B2Gold Aktie

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to B2Gold Corporation's First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our first quarter earnings call. This has been a period of solid operational performance and disciplined cost management against the backdrop of the ongoing volatility in global commodity markets. Our focus on safety, sustainability and operational excellence continues to drive reliable production and strong cash flow generation across our portfolio. Today, we'll review our financial results, highlight key developments across our assets and discuss our outlook for the remainder of 2026.

In light of recent events in Mali involving the conflicts between government and certain groups, the company also wishes to report that its business operations in Mali continue in the normal course with such activities occurring at far distances from the company's operations. The company continues to closely monitor the situation and take precautions to ensure the safety and well-being of persons of our employees and contractors in Mali.

Next, I would like to acknowledge the important leadership transition we shared earlier this year, announcing my retirement as President and CEO effective June 4, 2026, and the appointment of Mike Cinnamond as B2Gold's next President and Chief Executive Officer. It has been a great privilege to have led B2Gold since its formation in 2017 as a start-up exploration -- junior exploration company. Since then, we've grown the business through timely and well executed acquisitions to make the company where it is today. And I'm especially proud of the fact that we have lived up to our values of fairness, respect and transparency and our reputation as an efficient and transparent operator have enabled us to attract and retain some of the best people in the mining industry.

In addition, I'm proud of the contributions to the communities in which we operate around the world, and our goal is to lead them in a better place than when we arrived. Now is the right time to pass the torch and making this decision. I'm very confident in Mike and our strong executive team to lead our next stage of growth. I'm proud of my contributions to B2Gold and look forward in my new role as Chair Emeritus to watching and create long-term sustainable value for our shareholders in the years ahead. After 19 years, this will be my last quarterly conference call with you.

And while I can't say it's always been a pleasure, I think we've overall had productive relationships and there's currently a good strong group of professional analysts. We realize you have challenging jobs as you attempt to cover all of the companies in our sector. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike Cinnamond.

Thanks, Clive. I'd like to say I've had the opportunity to work closely with you and the team for many years now, and I'm stepping into this role with a strong understanding of our business and I take confidence in the foundation that's been built on. We've got great people. We've got great assets. And as we go through this transition, my focus is going to be on maintaining that foundation while continuing to strengthen execution and deliver consistent results for our shareholders. And I look forward to working -- continue to work with Clive during the transition period as well as Kelvin Dushnisky, our Executive Chair, our Board of Directors and the management team and all of our great people at B2Gold sites around the world as we help this company achieve its full potential.

And also I want to congratulate Clive in his role as Chairman of Emeritus. And I think that reflects its recognition of his lifetime's contribution to both our company and to our industry.

Moving on to the results. The first quarter was a strong start to the year at all of our operations with the Fekola led Goose, Masbate and Otjikoto mines all outperforming expectations. Financially, it was a strong quarter. GAAP earnings were $0.15 per share and on an adjusted basis was $0.19 per share. The company recorded revenue of nearly $1.2 billion in the first quarter, and that included delivery of just over 66,000 ounces under our gold prepayment obligations. And as of today, we're in our final 2 months of delivery. So we'll have delivered into the remaining prepaid ounces by the end of June.

Operating cash flows for the first quarter were $539 million, and free cash flow was $362 million, another strong result, highlighting the continuing cash generation potential, I think, of our operating assets in this gold price environment. We've been investing for the last 2 or 3 years as we build Goose and move things along at our other sites, and now we're starting to see that free cash flow [Technical Difficulty]. This performance highlights the strength of the business and it provides us with significant financial flexibility.

Looking at our balance sheet, we remain in a strong financial position with cash and cash equivalents of $479 million at March 31, '26, and that's up from $380 million at the end of '25. And also subsequent to the quarter end, we repaid the remaining $75 million outstanding balance on our revolving credit facility, which leaves the full amount of $800 million on the facility available for future draws plus another $200 million accordion feature. So lots of financial strength and liquidity there.

And during the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 16 million shares for $80 million. And subsequent to quarter end, we repurchased a further 4 million shares for $18 million. And I think we expect to continue repurchasing shares as the year progresses. When we look at the value of our business and our share price, we don't believe that the value of our business is reflected in our share price. So I think you'll continue to see us look at that repurchase as we go through the balance of the year, like I said.

