a knowledge advantage of what those projects are today and what they could be in the future. And so we're absolutely willing to do bolt-on acquisitions around our existing assets. A good example of that would be last year, we bought O3 Mining that brought the Marban deposit. That's going to be part of our fill-the-mill strategy to get Malartic to 1 million ounces a year. That stuff is pretty easy to do, but we're willing to do other stuff.

And really, it comes down to that knowledge. It's not about growth for growth's sake. It's really about growth that is accretive on a per share basis for our shareholders, and that's the way we analyze these things. And generally, really where we see the upside is the exploration, right? The market does a good job of valuing what's known today, where we think we have an advantage is our ability to -- with our regional approach, our geologists who know the rock, know the ground well, have a good sense of what could be there in the future. So when we talk about Detour and Malartic bringing close to 50 million ounces over the last 6 years, that's all upside to our owners. And those are both things that we had a strong view when we acquired them that, that growth was going to be there. It's hard to quantify it at the time, but our belief was that Detour was going to go underground, that we were going to have exploration success in Malartic, and that has proven out.

Maybe just before your question, as a follow-up to that, how do you think about moving outside of your core jurisdictions and away from gold?

Sure. Also fair questions. And so among the senior gold mining companies, we're by far the most pure-play gold. Last year, our revenue was 99% gold derived and then the rest byproduct metals. What makes us a little bit different on the other metals side is we haven't set targets. We haven't set goals to be 80% gold, 20% copper. We're really more opportunity-driven and metals agnostic. And so what we've done recently is we announced that we'd set up a subsidiary called Avenir Minerals. And its job is to look at other metals opportunistically, again, in those regions where either we operate today or we think we could be comfortable operating.

And so they're looking at things like nickel, lithium, phosphate, et cetera, to see if there is an ability to create value for shareholders. At the end of the day, if there happened to be a nickel mine or a nickel deposit, I should say, probably like immediately adjacent to one of our operating gold mines, and we thought we had a competitive advantage and an ability to operate that, there's no reason why we wouldn't if it created value for shareholders. But we're not going to chase other metals, and we're certainly not going to chase jurisdiction.

As we think about other jurisdictions where we could be comfortable operating, first, our view, and we've said this for years now, is there's probably the 3 best places in the world to mine for gold, certainly, are either the Abitibi in Canada, where we've got a strong presence through Ontario and Quebec, Australia, but probably Western Australia, where we don't currently have a presence and Nevada down in the States. So we've got one locked up pretty well. Two, we continue to -- we look at it from time to time. But more generally, we'd be comfortable operating in the U.S. for sure, comfortable operating in Western Canada, whether that be BC or the Yukon. And then Latin America, we dip our toe in from time to time through our junior portfolio of strategic investments. That's often how we try to learn about a new jurisdiction.

So we will make a small investment, get to learn the management team, get to learn the project better, but also importantly, get to learn the country, start to form those relationships with local contractors, local service providers, et cetera, to kind of develop that knowledge and see if maybe it would be a place we want to operate over the longer term.

Okay. Yes, go ahead.

[indiscernible] projects, have you [indiscernible] geopolitical risk...

So underwriting your projects and the price of gold and geopolitical risk and gold price, yes.

Sure. So the first thing I'll say is it's important to know the 4 projects I talked about today, those are the same 4 projects we were talking about 2 or 3 years ago when gold prices were $1,800 an ounce. So it's not that because the gold price went up, we decided to look at these projects. They were economic about 15% rate of return at $1,800 gold. At current prices, that goes to between 30% and 50% likely IRRs. So very healthy projects. We don't forecast the price of gold. We don't hedge the price of gold. We're price takers. But I think what we're seeing is there probably is somewhat of a new normal now.

Is it going to stay exactly where it is today, tomorrow? Who knows? There's still volatility. But it does appear like there might be a new floor under the price, whether that's $3,000, $3,500, time will tell. But that does seem to be a real change in the market now for how we underwrite the new projects, so we self-fund. So right now, the intention is to fund these projects through cash flow, not to take on additional debt or issue more shares to do it, which will help with those per share returns. And as I say, they were economic at a much lower price, so we think they'll continue to be economic. Long-term gold price, I think all the factors that have precipitated the current shift in the price, we don't see those going away anytime soon, right?

So the -- whether it be the weakening of fiat currencies sort of that really started to kind of happen probably following the Russia invasion of Ukraine, they get kicked out of the SWIFT system, all of a sudden, people realize maybe U.S. dollars aren't the best thing to hold. So that's not going away anytime soon. Global debt levels continue to increase. We see how tough it is to curtail entitlement programs. Everybody says they're going to cut the budget, but then it doesn't ever seem to really move. So that's not going away anytime soon. And then on top of that, when you layer in the geopolitical, obviously, what's going on around the world right now, that's probably a bit more of a volatile piece to the puzzle, but the world doesn't seem to be getting any easier that way either.

So we're -- certainly long term, we're bullish on the gold price, but we don't forecast or use that as we're making our current decision.

[indiscernible] So I think with the current [indiscernible] green light now [indiscernible].

So I think the way -- I wouldn't say green light now, but certainly projects that we're now relooking at, right? So the 4 I talked about, those are already moving towards production decisions or phased approaches to production decisions. So that's ongoing. As well in our pipeline, we have other earlier-stage projects. For example, we've got Hammond Reef in Northwestern Ontario. We've got a project in the Northern Territory of Australia. We've got a project near Timmins, Ontario. Those 3 with the elevated gold price could make more sense now. So we're going to -- part of our plans for '26 and '27 is to relook at those and see if there's -- once we're through the current phase of growth to get that 20% to 30%, maybe that's the next phase of growth.

So we're definitely looking at that. And I think the other element that the elevated gold price allows is at current operations that aren't mill constrained, if you have excess throughput capacity, maybe now it makes sense to run lower grade ore through the mill and might be, by definition, higher cost, but still significant margins at today's prices. So a good example of that is our Meadowbank complex in Nunavut. It's nearing the end of its mine life, but we have mill capacity there and infrastructure in place. So if we can run additional ounces through that maybe instead of our all-in cost of $1,400 to $1,500 an ounce, maybe they cost $2,300 an ounce. But if you're selling it for $5,200, it's still a very healthy margin.

And then just with margin of safety [indiscernible].

Yes. So it's certainly much lower than $5,000. So we run our reserves. The way we calculate our reserves and run our mine plans, this year, we just announced the update is at $1,600 an ounce. And so that number is how we sort of protect our 3-year forecast of production guidance. And so it will increase incrementally over time, but that $1,600 gives us good confidence in our mine planning. Our all-in costs are $1,450, $1,500 an ounce. That's before the dividend, that's before taxes and things, but that's sort of a good proxy for what it takes us to mine an ounce of gold and then you add on the return to shareholders and things.

So there's lots of room certainly in the $5,000 gold price environment. And we do sensitize our budget and our strategy. We sensitize down quite a bit, both up and down to make sure we have that margin of safety. But probably the best example would be our dividend. We just announced a 12.5% increase. In '26, we expect that to be a little over USD 900 million, but our intention is to never reduce the dividend. So when we announced that increase, that's a demonstration of confidence in the business ability to pay that. It's really the buyback is where we kind of be more opportunistic, but we're very confident in the ability of the business to keep generating...

Yes, go ahead.

Are you deploying any new technologies to help increase your profitability? And Is there anything -- I mean -- I know it's a [indiscernible] discovery, whatever. But is there any new technologies [indiscernible]?

Yes and yes. And so I'll start maybe on the discovery side on exploration. So there, a couple of things we're doing. One is we're working on automated drills, which allow us to drill more efficiently to get more drilling done for the same number of dollars. So that's -- and we've seen -- I think last year, we saw about an 8% improvement on our unit cost per drilling. So that's significant. Across our overall exploration budget of $600 million, that can make a big difference. And then the other thing that we're doing on exploration specifically is new core scanning technology that ultimately uses machine learning to analyze the core as it comes through.

And so instead of a team of geologists looking at the split core to decide what's what and what's where, the machines are able to do that quite efficiently.

[indiscernible].

A lot less expensive. And then also there's benefits, especially some of our like remote camps, where now you don't need to fly the same number of people up and house them and feed them and everything else. So there's benefits there. And then on the operational side, where we're seeing a lot of benefit is through automation or remote operation. And so the best example of that is our LZ5 is a satellite mine beside our LaRonde mine. It was developed, I think it was about 2016. And really, when we brought that on, the idea was to use it as a learning ground for some of this new technology. And so when it began in 2016, the target was 1,750 tonnes a day. And now we're operating over 3,500 tonnes a day, and most of that is thanks to automation.

And so there, for example, it's an underground mine, Friday night, when the Friday day shift ends from Friday night to Sunday evening, that mine continues to operate with nobody underground. So it's all done either automatic where the trucks know where to haul to and from and that can happen automatically and/or there's people at surface with joysticks running the machines. So there's definitely operational savings there. And the other big thing that does for us, particularly underground is -- so our LaRonde mine, currently, we're operating about 3.4 kilometers deep, so a little over 2 miles deep.

As you get deeper, the seismic stress goes up, the heat goes up. So it's better to not have to expose your employees to that. So the automated machines allow us to continue to mine safely at deeper depths.

[indiscernible].

Yes. The opportunities there are real. It opens up more ore. It doesn't necessarily overall reduce costs, but it allows you to mine ore that you otherwise wouldn't be able to mine.

I have a couple more questions we can discuss. So something that is often taken for granted is the ability to meet guidance. Mining is a very challenging business. So million things can go wrong. And Agnico has consistently met guidance for a number of years, and year-over-year has been able to maintain stable operating costs. So what do you think gives Agnico the ability to continuously meet guidance and operate at peer-leading costs year-over-year?

Sure. And so I think meeting guidance is a hallmark and a trademark of Agnico. Our CEO, Ammar, often says, we don't get paid for volatility, and we all take that to heart. And we certainly see across the market. If you meet your guidance by an ounce, the market is happy. If you miss it by an ounce, the market punishes you. But it's definitely not symmetric, and we've taken that lesson to heart over the years. First, I think it's back to that regional strategy. So 85% of our production coming from Canada with 7 mines that gives us significant synergy locally where we're able to learn from each other, develop best practice, deploy that across the business.

If and when there is a hiccup, it also allows us to deal with it faster. And so the best example of that would be, I guess, in 2023, I think it was, our Detour Lake mine, a transformer blew on site, so we didn't have power. And so we had a spare on site, so they installed the spare and within 24 hours, the spare blew. And so ordinarily to get a new transformer these days now is months and months and months, crazy long lead times. Through our supplier network in the region, we were able to what we kind of call Frankenstein a transformer back together. And within 3 weeks, our team was able to get it back up and running and ultimately didn't really have much of a hiccup.

And at the same time, with that portfolio of assets, our COOs were able to talk to each other and able to find opportunities to kind of push the threshold a little bit at some of the other operations. So on balance, we were still able to meet guidance. I think the regional approach, the working together, the strength of the teams, I think, is what allows us to do that together with a strong planning culture. One thing we do that's a little bit different is every year, we have our annual strategy session where we bring about 200 -- this year, 225 people together.

And a big focus of that is making sure as you go deeper in the organization, people understand the importance of meeting the guidance and delivering on our promises. So notwithstanding gold at whatever it is, $5,200 an ounce, the message there was really don't get complacent, focus on cost, focus on delivering because that's ultimately what we're paid for.

We have time for one more question. I can jump in. If we think about the next 12 months, what catalysts should investors focus on for Agnico?

Sure. So flowing from the last question, number one is meeting our cost and production guidance. That's what we're laser-focused on at all times. I think the next important thing would be moving forward our plans to develop that 20% to 30% growth by the early 2030s. So over the course of the next 12 months, you can expect updates on some of those projects. Some of those updates will be in 2027, but you can expect updates on those projects. I think in September, we'll give a comprehensive update on Malartic. In May, we expect to be in a position to make a construction and development decision at Hope Bay. That will be a significant milestone and otherwise progress on those projects.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you to Agnico for participating, and thank you to Chris for the conversation. If you have any more questions, we'll be in the breakout room downstairs. Thanks.

Thanks, everyone.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Vanessa, and I will be your conference operator today. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Mines Limited Q4 2025 Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Thank you. Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Agnico Eagle Fourth Quarter and Year-end 2025 Conference Call. I'd like to remind everyone that we'll be making a number of forward-looking statements, so please keep that in mind and refer to the disclaimers at the beginning of this presentation. This morning, we're pleased to announce another strong quarter, capping off a remarkable year. In 2025, as gold prices hit new highs throughout the year, Agnico Eagle delivered on our production targets, we delivered on our costs, and we did it responsibly and reliably. While the price of gold went up $1,700 year-over-year, our cash costs went up $76 per ounce. This means we delivered over 95% of this gold price increase to the benefit of our shareholders, delivering on our core mandate of providing gold upside leverage to our owners.

In 2025, we repaid almost $1 billion in debt. We built up almost $3 billion in cash, and we returned over $1.4 billion directly to our owners through dividends and share buybacks, all while continuing to invest heavily in our future through the largest exploration budget we've ever had and through continued strong investments into our 5 key growth projects. In an exceptional year for gold, Agnico Eagle delivered on our commitments to our owners, to our employees and to our communities. This strong momentum continues into 2026 and beyond, supported by a stable annual production profile of between 3.3 million to 3.5 million ounces over the next 3 years at peer-leading costs while reporting record reserves, record resources, record inferred ounces and an increase to our dividend. While 2026 cash costs are forecast to be up a little over $100 per ounce compared to last year, more than half of that increase is from the assumption of higher royalties and a stronger Canadian dollar.

Excluding those assumptions, our cost increase is about 4% to 5%. This would be at or slightly below the inflation we saw in the industry last year. So good cost control on the factors that we can influence. Our reserves are at a record 55.4 million ounces, up 2%. Our resources are at a record 47.1 million ounces, up almost 10% and our inferred ounces are at a record 41.8 million ounces, up a remarkable 15.5%. 2025 was an exceptional year, and our near-term prospects look even better. But the real story this morning, the real excitement is not in looking back or even the next 3 years. The real excitement this morning is that Agnico Eagle is in the best position we've ever been in, and we're already aggressively advancing our next phase of growth and growth per share. This morning, we want to focus on our plan to increase production by up to 20% to 30% over the next decade with a path to over 4 million ounces of annual production by the early 2030s. This growth is from the highest quality projects in the best jurisdictions in the world.

This growth is from projects we already own in jurisdictions we know well with existing teams and in most cases, leveraging off existing infrastructure. This is important because our job isn't simply to grow but rather, it's to grow value for our owners on a per share basis. And in our industry, growing in stable jurisdictions, leveraging existing infrastructure not only delivers to our owners the best return on capital, but also the best risk-adjusted return on capital. Next slide, please. These assets were over the past few years, we've been investing substantial time, energy and money and where our investments are accelerating. We're at a point where we see a step change in production per share starting in 2030, and we're eager to share our progress with you this morning. At Detour Lake, the largest gold mine in Canada, where we're executing a plan with the potential to deliver an additional 300,000 to 350,000 ounces per year through the development of an underground mine, we've added 4.3 million ounces of resources during the past year in the high-grade mineralized corridor that's amenable to this underground mining.

And we're tripling our investment from $100 million to $300 million as we accelerate our work towards a go-ahead decision mid-2027 and potential to start underground production as early as 2028. At the Canadian Malartic complex, the second largest gold mine in Canada, where we see an opportunity to add a remarkable 400,000 to 500,000 ounces per year through our fill-the-mill strategy. We've added 9 million ounces of reserves since our last technical update. We're ahead of schedule on the ramp, expected first production from East Gouldie this quarter and ahead of schedule on the first shaft expected to commission in 2027. We're making excellent progress evaluating opportunities to fill-the-mill further via the Marban open pit via Wasamac underground and via a second shaft, all 3 with targeted first production by 2033.

At Upper Beaver, which is expected to produce over 200,000 ounces per year, we're ahead of schedule again on both the ramp and the shaft. We're increasing our investment from $200 million to $300 million to accelerate the development of the project with the goal of bringing production forward to 2030. At Hope Bay, where we're working on a study that supports a 400,000 to 425,000 ounce per year operation, we saw a 46% increase in inferred mineral resources, primarily from Patch 7. We expect a study update and potentially a project approval as soon as May of this year. We continue to make good progress at San Nicholas and hope to have permits to move forward shortly.

These projects alone have the potential to add 1.3 million to 1.5 million ounces of highly profitable annual production. And in each case, we've made excellent progress, and we're moving forward aggressively. With that introduction, I will now turn over the presentation to our CFO, Jamie Porter, to review our third quarter and full year results.

Thank you, Ammar. As Ammar mentioned, we delivered record financial results in 2025, driven by a strong operating performance disciplined cost control and a supportive gold price environment. We finished the year with a solid fourth quarter, producing approximately 841,000 ounces of gold at total cash cost of $1,089 and all-in sustaining costs of $1,517 per ounce. Costs increased quarter-over-quarter, primarily due to higher royalties, lower production volumes and higher costs at our Meadowbank mine associated with extending mine life. Despite higher costs, we delivered a number of financial records in the fourth quarter, including record adjusted earnings of approximately $1.4 billion or $2.70 per share and record free cash flow of over $1.3 billion or $2.62 per share. For the full 2025 year, we exceeded the midpoint of our guidance with gold production of 3.45 million ounces, underscoring our consistent track record of execution.

Total cash costs and all-in sustaining costs were $979 and $1,339 per ounce, respectively. Both were slightly above the top end of our guidance ranges due to higher royalty costs driven by an average realized gold price of $3,454, nearly $1,000 per ounce above our guidance assumption. We exclude the impact of higher royalties, our total cash cost would have been $937 per ounce, $42 per ounce lower and below the midpoint of our guidance, again, reflecting strong cost discipline and execution by our operating teams. With this performance, we generated strong leverage to the gold price, capturing approximately 95% of the increase in gold price and margin expansion and delivered record financial results across the board, including approximately $4.4 billion in free cash flow for the year. We turn to the next slide. Our record financial performance and continued margin expansion benefited our shareholders, both through increased direct returns and through a materially stronger balance sheet.

In 2025, we repaid approximately $950 million of debt and increased our cash position by $1.9 billion, ending the year with $2.9 billion of cash. We delivered record shareholder returns through share buybacks and dividends, totaling approximately $500 million in the fourth quarter and a record $1.4 billion for the full 2025 year. We are in the strongest financial position in our company's history, and we believe we are exceptionally well positioned in the current gold price environment. We expect to continue to increase shareholder returns. We increased the quarterly dividend by 12.5% to $0.45 per share. And at current gold prices, we expect to be more active on share buybacks. To support this, we intend to renew our normal course issuer bid in May and increase the purchase limit up to $2 billion. In 2025, we returned approximately 1/3 of our free cash flow to shareholders, and we see the potential to increase that to 40% or higher this year with flexibility depending on the gold price and the needs of the business.

At the same time, we remain focused on further strengthening our financial position. As a reminder, given our strong profitability, we are required to pay a significantly higher cash tax liability related to the 2025 fiscal year this February, which is approximately $1.3 billion, and we have the cash on hand to fund that obligation. Lastly and importantly, we continue to deploy capital in a disciplined manner to advance our highest return organic growth opportunities. While current gold prices are driving strong cash flow generation, we remain committed to disciplined capital allocation with a continued focus on enhancing long-term shareholder value. We move on to the next slide. We have updated our guidance and continue to expect stable production levels over the next 3 years.

We're especially proud of the work our team has done as we were able to provide an improved outlook for 2028 relative to consensus, supported by a life of mine extension at Meadowbank and higher levels of production from Canadian Malartic, Fosterville and Kittila. We turn to costs. The midpoint of our 2026 guidance ranges are $1,070 per ounce for cash costs and $1,475 per ounce for all-in sustaining costs. Approximately 60% of the increase in cash costs relative to 2025 reflects higher royalties, driven by a higher budgeted gold price of $4,500 per ounce and the impact of a stronger Canadian dollar. The remaining 40% of the increase reflects expected inflation of approximately 4% to 5% and the impact of lower grade mining sequences. Beginning in 2026, to enhance consistency and comparability across our Nunavut operations, we have adjusted the calculation of total cash costs and all-in sustaining costs to exclude certain payments at Amaruq that are made to the NTI, an organization representing the Inuit of Nunavut.

These payments have similar characteristics to mining duties we pay under the Nunavut mining regulations, which are already excluded from the calculation of total cash costs and all-in sustaining costs. Our cash costs and all-in sustaining costs remain hundreds of dollars per ounce below those of our peers, reflecting the quality of our asset base and continued cost discipline. If we look at our capital expenditure guidance, it reflects our focus on reinvesting in the business to lay the groundwork for our next phase of growth. We are accelerating capital at Detour Underground and Upper Beaver through mid-2027. In addition, Hope Bay represents an attractive growth opportunity. If approved, we expect additional capital of approximately $300 million beyond what is currently reflected in the guidance for 2026. Dom, Natasha and Guy will provide further detail on these projects later on the call. Together, these projects represent compelling opportunities that deliver strong returns with significant upside and the potential to create value for decades to come.

Overall, our updated guidance reflects a consistent and reliable business at peer-leading costs as we continue to advance our pipeline of growth projects and remain well positioned to deliver meaningful leverage to higher gold prices. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dom.

Thank you, Jimmy. Good morning, everyone. In my part, I will cover the operation and key project highlights for Quebec, Nunavut and Finland. Q4 has been a very stable, again, consistent quarter that contributed to a strong 2025 on production and costs. Thanks to all employees and management teams for their commitment, engagement, but specifically about the collaboration to keep improving the business. And a good example of that collaboration is about how we are around how we are better usage -- we do a better usage of our data. It is highlighted here in the outlook. At LaRonde, the last 6 months, they've worked on telemetry to analyze the data, the behavior of the equipment and the behavior of the operator to better understand how this was going.

And they've been able to improve the number of hours on the transmissions and motors from 3,000 hours up to now 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 hours. This has been done by building an in-house expertise on analyzing data and finding trending and then getting back to the operator, getting back to the trainers to go in that direction. So this is a very good way to be more efficient. And this is also something which is transferable to other operations and other projects that we're currently building. So through that collaboration, now we're transferring that to Goldex and then it's going to go also to other divisions. Same thing with the fleet management system. We're piloting right now at LZ5. So specifically, we're going to have a dispatch system into our ramps for you that have already been underground into a ramp, you could see how it could be a mess sometime. So we're now bringing that to another level.

And all that knowledge is going to be rolled out also at Odyssey and Amaruq later this year. Another good news on the outlook is Meadowbank mine life extending up to 2030. Meadowbank has played a very important role in smoothing our 2026, 2030 production profile by bringing those additional ounces. Thanks to the Meadowbank team for this key contribution. Those ounces are, yes, higher risk, but no higher risk. I mean, higher costs, but low risk into, let's say, currently -- current infrastructure. So that's very positive. And thanks for the team also to keep looking for more options to potentially extend it beyond 2030. This is still under review. Next page. Malartic fill-the-mill strategy. So back in 2023, when we released our first or updated study on that, we had 9 million ounces. The mine life was going to 2042. With the good drilling done, we've been able to potentially extend by double that mine life.

So with the first shaft, which is illustrated on the first line here at the bottom and the ramp, we're still very in good position to deliver that on time, on budget. But since we are adding more ounces, that could bring us up to 2056, 2057. So this is why the second line is now into play. How could we bring those ounces faster into the time. So the team is working on that to potentially have a second shaft in operation in 2033. That's one part of the vision of the 1 million ounces. Again, back to the 2023, we, at the time, set a vision, okay, how could we bring that to 1 million ounces using just 1/3 of the mill. The first second shaft is a good example.

And as well in the last 3 years, we have worked to bring also Marban and Wasamac satellite ore body that's going to be transported to Malartic, and that also could bring more ounces. If you add, you do the sum of that, we're at the 1 million ounces. We are progressing well into the studies, and we're targeting to give you more information on that potentially end of Q3, early Q4 next year that you're going to be able to have a better view on all of them. So very positive news.