Subsequent to the quarter end, we also completed the sale of our 70% stake in Fingold Ventures to Agnico Eagle for $325 million in cash. And with that, we also have an agreement with Agnico to enter into a collaboration agreement related to our respective operations in Nunavut. I think this agreement creates a framework where we can share operational knowledge and best practices across mining, processing and logistics in Arctic environments. And we see Agnico Eagle as a strong long-term partner in the region. And I think this is also consistent with our focus on disciplined capital allocation and strengthening the overall quality of our portfolio.

Overall, we continue to remain excellent financial flexibility to repay our obligations, fund the growth initiatives and very importantly, return capital to our shareholders, both through dividends and through buybacks. And my priority for sure will be to maintain a disciplined approach to capital allocation while preserving that flexibility and optionality as we go forward.

And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Bill for an operational update.

Yes. Thanks, Mike. It's been a minute since I've been able to start out this way, but I'd say overall, we're very pleased with the operating performance during the first quarter with our operations producing approximately 238,000 ounces, which is above expectations. In Mali, gold production at Fekola is expected to be relatively consistent throughout the year. The company expects to meet the Fekola Complex production guidance range for the year, provided the permit -- the exploitation permit for the Fekola Regional is received by the end of June 2026.

At Goose, we continue to expect the operations to ramp up throughout the year. As we reported in mid-April, we experienced a fire in certain areas of the crushing circuit. As noted, there were no injuries reported and no medical treatment was required related to the fire. The fire damage was localized to the crushing circuit. The company has developed a preliminary revised mill processing plan based on the use of mobile crushers to feed crushed ore directly to the fine ore stockpile while repairs to the crushing circuit are completed. The company has estimated the repairs to be completed in the third quarter of 2026 at a cost of approximately USD 7 million.

These repairs will coincide with the first phase of the upgrades to the Goose mine crushing circuit comprised of the previously announced addition of the run-of-mine bin and apron feeder, plus a new larger jaw crusher and rock breaker. The total cost of the first phase of crushing circuit upgrades is expected to be approximately $11 million.

B2Gold reiterates its previously disclosed estimate that the Goose Mine crushing circuit will be able to operate at an average daily capacity of approximately 3,200 tonnes per day by the end of Q3 2026. The company estimates the impact of the lower availability of the crushed ore as a result of the fire will be limited to the second quarter of 2026 and that the availability of crushed ore in the second half of 2026 will not change from previous estimates. The company now forecast second quarter production of 18,000 to 20,000 ounces versus the prior internal forecast of 29,000 ounces.

Additionally, based on studies conducted to date, B2Gold has identified a second phase of crushing circuit upgrades that are scheduled to be implemented in the first half of 2027 in order to increase the name-plate capacity of the crushing circuit and enable it to run at an average of 4,000 tonnes per day. The total cost of Phase 2 is anticipated to be between $20 million and $30 million.

The second phase of the crusher upgrade includes the installation of a larger cone crushers, additional surge bins and feeders to optimize crusher performance and upgraded conveyors to support the higher throughput.

I just want to reiterate that we -- the company reiterates its full guidance for the Goose mine of between 170,000 to 230,000 ounces in 2026. Over the medium term, B2Gold still expects gold production to average approximately 300,000 ounces per year at the Goose mine.

At Masbate, the operation continues to perform well with a world-class safety record. I think they're plus 7.5 years now, LTI-free, knock on wood. The company has secured a guaranteed fuel supply contract for the next 3 months, and we anticipate another year of consistent operations in 2026.

At Otjikoto, the operations had a solid first quarter and has admirably managed the transition from open pit mining to underground mining, processing low-grade stockpile supplemented by underground ore. The company is actively developing the Antelope underground, which is expected to provide higher-grade ore to supplement the low-grade stockpile production during the period of 2028 to 2032 and result in meaningful production profile for the Otjikoto mine well into the next decade.

With that, I'll turn it back over to Clive.

Thanks, Bill. We're opening up for questions now. Michael. Okay, we're ready to take questions, operator.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Wayne Lam with TD Securities.

Just wondering as we -- at Fekola, maybe as we look out to 2027, production is expected to improve next year in the mine plan as you kind of get through the stripping phase. But just wondering what percentage of that production is expected from Fekola Regional in '27? And then just assuming you get the permit in June, I guess, would there still be a large portion of stripping that's been deferred into next year just given the delayed access?

So maybe I'll answer them in reverse order, if you don't mind. So we've already started pre-stripping at the regional project. Remember, not only did we only start pre-stripping, all the infrastructure is in place. So all is required there is the permit for us to go. So it's not like this delay is causing us to delay stuff into 2027. So as long as we get a permit by Q2, we're reiterating our regional guidance for the Fekola Complex.