The-fill-the mill strategy is taking place, and there's still room also at the mill. If you do the sum, all of that, you're going to be at 46,000 ounces per year. So there's still over 25 drills running into the region around Canadian Malartic, and who knows where we're going to be in 3 years from now. Next slide. At Hope Bay, back in 2021 after the acquisition of TMA, we quickly set a target to bring it over, let's say, north of 350,000 ounces per year to make that project economical. So the good news is we are reaching that now, and we are looking to release and to give you more information about that in May this year. The study looks like a 6,000 tonne per day north of 400,000 ounces per year. So we're reaching our target. We're going to be able to start to, let's say, first kick off a 10-year life of mine. This is what we're looking for. And if this goes forward, we're going to be able to spend -- we're well prepared to spend an additional $300 million on top of what we're guiding right now.

So it's very positive. And the study is built on strong foundation using Meliadine and Amaruq mine benchmark. So we know what's going to be the cost. We know how we're going to operate that. It is backed with historical background, historical information on the OpEx, on the CapEx, how it's going to cost to build. Secondly, we are over -- we're going to be over 50% of engineering. That was a clear target. We're reaching that. And on the execution, it's not our first barbecue in Nunavut. So we know how to do it. It's going to be the same team using the same contractors or partially same contractors, and we know it's going to be a success. On that, I will pass the mic to my great teammate, Natasha.

Thanks, Dom, and good morning, everyone. I'll cover the operational highlights for Ontario, Australia and Mexico. The regions delivered full year production as planned and demonstrated balanced execution across the portfolio. And at the same time, they continue to advance initiatives to further optimize our performance. At Macassa, we're very proud of the team as we've achieved record gold production. And in 2025, anticipating declining reserve grades in the coming years, the team proactively initiated work to increase mill throughput. And now in 2026, we continue to advance these initiatives with a target to increase throughput to 2,150 tonnes per day by the end of 2027.

At Fosterville, we're taking a very similar approach to managing declining reserve grades. We now have a plan to increase the milling and mining rate to 3,300 tonnes per day by 2028 through various optimization efforts. And this plan is expected to support annual production of somewhere around 160,000 to 190,000 ounces starting in 2028 and into the early 2030s. And we continue to see significant upside at Fosterville through exploration to support mine life extension. At Detour, despite the pit delays this year, the mill achieved record annual throughput of 28 million tonnes. That represents a 35% increase since the mill expansion began 6 years ago. I just want to take a moment to commend the site team for this achievement. It was a lot of hard work to get there. So I just wanted to say a quick thank you to the team. The team is now focused on further optimization with a revised time line to support a more measured ramp-up to 29 million tonnes, giving the team a little bit more flexibility and to optimize processes and embed sustainable operating practices.

Now moving to the next slide. The mill optimization that I just spoke about to 29 million tonnes is part of Detour's next phase of growth, which also includes the development of an underground operation. We're advancing on both fronts, and we have a clear line of sight to achieving 1 million ounces of annual gold production in the early 2030. In 2025, we made good progress in advancing permitting in exploration, in high-intensity drilling, in establishing the key infrastructure on surface and, of course, developing the exploration ramp. So given our increasing confidence in the underground project, we've decided to accelerate approximately $200 million of capital through to mid-2027. This acceleration of capital is expected to derisk project construction and ramp-up and also could accelerate the development towards the main ore zone. At the same time, we're also assessing to begin incremental underground production from a shallower Western extension zone as early as 2028.

So since our last project update in June 2024, the mineral resources have increased significantly. As a reminder, only 4 million ounces were included in the underground study update in June 2024, while our year-end mineral resources are now roughly at 6 million ounces in measured and indicated and another 6 million ounces in inferred. And considering the continued exploration success, we feel that there is an opportunity for a larger underground mine than the one we first envisioned. The combination of exploration success and this higher gold price environment has given us a lot of optionality at Detour that we're in the early stages of evaluating. This could include a higher milling capacity, a larger underground scenario or a larger open pit. We said when the study was completed in 2024 that this was just a snapshot in time, and we continue to believe that.

So stay tuned. We feel that further opportunity is still ahead at Detour. Now moving to Upper Beaver. The project continues to advance very well there. The exploration ramp is ahead of schedule. And in the fourth quarter, we began shaft sinking and by year-end, the shaft reached a depth of 155 meters. The team has done an excellent job. And given their strong execution, we're now planning to spend an additional $100 million from now until project sanction that's expected in mid-2027. Again, like the Detour underground project, this acceleration of capital is expected to derisk the construction and ramp-up and also accelerate initial production to 2030. Now I've said this before, but the Upper Beaver project could unlock significant long-term value across the company's wider Kirkland Lake camp.

In addition to the potential extension of the mineralization at depth at Upper Beaver, the project could also support a centralized mill strategy for satellite deposits that are nearby, like Upper Canada or Anoki-McBean . All in all, the Upper Beaver project is progressing very well. I would like to end by just thanking the teams for their passion, their persistence, their incredible efforts in 2025. It's very much appreciated, and I look forward to continuing to advance the optimization efforts with you and the key projects. With that, I'll pass the call over to Guy.

Thank you, Natasha, and good morning, everyone. First of all, I would like to take a moment to thank all of the exploration team at the different mine sites and regional exploration offices across the company for an excellent year for safety, productivity and cost control. We had more than 120 drill rigs in action through the year in 2025 and safely completed nearly 1.4 million meters of core drilling while controlling our unit costs that were slightly lower than previous year. Our commitment to innovation led by our drilling excellence team continue to pay off and will be an important part of our success moving forward as we are undertaking 2026 with an objective to exceed 1.5 million meters of drilling.

On Slide 14, the 2025 exploration drill program across our operation and key pipeline project, combined with the acquisition of Marban project next to the Canadian Malartic complex led to a very strong mineral reserve and mineral resources total at year-end 2025. Year-over-year, our mineral reserves are up 2.1% to 55.4 million ounces. Our measure and indicated mineral resources are up by almost 10% to 47 million ounces. And our inferred mineral resources are up by an impressive 15.5% to 42 million ounces, demonstrating the strong exploration upside of our asset. And as we can see on the graph on the right-hand side of that slide, if we look globally since the merger in early 2022, despite the fact that we've mined approximately 15 million ounces over that period of time, we'll still manage to significantly grow our mineral reserves net of mining depletion to a record of 55.4 million ounces through successful exploration, conversion, delivery of studies and smart acquisition over the last 4 years.

From a results standpoint, I would like to comment on 3 projects. On Slide 15, in Malartic, the great result produced throughout the year at East Gouldie, Odyssey and the parallel Eclipse zone led to an addition year-over-year of about 470,000 ounces in underground proven and probable reserves and of 2.9 million ounces in inferred mineral resources, including 600,000 ounces from the newly discovered Eclipse zone parallel to the East Gouldie close to our planned mining infrastructure. And on the adjacent Marban project, 128 drill were completed totaling in excess of 39 kilometers of drilling in 2025. An initial mineral reserve declaration of 1.58 million ounces was made from 52 million tonnes at 0.95 gram per tonne as part of our fill-the-mill strategy. The initial mineral reserve was calculated from the existing drill hole database at the time of the acquisition and did not incorporate any of the 2025 drilling.

We plan to deliver an updated study of the Marban project at the end of '26, incorporating new drilling as well as additional opportunities for synergy with the Canadian Malartic complex relating to workforce, equipment and facilities in order to optimize Marban as part of our fill-the-mill strategy. Now on Slide 16, at Detour, drilling has continued extremely well in the year with 215 kilometers of drilling completed, mostly focused on the infilling and expansion of the mineral resources towards the west to advance the underground project. 2 areas were specifically targeted, one below and around the center point of the current reserve open pit illustrated here in orange on this graphic.

The results in this area continue to support the 2 mining approach with several wide intervals with combined width exceeding 200 meter locally between 1 and 2 gram per tonne, including narrower high-grade intercept reaching up to 10 grams over 10 meters that could be mined sooner from underground while keeping the option to mine a much wider, lower grade surrounding mineralized envelope in a future larger open pit scenario. The other area being targeted is located 3 kilometers to the west and outside to the west of the current ultimate open pit scenario, close to the underground exploration ramp currently being developed. This area also returned strong results up to 10 grams over 10 meters and remains open at depth into the west. At year-end 2025, the resources amenable for underground mine project now stands at 5.5 million ounces in measured and indicated and 5.8 million ounces in inferred. This will provide a much larger mineral resources base for the upcoming update of the Detour underground project compared to the 2024 initial study that incorporated only 4.6 million ounces in the first iteration of the mine plan.

And last but not least, at O3, we had 6 drill rigs operating through the year, completing an excellent total of 131,000 meters of drilling in 2025. We continue to see strong results in the Patch 7 area, both at depth and in the southern extension. The excellent result provided through the year led to the addition of 1 million ounces year-over-year in inferred resources, mostly from the Patch 7 area. With the strong addition of mineral resources since the acquisition of the project in 2021, we have a much larger resources base to support the project development -- redevelopment plan that was discussed earlier by Dominique. In 2026, exploration will continue to focus on growing and converting resources to reserve to support the project development and deliver an updated reserve estimate at the end of 2026. So all in all, an excellent year in exploration that translated into a significant addition of reserve to support our short- to medium-term production growth vision, but even more importantly, a very significant increase of 15% in our inferred resources that makes us confident in a bright future.

This result keeps demonstrating the phenomenal exploration upside of our portfolio of projects and the outstanding work being done by our great exploration, technical services and operation team across our different operation and key value driver project. And on that, I will return the microphone to Ammar for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Guy. At Agnico Eagle, we are proud of our record of growing value per share for our owners over decades, not only by providing full leverage to gold prices, but also importantly, by growing gold production per share. As we look forward, we're excited that even as the second largest producer of gold in the world, we see a clear path to a decade of continued and meaningful increases in production per share at peer-leading costs with exceptional risk-adjusted returns. And we're already working on additional projects that have the potential to add even more growth, including early work on Hammond Reef, Timmins East and Northern Territory. Next slide, please. As you can see, we continue to work hard for all of our stakeholders, and we will continue to build off the same foundational strategic pillars that have served us well over the past 68 years.

We're going to continue to focus on the best mining jurisdictions based on geologic potential and political stability. We'll continue to be disciplined with our owners money, making investment decisions based on technical and regional knowledge, creating value through the drill bit and through smart acquisitions where and when it makes sense. We are uniquely well positioned with a quality project pipeline, leveraging existing assets in the best regions in the world and where we believe we have a strong competitive advantage. And we will continue to be focused on creating value on a per share basis and on being leaders in our industry in returning capital to shareholders as evidenced by over 42 years of consecutive and growing dividend payments and increasing share buybacks.

In summary, 2025 was a great year for the gold market. 2026 is off to an even stronger, albeit volatile start. And while we don't have a crystal ball to predict prices next week or next month, we do remain constructive and positive on the long-term gold price going forward due to global structural financial and political currents that are not easily changed.

Our goal is not only to give our owners full upside leverage to gold prices, but to give them more gold per share over time. We've done that for decades, and we have a solid plan in place to continue to do that over the next decade. all while having the highest quality assets in the best jurisdictions in the world at peer-leading costs. At Agnico Eagle, our business is going well, and we're in the strongest position in our almost 70-year history. Thank you again for joining us on this call. Operator, may I ask that we now open up the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And we have our first question from Lawson Winder with Bank of America.

If I could just tackle the subject of M&A right off the block, and I understand that it's probably a little bit sensitive right now, but any color you could provide would be helpful. But has Agnico decided if they would tender their shares to the offer currently out on Foran.

Well, thanks, Lawson. Look, like any M&A activity, the decisions are up to the various shareholders, and there's a lot more shareholders than us. So that's not really something I would be comfortable discussing.

Okay. I thought I would try anyway, but I completely understand. And then maybe just sticking with that theme, there has been an acceleration in M&A activity in the gold space in recent years, but even in recent quarters. What is the current view from Agnico in terms of M&A? And of course, I mean, I acknowledge that you have tremendous growth potential in the existing portfolio. But I mean, opportunities do emerge from time to time. What is the thinking on that, particularly with respect to jurisdiction, but also just respect to your thoughts on potential urgency around M&A.

Well, it's an excellent question. And I'll start M&A, like exploration, like project investment is a capital allocation decision. And it's our owners' money, and we take that seriously. And everything we invest in is designed to create value for our owners on a per share basis. What does that mean for M&A? That means a couple of things. The first part is, are you positioned to be able to identify and assess good opportunities to invest your owners' money, including in M&A. And I think we're very well positioned. You know us. We know everybody in the communities and the regions we work with. We have good relationships. We have, in many cases, a very good understanding of the various assets out there. So we are well positioned, and this is important, like it's easy to buy stuff. it's hard to buy stuff that makes money for your owners. So the first thing is, are you positioned to have a knowledge advantage. And I think we are well positioned there.

But what I would say, Lawson, is we are willing to move and we have moved when we see an opportunity on the M&A side that actually creates value per share. We're not interested in just getting bigger. The hard part is actually creating value per share. And so that's going to always be the driver, not only of M&A, but all of our capital allocation decisions.

We have our next question from Fahad Tariq with Jefferies.

Maybe just to clarify, there were a few cost productivity initiatives mentioned in this presentation. I remember there were a lot more also mentioned in the last quarter presentation. Is this already incorporated in the 2026 ASIC guidance? Or is this further improvement from the guidance that's provided?

Dominique speaking. I would say it's partially included, but not all. We all -- it's Natasha and myself role to put the bar at the right place for budget and guidance, but we keep some flexibility in that.

Okay. And then just on the underlying inflation, I think the comment was made, and this was in the press release, somewhere around 4% underlying cost inflation. Can you just remind us like -- or any other color on consumables versus labor? Fuel is probably a tailwind at this point. And any key labor agreements that are coming up for renewal in 2026?

Yes. So Fahad, it's Jamie. I can comment on that. I'd say, I mean, our biggest cost apart from taxes now is labor. It's about 45% of our overall cost structure. And we've seen labor inflation running in around 4%. Across the other consumables, chemicals, reagents, equipment, parts and supplies, there's some fluctuation. But overall, I think across the industry last year, inflation -- cost inflation ran around 5%. So 4% on labor, 5.5%, 6% on everything else.

And I'll make the comment. When you observe what's really pushed costs up in the past, it hasn't been so much that labor costs went up 6% instead of 4%. It's been when you can't get the labor and when you can't get the parts. At $5,000 gold, we anticipate there is going to be more pressure on workforces. But one of the advantages we really believe we have at Agnico is our lowest turnover in the industry. We've been the #1 employer in the regions we operate for decades. We have really good relationships with our people. And more than the -- whether it's 5% or 6%, it's going to be, can you keep your turnover low? Are you going to get the kind of productivity that you depend on from really the best workers. And we think we are very well positioned in the market for that.

We have our next question from Josh Wolfson with RBC Capital Markets.

If everything goes according to plan with the project portfolio, I'm wondering if we should expect CapEx to increase in future years? Or should we think about the current run rate as more of a plateau going forward?

Yes, Josh, it's Jamie here. It's a good question. And I think, I mean, with the 20% to 30% production growth starting in 2030 and ramping up through the decade, you're seeing the benefits of that capital spending. Assuming we go ahead with Hope Bay and approve construction of that project in May of this year, that would add about $300 million to maybe $350 million of capital. So if you factor what we've guided, the $2.1 billion that we guided of the $300 million for Hope Bay, we're about $2.5 billion -- $2.4 billion, $2.5 billion of capital this year, plus another $400 million of capitalized exploration. I think that's an appropriate range over the course of the next few years. We will see capital kind of stay at that elevated level. And then once we start to see that stair step increase in production in 2030, you'd expect the capital to start to come off.

And it's important to note, we are voluntarily accelerating these investments. These are not overruns. These are not things we are voluntarily accelerating because at these prices, these projects really do deliver exceptional returns in the sort of 30% to 60% IRR range. And again, our job is to make our owners money. And if we can make them an IRR of 30% to 60%, that's a good thing. So we -- again, to emphasize, these are voluntary decisions we made to accelerate what we think are the best projects in the world.

I hear you. I look forward to these project updates and the IRRs at $5,000 gold. Just on the capital allocation side of things, at current gold prices, even with the new dividend and assuming completion of the $2 billion upcoming NCIB, by our forecast, you're still building pretty meaningful cash at these levels. So when you think about our projections outlined potentially excess of $5 billion in the back half of this year of net cash, how do you think about allocating that in the event gold prices stay at these levels or potentially go higher?

Yes. Thanks, Josh. I mean, obviously, we want to have as much financial flexibility and financial strength as possible because it just creates optionality in terms of how best to grow value in the business. to Ammar's point, I mean, we've identified the 5 key value drivers and how we think we can expand those. But based on the success that we've had through the drill bit, the projects keep evolving, and there could be the potential for further growth and further accelerations in capital spending. So we do want to make sure that we've got the balance sheet to be able to support that. If we end up between 3% to 5% of our market cap in cash on the balance sheet, I don't think that's a bad place to be. Again, it just gives us that financial foundation to be able to have the capacity to invest in further growth in the business.

Got it. And maybe just to tie in that sort of train of thought and maybe Lawson's questions on M&A. I'm wondering on the M&A side, you sort of outlined, Ammar, the opportunity to create value per share, but there are a lot of projects the company has that look outstanding at current gold prices. So when you think about measuring external opportunities against the internal portfolio, what would make an M&A opportunity really look compelling beyond just per share upside?

That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you put it in the context of competing with internal projects because you always want to -- like anything else, you want to pick the best investment for your owners. I think with regard -- so on the one hand, internal projects, you always have more knowledge. You just do. And so that's a bit -- that kind of leans towards -- if I had something at the same return that's internal versus external, your natural reaction would go to the one that you have more confidence in, which is always internal. That said, what would really interest us and what has really driven us for external M&A has really been exploration upside. That -- everything we buy, you know this industry, if you buy a high-quality asset, you end up paying what seems like a full price, but the real value is, are you -- do you have a very strong view on the exploration upside. And that's frankly been the modus operandi of what we've done on the M&A side. The real the real return to our owners has been from expanding what was -- expanding well beyond the initial view of what was there.

We have our next question from Daniel Major with UBS.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Great. few questions. First one, can you give us an approximate cost estimate of the ounces coming from the life extension at Meadowbank like out to 2030?

Well, I probably should have said to Dom because he's got more updated numbers. I think the last number I saw was sort of in the $2,200 to $2,300.

Yes, right there.

Okay. Good. I just wanted to point out that those are additional ounces. So it's not like the costs went up. These are just additional ounces that make an awful lot of money at current spot prices. Something that's interesting, I'll just throw this out there. Meadowbank is on our books for, I think, $866 million. In 2025, Meadowbank made $870 million in cash flow. So it's been really quite a remarkable asset.

Okay. Yes. And sorry, just to be clear, that 2,200, 2,300 is that's an ASIC, not a total cash cost is correct?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. Yes, the second one, just to perhaps follow on from the capital allocation question in terms of returning excess cash to Josh's question, yes, I mean, would you consider the combination of buybacks and special dividends in a continued high price scenario? Or would you just extend the EUR 2 billion buyback facility?

Yes. Thanks. I think we could really do either. I think there's no reason for us to rule out ever paying a special dividend. That would certainly be a consideration in, as you say, a continually rising gold price environment. If we achieve that cap of $2 billion, and we're still generating excess cash beyond what we need or anticipate needing to run the business, then that would certainly be a consideration.

Okay. And then one more, if I could, and it sort of incorporates your current project pipeline and other options. You obviously accelerating capital spend and adding more projects to the pipeline. Do you feel that any point in the organization is reaching a limit in terms of technical and kind of human capital? And if that is the case, in terms of other options like Hammond Reef, Taylor, Holt, et cetera, what could they be worth to somebody else? And would it ever be a consideration to recycle those projects?

Again, excellent question. So we always look at how do we get the most money for anything for our owners. So I would say that we are at a point with what we've got on the table very comfortable, but we are using a lot of our people. And so to the extent that we would look at, say, Hammond Reef or some of the others, they would be scheduled to take that into account, the manpower availability. And a lot of these jobs are very highly skilled, highly specific jobs. But your point is a good point. If it makes sense for someone else to own one of those assets, and they view that they can pay our owners more money than we see in it, we would always be open to that.

Okay, great. Thanks and congrats on a great year.

Our next question is from Anita Soni with CIBC.

I think we've talked about capital allocation a lot, but I did want to understand the -- like the way you think about the downside on dividends. I get you guys are conservative and said you never want to cut your dividend. But how did you sort of come up with the 12.5%, say, versus the 25%? Is there some kind of pricing scenario that you're using in order to determine the dividends and that's like the baseline scenario that you use?

Anita, yes, it's Jamie. There's no specific gold price scenario that we're using in a specific downside scenario to come up with that dividend. The reality is the gold price could pretty well be cut in half, and we'd be okay maintaining that level of dividend. So I'm very confident in an increase. And the increase is $100 million from $800 million to $900 million a year. It's a pretty modest percentage of our overall free cash flow. So very comfortable increasing the dividend to that level. And really, we'll use the share buyback as the -- we will either increase or reduce that depending on our profitability and cash flow generation.

And then secondly, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the projects. So thanks for all the detail on the projects that gives us something to work with to bring to life some of these reserves and resources and that organic pipeline in our models. So could you just -- specifically on Hope Bay, I guess you're putting out an updated study in May. Could you give -- I mean, could you give us a little bit of a teaser on in terms of the CapEx and numbers that we could potentially be looking at?

Yes, Anita, it's Dominique. Yes, CapEx is going to be around this $2 billion. Again, we're still working on it, but that's where we're looking for. The project is going very well in terms of -- it's like Meliadine, we're preparing the field like we're going to have over 400 rooms, new rooms ready for the construction. We're preparing the landfill. We have currently around 100 people working full time doing engineering to make sure that we're going to be at 50, 60. And this is what you need to be able to have what is the CapEx that's going to be spent. When you have a lot of detail, the good amount of detail, it's easy, you could go in tender, you work with the contractor, the supplier to firm up your number. If that's what we did at Meliadine. We end up 6 months in advance and on budget at the time. So we're looking to do the same thing.

And as Dominiquestion sort of said, and I think he used the expression, not our first barbecue in Nunavut. But in Nunavut, because of the logistics if you make a mistake, it's a lot more expensive. And so the team has done a great job on engineering and a great job on preparing the site. I'll add upgrades to the port facility, upgrades to the laydown facility. We've emptied already the previous no building. I mentioned the camp, like all the things between preparation and engineering to make sure that you're in the best possible position for execution, which is important in any project and particularly important in projects that have sort of those kind of logistical challenges.

Just wanted to say congratulations on the growth. That's truly a standout for the senior group. And also on Hope Bay, I think I remember you took a bit of flag for that acquisition 4 or 5 years ago, and it looks like it's going to be -- I mean, just by my rough math, you're like a sub-$300 all-in acquisition and build costs. So congratulations on that.

Our next question comes from Tanya Jakusconek with Scotiabank.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can, Tanya.

Okay. Great. I was just going to continue with Hope Bay, if I could, from Anita's question. Dominique, can you remind me, you said if we get the go ahead in May. And by the way, if we do have a mine tour, Dominique, it better be in May or [indiscernible] barbecue for us to attend. Would -- can you just remind me of what exactly you have permitted up there to do for that $300 million that would be spent in 2026? And what exactly would that $300 million go for?

Yes. We have all the permit to spend that $300 million. It's not an issue. There's some element to do before, let's say, getting into production, but there is no red flag on that. What we're going to spend, it's mainly procurement. It's mainly putting steel, concrete and everything we need. Again, we work with barge season. It's always what we need to spend from mid or let's say, the first barge in September '26, getting to the September '27, we need to put everything on the boat. So it is approximately 8 boats that we need to fill up and to deliver to site and to start some more work. This is one part of the spending. The other part is to do ramp development. So keep preparing the field to be ready for full production in 2030. So that's going to be the other part where we're going to spend money.

Okay. Okay. Look forward to that study in May. And then I have a second question, which comes back to this capital allocation. again. I wanted to understand, Ammar, from you. First of all, as I look at all of these projects and think about the time frame of 2031 for some of these to come in and '23, should I be thinking that there's about $5 billion of capital to support this growth? Is that somehow how I should be thinking about it? Or maybe Jamie can help me out on that as well.

Yes, sure. I mean, at a really high level, if you walk through each of the projects, the Detour underground, potentially, if you round up $1 billion Upper Beaver is $1 billion. Hope Bay is $2 billion. Beyond that, we'll be providing an update on San Nicholas likely later this year. But yes, $5 billion to $6 billion of growth spending over the course of '26 through 2030, I think is about the right estimate, Tanya.

And I would point out, it's sort of subtle, but the team has done a great job in pretty much keeping the sustaining CapEx steady.

Okay. And if I can squeeze one more in, I know. But maybe for yourself, Ammar, as you think about this capital allocation and as you think about M&A and as you look at obviously returns to shareholders, one thing is how important is it to own 100% of your assets? And the reason I ask is if Teck was to sell their 50% interest in San Nicholas, would that be something you would consider for your capital allocation?

If it made money for our owners on a per share basis, absolutely, we would consider it.

Our next question is from John Tumazos with John Tumazos Independent Research.

We increased the underground resources at Malartic this year, 7.5 million ounces. Should we expect 7.5 million more in the coming year? Or are we getting done with it first. Then second, in terms of converting the inferred resources eventually to reserves, is it more efficient to wait until after 2030 when the first and second shafts might be done, significant development has been completed and the zones can be either visually inspected or channel sampled or close space drilled from underground without the substantial cost of 0.5 mile or 1 mile holes from surface.

John, this is Guy. So your first question, this year, we made a big push at converting the outskirt when you look at the pale green mineral inventory in the outskirt of East Gouldie to bring it to the inferred. So this is where you saw the big addition. There's still some mineral inventory in the outskirt, but much less than we were used to have. And it was by design because we wanted to tight fill that mineralized envelope to bring it to infer. And to your second question, we are already kind of doing some with the current infrastructure, with the ramp in the upper part of East Gouldie. We're going to be doing more and more of that conversion to reserve because you're right, achieving kind of the drill spacing to classify it to indicated or reserve is much more cost efficient from underground. So we're going to be doing having access from the current linkage ramp that goes all the way to the East Gouldie and from the upper part of East Gouldie, trying to do as much of the reserve conversion from underground.

But there will be also a continuation of drilling from surface. But we've seen over the total number of drill rig that Dominique was mentioning, there is a progressive shift towards much more drilling from underground compared to the drilling from surface. So we were really aiming to bringing it to infer from surface, and we're going to be doing a lot more of the conversion towards reserve from underground. For the reason you mentioned, the fact that in order to achieve the drill spacing at 30- to 40-meter drill spacing, it's much easier to achieve that and less -- and more cost effective to do that from underground.

Is it sort of the maximum capacity to add 2.5 million ounces a year to reserve? Or could it be faster?

To resources you meant because in terms of reserves.

No, no. from inferred to reserve.

From inferred to reserve, this year, for example, we've added 470,000 ounces and our pace is about that to convert about 0.5 million ounces from resources to reserves moving forward. I think that's the achievable pace we're targeting.

So you got 20 years' worth of that in front of you? I'm kidding you, Guy.

We have our next question from Bennett Moore with JPMorgan Chase.

Congrats on a record year. Could you unpack the slowing of the mill ramp and change of sequencing at Detour Lake a bit further and implications on cost and CapEx for the next few years ahead of that growth trajectory into the next decade?

Sure. You're talking about the time line, Bennett, for the mill ramp-up at Detour?

Yes. And any implications, I guess, also including incremental stripping and things like that.

Okay. Sounds good. So I'll start with the mill. So in terms of the mill, we did reach 28 million tonnes this year. It's a remarkable achievement for the team. The mill has been in expansion mode for the last 6 years, Bennett. And so the team was looking to just take a bit of time to stabilize the throughput and ensure that we have the sustainable operating practices in place. And this just gives the team a little bit of flexibility. So with respect to the time line, we're looking at still getting the mill up and running to 29 million tonnes by 2030. And at the same time, when we reran our life of mine plan, we're looking at reaching the 1 million ounces in the early 2030s. So not much of a change on that end yet.

Yes. Part of the thing with -- and this is getting maybe a little bit pedantic, but it's not just the throughput, it's make sure you don't have any recovery issues, you don't have any reliability issues. So Natasha's point, it's -- they've done a great job. And I think we have some of the best people in the world on that, and we always take their advice on how to do things the best way.

And then coming to Meadowbank, the mine life, it's nice to see extended to 2030, even if it's incrementally higher cost ounces. But wondering if you could give a better understanding of the opportunity beyond 2030 as it relates to an underground-only mine. I mean could this be of similar size and scale as we've seen over recent years?

Yes. The team are looking, targeting, and again, this is very conceptual 250. Is it something possible by -- we know it is going deeper underground. So we could just keep mining. They're also looking for smallest pushback here and there. They're looking below what we've mined at Goose at the time, below what we've mined at Vault at the time, putting that together to see could we extend the Meadowbank. Of course, the USD 5,000 per ounce gold price is very welcome for Nunavut, for Meadowbank. It is also very welcome because we keep drill -- the drill keep running. And who knows? We just need one hole, and that could change the picture. So it's very positive. Yes, it is higher cost. But as Ammar mentioned, it is on top of with existing infrastructure with minimal CapEx to deliver that. So we are still working on it. Maybe 20, I will say not before 2027, we give you -- we could give you more on that. Let's see how the team is going to be able to work at it.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. Please have a, for those of you who get the long weekend, please enjoy it with your families. Thank you.

And thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever this finds you. Welcome to the 88th Emerging Growth Conference and day 2 of our Virtual Investor Conference. I'm Ana Berry. Today, we're running until 5 Eastern.

[Operator Instructions] Now during each company's presentation, you can submit questions through the webcast module and we will attempt to address as many of these as possible at the end of the presentation. Now all of our conferences are uploaded to the Emerging Growth Conference YouTube channel. So please subscribe youtube.com/Emerging Growth Conference. And after today's event, you'll be redirected to the registration page for our next conference in the new year. So please stay on or come back to preserve your spot early.

Happy to begin with Agnico Eagle Mines. They trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AEM and on the TSX under the symbol AEM. It's Canada's largest mining company and the second largest gold producer in the world. It produces precious metals from operations in Canada, Australia, Finland and Mexico and has a pipeline of high-quality exploration and development projects.

Happy to welcome the VP of Investor Relations, Jean-Marie Clouet. Welcome to the program today, Jean-Marie.

Thank you, Ana, and good morning. It's a pleasure to talk to everyone listening in today. I'll be presenting the story of Agnico and discuss why Agnico, we think, is very well positioned to continue delivering superior leverage to gold.

If we look at the gold sector, actually, it's having this moment in the sun, being one of the best-performing asset classes in 2025. Gold itself has risen over 60% year-to-date, and it's really reaching record levels. The rise has been driven by geopolitical uncertainty by central bank buying by the high debt levels around the world and a push for the [indiscernible] of the world. So again, record levels at this point in time with gold over $4,200 an ounce. What we've seen, it's really a strong performance that builds on another strong performance in 2024 and reflects the enduring role of the gold as a safe haven. And we believe there is still upside coming into 2026.

Looking at the gold equities themselves, they actually outperformed gold this year with share performance of over 100%. And this really demonstrates the interest from investors looking for additional leverage to gold. Based on this, I'm going to really just mention that there are some forward-looking statements in this presentation, so please be aware, and I'll start talking about Agnico Eagle.

If you look at Agnico Eagle, this is a high-quality, low-risk senior gold producer. As mentioned, we're the second largest gold producer in the world, and we've built that over the last 20 years. Agnico has 10 operating assets located in 5 regions and 4 countries. So we have a simple and manageable business that relies on regional concentration, providing synergies that really benefits us in terms of building a reliable, consistent business.

We have approximately 85% of our production and value coming out of Canada from our 3 regions of Quebec, Ontario and Nunavut. Each region has the potential to produce over 1 million ounces per year for decades to come. So providing us with a strong basis for our production profile for the next years.

We are also located in Finland. Kittila is the largest gold mine in Europe. It has also a very long life. It's cash flow generating. It's producing over $1 million of free cash flow per year. Similarly, in Australia, we have one asset, Fosterville, located in Victoria State. Fosterville is probably the best gold exploration option in the world, generating also close to $1 million of free cash flow per year.

And finally, we're in Mexico, we do have one operating asset, the Pinos Altos operation. It's a mature asset coming close to end of life. But we have in place a local team that's recognized for its mine building, operating and social acceptance capability and that really will be building our next phase in the country.

So as you can see, we have a differentiated strategy where our strategy is regional. We look at regions based on 2 criteria. First, we are in regions that have the geological potential for multiple mines over multiple decades. And we do that because we believe that's how you become good and that's how you create significant value. And second, we are in regions that have political stability. We believe that's important to be able to operate those mines over multiple decades as it takes really years to discover, build and operate an asset.

So thinking about it, it's like what does that matter? Why do we think that regional approach is key. If you think about what makes a good miner, there's a few things that you need to think about. Do you know the ground better? So do you know the juniors that are in the region? Do you have a workforce in place? Do you have relationships with local contractors? Do you have suppliers? Do you know the suppliers in the region? Do you have actually an established supply chain and economies of scale? Do you have strong relationships with the communities, with the governments, with the indigenous communities? Do you have -- have you built mine in those regions? Do you have infrastructure in place that you can leverage?

So this is what we have in the regions where we are, and we believe it does provide you a competitive advantage. And this is really our business and why we believe we've been able to really outperform a lot of our peers.

So if you think about Canada, we're bigger than the 8 next companies in terms of gold production in Canada. We've been there for decades. We have an established relationships. We're the employer of choice, where we have lower turnover and we have the ability really to generate strong value in that region. And this is true in a lot of the regions where we operate.

So does that work? It does, demonstrably so. If you look how we've generated value over the last 20 years, there's really 2 approaches that we look at. We're trying to increase your exposure to gold on a per share basis because that's what you care. It's like how much additional value can we generate on a per share basis.

And second, can we deliver leverage to gold as the gold price goes up. Looking at the gold exposure per share, if you look on the left-hand side, we've gone over the last 20 years from 1 operating mines to 10 operating mines, actually, and now we have 1 mine to close at the end of 2024. We've gone from production of 250,000 ounces per year to a production of close to 3.5 million ounces per year. So an increase of about 14x.

But that's not really what you care about. What you care about the next 3 metrics. Have we been able to generate value per share. Our gold production per share has gone -- has increased by about 3x. That's difficult to do. Our EBITDA per share has gone up 10x. Our dividend that we've been paying consistently quarter after quarter for the last 42 years, has gone up 50x. This is really how we create value for you, how we add additional production. So over the last 20 years, on a compound basis, we've increased production per share for about 4% to 5% per year. That's impressive.

And so when you look at the bottom table, that explains why we've been able to outperform the gold equity index by about twice as much. We've outperformed the S&P 500, and we've outperformed the gold price. So that's really how we create value over the long term.

Looking at the leverage to gold, we've delivered reliable and stable production quarter-over-quarter. We've maintained our cost under control. By doing so, we've been able to expand our margins to over 60% as the gold price increase. That matters. That's how we really return the value to shareholders. If you think about it, like over the last year, gold price has gone up at $1,200 an ounce. Our costs have gone up about $10 an ounce. So really, we've delivered the margin -- we've delivered about 99% of the gold price increase to our investors. This is how we perform. This is how we deliver.

And -- so over the last 2 years, we've really generated a lot of cash, and we've strengthened our financial position and we've achieved record stock prices, as you would expect at this record gold prices. So since the start of the year, we've reduced -- we've paid down the debt. We've reduced our net debt position of about $200 million per year to a net cash position as at the end of September of $2.2 billion, and we expect to be close to $3 billion net cash position at the end of the year.

So we'll strengthen our financial position. We'll continue to do so. We believe it is a competitive advantage in this sector to have a stronger balance sheet in a sector that is cyclical, that is capital intensive and especially in a period where we are building an organic pipeline that will support our production profile for decades to come and where we also would like to remain opportunistic through the cycle.

If we look at our capital allocation, with this strong performance, we're in a fortunate position to be able to do a bit of everything, while maintaining a balanced and disciplined approach to capital allocation. So as mentioned, we strengthened our balance sheet position, anticipating to be in a net cash position of about $3 billion at year-end.

We've also continued to pay a sustainable dividend as we've done consistently over the last 42 years. We've paid $600 million year-to-date, and we should pay about $800 million on a full year basis. We've also increased returns to shareholders through our share buyback program. We've returned about $300 million year-to-date. We expect to do another $200 million in the fourth quarter that would bring us to about $500 million and an overall return to investors this year of close to $1.3 billion, so close to 1/3 of our free cash flow generated. This is what we're targeting.

We're also reinvesting in the business to a level of about $2.1 billion in sustaining growth CapEx as we continue to grow. We expect to accelerate some of that reinvestments in the coming year as we have what we believe is the best pipeline we've ever had that can really generate significant value and value per share in the coming years. And so we continue to do so in a safe manner and doing it responsibly in the communities where we operate.

So moving to our projects. Again, we believe like those 5 key projects -- key value drivers, as we call them, will move the needle in the coming years. On an aggregate basis, these projects can add close to 1.3 million to 1.5 million ounces of annual production in the next 5 to 8 years. This won't be fully additive. There will be some production coming off, especially if you think about our Meadowbank operation in Nunavut and Pinos Altos operation in Mexico, which are close to end of life. However, unlike with these 5 projects, we see the potential to grow production by about 20% over the next 5 to 8 years.

And more importantly, again, be able to increase our production per share, about 20% as all these projects will be self-funded. If you look at the projects themselves, Detour Lake and Canadian Malartic, those are large open pit gold mines in Canada, but the largest open pit gold mines in Canada. They have the potential to grow to about 1 million ounce all producing per year -- gold production per year, and the up decades of mine life ahead of them. Those are world-class assets, unique. They have like green electricity. They have the infrastructure, the people in place. So all those are simple expansions that will provide strong returns at current gold prices and even really when we approve those projects at a gold price of $900 an ounce.

Upper Beaver, that's a project located in our Kirkland Lake camp, close to our Macassa mine, about 20 kilometers. So it benefits from synergies from, again, having infrastructure in place from our workforce and expertise in place. It has a potential to add about 210,000 ounces of gold per year starting in 2031 and contribute to the production increase in Ontario from about 1 million ounce to 1.5 million combined with Detour Lake. So this is an asset that we're advancing in terms of the exploration. We're advancing the ramp, the shaft, and we think we'll be able to approve it in 2027 and start producing in 2031.

Hope Bay that's located in Nunavut. This asset has the potential to produce close to 400,000 ounces of gold per year and maintained the platform. So the Nunavut platform to a production level of 1 million-ounce per year for decades to come. We've had tremendous exploration results over the last 2 years, and we're getting ready to announce construction in the coming year.

And finally, San Nicolás. This is a joint venture with Tech located in Zacatecas in Mexico, one of the best states in terms of geological potential. We're currently advancing the feasibility study, and we're waiting for the permit, and we hope we'll be able to sanction it also in the coming year. So again, overall, those 5 projects provide strong risk-adjusted returns, risk-adjusted because we either have -- they're either simple expansions of existing assets or there are mines that are being built in regions where we already operate, where we have expertise, where we have a competitive advantage in place.

And so like we're really looking forward to be able to advance these projects over the next 5 to 8 years. And I'll go a bit more in detail for the main ones, so for Detour Lake, Canadian Malartic and Hope Bay.

Detour Lake is the largest open pit gold mine in Canada, producing close to 700,000 ounces of gold per year. If you look at this long section, mined out in brown, you can see about 8 million ounces have been mined to date. In orange below, that's the pit reserve. That's what is in the plans to be mined over the next -- all the way to 2054. It's about 19 million ounces. And it's really all in place. below in light blue as pit resource as close to another 18 million ounces. If we include that in the production profile, it extend the mine life to 2070.

And then we've also, through exploration, identified significant potential underground below the pit and to the west and we've provided a pathway really to bring this operation to 2 million-ounce per year. This is the way you can generate value here. The mill is close to capacity at 28 million tons per year. We think we can increase it to 29 million tons per year. But the key thing to bring value forward is to bring some higher grade forward. And to do so, we're looking to add an underground component and replacing about 12,000 ton per day of open pit ore at 0.9 grams per ton with underground ore at 2.3 grams per ton.

By doing so, we go increasing production from several 700,000 ounces per year to 1 million ounce. We think we can get there in 2030, 2031. And when we're at the 1 million-ounce per year production for the next 14 years, that asset would be generating over $2 billion of free cash flow per year at current gold prices. So an incredible asset, long life support for our production profile for years to come.

Moving on to Odyssey. This is located in Quebec. This mine, the initial discovery was in 1923, so over 100 years ago. It has been in operations as an underground mine in the '50s to the '80s. It was reopened as an open pit in 2010. So that's what you see in brown. The open pit operation is coming to an end, close to 2028. At that point, we'll be fully transitioned underground. So the proposition here is a bit different than to Detour. We do have currently an open pit mine in operation that produces about -- that runs at about 60,000 tons per day at about 1 gram per ton, producing close to 600,000 ounces per year.

We are transitioning to a full underground operations. It will be the largest underground gold operation in Canada and operating at about 19,000 tons per day, but at 3 grams per ton. So the gold production overall is expected to remain fairly stable at around 550,000 ounces per year.

But by doing that transition by 2029, what we'll do is we'll liberate some excess mill capacity to a level of about 40,000 tons per day. And the opportunity there is to find new ore sources to fill in that mill and increase the production from 550,000 ounces per year to 1 million ounces per year. How do we do this?

First, if you look at the underground deposit itself, it's grown to over 20 million ounces over the last 8 years. We've established -- we're developing the underground mine with a ramp with a shaft. Again, that will produce about 90,000 tons per day. Because of the size of the deposit and because it keeps on extending, we believe we can add a second shaft -- a second mining front that would add about 10,000 tons per day and contribute about 220,000 ounces to the underground operations.

So key here is the geological potential is still very much alive. We have 29 drill rigs operating this year and extending this deposit to the east, to the west and at depth. So continuing to expand the potential there. We're also expanding within the cap itself, the 16.5 kilometer strike that we own and where we believe there's other opportunities to keep on finding [ resources ].

If we look at how do we get to 1 million ounces, so we have the first shaft, as we mentioned, that will sustain operation about 150,000 ounces. The second shaft could bring us another 220,000 ounces. That probably will be around the 2032, 2033. And then within the region, we have satellite opportunities that we can add to our mill.

The Marban deposit that we acquired this year, that will be a satellite open pit looking about 15 kilometers away from our meal. We could track ore there. We're currently drilling the deposit to define the optimum pit shape, and then we'll have to permit it. We think we'll be able to bring production fully around 2032, '33 also, adding another 15,000 tons per day at the mail and adding about 130,000 ounces to the production.

And then finally, we also have the Wasamac project. That's a satellite underground project, located about 100 kilometers away from the mill. It could operate about 3,000 tons per day at about 100,000 ounces a year. So combining those 4 elements, we'll be able to get to 1 million ounce close to that 2033 year time line.

There are other opportunities within the regions, as you see in this map in purple are the land package that we own and where we pretty have the ability to keep on drilling and finding additional deposits. So a lot of potential in this asset. We're working towards providing some more concrete figures as we're advancing the studies and the exploration, and we'll be able -- we're hoping to provide an update to the market in early 2027.

And then moving on to the third project, Hope Bay, again, located in Nunavut. The challenging in Nunavut has always been the high fixed costs. It's -- the logistical requirements are fairly unique. You can bring material only by sea barge for about 2 months a year. So you really need to plan well in advance for your consumables, for your equipment, you need to plan for 2 years in advance, you bring everything a year in advance, and that implies a lot of fixed cost.

So to be able to make this project economics, we believe you need to be at a level of over 350,000 ounces per year, and that has been the focus in -- at Hope Bay. We really want to get -- to be able to prove economics of a project over 400,000 ounces per year for the next 10 years and returned over 15% to really go ahead and build the product. So over the last 3 years, we've really focused on exploration.

We've been able to prove sufficient mineralization and 3 mining fronts that would be able to report that 400,000 ounces per year. The last -- over the last 2 years, we really focused on the Patch 7 area, where we've added about 1.7 million ounces in resources over the last 2 years. We're at a level now where we're close to completing our study and being able to provide an update in early 2026. And where we really be able to advance the construction.

So we're advancing some of the surface infrastructure, just to be ready for construction. We're upgrading our camps. We're bringing our power supply, our port. And so we're in a good position really to go ahead and move ahead with this project.

Hope Bay, again, will be able to support the platform, the Nunavut platform to close to 1 million-ounce per year for decades to come. So between Ontario, where we have Detour, that will be 1 million ounce plus Upper Beaver, another 200,000 and Macassa, another 300,000. So Ontario will be at 1.5 million ounce per year. Quebec with Canadian Malartic itself will be a 1 million ounce with the addition of LaRonde and Goldex will also be above that, about the 1 million, 1.5 million ounce and then Nunavut at 1 million ounce. So we have a very strong basis in Canada to continue supporting our production platform for years to come.

And to conclude, I really want to mention that we'll stick to the strategy that has worked. We're going to continue to be in safe jurisdictions. We're going to play off our strengths, so our regional competitive advantage. We're going to be leveraging this infrastructure as much as we can as that provides the best low-risk returns in the business. We'll treat our people well. We'll treat our communities well, our indigenous communities well and really continue to do what we've been doing really well so far.

So it's a business that makes sense. We've got the best pipeline that we've had in years. And we're really looking to continue advancing it and sustaining our margins over 60% per year. So really a business that's running very well and has a lot of potential to go on in the future.

And on that, like I'll pass on for any questions.

All right. Thank you so much, Jean-Marie. Yes, a few questions for you. Starting with Mike, what are you mine life estimates on your properties?

So we have about 53 million ounces in mineral reserves. So combined, we have over 15 years of mine life. Now depending on the assets, like some are extremely long life. You look at Detour, we're past 2050. Canadian Malartic, we passed 2040 and probably once we upgrade our reserves and resources, it will be past 2050. So we have very -- Kittila is over 17 years mine life. So we have very long-life assets, which is key really in terms of giving us the opportunity to build our platform organically and not being under the gun really to do some acquisitions. We can be opportunistic as we evaluate projects and look at how to fill in the pipeline in the future.

And Braden wants to know how many operating mines versus development-stage projects do you manage? And are you still exploring and/or developing other sites?

So we're operating 10 mines. But importantly, like the way we look at it, it's through our original. We have 5 regions that we manage, and that's really how we maintain a simple and manageable business. We have like those 5 key products that we talked about. That's really our key focus going forward, but we also have additional optionality within the portfolio that we're working on and we hope to be able to bring to the market in the coming years.

And Jordan wants to know what are your recovery rates? And how have they changed with the metallurgical improvements?

So that depends on the projects. We're typically between 90% to 95%, but it's going to depend on the project, on the grade, high-grade operations tend to have a much higher recovery, lower grade, lower recovery, but we're in that level. We're focused a lot on continuous improvement on increasing our throughput, increasing our recoveries year-over-year. That's now part of what has been our success over the last few years.

And Jayden asks, what are your all-in sustaining costs per ounce? And do you see any geopolitical or political factors that can change this?

Yes. So our all-in sustaining costs, it's close to $1,300 per ounce. So we're really a leader in the sector. We're easily $200 lower than our peers, our senior peers. The benefit for investing in Agnico is actually our low geopolitical risk with 85% of our production coming out of Canada, also being located in Finland, Australia, Mexico, we are already at low risk. And it's really one of the benefits and we're seeing really that our ability to operate being in places where the rule of law is maintained, and we are not concerned about the ability to maintain our operations in...

Perfect. And how sensitive are your operations to gold price fluctuations?

Yes. So we're definitely sensitive to gold. We've seen with the margin expansion like with gold price going up, our margins have gone from 50% to over 60% over the last year. So for every increase of $100 in the gold price, we generate an additional $250 million of free cash flow, and that's really like the key metric there.

And George asked, how do you engage with local communities and you mentioned this and the indigenous groups?

So any operation, any projects requires the involvement of the indigenous community. So we have indigenous relationship groups at each of our sites, at each of our regions. We have IBAs in place. We have so impact benefit agreements with the communities in which we operate. And we're actually -- Agnico is the largest payer to indigenous communities in Canada by far.

Wonderful. And last question for you, Jean-Marie. Aiden asks what are the next major catalysts that could materially change production and/or valuation?

Yes, I think the key ones. So the 5 key projects are really the main ones. The ones pretty to highlight our Detour Lake and Canadian Malartic. Again, those are world-class assets. They have the ability to produce over 1 million ounces per year. There's about 5 operations in the world that do that. There's only one in the Western Hemisphere. That's the Nevada joint venture between Barrick and Newmont in Nevada.