The first part related to 2027, I don't think we've actually put out at this time, 2027 guidance anywhere. So clearly, it's going to depend on what happens over the next little bit with the permit and how it all -- what the percentages are. But you are correct. There is a large portion of ounces that do come from the regional permit in 2027.

Okay. Great. No, yes, I know. I was just talking about the prior mine plan. But maybe just at Goose, I just want to also understand a bit more in terms of the ramp-up of the capacity at the mill. If I take the Q1 grade recoveries, I think the 20,000 ounce guidance implies around 1,000 tonne per day run rate. So just wondering, as we look kind of ahead to Q3, is that a progressive increase in tonnage through the quarter to get from 1,000 to 3,200? Or is it a step change based on the first phase of the crusher install? And then just similarly, to get to 4,000 tonnes, again, is that a gradual increase? Or is that another step change? Just trying to understand the quarterly cadence in production profile over the coming year.

Yes. So you got the first part, absolutely correct. In kind of Q2 and as we move forward, you're right, we're kind of sub-2,000 for sure as we get going. But we will be ramping up. It will be a ramp-up to the 3,200. And that's primarily because in Q3, in September, that's when a lot of the big change out happens. So there is kind of that ramp-up between September and October. So the answer is yes. It's a ramp-up to 3,200.

And then as we get into kind of 2027, you're looking at Q1, Q2 running at that 3,200 tonnes per day rate. And that -- we definitely will see as we get towards the end of Q2, that 4,000 ounces. So it's -- I would say it's a very linear ramp up. I think you're going to see there will be days where we're not installing stuff, you're going to see 4,000 tonnes, and then you're going to see days where we're putting stuff in. So on average, you're going to see 3,200.

Okay. Great. That's really helpful detail. And then maybe just last one, just on the field situation at Masbate. Does that 3-month supply take you out to the end of June? And then just wondering what the impact on cost there is at the mine ex the hedging that you have in place?

Ex the Hedge, so I don't know. I don't want to talk about the cost. The answer is it does take us through -- really, basically, what has happened is we have a supplier that is kind of guaranteed a 90-day kind of running supply. So when you say through the end of June, the answer is yes. But if you ask me again next week, I'd say the end of June plus 1 week, right? So right now, we have a rolling 90-day supply. And the cost itself, I'll let Mike comment on versus the hedges.

Yes. I think it's fair to say Masbate is the most sensitive of our operations to price increases. I think that's the way to look at it. We obviously look at it on a consolidated basis and are pretty comfortable with the overall cost profile because we've got solar in our operations, our 3 of our operations. We've got that hedging program. And as you know, at Goose, we already bought the fuel that we're going to use this year. But Masbate is the one operation that probably is seeing the most direct fuel impacts.

The next question comes from Ovais Habib with Scotiabank.

Very congrats on a solid quarter and free cash flow that was generated. Before I jump on to my questions, I just wanted to say thanks to Clive to all the color and the guidance that you have provided on the conference calls as well as all the investor dinners over the past, I would say, 1.5 decades. I just want to say congrats on the retirement to you as well, and please stay in touch.

So just moving on to questions. Sorry, Clive?

Just thanks, Ovais. I appreciate it.

I just wanted to move on to the questions then. Again, just moving on to the situation in Mali. Really great to hear operations are not being impacted. Are you having any sort of discussions with the regulators right now in terms of the regional permit? Or are they all kind of distracted with the situation in Mali?

We are continuing to have discussions. In fact, there was some Q&A that was completed on Monday with the mining ministry. So there still is ongoing discussions, but there is no further process in this. It is really just now a decision of the ministry to put it forward to the Council of Ministers. As you say, there has been obviously some significant distractions over the last couple of weeks. So we do understand that there has been delay, but there certainly has been an ongoing dialogue.

Okay. That's great to hear. And just in terms of question asked by Wayne regarding, obviously, the diesel exposure across the group. Obviously, we're seeing pressures on the cost side on diesel. But in terms of any supply stress issues that you see on any of your sites in terms of reagents or explosives that you're witnessing, any sort of color there?

Yes. So we already talked a little bit about Masbate, right? Masbate, we -- historically we have gone shorter term and barge fuel in. So that's actually been a change on our side that we've tried to lock into a little longer-term contract.