So once we have those 2 assets operating, that will have a long mine life, where we have a strong -- what's important there is operations that have a long life that have the ability to generate significant free cash flow year-over-year and have the ability to benefit from several cycles in the gold price.

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the conference. We wish you a very successful start to the new year.

Thank you very much, and have a good day, everybody.

Thank you. All right, everyone. We'll be right back.

Bye-bye.

Good morning. My name is Danny and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Mines Limited Q3 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Agnico Eagle third quarter conference call. I'd like to remind everyone that we'll be making a number of forward-looking statements, so please keep that in mind and refer to the disclaimers at the beginning of this presentation. Once again, we are pleased to be sharing a good news story with you. In a nutshell, with record gold prices with strong and importantly, safe production, along with continued solid cost control we are once again delighted to be reporting record financial results.

Across all metrics, our business is running well. And beyond the record financial results, we continue to invest in the best pipeline we've ever had and we continue to invest in the most ambitious exploration program we've ever had, which continues to deliver exceptional results. With almost 70 years of history behind us, we have never been stronger than we are now, and we have never had a better future than we have today.

Before I turn this call over to my colleagues, who will go through our business in more detail, I'd like to spend a few minutes to summarize the key takeaways. One, we're reporting record financial results, driven by, of course, record gold prices, but coupled with strong and consistent operational performance. We delivered another exceptional quarter of strong production at 867,000 ounces, putting us year-to-date at 77% of our full year guidance range. We sold gold at an average price of $3,476 per ounce, another record and a full $20 per ounce higher than the spot average in the quarter, well done to the treasury team.

At the same time, we continue to work hard to control costs, which means continue to deliver benefits of these record gold prices to our owners through record margins. While our reported Q3 cash costs of $994 an ounce are higher than the previous quarter, the majority of this cost increase is due to higher royalty costs which are a direct result of the higher gold prices. If we back out the impact of these higher royalties, which, again, are the direct result of higher gold prices, our Q3 cash costs would have been $933 an ounce, well below the midpoint of our cost guidance range. Year-to-date, our average cash costs were $943 an ounce. Again, if we back out the impact of higher royalties, our year-to-date average cash costs would be $909 an ounce well below the bottom end of our cash cost guidance range for the year.

All of this, the record gold prices, the solid production, the continued good cost control has led to another quarter of record financial results for our owners. Record EBITDA, record adjusted net income and record returns to our shareholders. Two, we continue to strengthen the company to strengthen the balance sheet and to return record amounts of cash to our owners. We repaid $400 million of debt this quarter. We returned $350 million directly to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, and we increased our net cash position to $2.2 billion, while at the same time, receiving an upgrade in our credit rating.

Three, we continue to invest heavily in building the foundations of our future growth, advancing construction, development and studies of our 5 key pipeline projects and investing heavily in an exceptional exploration program. At Malartic, we are ahead of schedule on the underground development, ahead of schedule on the shaft and progressing studies for Marban, Wasamac and a potential second shaft. At Detour, the ramp portal is built. We have begun building the ramp to access the underground, and we continue to optimize the mill. At Upper Beaver, I was there just on Monday, we are on budget and we are ahead of schedule. The team is doing an exceptional job. At Hope Bay, we continue to get great drill results, and we are accelerating on-site activity. We've upgraded the port, we're upgrading the camp. We've emptied the mill building. We're progressing the Madrid ramp, and we have completed the box cut for a ramp at Patch 7.

At San Nicolas, we continue to progress engineering on this high-grade, high-quality copper project in the best mining jurisdiction in Mexico. These projects cumulatively represent about 1.3 million to 1.5 million ounces of potential production. All from assets we already own in regions we've been operating for decades and in most cases, leveraging off existing infrastructure in place. At the same time, we are investing more than we ever have by a wide margin in our exploration program, and as Guy will illustrate at the end of this call, we continue to get truly exceptional results that will position Agnico Eagle well for decades to come.

These 3 key messages are consistent with our story last quarter and are consistent with our focus over the past couple of years. But on this call, I've asked the team to spend some time on a fourth key message. I've asked the team to spend some time to talk about our continued focus on productivity.

Dom and Natasha will go through a few examples to convey the message that even with gold at $4,000 an ounce, even with record financial results, our teams continue to be absolutely laser-focused on improving productivity at every opportunity at every mine. We are proud of our teams and how hard they continue to work to deliver not only great and consistent results, which, by the way, make my job a lot easier but to also focus every day on pushing themselves to operate even better and even safer.

With that introduction, I will now turn over the presentation to our CFO, Jamie Porter, to review our third quarter financial results.

Thank you, Ammar, and good morning, everyone. Our operating teams delivered another excellent quarter with strong cost control, particularly on a per tonne basis. By delivering on our production targets and managing costs, our investors continue to benefit from margin expansion in a record gold price environment, a dramatically strengthened balance sheet and increased direct shareholder returns. We are in the strongest financial position in the company's history.

The strong operational performance and cost control paired with higher gold prices to drive record financial results, including record revenue of $3.1 billion, record adjusted earnings of $1.1 billion or $2.16 per share and record adjusted EBITDA of $2.1 billion. These are excellent financial results, delivering the leverage to higher gold prices as you would expect. At current spot gold prices, key financial return metrics such as return on equity could be as high as 20% for the full 2025 year.

Gold production in the third quarter was approximately 867,000 ounces of total cash costs of $994 per ounce and all-in sustaining costs of $1,373 per ounce. We have achieved 77% of our full year production guidance to the end of September. Though we have budgeted lower gold production in the fourth quarter, we are confident in achieving the midpoint of our full year production guidance range of 3.4 million ounces. We are benefiting from record gold prices. However, the higher gold prices do result in increased royalty expense.

In the third quarter, cash costs were approximately $60 per ounce higher than what we had budgeted largely as a result of the increased royalty expense. Despite that I'm pleased to report that our cash costs remained within our guidance range on a year-to-date basis, and we still expect to be at or near the top end of our cash cost guidance range of $965 per ounce for the full year. Our teams have done an excellent job managing costs, the costs that are within our control and continue to work on ongoing optimization initiatives that Dom and Natasha will talk about later in this presentation.

All-in sustaining cost per ounce were higher than the prior quarter, primarily due to the increase in cash costs and the timing of sustaining capital spending. We also expect to be close to the top end of our all-in sustaining cost guidance range of $1,300 per ounce on a full year basis. Our all-in sustaining costs continue to be hundreds of dollars per ounce below those of our peers. Again, this is the result of continued efforts by our teams to control costs and to continuously improve while maximizing the cost synergies and benefits resulting from our regional strategy.

We move on to the next slide. We had another strong quarter of free cash flow generation that directly and indirectly benefited our shareholders through direct shareholder returns, the dividend and share buyback and indirectly through the strengthening of our balance sheet.

We generated $1.2 billion of free cash flow this quarter and added another $400 million through the sale of equity investments which allowed us to continue to strengthen our balance sheet. Our net cash balance more than doubled in the third quarter, increasing to $2.2 billion. Given our strong financial position, we decided to redeem an additional $350 million of long-term debt in addition to the $50 million of debt that matured during the quarter. Over the past 18 months, we have significantly delevered the balance sheet reducing our gross debt in that period by over $1.6 billion.

Reflecting this strength in credit profile and financial position, I'm also pleased to report that during the quarter, Moody's upgraded us from Baa1 to A3 with stable outlook. We are, again, in the strongest financial position in the company's history, giving us the flexibility to take a balanced, disciplined approach to capital allocation.

We move to the next slide. We continue to deliver record shareholder returns this quarter, totaling approximately $350 million in dividends and share buybacks and totaling $900 million on a year-to-date basis. This brings the cumulative shareholder returns in Agnico's history to over $5 billion, the majority of which has been returned in the last several years. Our capital allocation strategy remains unchanged, and we are well positioned in this gold price environment. We expect to continue to increase shareholder return through increased share buyback activity and potentially through higher dividends. We also expect to continue strengthening our financial flexibility by increasing our net cash position.

Given our profitability, we are expecting a significantly higher cash tax payment relating to the 2025 fiscal year in the first quarter of 2026. This is estimated at approximately $1.2 billion we are allocating cash to fund that obligation. Lastly and importantly, we will continue to reinvest in our business in order to bring our high-return organic growth projects online. We have our 5 key value driver projects Detour Underground, fill-in-the-mill at Canadian Malartic, Upper Beaver, Hope Bay and San Nicolas, all of which generate solid returns at gold prices significantly below the current spot price. At current spot prices, these projects have the potential to generate phenomenal returns. Detour, for example, once ramped up to 1 million ounces of annual production has the potential to generate over $2 billion of annual after-tax free cash flow at that mine alone at these gold prices.

We will continue looking for opportunities to accelerate reinvestment in the business to drive long-term shareholder value. At current gold prices, we're generating a lot of cash, but we will remain disciplined and continue to take a measured approach to capital allocation with a focus on increasing returns to our shareholders over the long term.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Dom, who will provide an overview of our Quebec and Nunavut and Finland operations.

Thank you, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. Our Q3 results for Quebec, Nunavut and Finland continued to show strong and consistent operational performance, just as we saw in Q1 and Q2. We are on track to meet our guidance and we're positioning ourselves on good foundation for 2026. The production costs remain well controlled and as shown in the bottom right table here, we are seeing record profit margin thanks to the gold price. I'm very happy of our team's leadership and mindset. Even with higher gold price, the focus remains on debottlenecking the operation and improved productivity. As for example, this quarter, we have 3 mills that beat record -- quarterly records at Meadowbank, Meliadine and Goldex.

For the next 2 slides, Ammar asked Natasha and myself to explain more and give examples about what we're doing at the site and regional level to control our cost to manage our business. You will hear not about cutting, cutting and cutting what you're going to hear is going to be more about productivity improvement, integrating technology, leveraging skill sets and leveraging our people. The first example is going to be Kittila, led by the team that you could see here on that picture celebrating the 3 million ounces ore. And the second one is going to be about new technology implementation in underground.

Next slide, please. So at Kittila, following the new shaft commissioning and ramp-up the team were struggling to meet their operational targets at underground. And from there, I need to recognize the leadership of Jani, Mikko and [indiscernible] for taking action leveraging learning from similar initiatives done at Meliadine in 2023 to drive meaningful change. So in June 2024, they've launched an underground productivity improvement program and as at Meliadine, their approach was built on ownership focused on what matters and on problem solving. They work in collaboration with the employees. They did benchmark to define what perfect shift could look like and to be more productive. At the end, what they did, they've worked with the guys driving the equipment, as you could see there, a scoop to find how they could help them to be more productive.

And some examples, like just bring the equipment faster than it was before either -- it's an easy one, but it's things that you -- that we kind of implemented to be more efficient. I will just show you some results of that, if I take the 2 graphs on the -- bars on the left, the bottom one, you could see the tonnes mined per day improved by 13% year-over-year to the first 9 months of 2024 compared to the first 9 months of 2025, 13% more tonnes moved or mined from underground. This is with the same equipment, same fleet, same people, more efficient. That allowed them also to do more by themselves and less relying on contractor which helped to reduce the cost. And on the cost side, if you take the top 1 on the left, you could see that euro per tonne minesite cost decreased by 4%, and this is despite inflation and higher royalty. So a very good job to the Kittila team. Thanks for that.

Next slide. The second example is about implementing new technology of remote operations. The gains we are doing with those remote operations are not just helping us to control our costs and manage their business. It is more than just the current operation performance. It is also unlocking future growth project, enabling future growth projects. All of our projects if we could improve what we use into our studies in terms of tonnes move, tonnes mined as well as we're going to see at Odyssey, if we could improve the ramp development speed, this is significant improvement.

So I will start with the example of LZ5 in 2016 where they've implemented the first LTE system in the world, underground, since that time, they really, really did very good progress. You could see with the yellow here through the time, we are now approximately over 20% of the tonnes are done through remote operation. And how this is -- the gain -- where is the gain is there were some areas some time that we were not operating the equipment because we need to do the out of the mine for the ventilation purpose, for example. So the same skill set and the same thinking has been applied to Odyssey ramp. And you could see the jump done in the year in 2023 when we started to do remote mucking and remote drilling at Odyssey. So we've increased the productivity by 20%.

Again, same people same team just using the technology. This is a significant improvement. How it works? So you could see the people here sitting on the front of screen in a seat, which is the same that than the one in the scoop. So they are able to operate 3 to 4 equipment each, and we're collaborating very closely with Sandvik, LZ5 with Epiroc at Odyssey to push those technologies to do more and more. So this is helping us to control our costs. This is also enabling future projects. It is also an aspect on the workforce.

Natasha is going to talk about opportunities and action on the workforce. But those type of things are in the balance to help the workforce. So we are in Quebec approximately 5% of turnover, which is fantastic and those type of initiatives are helping us to have better conditions for the workers for giving them great challenges to our professional. This is helping for the retention. This is helping for the recruitment, and this is helping for the stability of our operation.

Next step, stay tuned. We're moving into the fleet management system. So the blue that you see on the graph there, this is still conventional hauling. Now to be better in that area, we're implementing fleet management system underground. We're going to be in the first of the world to implement such a software advanced like we're thinking about. In the coming years, you're going to hear about that.

Next slide, moving to the project pipeline. As Ammar mentioned, both projects are on track and evolving very positively. As Guy will talk later, the drilling results keep adding value to the project. Very, very interesting. Canadian Malartic, in terms of shaft sinking where we start more conditional shaft sinking in Q3 we did a record in terms of speed. And we are about 2 months in advance of what we were planning initially when we updated the study in 2023. I would like also to highlight the construction team in Q3 did triple zero for 70,000 hours. What is triple zero is no lost time, no modified work, no medical aid and 70,000 hours, this is equivalent of 1 guy working in the construction for 30 years. Congratulations to the team, it's fantastic during those type of achievements. So to close on Canadian Malartic, the study is progressing for the vision to 1 million ounces with a second shaft Marban, Wasamac, everything is on track, and the construction team keep delivering what needed. For example, the administration building is going to be delivered in Q1 is going to be a good thing for the team to be in better position.

At Hope Bay, potential 400,000 ounces annual production from the good drilling, I see, I think it's going to be slightly more than that. Let's see where the study is going to end. But in the meantime, we are -- the key thing is to advance engineering. So we are currently around 25% achieved on the engineering, and we are progressing between 3% and 4% per month, which bring us to the 40%, 50% we were looking before greenlighting the project next year, everything is in good position for that. And also, the construction team are preparing the field to be able to do that heavy construction time. So you could see here on the picture, there's 2 new wings. Both of them were approximately 133 people per wing. So we're building capacity. We're going to have 6 of them ready to go for construction, operation and keeping exploration.

On that, I will pass the microphone to Natasha.

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. So I'll cover the operational highlights for Ontario, Mexico and Australia. The regions delivered good safety, operating and cost performance this quarter. And along with the higher gold price, this led to record operating margins at both Macassa and at Detour. Now at Detour, as we continue to stabilize the mill at the higher throughput, the team achieved another quarterly record mill throughput. The open pit mining rate in the quarter, however, was affected by slower progress around the historical underground working. But grade is still expected to improve in the fourth quarter as we move into the higher grade domain in the pit.

Over at Macassa, we had a really good quarter there, too. The team continued to see some overperformance with higher-than-expected grades in localized areas. And then at Fosterville, production this quarter was on target, following a very strong first half of the year.

Now in terms of business improvement, similar to what Dom discussed, the teams, they continue to push hard to optimize our business. There is a constant effort to keep all of our operations at a state of optimal performance. It's just part of their DNA. And the optimization of the ore haulage system at Detour is a really good example of that. It's a good example of the many initiatives that are going on. It's a good example of how the team is looking at ways to sustainably lower cost and improve efficiency. And this particular journey started 10 years ago with incremental slow enhancements made over time and significant progress made, as you can see from the utilization and payload improvements as noted on the graph.

And the team, they continue to look for optimizing our unit costs by involving external experts to review their performance and help identify possible efficiency gains similar to what Dom was talking about at Kittila, not just as it relates to haul optimization, but really the entire mining cycle. Another hot topic, and Dom touched on this, is related to the skilled labor shortage that the entire industry faces. Labor is a large portion of our overall cost, and our focus is to not just maintain our operational needs, but also secure the workforce to grow our business and at the same time, manage the costs. So we're taking a very proactive approach to workforce planning as we grow in Ontario by leveraging our region strategy by leveraging our competitive advantage, specifically when it comes to people.

So our strategy to address the short and long workforce needs is multi-layered, of course, the first one is to ensure we continue to be a Great Place to Work for our employees by continuously investing in our people, by continuously leveraging the culture that Agnico has built we have increased the engagement levels of our teams. And Macassa is a really great example of how powerful this combination can be. Since 2022, we have significantly increased production at Macassa, and at the same time, we've significantly improved safety performance. They say that a safe mine is not -- is a productive mine. In our experience, it's also a highly engaged mine.

In addition to that, we're investing in local workforce training. This quarter, we started the underground school of Mines for Macassa. Our plan is to, over a period of time, train local candidates to meet the increased demand for Macassa, for Upper Beaver, for Detour underground. While we remain focused on hiring First Nations and local employees, we're also seeing success in filling roles through our immigration program for skills that are generally hard to recruit for in Canada. So I'm very proud of the team because even at these gold prices, like Ammar was seeing their foot is still on the gas. They continue to safely and responsibly make our mines more efficient and more productive, ultimately reduce our costs.

Now moving to the next slide. I'll give you a quick update on the 3 projects for Ontario and Mexico. As you are aware, the Detour Underground project plays a big part in the plan for the complex to be a 1 million-ounce producer annually. It's still early days, but as Ammar mentioned, this quarter, we commenced the exploration ramp and have advanced just over 250 meters laterally. We're also continuing with the infill and expansion drilling and continuing to see positive results, and Guy will talk about that later on in the presentation.

As for Upper Beaver, during the quarter, there's been a lot of progress made in a short period of time. We did have the pleasure of hosting our Board and our senior management team this week at Upper Beaver, but also Macassa. And they were complementary, not just about the progress, but also strong teams that we have on the ground, and I completely agree. In terms of the project with respect to the shaft head frame, the structural steel and the cladding is completed, the winches have been roped up and the service hoist is ready for commissioning. So shaft sinking is still expected to commence in the fourth quarter.

And over at the portal, the excavation of the exploration ramp began at the end of July and has advanced over 250 meters.

Finally, with respect to San Nicolas, we continue to engage with government and authorities and our stakeholders related to the key permits that are needed. In the meantime, we're continuing to advance the engineering of some critical infrastructures which will just help us further derisk and build confidence in the execution strategy. So all in all, good progress being made on the projects. And I just wanted to end by thanking our operations team and the project team for another solid quarter.

And so with that, I'll pass it over to Guy.

Thank you, Natasha, and good morning, everyone. First of all, I would like to start by taking a moment to thank the team at all sites for another excellent quarter, both safety and productivity and cost control went extremely well with an excess of 120 drill rig in action. We've completed north of 370,000 meters of drilling in the quarter, now exceeding 1 million-meter year-to-date. That is ahead of our schedule by about 9%, year-to-date in terms of meter and our unit costs are approximately 8% below budget year-to-date as a result of our strong involvement at controlling costs. Our Journey Excellence program continues to deliver. We're improving safety by introducing more mechanized feature such as robotic arm technology to reduce weightlifting and repetitive motion and we are ramping up our unattended drilling capacity that allow for drilling between shift, which is very beneficial for our underground mining sites. .

Ending towards year-end, we continue to focus on key value drivers, expanding a little bit the drill program on several sites, such as Marban, Detour Underground, Hope Bay and Canadian Malartic, Odyssey where we have good exploration results that continue to blaze the trail to support studies that will support studies to deliver on our vision of growth for these assets.

From a results standpoint, I would like to comment on a few projects, starting on Slide 15 with Canadian Malartic. We currently have 29 drill rig in action at Malartic, both underground and on surface at Odyssey in the extension of the deposit around the mine, including the recently acquired Marban project. And once again, this quarter has seen some very exciting results in the upper eastern portion of East Gouldie, results here says 4.8 over 25 meters at 800-meter depth in the area, we anticipate can get to mineral reserve by year-end that could provide additional flexibility to accelerate ramp-up of production in the upper portion of the East Gouldie deposit.

Then also in the lower extension of East Gouldie with result of 2.3 over 30-meter 2,000 meters below surface, which is also kind of aligned with our decision to extend the depth of the first shaft down to 1,870 meters and the deposit remains open at depth and laterally.

And on the adjacent Marban project, we've so far completed 96 drill on the property for 30 in excess of 30,000 meters since the acquisition -- since the drilling started in May following the acquisition mostly to test the eastern extension of the deposit on ground that belonged to Agnico prior to the consolidation. And the results have the potential to increase the ultimate design with result of to 3.3 over 11 meter, 4.6 over 10 meter, approximately 2,200 meter east of the current open pit being considered.

Now on Slide 16, at Detour, as mentioned by Natasha, the exploration ramp is now progressing well with just over 250 -- almost 260 meters developed in the quarter, reaching a depth of 43-meter below surface, 62-kilometer of drilling were safely completed in the quarter with 9 drill rate and continue to infill and extend the deposits from surface in areas that are targeted for the underground mine project, both below the saddle portion of the deposit with result up to 3 gram over 40 meters, 2.7 over 55 meters. And to the west of the pit, where the planned exploration ramp would result pretty significant of to 7.4 over 27 meters. The result so far should lead to growth in the underground mineral resources system at [indiscernible]. And based on these results, we've added an additional 55,000 meter of drilling in the fourth quarter and expecting to achieve almost 220,000 meters by the end of the year.

Now on Slide 17, as discussed by Dominique, again, some very good results in exploration. We have 6 drill rigs in operation. We've completed in excess of 100,000 meters year-to-date, expecting to achieve north of 120,000 meters by year-end. And we continue to see very strong results in Patch 7 area. First of all, in the southern extension of Patch with a result up to 6.7 over 10 meter, 10.7 over 3.8 meter at shallow depth 350-meter below surface, showing that the deposit remains open to the south on the right-hand side of that graph.

And two, at depth in Patch 7 with very strong results, up to 12.7 gram over 9.3 meter and 16.9 gram over 4.6 meter both at around 880-meter depth in the strong new discovery at Patch 7 that shows that the deposit remains open at depth and laterally.

So we anticipate that all of the good results we've seen at Hope Bay this year, where we have a very positive impact on the mineral resources at year-end and as mentioned by Dominique, all of that be integrated and our potential project development scenario to be communicated in 2026.

Then on Slide 16 (sic) [ Slide 18 ], I would like to add a bit more color around Meadowbank. And as you are aware, we're looking in a current gold price environment to look at opportunity to continue to operate Meadowbank. So we've been since 2024 validating some option for pit pushback in the IVR area, but also continue to derisk the underground extension of the deposit that is known to be still open at depth. And all of those good results that we are displaying will be integrated in our scenario analysis to evaluate the pushbacks scenario and eventually to continue to mine from underground only with mill operation at a lower throughput once the open pit are fully depleted.

Finally, at Slide 19, at Fosterville, not mentioned in our press release because it came out right after the cutoff of our press release today, we're pleased to announce that we've reached an agreement with these 2 resources to acquire their 39,000 hectares exploration license that surrounds our mining leads at Fosterville. This will consolidate in total more than 250,000 hectares stretching over more than 100 kilometers along the great at Fosterville to allow the continuation of the full investigation of those structure without any property boundary constraint and the transaction obviously is subject to the Victorian government approval and the closing is expected to close within about 2 months.

So on that, I will return the microphone to Ammar for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Guy. As you can see, we continue to work hard for all our stakeholders, and we'll continue to build off the same foundational strategic pillars that have served us well over the past 68 years. We will focus on the best mining jurisdictions based on geologic potential and political stability. We will be disciplined with our owners' money, making investment decisions based on technical and regional knowledge creating value through the drill bit and through smart, disciplined acquisitions when it makes sense. We are uniquely well positioned with a quality project pipeline leveraging existing assets in the best regions in the world where we believe we have a strong competitive advantage. And we will continue to be focused on creating value on a per share basis and on being leaders in our industry in returning capital to shareholders as evidenced by over 42 years of consecutive dividend payments and increasing share buybacks.

And finally, before we open up for questions, I'd like to comment briefly on the current exciting gold environment, both the gold price and the sector more broadly, including our recent investment in Perpetua. On the gold price, of course, nobody has a crystal ball and nobody can predict near term moves, but it is very common that when a market moves up quickly, there is often a measured retracement in a period of consolidation before the next leg up. I think that is where we are on the gold price. Long term, we remain very constructive on gold and as all the factors that have pushed gold to outperform over the last 25 years remain in place and in many cases, have become more prevalent.

On the M&A front, while we do have the best organic growth in our history, while we continue to have great success in our exploration programs, and while we feel absolutely no pressure to do anything, of course, we will continue to look at opportunities to create more value for our owners through smart and disciplined opportunities on the M&A side. Our owners want us to look at these opportunities our owners expect us to look at these opportunities, it is frankly part of our job.

Our investment in Perpetua is a good example of this. Perpetua is 1 of the largest, highest grade undeveloped open pit gold mines in the United States and to paraphrase one of our senior exploration people. It is the most exciting U.S.-based gold exploration project she has seen in many, many years. Perpetua is also an investment in gold. Yes, there are valuable byproducts that will reduce cash costs but that's a good thing. This is what we do. We focus on geologic potential in safe jurisdictions, and we try to get in early to gain a knowledge advantage.

Thank you again for joining us on this call. Operator, may I ask now that we open up the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Fahad Tariq of Jefferies.

Ammar, can you talk a little bit about the noncore investments in critical minerals? It sounds like it's a new subsidiary. I'm just trying to understand what type of investments will be vended in or spun out in there? It sounds like it would be things like Canada Nickel and maybe some other equity investments. And what is the future strategy of that subsidiary. Would it invest in like -- make equity investments or actual project development?

Fahad, thank you for that question. You're absolutely right. For example, Canada Nickel will be in that subsidiary. I think as most of you know, there's been a lot of interest globally on critical metals. We are a gold company, but we're also, in my opinion, the best miners in the regions we operate, and we're the largest by far a mining company in Canada. We get asked about critical metal all the time. We want to remain a gold company. And so what we've -- the approach we've taken, which is consistent with being disciplined and consistent with our philosophy on capital allocation, which is that it should be based on knowledge.

For the last 3 years, we've had a small team, as again, most of you know, looking at opportunities on the critical metals side. With everything that we've got going on with the great pipeline we've got, with our continued focus on gold, we felt now was the time to let that small group of people have a little bit more independence and look at opportunities on their own. So we've contributed small investments that are non-gold, non-copper into that subsidiary. We've given a little bit of seed capital. And frankly, Fahad, it's their job to look at opportunities. We are not obliged to invest more money. We'll be supportive, but we'll also have a first shot at looking at what they're doing.

Got it. And then may be switching gears, can you talk a little bit about how just government relations are going with the new federal government in Canada. Have you noticed changes in terms of the level of access to the government dialogue? And any opportunities in particular for Nunavut infrastructure?

That's again an excellent question. We have been very pleased with the new government. I'll give you an example. While we are the biggest mining company in Canada, we really didn't get a lot of attention from the previous government. The weekend after the election and I got a text from Tim Hodgson, I've never met Tim Hodgson. He went out of his way to find out who I was, and I guess who other and I know he's talked to a lot of other mining executives and so you've got to give a government credit when the minister in the very first weekend reaches out to people on their cell phone via text. We know the teams there well. We've probably had more discussion with the new government on the importance of mining and the opportunity of mining to contribute to Canada than we had with the previous government over several years. So we're very pleased. They are very smart. They're very engaged, and they really are interested in leveraging off of what mining, for example, can do for the average Canadian.

Next question comes from Anita Soni of CIBC World Markets.

First question is with respect to Hope Bay. What are you expecting to deliver by year-end in terms of a resource update? And then what are you targeting for the 2027 study.

I could start maybe with the study, and I will let Guy for the resource. On the study, we're expecting in the first half of next year to deliver PEA study with the engineering at over 40%. And again, as we did that mediating to really have a good view on the schedule and on the cost. We like to give the information when we have enough of that engineering done. I'm very happy to see the progress with the team and midyear -- before midyear next year, we're going to give you more detail on all those KPIs Anita. And with that, I will pass it Guy.

Yes. So as a follow-up, so for year-end, I would say reserve will remain as last year. We're going to be updating indicated and inferred resources, obviously, integrating all of the new results we've been getting expanding Patch 7 driven. And along with what Dominique described our study in 2026 with the new development scenario, new [ cusp ]. So our desire would be to update with a brand-new PFS supported reserve and resources filing by the end of 2026.

Okay. And then just a question with respect to cost. I know you talked about tariffs a little bit, and it seemed like it was the standard customary cautionary language. But is there any -- is there any other -- I guess, I'm just trying to get an idea of what inflation -- what kind of inflation expectations you're seeing going into next year? Is it the typical 3% to 5%? Or -- and you obviously talked about optimizations where you're trying to defray some of those 3% to 5%. You've done an excellent job this year of maintaining costs within the original range despite a more than $1,000 gold price move. But what can we -- what should we be thinking about going into 2026 and other moving parts like changes in grade and things like that?

Yes. Anita, it's Jamie here. We're obviously working through the budgeting process now. I think 3% to 5% is where we've seen labor inflation over the past several years, but across all of our costs, it's been closer to 6% to 7%. And if you go back over the last 3 years, the average cost of inflation we've seen has been 6% to 7%. Our guidance has been up on average by about 3%. So we've been able to do a bit better than the rate of inflation over the last few years.

Going into 2026, I think we're seeing a similar level of inflation in around 6% to 7%, across all of our various cost components, and obviously, we're seeing the pressure on royalty costs as a result of the higher gold price. So we would expect costs will be higher next year just based on the impact of higher gold prices. But as we've talked about through the call today, we're always looking at opportunities to do better than inflation.

Your next question comes from John Tumazos of John Tumazos of John Tumazos Very Independent Research.

Could you review the rigs operating across the company? I think I heard there were 29 rigs at Malartic and the meters were being increased 55,000 to 220,000 for the year. Could you give us that review across the portfolio, please?

John, I'm going to -- thank you for the question, John. I'm going to ask Guy to comment on that.

Yes. So basically, the 120 rigs as reported are spread over operating mine, advanced projects. I can go through maybe with you off-line if you want to see, but basically, we have those 29 rigs, the 220,000-meter an additional 55,000 meters, you're referring to pertaining to Detour, where we have those 9 rig operating. So we haven't seen -- I'd say, quarter-over-quarter, we have the exact same number of rigs. We've just seen an increase in productivity, and we're trying wherever we've been getting some good results, especially in the pipeline to keep drilling at the same pace during the fourth quarter.

Therefore, we're expecting that we will be in a position to go all the way to around 1.25 million, 1.3 million meters by year-end without spending much more because of the lower unit cost we've been getting with those productivity improvements such as the unattended drilling. Basically, what it means on a day to day is when the driller -- with the new rig that we are currently revamping on each of the sites with collaboration with our entrepreneurs, you're basically adding the function that when the guy hit the rig at the end of the shift for the blasting and the gas clear up you can just press the button, the drill, continue to drill in between shift. So if you look at it, if you can drill 3 more meters at the end of the shift 3 more meter at the end, for an underground mine, it is quite significant. So those are the things that with the same fleet of rig, we can get more done. And we're going to continue to drill at the same pace because we have some good results.

And overall, we are expecting our global exploration budget for the company, $525 million, including an exploration project to be about right on that $525 million for the year based on our [indiscernible] forecast we've just done.

Could you just run through several sites where the most rigs are running, I don't remember how many rigs were at each site.

Yes. Well, maybe I can provide you with those detail offline, but we have those 29 in Malartic, we have 9 at Detour. We have 12 in Macassa. We have 6 at Hope Bay so maybe I can provide you with the detailed list of the spread of our rig offline, John.

Your next question comes from Tanya Jakusconek from Scotiabank.

I just wanted to talk to you about the reserve and resource replacement this year, year-end 2025. I think if I go through the -- what you mentioned we're going to see increase in reserves at East Gouldie. That was really the only mine the only cause that I heard and then resource growth at Detour and Hope Bay. Is that correct?

Yes, yes, I can take it. So we will also -- we are in a good position to fully replace what we mine at Kittila, Macassa and several of our sites will see some partial replacement. We will also have Marban that will get into the mix siding the first iteration of Marban. So net bottom line, we're expecting to see a net growth, net of mining depletion by year-end by maybe, I don't know, my guess we should be up by 0.25 million or 0.5 million ounces year-over-year despite the fact that we've mined we've extracted 3.8 million and will produce 3.45 million this year. So all in all, the drilling has fully replaced what we've mined out with a light growth year-over-year.

Okay. And should I be thinking as you have done historically that you take your reserve and resource pricing and you look at inflation and adjust accordingly. So I know your reserves are at about $1,450 our resources at $1,750. If I put that 5%, 6% or thereabout inflation, I guess, $1,550 and $1,850, respectively. Should I be thinking that's how you're going to approach your pricing for your reserves and resources at year-end?

Well, that's a very good question. Obviously, with the current gold price environment, we are at that question, and we're working on it. But our care remains to deliver the margin ounces upfront. Therefore, we don't want to lower the cutoff grade that will change our mining sequence in the upcoming couple of years. So we are looking at it on a mine-by-mine basis, if there is some excess milling capacity. If we can mine some -- so we're going to be having that in mind, Flexing maybe our gold price assumption on some projects, whether it's a life of mine extension scenario or where there is additional milling capacity. But our firm intention remains to keep the cut-off rate stable while as you described, offsetting inflation, moving the gold price up in line with that inflation we see overall on the market.

So then it's really what you talk about is real actual replacement of ounces rather than any movement in gold price for what you're seeing for year-end?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. Maybe over to you, Ammar, if I could, about just the strategy on the overall portfolio, both from an investment equity standpoint. And then also on your portfolio, your asset -- overall assets. So some really -- there are some smaller ones that you have in there as well. So I'm just interested in how you're approaching this -- let's start with the equity portfolio. Should I be thinking your investing in Perpetua is 1 investment. But should I be thinking that whatever sales or sales you make from that investment portfolio, it just gets reinvested into other equities rather than being thought about this gain as allocated to shareholder returns. Should I be thinking about it in that way?

Thank you, Tanya, for the question. No, the money belongs to our owners. We make strategic investments in things that we have looked at and think might have an opportunity to create value for our owners. We don't do it as a trading position. We do it really again, in line with our philosophy on being disciplined with capital. It's an opportunity to make an early investment to learn about a project that we might be interested in. And so if you take a look at something like Orla and there's a long history there. We -- eventually, Orla did a fantastic job. They didn't really need us anymore. There was a lot of money tied up.

We took up -- we liquidated that position, but that does not go into a pool that goes back into equity. That is our owners money, and that money everything competes for that money. Investments into our mines, technology, everything has to have a business case. So we do not simply take that gain and allocate it to future equity investments. It's our owner's money, and it gets treated like the rest of our owners' money.

Okay. So it just goes part of your cash flow and then gets allocated accordingly.

Correct. .

Okay. And then in the portfolio itself, as you hire gold prices, everyone is looking at their portfolio and some you have a lot of big assets that you're focusing on coming up these top 5 assets that you talk about. Anything that you see as anything within the portfolio for noncore .

Yes. I mean there -- I just looked at it this morning, John and I talk about this all the time. You're right, Tanya. There are some things that transition well, and we continue to be interested in. And as you would expect and as in the history of our company, there are some projects that while we invest in early we end up concluding don't make the criteria for our owners, and we will be disposing of them. And frankly, again, you're right at these current gold prices, it's not a bad time to in some cases, sell those assets.

Yes. So when we're talking about assets, we're talking about assets, not investments?

Correct. Well, no, no. In this case, I'm talking about the equity investments.

Equity investment. How about just overall within the portfolio, just some smaller within the portfolio, anything in Mexico. You've got some smaller stuff with that...

Yes. I mean the -- you asked about Mexico. There are some things that are now pretty small and nonstrategic. We always look at opportunities to get the most value from any asset, whether that means we operate it or we sell it. I can assure you we do that with all of our assets, including ones that are small. And so if there are some that you might wonder, well, why haven't you sold them, the simple answer is you can assume that we've looked at all the different opportunities and have concluded on the ones that will make the most money for our shareholders, even if it's a small asset.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi. Please continue. .

Well, thank you, everyone, once again for joining us this morning. More importantly, thank you for being our friends and supporters over many decades in many cases, everybody 1 day early, have a nice weekend.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Perfect. Thank you very much, and it's great to see everyone here today. Please be advised some forward-looking statements. There's a lot to cover. I'm going to try to go fairly quickly. I'll try to wrap up my presentation in about 10 or 12 minutes and leave the rest of the time for Q&A. So I'll go quickly, but there are really 4 messages that I want to give you.

First message is the business is going very, very well. Production is strong. Costs are exceptional, under control, and our people are safe. To put things into perspective, in the last -- in year-to-date, gold is up almost $1,100 an ounce. Our costs are up $10 an ounce. So when we talk about delivering leverage to our owners, you can see in that example, we are delivering 99% of the gold price increase directly to our owners. So one, the business is going well. Two, probably the most exciting, our projects are going well. I'm going to talk about the 5 big projects, and there are others, but the 5 big projects alone are between 1.3 million and 1.5 million additional ounces of production per year starting in 2030.

Now some of that will offset some declines, but that is significant, and we'll talk about that. So production business going well, projects going well. Three, exploration going exceptionally well. And four, in this environment, and this is important, we are going to stay focused. We're going to stick to what we do well. We're not going to do anything crazy. We get asked the question. I want to be clear. We are not considering a bid on tech. The logic of that merger is all about synergies between Collahuasi and QB. That makes a lot of sense for them. There's a lot of players that will look at that.

Agnico is not considering a bid on tech. So jumping into the presentation, I start with this slide because it's important. It's an important differentiator of what Agnico is. Agnico doesn't want to be all things all over the world, and we don't consider ourselves a global gold mining company. We won't go everywhere in the world to build a gold mine. We get the logic of doing that. We get the logic that says, look, if I want to be a big global gold miner, I've got to follow the gold wherever it is, that's a fine strategy. That's not our strategy.

Our strategy is regional. We focus only on regions that meet 2 criteria. The first criteria is an obvious criteria, which is it has to have the geologic potential, but for multiple mines over multiple decades because that's how we think you get good. And two, it has to have the political stability to actually allow you to operate multiple mines over multiple decades. And when you think about it and when you think about what makes a good miner and when you have thousands of employees and thousands of smart, hard-working people, what really -- it's sort of disingenuous to say, well, we're smarter than everyone else or we work harder.

The truth of the matter is what makes a good miner is, do you know the ground better? Do you know the suppliers better? Do you know the contractors better? Have you built mines there before? And you get all of that with this regional approach. In Canada, we produce more gold than the next 8 companies combined. We are the employee of choice. We have half the turnover. I'm telling you it is a big competitive advantage, and that's our business. Does this work? Demonstrably, it does work.

If you look over the last 20 years, yes, we've grown from 1 mine to 11 mines. Yes, we've grown from 1 country to 4 countries. Yes, we've grown from under 0.25 million ounces of production to 3.5 million. But honestly, you guys shouldn't care about that. What you should care about our per share metrics because that's what translates into value for you individually. And we're proud to say over that period of time, our gold production per share is up by a factor of almost 3. Our EBITDA is up by a factor of more than 10 and our dividend, and we've been paying a dividend for 42 years straight, not miss a quarter, is up by over a factor of 50.

Our gold production per share over the last 20 years has increased on average 4% to 5% compounded over 20 years. That's impressive. And when you look at the bottom left, you can see that, that has translated to not only outperforming the XAU index by more than double. We've outperformed the S&P and we've outperformed gold price. And guess what? We've outperformed the gold price almost by that 4% or 5% compounded annual increase in production per share.

Our costs, as I mentioned, are under control. Margins in the last quarter were over 60%. Over 60% because gold has gone up and because we've delivered, as I mentioned, 99% of that increase directly to our shareholders. Obviously, in this environment, we're doing very well for our shareholders.

We're making a lot of money. We have since the start of the year, we've gone from a net debt position of $200 million to a cash position of $1 billion. We've paid $400 million in dividends so far this year. We've bought back $150 million of share this year. We've invested about $1 billion back into the business this year. We have the best pipeline we've ever had and we have the best exploration results we've ever had, all doing this safely, all doing it responsibly within the community.

Our strategy continues to work. Again, not a lot of time, so I'm going to go over these 5 big projects. And again, there are others, but we are -- we believe we're going to be able to bring Detour, a world-class mine from 700,000 ounces a year to over 1 million ounces a year. We have a plan to take Malartic from about 550,000 ounces a year to over 1 million ounces a year.

In the world, depending on the year, there are 4 to 5 mines that produce over 1 million ounces a year. One is in Russia, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and sometimes Kazakhstan. The only one in the world producing more than 1 million ounces a year in the western world is the Nevada Gold Mines, and that's a combination, roughly 60-40 Barrick and Newmont. So by bringing Detour and Malartic to over 1 million ounces a year, we will have 2 of 6 mines in the world producing over 1 million ounces a year, 2 of 3 in the Western world, and these are multi-decade mines with mine lives well into the 2050s.

Our EVP of Exploration, Guy Gosselin, also mentioned that Detour just is kind of interesting. These are ballpark numbers. But a $1,400 gold, the pit at Detour has 20 million ounces of mineable gold at $1,600 gold, it has 40 million ounces of mineable gold. These are serious gold mines in serious locations. We're going to build Upper Beaver, that is progressing very well, where that's about 220,000 ounces a year of additional production, Hope Bay, a fantastic mine in Nunavut, we believe that will be a 400,000 ounce a year mine, and then our share of San Nicolás, about 200,000 ounces. So just these 5 projects add up to 1.5 million ounces.

Again, there's going to be some reduction in production as you go through at other mines, but we see a solid path to over 4 million ounces a year without issuing new shares at these prices, funding it ourselves continuing to do share buyback, strengthening the business. And all of these mines, by the way, are in jurisdictions where we've been for decades. Detour Lake, Canadian Malartic, Hope Bay, those mines are leveraging off existing infrastructure.

So they're not just important big mines, but they have the best return on capital because a lot of the capital is already in the ground, and they have the best risk-adjusted return on capital. Just to hit a few highlights on exploration. I'll start by saying we continue to reinvest in the business, and we have 121 drills turning. Not because gold is $3,600 an ounce, but because we have some fantastic results, and we're continuing to drill.

I'll just quickly hit some highlights at Malartic. Remember, Malartic was a mine discovered in 1923. It's still going strong. We found over 10 million ounces over the last 7 years. And we've hit another hole, I'll just some highlights, 3.4 grams over 36 meters at 2 kilometers depth. That's important because it is below the existing mineral envelope. Detour, confirming high-grade domain, 3.4 grams over 67 meters at 400 meters depth. Hope Bay, this is quite an exceptional hole, 53 grams over 8.4 meters at 750-meter depth. Meliadine expanding the Tiriganiaq zone, 15 grams over 5 meters, but only at 200 meters depth. I could go on and on, but we're getting a lot of success there.

And then finally, I'll finish by saying we're going to stick to the same strategy that we've always had. We're going to stay in safe jurisdictions. We're going to play off our strengths. We're going to leverage existing infrastructure where we can. We're going to treat our people well, which leads to half the turnover of our peers. We're going to treat our contractors well, our suppliers well, our communities well, our First Nation partners well. It's a business that makes sense.

Again, we've never had a stronger pipeline. We're in safe jurisdictions, which matter more now than ever before, especially when your margins are pushing close to 70%. The business is looking pretty good. And with that, I will -- we've got 6 or 7 minutes for questions. Thanks for the discussion.

Thanks, Ammar. Okay. Well, the presentation has a big focus on organic growth projects, 2 biggest pieces of which are Detour and Canadian Malartic, targeting 1 million ounces a year from each into the 2030s. So can you talk about the studies that are currently underway? What sort of decisions need to be made to maximize the value of those assets?

Well, I'll start by saying, while these are significant big projects in the scheme of things, they're not that complex. If you take a look at Detour in a nutshell, we would be -- remember, the mine is there. The mill is there, the power is there, the permits are there, the tailings facilities there.

At Detour, really, what we're doing is we are going to replace 0.9 gram open pit material with about 2.7 gram underground material. So it consists of building a ramp, building a paste plant, building a conveyance system. And really, that's about it. And we're good at that. At Malartic, it's -- the mill is there. The tailings are there, the power is there, the people are there. At Malartic, it's kind of the opposite, where at Detour, you've got a mill capacity that's largely full and you're changing what you're mining to increase the grade.

At Meliadine, you've got a mill that's going to have an awful lot of capacity as we transition from open pit to underground. So it's about new sources. And at Malartic, those new sources are -- we're building a shaft. We might build a second shaft. Eventually, we might even build a third shaft because the ore body continues to grow. We've got an open pit deposit that's 15 kilometers away that we bring in, we've got another underground mine nearby that we can source it.

So it's really -- it's not -- they're not just big, important long-life mines. They're in good jurisdictions. And as a person who I spent a lot of my career in finance. I'm going to repeat myself, but it's important. They give you the very best return on capital, and they give you the very best risk-adjusted return on capital. This is not going to a brand-new country where we've never been before where we have to hire a floor to hint or some contracting company to build it. This is in our backyard, and they're going very, very well.

And is there anything you can do to accelerate the growth from the 2030s?

Well, I think we are moving these projects forward faster than we had initially assessed. I've been in this business over 25 years. It is rare when you have a plan to build something that it actually goes better than you expected. And so these are moving very quickly. Again, we have the teams, we have the people, we have the resources, and we are actually going to be accelerating some of these projects. I expect you'll see that as we give our guidance next year as we talk about what's going to be announced and we talk about the capital that we've budgeted.

Okay. Look forward to that. You're the largest miner in Canada. So I'm interested in your perspective, country of Canada has new leadership, a new cabinet in place. so far, it seems like the government wants to enable the resource sector to grow. Can you share any thoughts on implications of the political backdrop for Agnico or the broader Canadian industry?

We've been very pleased with the support of the new government. We are the biggest miner in Canada. Frankly, we had difficulty getting the attention of anybody in the previous PMO office. I'll tell you -- I won't say the names, but I will tell you that the weekend after the election I got text messages from very senior federal ministers directly.

I mean I never met the people. I don't know how they got my phone number, but they reached out right away. So that just shows you, I think it's a bit of a sea change in attitude. It is going to take time. It's not that easy to do things instantly. But certainly, we're very encouraged by what we're hearing and seeing with the new government.

Interesting. One on the gold price and margins. I think the #1 question I get from generalists coming into the space these days is they see the unprecedented margin the industry is generating, and they say, how long can it last? A key part of that discussion is cost and CapEx. So I'm just interested in Agnico's process of setting mine plans and capital allocation when margins are this high.

Well, the interesting thing is these 5 projects we're talking about for any of you who have heard us talk before, they're the same 5 projects as last year and 2 years ago when we started the concept of them. So we are being disciplined. These are the highest return projects. We have our team focused on it. We're not stretching too thin.

We can do all of this, there are other opportunities. I mean there's something like Hammond Reef. That's something that actually is going to look good at these levels, but it doesn't meet the returns. It meets the 15% hurdle rate, but these things are higher and they're easier and they're more impactful.

So we are getting more opportunities. But I think the message I'd give all of you is we're going to stay focused and disciplined and deliver. And when we deliver, again, to go from roughly 3.4 million ounces a year to over 4 million, while you're reducing your shares, that's something our shareholders want. And again, return on capital really just means return on share on a per share basis.

Any questions from the crowd in the final few minutes here? No. Okay. I've got one more for you. When you look at your growth options, you've got these greenfields, Upper Beaver, Hope Bay, San Nicolás. How do you look at the attractiveness of those versus the brownfield opportunities?

Well, every project is different. But in general, and again, not always, but in general, it's better to leverage off existing infrastructure. It's less risky. It takes less capital, you've got the teams in place. And that's why having this regional approach really works for us. It's not just I've got a mill. It's I know the suppliers, I know the contractors, I'm the employee of choice. I know the community.

We had a tour -- I'll just finish with this. We had a tour at Upper Beaver a few months ago. It's a very simple example. But I think people were surprised how much progress we've made and how we're actually ahead of schedule. But I'll give you 2 specifics. They seem small, but they're important.

We went into the water treatment plant, and we're talking about the water treatment plant. And we talked a little bit about the plant, but what's interesting to me is the steel building around the plant is the 14th of those buildings we bought and had constructed from the same supplier, the 14th.

So me as a CEO, when I get a number that says, well, this building is going to cost x, we've already built 14 of them. I have a knowledge advantage. The shaft that we're building at Macassa, it's the same team that just built a -- sorry, the shaft that we're building at Upper Beaver is the same team that just built a shaft at Macassa 20 kilometers away.

It's the same team, the same equipment the same construction equipment to do it. It's a huge competitive advantage, not just in operation, but also in being able to make good capital allocation decisions.

Great. Well, that brings us the time. Thank you, Ammar.

My pleasure.

Okay. Welcome, everyone, to our next session. Just as an introduction, my name is Fahad Tariq. I'm a mining analyst based out of Toronto at Jefferies. I cover predominantly the large cap precious metals, including Agnico Eagle, of course, as well as some of the mid-cap copper companies in Canada. Really happy to have Agnico Eagle join us. Agnico Eagle probably needs no introduction, but I will introduce them anyway.

The second largest gold company in the world with a market cap of $70 billion. That was as of last week. I think I'm off by a couple of billion so it's probably higher than that today. Through disciplined acquisitions, the company has grown to 3.5 million ounce per year low-cost producer, leveraging its regional focused approach primarily in Canada. And important to note, at least in our model, 85% of the net asset value of the company is in Canada. And I'm really delighted we have today with us Jamie Porter, EVP Finance and CFO. Jamie, welcome to our conference.

Thanks, Fahad.

Maybe just to set the stage, this is an industrials conference. We do have quite a few generalist investors who maybe don't spend as much time looking at mining. Can you just provide just a high-level overview of the company, where the assets are located and just the cost structure?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you. I mean, you gave a pretty good overview, second largest gold mining company in the world by market capitalization, we produced just under 3.5 million ounces a year. The vast majority of that from Canada.

I think what differentiates the Agnico strategy though from Barrick and Newmont is that we -- while we're a global company. We have operations in Canada, Finland, Australia and Mexico. We are a regional miner. So our focus and the majority of our production comes from regional clusters in Northern Ontario, in Northern Quebec and Nunavut. Our strategy is really consolidation within a region to create a competitive advantage. So in the areas where we operate, we are the generally the largest employer, the employer of choice in many cases, our employee turnover is half of the industry average. We have long-standing multiple-decade relationships with our suppliers. We have purchasing power by virtue of the volumes that we buy. And we have the ability to share technical resources, so people, technical expertise, equipment, in some cases, parts and supplies because of the physical proximity of many of our mines. So that's really our strategy. And that's what helps us to keep our costs in check.

And if you look back over the past five years, I think cost inflation has moderated but Agnico has really been a leader in terms of keeping costs low, driving -- constantly looking for continuous improvement opportunities and efficiency to make sure that we allow the benefit of higher gold prices to actually accrue to our shareholders through margin expansion rather than having it get eaten up through higher costs.

And then just to address the elephant in the room, M&A, I'm sure it comes up often in meetings. If I think about your peer group, whether it's Newmont or Barrick, just the top three, it sounds like there are more divesting assets that they are acquiring. Agnico maybe is more uniquely positioned to acquire. Just walk through philosophically how the management team is thinking about M&A? You alluded to regional focus, but what are the other filters and screens that they're using?

Yes. I mean it's a good question. If you look back in Agnico's history, there has been a fairly significant M&A that's helped to bring the company to where it is today. a lot of the company's growth has come through the drill bit and then through the development of its own projects, but certainly significant M&A in 2022 with the merger with Kirkland Lake Gold, bringing in the Detour mine, Macassa assets as well as Fosterville, which are all important core assets to the company today.

We are uniquely positioned. I'd suggest in that we -- we're very happy with our current production base, producing 3.4 million ounces this year. We'll talk about I'm sure later on this morning, but we do have what we call our five key value drivers. So five projects that collectively represent about 1.5 million ounces of additional production. Now that will be offset by depletion at some of our existing mines, but we see the potential for 20% to 30% production growth over the course of the next 5 to 10 years, all with projects that we already own.

So from an M&A perspective, from an external M&A perspective, we can afford to be very patient and very disciplined. And obviously, we have to weigh any external opportunities against the internal development projects that are part of our organic growth pipeline that we already own and that we know are high return at gold prices, $1,000 an ounce below where current spot levels are. So yes, we'll take our time. Obviously, it's our job to look at every decent opportunity out there, but it's a pretty high bar in terms of competing for capital against what we already have.

One specific region that comes up often in M&A discussions, and there's been some media reports around this is Australia. Agnico, of course, has the Fosterville mine that they acquired through Kirkland Lake, a single mine in Victoria. How do you think about Australia as a region? Is that a place where you'd like to grow or potentially exit as you think about just having a single mine there?

Yes. I think when you look at our strategy, I mean, we're willing to accept technical risk and geologic risk but we're not -- we're less inclined to go into jurisdictions where there's high potential geopolitical risk or uncertainty around permitting and then the ability to develop projects and the rule of law and everything else. So looking through that lens, Canada is obviously a great place to operate the United States and Australia would be some of the top three gold mining jurisdictions in our view. So we are focused. We've got 85% of our NAV in production coming out of Canada. Newmont and Barrick have done a good job with the U.S. with their joint venture in Nevada and Australia is an obvious potential expansion jurisdiction for us.

That said, I'd say our thinking on Australia has evolved over the past several years. Immediately, after the merger with Kirkland Lake, there was a thought to potentially divesting of the Fosterville gold mine. At the time, the gold price is about $1,600 an ounce. Fosterville had been in operation for about 15 years. For most of those 15 years that had made a lot of money, and then they hit this ultra high-grade Swan zone and was printing like $1 billion a year of cash flow was one of the top five corporate taxpayers in Australia for a period of a couple of years. But those -- that zone was being mined through and grades were on the decline. And the thinking was, well, maybe this asset should be divested.

What's changed since then has really been the gold price. We've gone through a period of a near doubling of the gold price over the last several years. And now we're generating north of $1 million a day of free cash flow from the Fosterville mine. So it's extraordinarily profitable. Our geologists are very optimistic that there's strong potential for us to find another ultra high-grade zone and have another kind of boost in production. And where that mine is located, Fosterville's in the state of Victoria in Southern Australia, there's really no other mining -- gold mining operations in close proximity to us. So the infrastructure that we have there, the processing facilities creates a lot of optionality if there's other discoveries in the region. If we can find or another junior finds a good gold deposit within 100 kilometers of where we're located, that's likely going to be processed at our facility. So we see a lot of exploration upside. We see a lot of optionality associated with the infrastructure, and we're making a ton of money.

So Fosterville is core for now. Do we expand in Australia over time, potentially? But again, our focus is on regional clusters. So creating that competitive advantage from physical proximity and where Fosterville is located, there's not much around it. So we'll be very selective in terms of an expansion into Australia. And any opportunity again, would have to be weighed against our internal growth projects.

And then a lot of the opportunities, as you alluded to, in Australia would be Western Australia, which is not the same as Victoria. Is that -- would that still be considered. a Regional cluster if it was an acquisition, let's just say hypothetically in Western Australia?

There would be the potential, certainly, and again, because that's a location where you have multiple mines within the same kind of geographic region, and you can create that strong supplier network that employee base and everything. So yes, that would be a potential at some point if the right opportunity came along. But today, we're very focused on Canada and our existing development pipeline there.

And then maybe just lastly on M&A, and then I promise we'll talk about the operations. On commodity, we hear from some investors that we talk to that maybe the right thing, not just for Agnico, but for any gold company that's trading at a decent premium is to do something countercyclical, potentially look at copper opportunities. Maybe just talk through at a high level how management thinks about commodity.

Yes. So I would say our strategy differs from that of our peers. Some of our peers years ago decided they were going to pick another metal, copper, and they were going to set a target percentage of their revenue that they wanted to be in that other metal. And they kind of scour the globe for those opportunities.

Our strategy, I'd say, is entirely different. We are not choosing a specific metal, copper. We're willing to look at any other metal but only if it's an opportunity where we can lend our competitive advantage, our skill set. So if there's a copper, zinc, nickel, whatever project that's in our backyard, where we have the workforce, we have the supplier network, we'll look at it and then see if we can generate a good return for our shareholders, we'll absolutely consider that.

But we're 98% gold by revenue currently. We have one significant copper zinc project, our joint venture with Teck in the state of Zacatecas in Mexico. And even with that up in full operation, we're still 96% gold. So I would suggest that we will remain primarily gold for the short, medium and likely long term. But again, it's just based on the opportunity set. If there's an opportunity for us to do something approximate to where we already operate and we see a competitive advantage, then we'll consider it, and we're almost metal-agnostic.

Just switching to the actual operations. Canadian Malartic, of course, is the major growth driver or one of the major growth drivers. And the current plan is to mine additional ore underground at Malartic and then also satellite deposits, Marban, Wasamac. A lot of investors, particularly general investors, they don't have maybe as clear of an understanding of just how those different satellite pits or the underground come into the mine plan. Can you maybe just provide a high-level overview of where Malartic is today and how it grows to, let's say, 1 million-ounce per year?

Sure. Yes. So it's a good question, and maybe I'll go back in time 100 years. I mean this deposit was initially discovered in 1923 by a couple of brothers named the Gouldie Brothers. And now the heart of our deposit underground is called East Gouldie. But Agnico got involved initially in 2014 when Osisko Mining sold the Canadian Malartic asset. At the time, it was basically a big open pit project. It was a relatively low-grade bulk tonnage, 1-gram per tonne, 60,000 tonnes per day being mined and processed through the mill. Agnico entered into a 50-50 JV with Humana at the time. And a couple of years back was able to take out Humana's position and consolidate 100% of it. The open pit, so that this was Canada's largest open pit gold mine for a number of years. And what we're doing at the Canadian Malartic complex is transitioning it to being the largest underground mine in Canada. So we're going from 60,000 tonnes per day of relatively low grade 1-gram per tonne material to 20,000 tonnes per day of 3-gram per tonne material. So our production stays about flat, around 600,000 ounces a year. But all of a sudden, we've got 40,000 tons of available access mill capacity, which is -- provides tremendous optionality. So obviously, what we're doing is looking at ways to fill that mill because if we can fill it at that grade, we can produce well north of 1 million ounces a year. And then that's really been the objective.

The underground deposit at our Odyssey project has gone from zero ounces in reserves and resources in 2018 to -- we're north of 20 million ounces currently and growing. Deposits open in every direction. It's been arguably the best exploration discovery in the sector in the last decade. So we're north of 20 million ounces currently. We see the potential to sink a second shaft and secure another 10,000 tons per day of mill feed from a second shaft. We also have the satellite deposits that you alluded to, the one called Wasamac that's about 90 kilometers away from the Canadian Malartic mill. We see potential to develop that and truck that ore to the mill. We also acquired a company called O3 Mining. We announced that acquisition last December. And through that, acquired their Marban deposit, which we're drilling off now and [ drill defining ] but we see the potential for 14,000 tonnes per day of mill feed coming from Marban as well.

So if you put it all together, 20,000 tons from the planned first shaft underground gives us about 600,000 ounces a year. A second shaft gives us another 200,000 ounces a year and then if you add Marban and Wasamac, you get up to about 1 million ounces a year, and you still have about 13,000 tons of excess mill capacity. So there's tremendous exploration upside and again, tremendous optionality associated with having that mill capacity. We're drilling at a pace around Canadian Malartic that we never have in the company's history. We've got 25 drill rigs active currently on the Odyssey underground project and in the 20 kilometers surrounding that Malartic mill. There's a number of old mines that were shut down in the 50s, 60s, 70s because it just wasn't economic, but they were mining down to a depth of maybe 800 meters at a grade of 4 or 5 grams per tonne, we're down to 3.4 kilometers at our LaRonde mine. So the exploration potential and depth of these old mines is significant. And we're looking at ways to optimize the grade of that mill feed. If we can find other deposits and develop those at closer to 2 or 3 grams per tonne, we could see well north of 1 million ounces of annualized production. So that's the -- really, the focus there is just maximizing the value of that complex and that infrastructure.

Great. And is it fair to say that to the extent that you can expand the mining underground at Odyssey that, that would always take precedence over the satellite pits just from a grade perspective?

Yes, absolutely. I mean the average grade underground at Odyssey is around 3 grams. Our Wasamac project, the average grade is about 2.5 grams, but it's 90 kilometers away. So you have the incremental hauling cost, the average grade of the Marban satellite pit is closer to a gram. So it's relatively low grade. So we will absolutely prioritize continuing to figure out exactly how much we've got there and how underground and how best to access it. I mean, there's talk of a potential third shaft at some point. All of this takes time. We need to do the infill drilling and engineering and mine planning and everything else, but there's tremendous upside potential at that asset.

You touched on the exploration at Malartic, including at the satellite pits. What about the rest of the portfolio? What is the exploration team getting excited about? I mean there seems to be a lot of work being done at multiple mines. How would you kind of rank order where the most exploration upside is?

Yes. I mean I'd say our focus is on our biggest assets.

I mean, Canadian Malartic, we found 20 million ounces over the last 8 years at a discovery cost of CAD 10 an ounce. So that is -- I mean that's how you add value in the gold mining industry. If you can minimize your total cost. So you can either find ounces or you can buy them. If you're buying ounces through M&A, you're normally paying $300, $400 an ounce. If you can find them at $10 an ounce, you're off to a hell of a head start.

The second component of your cost is your capital cost per ounce. And if you can leverage existing infrastructure, you can minimize your capital intensity. And then the third component is obviously your operating costs. And if you have that kind of regional setup that we do where you benefit from synergies, you can minimize your operating costs and your all-in cost of producing an ounce of gold is as low as possible. So Canadian Malartic is a huge priority, as I already talked about.

The other major priority for the company from an exploration perspective is at Detour. So Detour is another mine that it's a bit of a unicorn in our industry. It's currently producing -- it's now the Canada's largest open pit gold mine. Produces about 700,000 ounces a year. Reserves and resources have gone from 20 million to 40 million ounces over the past decade. We put out a study last June whereby we're planning ongoing underground to access some higher grades and bring production up to 1 million ounces a year.

So that study that was based on information from two years ago had us getting up to 1 million ounces of production a year in 2030 and staying there for about 13 years. Since that time, we've been continuing to drill, and we've seen better grades closer to surface. And we actually see the potential to bring that -- some of that production forward and actually get to 1 million ounces sooner and to be able to stay there for longer. So we're dedicating a lot of our exploration budget to Detour and making sure we flesh out exactly what we have underground there so that we can optimize the value creation at that asset.

So Canadian Malartic and Detour, our two biggest assets, by far, long-life, very large assets, and they're the focus from an exploration perspective. Beyond that, we have a project called Hope Bay in Nunavut. We currently operate two mines in Nunavut, Meadowbank and Meliadine. Together, they produce about 900,000 ounces a year. Meadowbank is in decline. We were initially scheduled to actually end the mine life there in 2028. At these gold prices, we see the potential to push that out to about 2035. But production will be declining. So in order to really offset that and keep our production from the Nunavut platform close to 1 million ounces a year, we're looking at a redevelopment of Hope Bay. And Hope Bay has been another key focus from an exploration perspective. We've bought the asset from TMAC Resources in 2021. They were operating it at a much smaller like 2,000 tonnes per day producing around 100,000 ounces a year. In Nunavut, you need scale. You need size and scale in order to make money, everything cost 3x as much as it would in the southern part of Canada. So we've spent the last three years really drilling that deposit off. And over the last two years have discovered this new zone called Patch 7, that's higher grade and represents really a third mining front for us. So we'll be announcing a construction decision on Hope Bay in the first half of next year. And really, it's that Patch 7 zone that has helped to push that project to the size and scale that we need. We think it will be about 400,000 ounces a year, and it will go for decades.

So I'd say Detour, Canadian Malartic and Hope Bay have been the three key focus areas. But across the portfolio, I mean, Fosterville, we're looking for another super high-grade zone. We've -- we're drilling even San Nicolas, which is in the relatively -- we're just doing the feasibility study and permitting activities there, but we've had some good success there. So there's lots of upside across the portfolio.

And the exploration budget, whether it's 2025 or 2026, does that -- does it line up with the order that you provided to Canadian Malartic, Detour, Hope Bay? Would that be roughly how the exploration dollars are allocated as well?

Yes. That's exactly right. So yes, we spent about $300 million a year. We'll spend about $300 million this year on exploration. We've got about 125 drills running across the company. And as I mentioned, 25 at Canadian Malartic. So that's about 20% of our overall activity.

And then just switching gears to costs. So one of the, I guess, really impressive operating performance in the first half was just Agnico's cost control. So rough numbers for anyone looking at Agnico. All-in sustaining costs around $1,300 an ounce. Your peers are $200 to $300 an ounce higher than that. That may surprise a lot of generalist investors who think of Canada as expensive labor market. You mentioned Nunavut, things are expensive to just even transport supplies there. Maybe talk through how Agnico has been able to achieve peer-leading costs among the seniors.

Yes. I mean, obviously, the Canadian dollar has helped over the past several years. I mean we've had about 5 years of increasing U.S. dollar gold prices and a weakening Canadian dollar. So I can't discount that. I mean that's been a contributor for sure. But I think -- and I touched on it briefly previously, it's really our strategy. It's that regional consolidation focus. We have five mines in Northern Ontario, Northern Quebec that are within a few hundred kilometers of one another. And within about a 10-hour drive of our head office in Toronto, there's tremendous synergy associated with that. Again, supplier -- in many cases, like we've been active in the Abitibi in Northern Quebec at least for over 60 years. So in many cases, we helped our suppliers set up their business when they initially got it up and running, which means if we need something, they drop everything to help us.

So that's a distinct competitive advantage. I mean our employee turnover in Quebec right now -- or not right now over the last 12 months -- trailing 12 months is 4%, less than half of the industry average. So Agnico is the employer of choice. Turnover is minimized our costs in terms of just purchasing power are lower than those of many other kind of single asset companies. And there's an intense focus on cost control. I mean our messaging over the past several years internally has been -- the gold price is going up, but we can't lose focus on cost and capital discipline. We need to constantly be evaluating how we do things and looking for opportunities to get better.

The example that I always refer to -- we have a gentleman named Mark [indiscernible], who was Vice President of our Nunavut operations. And a few years back, they recognized that Meadowbank was going into decline and would be approaching closure. And he recognized that they needed to reduce costs in order to keep the operation going. And they brought in a third-party to help with an internal review of everything the mine does, the process flow, equipment availability with a view to just optimization. They were able to shave over USD 100 an ounce per ounce of production off their cost structure and extend the mine by two years.

So that kind of process that third-party check on how we do things, we've extended across all of our operations. And every year, we're looking at what are the technical limits, what's the maximum output that we should be able to achieve based on the equipment and people and resources that we have and trying to minimize the gap if there is one from where we are. So we're always focused on operational efficiency. I'd suggest that in underground gold mining, we're a leader with respect to automation and technology adoption. A major project for us this year is a fleet management system underground. So underground mining is still very rudimentary. In some cases, you go down the shaft, you get a clipboard and wander over to your piece of equipment and start your day, but there's often a big lag between the time you actually start working in the time you start being productive. So we're looking at digitizing a lot of our underground mines and optimizing how our process flow works using technology to do that, and that could be a game changer in terms of our overall cost structure and productivity.

Are there any questions in the room? We can take some questions in the room. If you just wait for the mic, and then we can start.

George Ross for [indiscernible], not precious metals analyst. That's our other guys, you know them. Just a quick question on the [ Macalena Bay ] project. When you guys have raised your stake to, I think, almost 14% of the company for in. Just curious, is that one of those cases where you have potential regional synergies because it's not really a gold asset as I understand it. Just curious what your thoughts on that?

Yes, that's correct. I mean there is some gold there, but it's primarily a zinc copper asset. Why we were interested in that project is really an [indiscernible] to our LaRonde mine. So I mean, you'll note the name of the company, Agnico is the silver nickel cobalt, the early days of Agnico were very much less focused on gold. And even 25 years ago, the majority of the revenue came from zinc and copper. LaRonde is really the founding mine of current Agnico was opened 37 years ago with an 8-year life. It's been expanded 5 times. There's 4 shafts and the wins there currently. It's produced 8 million ounces, been operational for 37 years. And it's a VMS-style deposit, and we see similar potential at with [indiscernible] projects. So we're not interested for what they have now. We're interested in having a seat at the table and seeing how the deposit evolves and whether they're able to grow it, double it or triple it in time, at which point we might be more interested.

The other thing that's interesting is that we're starting to source a lot of labor for our Hope Bay project out of Central and Western Canada. So we do see the potential for that to be another regional hub in the future if we see other opportunities there or end up creating a regional head office supporting Nunavut in that part of Canada.

I think there was one more question up here.

Good morning. Threefold. Like one, if you look into Canada, you see at New Afton with New Gold, they extend the mine line, you see mine life, you see that [ Heiden Valley ] that -- they extend the mine life you do it at the Hope Bay. Like is this a Canadian thing that you [ perhaps ] with higher prices can go into existing locations and extend mine life?

And the second question is leading on the reserves. Like at what price have you booked basically your reserves, like the price of gold went up sharply, but I guess your reserves, proven and probable reserves booked on a different price far lower. So at what point are you going to increase your price in your net present value calculation?

Yes. No, both great questions. On the first question, like is it something kind of particular to Canada where we're able to extend mine life. I think there's two parts to that. One, yes, often when the gold price goes up, there's lower grade material that previously would have been designated as waste that all of a sudden is economic. So you're able to extend mine life that way. The other, I guess more geological answer would be in certain parts of Canada, the Abitibi where the majority of our production comes from these deposits tend to extend a depth. And I talked about LaRonde. LaRonde, we're mining down. That's the deepest mine in the Western Hemisphere, the deepest gold mine in the Western hemisphere, 3.4 kilometers. So there are a lot of old mines that were mined down to a depth of 600, 700, 800 meters and shut down 50 years ago, where they haven't been exploration tested since. So there is a lot of potential there.

On your second question with respect to reserve pricing, absolutely. I mean there's a massive disjoint between our reserve price last year was $1450 and current gold price is north of $3,500.

So I think the industry -- it's a challenge for the industry because if everyone updated the reserve pricing to spot, grades would drop by 30% which means margins dropping by 30%. And so there's a balance between protecting the integrity of your short- to medium-term mine plans while making sure that you're optimizing value. So in situations where we have spare mill capacity, we're absolutely processing more because it makes sense to do so because we're making money in other situations where we don't have excess mill capacity, especially in open pits scenarios, we're looking at stockpiling some of that material that's potentially economic and ensuring that it's there for closer to the end of the mine life to feed the mill and make sure we don't lose that production. But that's a great question. It's a challenge for the industry when you see such a dramatic increase in the price of gold.

Maybe one more. Yes, go ahead.

Yes. A quick one for me. Right now, you are constructing Canadian Malartic underground, you are also thinking of the detail underground. We've seen in the sector CapEx budgets blowing out and when the projects are built, they're not working -- to the design spec, how do you protect against that risk for your projects? Do you -- for construction expertise right now, and we know that it's very hard for companies to build projects, how do you get to the right answer?

Yes, that's a great question, and it gives me an opportunity to talk about our construction team. So we do have -- and that's another thing that I'd suggest is unique about Agnico. We build our own mines. We have an in-house, like basically EPCM construction team, 400 people led by an Agnico lifer that have built multiple mines for the company. We have two distinct shaft sinking teams. We're not reliant on Redpath or cementation, we do it ourselves. We have one currently working on at Odyssey, Canadian Malartic. And we have another that completed the #4 shaft at Macassa that will sink the shaft at Upper Beaver. So that is a very unique advantage. We have this in-house team. We are able -- because of our size and scale, we're the largest mining company in Canada. What we call contractors, we're able to ask for the A team and dictate how they operate and work with us. That gives us a lot more control over our capital budgeting and spending and our timing. Just as an example, I was visiting our Upper Beaver project a couple of months back. And there's a gentleman building a water treatment plant, and I asked his background. He said, "Oh, I've done 8 of these. And most recently, I built the water treatment plant at Meliadine" So there's a lot of in-house technical construction expertise that I'd say -- I'd suggest derisks our projects.

I think we're right up on time. Jamie, thank you so much. That was excellent.

Thank you.

Welcome back. My name is Courtney Libby, and I'm a Vice President in Canaccord's Natural Resources Investment Banking team based out of Perth. I've had a few coaching lessons on how to pronounce our first speaker's name, and I'm sure I'll still probably get it wrong, but let's give it a go.

First up, we have Jean Robitaille, who is the Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Agnico Eagle Mines. Jean is one of the original members of an executive group established in the late '90s at Agnico Eagle. He's been instrumental in Agnico Eagle's journey from a small regional mining company in Abitibi to a globally recognized industry leader. Today, Agnico Eagle has 11 operating assets, generates over USD 5 billion of EBITDA and has become a benchmark in the industry. Over to you, Jean.

Thank you, Courtney. So apparently, it's very serious. So I'm not supposed to -- it's the first time I present here. So normally, I will do a joke, I will not. And in the room, we have the group of Agnico Eagle. They are phoning me on again on my watch just to make sure I will be fully concentrate.

So good day, Australia. Is it Okay? Good. So thank you, Courtney. So let's go. I will not burn all of the time. So good morning, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be today at Diggers & Dealers. I'm quite impressed with the -- everything organized. It's the second year I'm coming.

So I really appreciate the opportunity to present Agnico Eagle. In fact, 37 years ago, I started with Agnico Eagle from a very small mining company to now what is, in fact, a global enterprise worldwide. And we are the second largest by market cap gold company in the world. It's not too bad.

So I will give you a good perspective on the -- what we were able to accomplish and what is our vision moving forward. The -- please note the cautionary statement on forward-looking information and also all of the currency are in U.S. dollar. Before going any further, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the country where we are meeting today, and I pay my respect to their culture, to the elders past, present and emerging.

Agnico Eagle. What is our strategy? It's quite simple. We focus on region with high geological potential and political stability, allowing us to develop mine for a decade to come. And more than in any region, we're looking not just to have one mine, but eventually develop a regional platform. So we are global, but we are regional oriented.

So we are currently in 4 countries: Canada, Australia, Finland and Mexico. The majority, you can see on the chart on the right, the majority of our production, 85% come from Canada in Northern Ontario, Northern of Quebec -- northwest of Quebec and in Nunavut. Nunavut is quite north and colder than here, to be honest.

And when we developed this, we were able to build competitive advantage with the different entrepreneur or service provider, and that was the core of building our business. So in Canada itself, we have 12,000 employees currently, and we are an employee -- an employer of choice. One of the competitive advantage we have, as I mentioned, with the contractor, with the entrepreneur, with the different stakeholder, we have also -- our competitive advantage, we will say, will resume in terms of the technical ability to advance our -- different project.

So it's not too big, the team, but it's not too small. So we have in the field of the different expertise, geology, mining, metallurgy and all related to the business, we are able to support our operation to be able to improve them. And in parallel, we are also able to develop our project that we have in the pipeline. So this is an angle that we -- and I will come back. This is an angle that we -- on this later on.

This is an angle that it make a huge difference from our perspective to be where we are at this point of time. So if you look at our track record over the last 20 years, you can see on the slide from 2005 to 2024, we passed from 1 operating mine to 11 currently operating mines. We're in 1 country. Now we are in 4 countries.

In terms of the production profile, we're at 240,000 ounces, and now we're near 3.5 million ounces and a production that we'll be able to sustain moving forward, and we see some growth I will explain later on. On the key metrics per share metrics, if you look the 3 other components, we were able to substantially improve the return to our shareholder mainly on the per 1,000 share, the production per ounce, the ounces per 1,000 share, the EBITDA per 1,000 share and as well as if you look bottom line, the dividend, and we pay dividend for many, many years.

In fact, we never reduced -- since I'm with the company, we never cut the dividend. It was always a dividend, and it's quite decent, USD 1.60 per share on an annual basis. You can see on the chart also in terms of our gold production, the last quarter that we just reported, we produced 866,000 ounces at a cash cost, all-in sustaining cost, $1,293. It's sustained, it's stable.

We are within our guidance, maybe slightly above, looking forward statement at the beginning. And if you look the chart below, we were able to increase the all-in sustaining cost margin percentage. So everything we do, we were able with the technical support with the good operation team we have to be able to participate to the margin expansion with the price of gold going up. So this is -- we are very proud, and we are working really to return as much as we can to our shareholders.

So to be able to develop this, we have -- our strategy, it's quite simple. So we look to develop more and more the pipeline looking forward in the long-term pipeline. So in terms of evaluation of our different project [indiscernible] that we do, we have a dedicated team working closely with. We have our project evaluation, working with the technical services and the exploration group. Exploration is key for us.

This is what makes a difference to build the company we are. So if you look just in terms of our exploration program to be able to add value in the area that we focus mainly, it's resource conversion in terms where we have any mine, what can we explore around to be able to continue to feed our operation or the ore processing facilities that we have and expand mineral resource, it's one of the key drivers.

This year, in 2025, the budget is above USD 500 million -- USD 525 million. Just in terms of exploration, in terms of the drill, we have 121 drilled presently worldwide for a budget above $300 million. In parallel, we are -- and I will talk later on, we are advancing exploration infrastructure for close to $150 million. And finally, in terms of the technical study, advancing our project slightly above $70 million.

You have on this slide also 2 examples how we are able to -- when we develop a project or we move, how we are able through exploration, through the different study, we're able to increase the value. So at Kittila, in 2005, we acquired Riddarhyttan Resources. Kittila is in Finland. And you see the -- based on resource, what we're able to achieve. And also in Nunavut Meadowbank, when we did the -- from the acquisition in 2007 from Cumberland Resources, we're able to expand the resource. And for sure, we are continuing to mine. So it's a proven model that add value.

Just to give you a perspective in terms of our strategy. So I took the example of in Canada, the Northwest -- the Northern Ontario and Northwest of Quebec, the consolidation that we were able to do over years. So based on this, what you can see, we're able to acquire 50% of Canamartic (sic) [ Canadian Malartic ] in 2014. We're successful to acquire the other half in 2023. We added Upper Beaver, what is an ore body close of Macassa in Kirkland Lake. We did the merge with Kirkland Lake Gold in 2022, what brought also Fosterville into the equation and adding Wasamac and more recently, O3 Mining in Quebec with the project Marban.

So all of this presently from -- you look Canadian Malartic 2014 to now, you see again the expansion in terms of the resource base and Detour from 2020 when Kirkland Lake acquired them and where we are at this point of time. So our intention is always the same, how can we continue to add value. One of the key elements, it's always with -- through the drill bit and after being able to support the study and support the operation, maintaining a very decent cash cost of operation, and be able to deliver for our shareholders.

Canadian Malartic, more as an example. So our plan is to go to 1 million ounces towards -- in 2030. Bottom line, Canadian Malartic, it's a large open pit in Quebec, Canada and 60,000 tonnes per day mill capacity. We have through exploration, we're able to discover an extension underground. So we approve the sinking of a shaft, and it's already in operation. We continue to sink the shaft. And this will transit from 60,000 tonnes per day at 1 gram-ish to 20,000 tonnes per day from underground at 3 gram.

So it give us a 40,000 tonnes mill capacity in excess. On this presently, with continuous exploration. I feel I repeat myself, exploration. So we have Guy Gosselin in the room. He is our Head of Exploration. So probably he will be very happy. Normally, I don't talk that much about the group, but we are very proud of them.

So we are looking to add another shaft to add more because the size of the ore body in excess of it, we will add the Marban that we just did the acquisition. It's roughly 13 kilometers from the mill. So we are conducting a study now, and we anticipate to be in a position to bring the ore to the mill.

We have also acquired Wasamac when we did the other half of Canadian Malartic. All this combined show us that we will be in a position to produce 1 million ounces per year at Canadian Malartic. It gives you an example of what the way we are working really oriented with regional opportunity, how we can build from one asset and we can expand.

Now with the merge of -- with Kirkland Lake, we were fortunate to have a Fosterville operation. Listen, this is a good operation. Recently, they have the long-term approval. So we see at least another decade of operation. We're working to improve the asset and probably increase slightly the throughput to maintain a decent operation.

On this side, we are aggressive on exploration. So I don't know who know Ian in the room. He has a strong accent. I'm telling you he has a very strong accent. I have hard time to understand when he talked to me. So -- but after a few beer, I understood that he said there is another Swan Zone. So we are investing more on exploration, not more, but we are aggressive on exploration. We would like to discover the full potential of Fosterville.

So the budget is quite substantial as on the other projects that we have across the organization. In Australia, also, we are in Northern Territory. We own the entire Pine Creek district. We have a mill facility, permitted mill process plant and tailing facility. It's in care and maintenance. We are doing study. We're doing also exploration, and we are looking if there is an opportunity to restart the operation. Stay tuned. We will update you. We don't have a time on this, but Yes.

So I have 13 or 12 from Agnico Eagle, so they are watching me. So on this, the -- we have 5 -- I have 5 minutes, but we have 5 key projects in our pipeline. We have a lot of projects, but the major one that we are working on presently, it's to advance those projects, the study to be able to continue to build our production profile and maintain and being sustainable.

So the first one is Detour. Mainly Detour, the key point is last year, we approved an exploration ramp, and we will go underground and we will do a bulk sample. We will be in a position to confirm the continuity and the grade, and we anticipate in 2027 to be in a position to move forward. We perceive this. It's a good addition with a higher grade to help -- not help, but this is our vision also for Detour to go at 1 million ounces per year in 2030-ish.

Canadian Malartic, I will not go in more detail. Study is expected in the first half of 2027. Now Upper Beaver, it's another ore body, 10% copper in terms of revenue versus gold. We will need to have a process plant with the flotation circuit. So we'll not use what we have at Macassa, but we will be able to use the infrastructure or the synergy out there.

We are doing an exploration shaft. Everything will be properly positioned or built to allow us to go in operation. And we are doing in parallel an exploration ramp, again, to bulk sample continuity of the ore body and the grade before making a final decision in terms of moving forward in operation.

Now OP in Nunavut. We have currently Meadowbank and Meliadine in Nunavut. We want to stay in Nunavut. We want to expand. So in 2021, we acquired TMAC. And from there, we decided to put in care and maintenance. It's challenging operating in the north remotely, and we just decided to invest massively in exploration. We need -- based on our experience, we need roughly 400,000 ounces, and we are looking at 10 years of operation.

We're successful in operation. The exploration continue. The study is advancing well, and we anticipate in the first half of 2026 to be in a position to update the market and potentially make a decision.

And finally, in terms of Mexico, we have our JV with -- that we recently did. We are advancing with Teck, and we are advancing -- this is a VMS. We're advancing the feasibility study. The permitting are all in place. We are expecting by the end of the year or early next year to be in a position to make a decision. This is -- so that summarize high-level Agnico Eagle.

So what we are looking across all of the regions we operate, we -- if you recall, I said high geological potential and political stability. We are working in partnership. We're looking to a partner. When we do any investment or we work with others, okay, we want to make sure that we'll participate, but not just financially when we invest, but also on the technical side. So we are not shy to share our expertise to help to develop other projects. And when time happen, if it's happened, we want to be the best partner.

So on this, I would like to thanks the organization committee, Diggers & Dealers, very great. I'm very pleased to be here. And thank you to listen my presentation. Sorry for the accent, okay? But I decided to do anything. No, I'm not sorry. okay. So thank you, everyone.

Good morning. My name is Jenny, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Mines Limited Second Quarter 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, and good morning, and thank you all for joining our Agnico Eagle second quarter conference call. It's always a pleasure to speak to all of you and particularly a pleasure when things are going well, and we have good news to share like this morning.

Before we come to our call, however, I'd like to remind everyone that we'll be making a number of forward-looking statements, so please keep that in mind and refer to the disclaimers at the beginning of this presentation. The message we'll be sharing with you this morning is, frankly, the same positive message we've been sharing for the last several quarters. One, we continue to report record financial results, driven by strong and consistent operational performance. Two, we continue to strengthen the company, to strengthen the balance sheet and to return record amounts of cash flows to our owners and three, we continue to invest heavily in building the foundations of our future growth, and we're excited to talk about that.

By any measure, we've had another strong quarter. Gold prices are up, gold production is strong, and our costs are under control. With that, we're making a lot of money for our owners and reporting once again record financial results. Record free cash flow at $1.3 billion, record adjusted EBITDA at $1.9 billion, record adjusted net income at $1.94 a share and remember, it's always the per share metrics that matter most. We've returned record cash flow to our owners in the form of $200 million in dividends and $100 million in share buybacks, add to that a further $550 million of debt repayments. And while delivering those record financial results, these record financial results, we continue to make great progress and in some cases, accelerating progress towards building the best project pipeline we've ever had. And we continue to have great success with the most aggressive exploration program we've ever had.

With 866,000 ounces of safe, responsible gold production at peer-leading costs, I want to take a moment to thank all of our Agnico Eagle family for delivering these results. We know it's not easy. We know you work under difficult conditions, whether it's 3 kilometers underground at LaRonde or at minus 50 degrees in Nunavut. We know you always work hard, there are always challenges and you push yourselves. You all do a great job quarter after quarter, reliably, safely, responsibly and I just want to acknowledge and appreciate that. We all do.

I'm proud to say that as gold is up $400 this quarter, our cash costs are up a relatively modest $30 per ounce compared to Q1. This means that we're delivering 93% of this remarkable gold price increase to our owners. Jamie will go through that in a bit more detail, but again to our teams on the ground great work on cost control. Of course, one should expect record financial results when we have record gold prices. That's why people invest in a gold company and while we are naturally proud to be able to deliver these financial results, we want to emphasize that we remain regardless of gold price, absolutely laser-focused on operational improvements, on controlling our costs, on capital discipline and on continuing to build value per share for our owners. Consider the following examples in this quarter alone.

At Odyssey, record gold production and record underground development. At Goldex, record tonnes processed. At Macassa, record gold production, at Detour, the best mill throughput for a second quarter ever, and that our exploration sites, Guy and his team have delivered, I think, quite remarkable 9% reduction in costs per meter drilled. These are all just a few examples, individually they may not seem material, but collectively, quarter-over-quarter, this focus on improvement adds up and makes a big difference.

And it also illustrates part of the culture at Agnico Eagle, where everyone at every level is encouraged and authorized to look at all options to do things better. At the same time, we continue to invest in the future as we make steady progress on our 5 key value drivers. Ongoing work to get Detour to over 1 million ounces a year, our vision to get Malartic to over 1 million ounces a year, excellent construction progress at Upper Beaver, a brand-new mine in a great region that could add over 200,000 ounces a year, continued great drill results and accelerating on-site activity at Hope Bay with a target of over 400,000 ounces a year and continued progress at San Nicolas, a high-grade, high-return copper project in the best mining jurisdiction in Mexico.

These projects cumulatively represent approximately 1.3 million to 1.5 million ounces of potential production, all from assets we already own in regions we've been operating for decades and in most cases, leveraging off existing infrastructure already in place. Dominique and Natasha will provide a brief update on some of these projects and Jamie will describe how at these gold prices, we cannot only fund acceleration of these projects but continue to strengthen our balance sheet and continue to increase returns to our shareholders.

And finally, once again, Guy Gosselin will be the star of the show as he spends a few minutes highlighting some of the exciting exploration results our team is delivering at some of the most promising ore bodies in the world.

And with that, I'll now turn it over to our CFO, Jamie Porter, to review the second quarter financial results.

Thank you, Ammar, and good morning, everyone. We've had an excellent first half of the year with another strong quarter of operating results and good cost performance. By delivering on our production targets and controlling costs, we continue to ensure that the benefit of margin expansion in a higher gold price environment accrues directly and indirectly to our shareholders through both direct shareholder returns and the strengthening of our balance sheet.

Our strong operational performance and cost control paired with higher gold prices, drove record financial results, including record revenue of $2.8 (sic) [ $2.9 ] billion, record adjusted earnings of $976 million or $1.94 per share and record adjusted EBITDA of $1.9 billion, and record free cash flow of $1.3 billion. Free cash flow more than doubled quarter-over-quarter, benefiting from favorable working capital adjustments, primarily due to an increase in accrued taxes payable.

Gold production in the second quarter was approximately 866,000 ounces at total cash costs of $933 per ounce and all-in sustaining costs of $1,289 per ounce. Gold production was better than anticipated this quarter, primarily due to better grades at LaRonde, Canadian Malartic and Macassa with this outperformance partially offset by lower production at our Nunavut operations due to an extended Caribou migration and lower gold production at Detour.

I'm pleased to report that costs were within our guidance range. While our total cash costs of $933 per ounce were $30 per ounce higher than in the first quarter, the quarter-over-quarter increase was primarily due to higher royalties as a result of higher gold prices and a weakening Canadian dollar, which on a combined basis represents an increase of about $46 per ounce. If we exclude the impact of royalties on foreign exchange, our cash costs were actually lower than in the first quarter, which is, again, a testament to the ongoing optimization efforts that Dom Natasha will talk about later in the presentation.

For the full year, we are maintaining our cost guidance and expect cash costs to be within the guided range of $915 to $965 per ounce. All-in sustaining cost per ounce were higher than the previous quarter, primarily due to the increased cash costs and the timing of sustaining capital spend. We continue to expect to be within our guidance for the full year at between $1,250 and $1,300 per ounce. Our all-in sustaining costs continue to be hundreds of dollars per ounce below those of our peers. This is the result of our focus on controlling costs, continuous improvement initiatives and the benefits of our regional strategy.

As an example of the benefits of that regional strategy, our Abitibi platform in Quebec and Ontario has outperform in the first half of 2025 with over 1 million ounces of gold production at total cash cost of only approximately $850 per ounce and a realized operating margin of 73%. This platform hosts 5 of our 10 operating mines, including the 2 largest gold mines in Canada with multiple decades of mine life and strong potential across the region to continue to grow and expand.

If we move on to the next slide, the record free cash flow we generated this quarter allowed us to continue to strengthen our balance sheet, ending the quarter with net cash of almost $1 billion, improving from a net debt position of $5 million at last quarter end. In addition, given our strong cash position, we decided to prepay $510 million of long-term debt in addition to the $40 million of debt that matured in the quarter. Over the past 15 months, we have significantly deleveraged the balance sheet, reducing our gross debt in that period by $1.3 billion. We will look for further opportunities to reduce debt in the third quarter and intend to continue to strengthen the balance sheet, increase our financial flexibility while at the same time, increasing returns to shareholders.

We move on to the next slide. We delivered -- as Ammar mentioned, we delivered record shareholder returns this quarter, totaling approximately $300 million and $550 million for the first half of the year, bringing the cumulative shareholder returns in Agnico's history to approximately $4.7 billion, majority of which has been returned in the last several years. From a capital allocation perspective, we remain well positioned in this gold price environment to continue to take a balanced approach. We expect to continue to increase shareholder returns through increased share buyback activity and dividends, we also expect to continue to strengthen our financial position and flexibility by increasing our net cash position and potentially repaying additional debt.

Lastly and importantly, we will continue to reinvest in our business in order to bring our high-return organic growth projects online. We have 5 key value driver projects between Detour underground, filling the mill at Canadian Malartic, Upper Beaver, Hope Bay and San Nicolas, all of which generate solid returns at gold prices $1,000 or more below current spot levels. We have a strong balance sheet, and we'll look for opportunities to accelerate reinvestment in the business to drive growth and value creation. At current gold prices, we are generating a lot of cash, and we'll remain disciplined with a measured capital allocation approach which is focused on increasing returns to shareholders over the long term.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Dominique, who will provide an overview of our Quebec, Nunavut and Finland operations.

Thank you, Jamie. Good morning, everyone. First, I would like to thank the teams for the excellent quarter to continue to keep improving safetly, focusing on cost and production, productivity while protecting the environment and the wide life. The quarter was led by LaRonde -- the production was led by LaRonde in Canadian Malartic mainly because of upside grade. So at LaRonde, we had 3 of the 25 stopes better than expected and at Canadian Malartic still having more tonnes at good grade around old workings, which is a positive surprise. Very good timing because it offsets some challenges at Nunavut, where we have a longer Caribou migration, than planned in our forecast. Some years are better like last year and some years require more stoppage like this year. It is very variable and depending on the Caribou [path]. So we don't control that one, but our plan are adjusted to it. And wild life protection will remain always a priority.

But despite those challenges in Q2 in Nunavut both Meliadine and Meadowbank remain on track to achieve this year's guidance.

Moving to the optimization. I would like to thank specifically the Kittila team, where and congratulate them because they are doing significant change management in their way to approach underground production and we see 10% to 15% improvement in productivity underground, which lead to a 4% decrease in cost per ton if we compare the first half of '25 compared to the first half of 2024. So very good there.

But the thing I would like to bring your attention is about fleet management system. Currently, our underground mine are operating mainly based on radio communication and manual scheduling. So a driver could -- a truck driver could often wait or doing unnecessarily traveling due to change of, for example, an equipment is down or just the timing so the truck drivers are not fully efficient right now. Imagine that you have -- you are in a truck underground into a tunnel, you don't have a visibility of what it is, let's say, 2, 3, 4 kilometers away. It's very difficult to be optimum.

What is a fleet management system? It is a system that gives you a real-time track information about the equipment and the people that you could track. So the system knows exactly where each one is, how fast it's moving and if it is waiting. So with the fleet management system with algorithm and artificial intelligence, we will be able to optimize and to originate the fleet to reassign the trucks or to better route if needed, if something happened. So the result of that, as an example, currently, a truck could do maybe 5 trips into a shift, if we bring that to 7 trips into a shift, that's a 40% improvement. Simple like that. It's also reducing fuel consumption because there's less idle time and less route that traveling that you do, which is unnecessary.

So what is our plan is to use LZ5 and to pilot a new fleet management system for underground. The LZ5 team have been the leaders to implementing the first LTE communication system in the world underground. That was 7 to 8 years ago. They've been the leaders into implementing remote operation underground, where right now, 25% of the ore is out of the mine without any truck driver operating from surfaces. And the next chapter for them is to develop the fleet management system for underground. What result we could expect from that when we look historically using those systems into open pit, which we do, could be 10% to 15% improvement. So we expect to reach that also for underground. Remains to be seen, it remains to be done, lots of work, but we count on LZ5 to develop that. We're going to pilot in 2025, the loading and the hauling and in 2026 starting went after positive results, starting to implement that also to other mines which already have equipment connected to the system.

Moving to the next slide. I would like to bring your attention to the figure on the right. So you could see in black, this is the -- what is done concerning the ramp and the shaft development, shaft sinking. The good news, we are on target, we are in cost. And even though the shaft sinking is 4 to 5 weeks in advance compared to the plan, very good news. The second thing on the image, you could see the dotted line that was the resource use when we did the June '23 study. As Guy going to show you that ore body just keep growing.

So right now, if we take all the resources together, we're looking to 20 million ounces into that ore body. So that brings me to my -- the point #1 and #2 below, where shaft #1, the team came with a good idea to improve it. We're going to go slightly deeper, 70 meters deeper with the shaft #1. And we're going to also add a second loading station to build flexibility to help the production and to save on costs with this one. So that's the first thing now new into the story.

And the second one about the second shaft. The team is finalizing where it's going to be and the capacity of this one. But it looks like it's going to be close to this one because the reason is simple because that's the center of the mass. And it is also bringing some flexibility or synergy to work with the first shaft. So again, we're not yet finalized on that one, but this is where we're heading. And it's also -- strategically, we need to position that shaft into good rock. So with the shaft #1 at 20,000 tonnes per day, including the ramp plus shaft #2, let's say, at potentially 10,000 tonnes per day, we're going to be 30,000 tonne per day coming from that ore body and potentially getting to 750,000 to 800,000 ounces per year from 1 ore body. So that's going to be definitely the biggest underground mine in Canada in terms of production of gold.

But we still have room at the mill. We have 60,000 tonnes per day. We're going to use 30 just for that ore body. This is why #3 and #4. We're looking to Marban pit which is 13 kilometers away Satellite pit of the Canadian Malartic mill. We're going to truck it to the mill, and we have the Wasamac underground satellite project, which is 100 kilometers away from the Malartic mill. When you add all of them together, we're going to be around 45,000 to 50,000 tonnes per day, and we're getting to the 1 million ounces production per year. So that vision is realistic, and this is what we're working on. All those piece of the puzzle, let's say, #2 to #4 is going to came together with advanced studies more in early 2027, we're going to be in position to give you more detail on that.

On this, I will pass the microphone to Natasha.

Thanks, Dom, and good morning, everyone. So I'll cover the operational highlights for Ontario, Australia and Mexico. The regions, they delivered another strong quarter when it came to safety, operating and cost performance. At Macassa, as Ammar mentioned, the team beat their record on gold production for the second consecutive quarter. The strong quarter was really on the back of one cut and fill area that overperformed with higher-than-expected grades.

Over at Detour, they have their highest Q2 mill throughput and that's a good sign that we're starting to stabilize the higher throughput. But the ounces for the quarter were affected by lower grades. Now during the first half of the year, mining was within a low-grade domain, which did result in some localized negative or tonnage reconciliation. So we ended up supplementing the shortfall with ore from our low-grade stockpiles. Now mining activities are going to remain in the low grade domain throughout Q3, and then we expect the grade to improve in Q4 as we move into higher-grade domains. So given the year-to-date gold production, we now expect to be around the lower end of the full year production guidance range at Detour.

With respect to San Nicolas, through the joint venture, we're continuing to advance the feasibility study which remains on schedule to be completed by the end of this year. And we're also continuing to engage with the government authorities and stakeholders with respect to our key permits, which is specifically the environmental impact assessment, and following that, the change of land use. This quarter, the JV -- they also received an exploration permit authorizing additional drill pad across the property. So we're going to take this as a slightly positive signal from an overall permitting standpoint. And with respect to the plan to approve the project, this really hasn't changed. It's expected to follow dependent on the receipt of the permit and the results of the study.

Now moving into the term -- now in terms of the operational and cost improvement efforts, they're ongoing with a strong focus on extracting the full potential at all our sites. And we've just included a couple of examples here on this slide. One of them is the internalization of the maintenance work on the 795 trucks at Detour. The team is progressing very well on this, and it does have a cost savings of about $5 million a year. But moreover, we're developing the in-house expertise and sustaining an internal knowledge base on these ultra-class trucks, which to me is really invaluable.

Another example is at Macassa. The mine has over 90 years of operations and with the recent infrastructure upgrades, we're now in the very early stages of connecting the mine. And so with the work ongoing for the next, say, 2 to 3 years, similar to what Dom was saying with respect to LZ5, Macassa will also be able to leverage technology to help us optimize our processes even further than the team already has. Our GM at Macassa, Mariana says it well. She says that connecting this mine will help us "turn on the lights," which I agree because we'll be able to track in real-time personnel and equipment, provide situational awareness, automate and enhance the reliability of the data that we have, make it easier to diagnose equipment help, utilize fleet management systems, and enable us to obtain short interval control. And of course, Macassa will be utilizing the learnings from LZ5, so that as they go through their journey, so that we'll be able to make quicker decisions become more agile, become more productive and as a result, optimize our costs.

Moving to the next slide, I'll give you a quick update on the 2 projects in Ontario that we continue to be excited about because it does give us an opportunity to grow low risk, profitable production in one of the best mining jurisdictions in the world. And I want to talk to you first about Detour Lake and the underground project. This is a world-class asset. We outlined a pathway for Detour to be a 1 million-ounce producer annually for over a 14-year period. It's still early days, but this quarter, we received the permit to take water. Upon receipt of that permit, we established the box cut for the ramp, mobilize the development contractors and as you see in that picture, took our first round in July. We're also continuing with the infill and expansion drilling and continuing to see positive results, but Guy will discuss this later in the presentation.

As for Upper Beaver, again, this is another low-risk opportunity to grow the production profile in a camp we know well and where we can leverage the -- and the benefit of our technical expertise and our workforce at Macassa. This quarter, we continue to advance on both the surface setup needed for shaft sinking and the site preparation for the ramp. Those of you that joined us on our site visit earlier this quarter, you got to see this firsthand. Our construction team who leverage their past experiences from building our other mines has advanced very well on the installation -- the steel installation of the head frame and the installation of the hoist. We're expecting all of this infrastructure to be commissioned in early Q4 this year and then commence shaft sinking right after that in the same quarter.

As for the exploration ramp, the box cut was completed in Q1. And in Q2, the team finalizes supporting infrastructure such as the storage base, the temporary air and water services. And we also made a decision to self-perform this ramp development, and we successfully recruited the team there. So now we're expecting to commence the ramp development a little sooner than we had originally planned in Q3 rather than in Q4. I know I've mentioned this before, but with the inclusion of these 2 projects, we could see gold production from our Ontario operations to grow by 50% by the early 2030s, so we're looking forward to continuing to advance these projects throughout 2025.

And finally, to conclude, similar to Ammar and Dominique, I just wanted to thank all the operating sites and the project teams for all their efforts in achieving our objectives to date and for your focus on business improvement, not just on cost but on all fronts, including safety.

And with that, I'll just pass it over to Guy.

Thank you, Natasha, and good morning, everyone. First of all, I would like to take a moment to highlight the work of our great exploration team, both mine site and regional exploration through the portfolio. The first half of 2025 has been excellent. We currently have 120 diamond drill rig in operation on mine site and regional exploration. Our health and safety performance continued to improve overall as our team is committed to our boots in the field program to improve our safety performance in every single aspect in collaboration with our various diamond drilling entrepreneurs.

This concurrently with our drilling excellence program led to the safe delivering of our first 6 months of drilling, slightly ahead of the program with 670 kilometers of drilling completed with expenditures standing at about 9% below our budget. I'm extremely proud of the improvement observed since 2022, where we have reversed the trend in safety, productivity, and unit costs after COVID.

Among highlights I would like to mention Detour Lake exploration just celebrated 5 years with 1 million-meter of core being drilled with our entrepreneur [indiscernible] partner. Malartic and Odyssey and regional exploration around the mine that has just celebrated 7 years without a reportable accident and 2 million meters of core drilled and processed at the regional core shack facility and Macassa exploration team on the ground with the entrepreneur [indiscernible] that celebrated 2-year and 300,000 meters of drilling done without a reportable accident. So across the board, world-class exploration team delivering safe and exciting drill results on world-class assets.

And from a results standpoint, I would like to comment on 3 of our key value driver projects, Canadian Malartic, Detour and Hope Bay. On Slide 12, at Odyssey, we currently have 26 drill rigs working surface and underground and around the mine and are getting some very exciting results in 3 areas that I would like to highlight. In the upper eastern portion of the East Gouldie, we've seen some great results, such as 5.7 gram over 17 meters, around 900 meter, which is the upper part of the East Gouldie deposits. So we see that area that is progressing well and expand the deposit, and we'll likely get into reserve at our next year-end mineral reserves and mineral resources update.

And then in the lower east extension of East Gouldie, which result up to 3.4 over 36-meter and 3.5 over 19 outside of the current mineral reserves and resources, extending the zone below 2 kilometer depth and still open at depth by the way. And also the Eclipse parallel zone with result of the 3.8 gram over 14, that continue to demonstrate the potential to add parallel zone in proximity of the existing zone currently in the mine plan, offering potential for additional optionality and flexibility for future mining. The strong result in the Lower East and Eclipse continue to expand the zones laterally and should lead to a substantial mineral resources addition at year-end this year. And continue to enhance our scenario for the location of the second shaft as what it was described by Dominique earlier.

Now on Slide 13, at Detour, drilling continued with 8 drill rigs that continue to infill the deposit in the area that are targeted for the underground mine project, both below the pit in the saddle in the central portion of the deposit, with results up to 3.4 gram over 67 meters and to the west of the pit, next to the planned exploration ramp with results up to 2.9 over 32 and 1.7 over 113 meters. The West Extension of the deposit outside and to the west of the open pit and next to the proposed exploration ramp, continue to deliver strong results that could potentially outline an area where underground production could be accelerated in our underground mine development scenario.

And last, but not least, on Slide 14, at Hope Bay, we have 6 drill rigs in operation and have completed almost 70,000 meters year-to-date, and we continue to see strong results in 2 very interesting area. First of all, close the surface in Patch 7 with 16-gram over 4-meter and 5.7 gram over 12-meter at around 300-meter depth. That could potentially be accessible early in the mine plan, close to surface in our project development scenario.

But more importantly, I would like to bring your attention to the deep results we just got in gap between Suluk and Patch with one of the best drill results to date, as of date that we can see in the core box below that long section in all 345 that returned 53-gram over 8.4 meter. We're using 25.7 using capping of the high-grade assays at 50 gram. But that drill intercept is quite spectacular as you can see visually simple cord vein, visible gold, and that drill hole sits at 750 meters below surface where the zone remains open at depth, showing great potential for the mineralization to continue to expand at much greater depth that we currently know.

So we anticipate that these results will have a positive impact on the mineral reserve for Hope Bay at year-end. So midyear, we're very confident that we are in a good position to replace mineral reserve from ongoing production depletion and potentially grow our overall year-over-year bottom line reserve total and as we continue to derisk our key value driver project and deliver economic studies that pertain to each of them.

And on that, I would like to return the microphone to Ammar for some closing remarks.

Thank you, Guy, and everyone else. We began today's call by saying our key messages are largely the same as those over the past several quarters, good production, good cost control, great progress moving forward and accelerating the best pipeline we've ever had. And as Guy just discussed, excellent exploration results with the most aggressive exploration in the company's history.

All of this as gold prices continue to reach new highs as we continue to generate record cash flows as we strengthen the balance sheet and as we return record amounts of cash to our owners. I have to say, in this case, it is a pleasure to be repeating the same good news message quarter-over-quarter. At Agnico Eagle, we will continue to work hard for all of our stakeholders and we will continue to build off the same foundational strategic pillars that have served us well over the past 68 years. We will focus on the best mining jurisdictions based on geologic potential and political stability. We will be disciplined with our owners' money, making investment decisions based on technical and regional knowledge and creating value through the drill bit.

We believe we are uniquely well positioned with a quality project pipeline, leveraging existing assets in the best regions in the world where we believe we have a competitive advantage. And we will continue to focus on creating value on a per share basis and on being leaders in our industry in returning capital to shareholders as evidenced by over 42 years of consecutive dividend payments and increasing share buybacks.

Thank you all for your time. And operator, may I ask you to open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question is from Fahad Tariq from Jefferies.

Congratulations on the quarter generated free cash flow, about $1.3 billion and then repurchase shares of about $100 million. Maybe can you walk us through your thought process on buybacks versus dividends? And does the current share valuation play a role in determining which option you choose to return capital to shareholders?

Yes. Thanks, Fahad, for the question. It's Jamie here. As I said in my remarks today, we're doing what we said we're going to do. We're taking advantage of higher gold prices to strengthen the balance sheet to reinvest in the business and increase returns to shareholders. So we pay a half dividend, $800 million annually. We've dramatically increased our level of activity on the share buyback, and we doubled it in the second quarter relative to the first. And I think there's room through the rest of the year to do even more. I mean we're at $550 million through the first half of the year, if you annualize that. So just assuming we did the same, we're at $1.1 billion. But what we've been saying consistently over the past several years is that we're targeting about 1/3 of our free cash flow being returned to shareholders.

So if the gold price stays where it is, that total return to shareholders could get up to $1.3 billion, which implies a lot more activity in the share buyback in the second half of the year. And I think that's what we're favoring in the near term. We'll certainly be evaluating the dividend as we get into our budgeting season. And if there's room for an increase there would likely be later this year or early next.

Okay. That's clear. And then maybe just switching gears to Macassa. Maybe this question is for Natasha, but can you talk a little bit about how to think about grades in the second half? There's been 2 consecutive quarters now, pretty high grade. I understand it's 1 or 2 or maybe 3 stopes, but can you talk through how to think about grades in the second half?

Yes. Fahad, thank you for the question. So both quarters, we did see some localized positive grade reconciliation. So we are not factoring that in, in the second half, and we're expecting to be a bit of a softer second half, but still meeting guidance.

And your next question is from Josh Wolfson from RBC Capital Markets.

I think this question is best for Jamie. Some of the free cash flow beat this quarter looks like it was attributed to the tax deferrals. I'm just wondering how should we think about that going forward and when that liability maybe reconcile and would be a headwind as opposed to free cash flow?

Yes. Josh, thanks for the question. Yes. No, you're absolutely right. I mean that was a big swing this quarter. I think pre-change in taxes payable. Our free cash flow is about $800 million. So it's almost $0.5 billion swing as a result of taxes. If we look at our cash taxes for 2025, we paid about $600 million in the first half of the year and we plan to pay about $600 million in the second half of the year. So in around $1.2 billion for 2025 in cash taxes.

Now our income tax expense is substantially higher than that. But the way it works, we pay installments based on the prior year's profitability. So if the gold price stays where it is, we will have a significant catch-up payment in Q1 of 2026, just as we did this year. This year in Q1, we paid $400 million in relation to 2024, and at these gold prices in Q1 of 2026, we could have upwards of a $900 million catch-up payment in relation to 2025. So you're going to see this volatility in periods where the gold price is rising [at a rate] as it has been.

Got it. And then on Detour, just on the operating side, what should we think about sequencing in the second half of the year? And maybe more specifically, what sort of grade can we expect in the fourth quarter when we're out of this or this maybe more challenging zone?

So as mentioned earlier, so with Q3, we're all going to be in the lower grade domain. In Q4, we're expecting to be in higher grade, I would say, somewhere between 0.97 and 1.

Okay. That's solid. And then on Malartic, similar sort of question here for Barnett. When does the contribution from that area taper off?

Yes, Josh, it's Guy. So that's something we're going to see through the remainder of the Barnett of the open pit as we experienced back in the day, even in Canadian Malartic. And as you get towards the bottom of the cone of the pit, we're getting closer to the old workings. And around the old workings, that's basically either there was some time we are kind of taken a conservative approach about the pillar that were left around the old workings. So there is more ton left than planned on our void model, and the grade is better also. So that trend is expected to go -- but it could be variable. But theoretically for the rest of the open pit at Barnett, we should see that positive trend and with a little bit more tonnes left behind by the old miners.

Your next question is from Anita Soni from CIBC World Market.

So first question, just wanted to ask about the exploration results at East Gouldie. I think you said that you're evaluating, deepening the shaft as well as doing a second shaft. On the shaft deepening side, do you have an idea of how much that would cost in terms of the moving loading station? I'm trying to understand is that, that loading station is not built yet, it's just a matter from a design standpoint of actually moving that loading pocket further down and then adding one a little higher up. But what would that do to the CapEx for the asset?

Yes. Deeping the shaft #1 by 70 meters including doing a third loading station, which means all the infrastructure plus a crusher, we're talking approximately USD 40 million to do that but it is a payback project. So we're going to save on trucking. We're going to save on fuel. We're going to be more effective. So that's overall, that's a positive thing.

And as Guy showed in his slides, it's getting deeper than expected. So the 70 meter, let's say, we're going to be at 1,870 meters with the shaft. It is like the limit of the deep we could go with that technology and the shaft we're having in head.

Okay. No, $40 million sounds very reasonable. In terms of capital allocation for Jamie, I think you mentioned 1/3 capital return to shareholders? And I could be wrong about the 1/3, but I did catch $1.3 billion at these gold prices. But could you talk about how you -- the other portions of the other 2/3 and how that's split? And could we see some accelerated investment into your organic opportunities going into the next couple of years or at least next year?

Yes, Thanks, Soni. Yes, I think absolutely. I mean we'll continue to strengthen the balance sheet. We still have almost $600 million of debt on the balance sheet. We'll look for opportunities to prepay some of that. And yes, as we alluded to in our remarks on the call, I think there will be opportunities for us to accelerate development of some of our projects. So that's what we should be doing. And in these gold prices, we're generating high returns. We should be reinvesting in high-return projects. We could well see higher capital in the years ahead in order to do that.

And Anita, it's Ammar here. To the extent that we are accelerating, it's only because they're good projects. It's only because they're good projects. And frankly, the team is doing a very good job. And these are -- there's a lot going on, these are in the future. But having been in this business a long time, I can tell you I'm pleasantly surprised that the quality of the work and the potential of the project and the ability to actually move these things forward. So it's not because we're going to have extra money at these levels that we are looking to accelerate. It's primarily because they're even, in some cases, better than we thought, and we're making faster progress than we thought.

No, for sure. I think you demonstrated a prudent capital allocation. And I think it was this time last year, I was worried about you guys building a second shaft and now I'm hoping you build a second shaft. So a lot changes in the year.

Well said.

And your next question is from Tanya Jakusconek from Scotiabank.

Congrats on a good quarter. Jamie, just coming back to you on that capital allocation, just a lot of cash and I appreciate there's some of that $600 million of debt you want to pay down or buyback. I understand you're going to be reviewing the dividend maybe third quarter, fourth quarter or early next year. Can I just ask what minimum cash balance you feel comfortable keeping on your balance sheet to run your business? First one; And number two, if we were to see additional capital be put to projects, is accelerated? Would it be for Detour, Hope Bay, and Canadian Malartic with those be the 3 that you highlighted?

Thanks, Tanya, for the question. Yes. No, I mean, on your first question with respect to the minimum cash balance. I mean at these gold prices, we could be well north of $2 billion, $2.5 billion in cash on the balance sheet by the end of this year. And I'm certainly comfortable at those levels. I mean we do -- we talked about the timing of cash tax payments. We are going to have a significant cash tax outflow in the first quarter of next year.

And this goes to your second question, we do anticipate having opportunities to accelerate some of our capital spending to bring some of that production forward. I think it's really -- it's across our project pipeline. We'll be, I think, talking more about the potential to accelerate some of the underground production to Detour as an example. But across all of our key value drivers, there are opportunities for us to do more quicker and bring in that incremental production sooner.

Okay. And should I be kind of thinking that we should keep this total capital? I'm going to say it in a way, should we be thinking between the $2 billion to $2.5 billion range over the next few years? Should I be thinking about it that way?

Yes, I'd say it's too early to give you any formal guidance on that, Tanya. We're in the process, we're going through our kind of budgeting and scenario analysis now. And as we get into the fall, we'll have more clarity in terms of what the capital profile looks like over the next several years.

Okay. And then maybe I could just ask about -- as you are thinking about your capital profile, can you talk a little bit how you are thinking about your life of mine plans and your reserves and resources given the big discrepancy in the gold price where we're at versus where reserves and resources are done? And how are you thinking about approaching that?

I'll start with that, Tanya, and then maybe I'll ask Guy to jump in. I mean that's an excellent question. It's one thing managing your reserve price when gold moves $100 or $200 a year. Frankly, it becomes a more complex question when the gold price moves $1,000 or $1,500. So right now, we're maintaining and we can get into the specifics a very reasonable number for our reserves -- he'll get into -- and I don't want to steal his thunder. We're doing a good job in replacing reserves. But there could be opportunities, Tanya, and I think I've talked to you about this. So let's take a look at, for example, something like Meadowbank.

Meadowbank was supposed to run out in 2028. This is not formal direction to anybody, but we are working on something that might allow us to extend it at a lower rate to, say, 2034. Now those would be lower grade ounces that weren't the best use of our owners' money at $1,800 environment to make an awful lot of money for our owners at $3,300. So those -- in that example, of course, it makes sense because you're otherwise going to shut down the mine. Of course, it makes sense to take advantage of those additional ounces. I mean we're working on that. But -- so it is a function, and you know this very well, it's a function of do you have spare mill capacity? Are you extending a mine life? If you bring in lower-grade stuff, are you displacing higher grade into many years in the future. So it's an excellent question because gold has changed a lot, and we're looking at all of that. I don't know, Guy, if you want to jump in.

Yes, exactly. So we're looking at it on a mine-by-mine approach. But as mentioned by Ammar, it is paramount for us to continue to send to the mill what was in our guidance, meaning we don't want to lower the cut-off grade and change the mining sequence. But on the mine by mine, we're looking if there's extra mill capacity that we can send additional ton at lower grade and that are profitable in the higher price environment, which is the right thing to do.

And also looking at sensitivity long-term. So we started some analysis of what could be the implication on the higher gold price environment, looking at sensitivity on each of the deposits, which may help us in some design and making sure we're not, for example, putting a waste dump next to a pit that could be much larger or stuff like that.

So we're running those scenarios, but our bottom line remains the same. We don't want to lower the cutoff grade. We don't want to change the mining sequence. We are committed to deliver the right -- to send the right ounces first, right ton first at the mill. And if there is available additional milling capacity, we're going to do so if they are profitable.

Okay. I don't want to ask any more questions, although I do have a lot. Hopefully, someone asks about how your exploration and reserve replacement is going. So I'll wait hopefully to hear on that.

And your next question is from Daniel Major from UBS.

I think most of the capital allocation questions have been asked in different ways, so I'll leave that one. But I suppose 2 questions. One, you mentioned about the scope to accelerate CapEx potentially. I think around this time last year, maybe it was Q3, you increased the CapEx budget for this year. Should we assume that ability to accelerate CapEx more applies to 2026, 2027 and this year's budget is kind of reasonably fixed. Is that the right way of thinking about it?

Yes, thanks for the question, Daniel. I think that's yes, I mean, I think like we're going through the process now of looking at our capital spending outlook. I think it will be -- there will be incremental spending beyond this year's budget. Examples that like Dom just spoke about. I mean, third loading shaft at Odyssey, $40 million probably has an 80% IRR. If there's things like that, that we can do to lower costs in the future to bring production on sooner, strong return projects, we'll look at them. We'll have an announcement early next year out on Hope Bay, that's going to be a new significant mine for the company but comes with a fairly hefty capital cost. So there is the potential for an increase in our overall capital spending but it's going to result in higher long-term returns and value creation for shareholders.

Okay. And the second one, just on the kind of portfolio M&A, et cetera, actually more on the sort of streamlining side. You've got a big portfolio of early-stage kind of options. Is this high gold price environment an opportunity to monetize some of those that don't meet your quality criteria?

Yes. I mean, clearly, a good question, good observation. We don't invest in this as a portfolio to trade and make money. We -- everything we invest in, we take a look what's the long-term potential. That said, historically, 9 out of 10, we decide -- don't fit exactly and your -- it's a good observation to notice that at these gold prices, the value of that portfolio has gone up a lot. And I can't really talk much more about it than that, but to say that it's not an unreasonable question.

And then final, just operational question. Grades at Fosterville continue to hold up well into [indiscernible] and you look to be tracking well ahead of the guidance. Are you still expecting that grade profile to come off in the second half? Is it kind of reconciliation largely and should normalize? Or is it -- are we more likely to sort of hold those rates into the end of the year?

So with Fosterville, reconciliation has been actually okay. It's just the mine sequence. So were expecting a high -- a stronger H1 similar to Macassa, I guess, and we're expecting a lower H2 or softer H2.

And your next question is from John Tumazos from John Tumazos Very independent Research.

With the favorable paces of underground development at the underground at Malartic. Is it possible that the East Gouldie shaft has output in the second half of 2026 or reaches full output sometime in '28 instead of '29?

Yes, John, Dominique speaking. The first shack, the end of the commissioning for the mid-shaft loading station is mid-2027. And getting to the latest loading, where we're going to be at the third now, I don't have that date, but I guess we're in the 2030.

But the commissioning of the midpoint at '27 and it is going conclude from that.

June 2027, it should be a good party at Malartic where we're going to start to bring some ore to the top with that new shaft.

You can come to that party, if you want, John.

I can ask the second one. The investment portfolio was up to $1.063 billion at June 30, should we post every night on the Investor Relations page of the website, the value of your total stockholdings, just like you're a hedge fund manager? And how do you want to safeguard these values? Some of us buy Agnico [indiscernible] nickel and all this stuff. So is this a good opportunity to take $0.5 billion off the table since the stocks are up $400 million year-to-date?

Yes. Look, I want to get to the core of our philosophy on that. We talk a lot and I talk a lot about being disciplined with your money and about capital allocation. And it's our belief, and again, my personal belief that I can't be sincere -- we can't be sincere in saying we're going to be disciplined in allocating your capital, especially into new investments if we don't know a lot about those investments. If we haven't done our homework, and so we've always had a view that we're willing to take small [end] positions and interesting companies early on as you would want us to in regions that we like with projects with good prospectivity to get to know more about them. And from that, decide based on knowledge, whether or not it makes sense to spend and invest your money.

So none of these are as a portfolio. So I certainly wouldn't treat it as a hedge position. That said, as I mentioned before, quite often. And in fact, in most cases, we look at something, and we say it doesn't necessarily fit perfectly. In some cases, it does, and it's worked well but we do appreciate that the market has gone up. And to the extent it made sense to divest some of these things, we're not ignorant to market conditions.

It's just a lot of money, at least it seems like a lot of money to me.

You're welcome. And it is a lot of money, fair point.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand the call back over to Mr. Ammar Al-Joundi for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone, for taking the time. There's a lot going on. The business is running really well, and we continue to appreciate the support of everybody on the call, both our investors and the analysts who coverage. Thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The conference has now ended. Thank you all for joining. You may all disconnect your lines.