At Fekola, yes, we have seen -- we certainly have seen some changes in the way we operate. We have a preferred contractor that we use that has basically been working through all the issues. He's actually gone out and got additional help. So we don't see it on our end. We still continue to get fuel, and there is no restriction on us and we're operating as designed. But I think some of the vendors have -- they've changed their modus of operating that.

And any sort of color on the reagent side or kind of exposal side, fuel I kind of -- I'm kind of okay with. It's more on the supplies of the fuel and reagents. Any color there?

Yes. Well, this actually goes back to -- let's actually -- remember, when we went through COVID, we operated unhindered. And one of the ways we did that is we opened up our supply chain and looked at the various different ways that we could get materials to site and really kind of put plan A, B, C and D in place. And so some of those have certainly come into play in reagents, whether it be that we're changing locations to make sure that we don't have to ship stuff from -- that goes past the Middle East, and all of that stuff is in play. So the answer is we're not seeing an impact, but we certainly are -- it's something that we are watching, and it is an active discussion inside our supply chain.

Excellent. Thanks, Bill for that. And this -- maybe this question is for Mike. Again, big free cash flow quarter. You've received the $325 million payment from Agnico as well for the sale of the Fingold and the prepays are falling off in June, which should improve your free cash flow profile heading into the second half. So are you looking to get more aggressive on the buybacks, dividends? Any sort of color that you can provide there, that would be great.

Yes. I think you've seen us ramp up there, Ovais, already from last year, what we did in Q1. And I think the answer is yes. We want to use our cash expeditiously. But I think if we continue to see a share price where it is now and the kind of asset value that we see in our assets, then I think you will see us aggressively pursue that. It will be opportunistic, right? There's no fixed formula to do it. We jump in when we see what we think is weakness in the price. And you'll see us continue to pursue that. We budgeted to do that internally through the rest of the year.

The next question comes from Carey MacRury with Canaccord Genuity.

Just maybe a follow-up on Goose. I'm just wondering how the underground mining is progressing versus your target. And I assume you're still building stockpiles ahead of the mill kind of coming back maybe this summer?

Yes. So Q1, we were down just a little bit, but I would say within what I would call kind of a normal range. Q2, we're expecting to be fully online and the stockpile does continue to build up. That's really what Q2 is about.

And what's the underground mining here again, if you can just remind us?

What are they doing right now? I can't remember, if I'm being honest. Let me -- Carey, let me look that up real quick and get back to you.

The next question comes from Don DeMarco with National Bank.

So congratulations, Clive. Best wishes on next step. Certainly, it's been a privilege working with you over the years. First question, at Goose, the fire damage focused on the crushing circuit. So I see a crusher is being brought in. What's the time line risk to the repair? And taking a step back, do you have adequate spares on site to the extent that's practical? And does this make you relook at your annual supply stocking and maybe potentially extend the inventory of other items?

Okay. So it doesn't impact. As described at the first, it doesn't impact the schedule. It basically kind of fits right in line so much so that we're now looking at where do we have double -- we have overlap in labor, right? So it doesn't impact the schedule for the upgrades. We did not have some of the key stuff on site. You wouldn't expect that you would have fully replaced a lot -- had a lot of the screens as everything on site, in particular, as much as the fact that we can [indiscernible] stuff in Canada.

So we are looking at it for sure. But remember, we just came into operation just a little bit ago. So all that's in play. Some stuff we think we may have a little bit too much of inventory because we ordered for the sea lift and we brought it in [indiscernible] some stuff we're seeing now that we need additional based on the hardness of the ore or the way we're operating. So all that stuff is in play right now. So the answer is yes, we're looking at inventory very closely.

Okay. And then over to the sale of Fingold and the collaboration agreement you have with Agnico in the north. To what extent do you already collaborate with Agnico? And looking ahead by sharing best practices, would this involve sharing labor, maybe cross appointments, across operations? Just trying to understand what the scope of this agreement might entail.

Well, in terms of what we already do, we already liaised with Agnico fair amount, like we see them periodically, and we do talk. And so this agreement, I think, really just put a bit more structure around that. We definitely want to focus on things like best practices, how you order goods in and how you get them in because we all have the same logistics issues. The mining function. Labor, I wouldn't say it's sharing labor per se, but certainly labor best practices and where we're sourcing our labor workforce from and how we bring them in and out. It's really all -- overall, it's just how can we both benefit by saying this is what's worked for us and maybe this is what hasn't.

And then also, I think you'll see us probably look at collaborating on what can we do in terms of community relations and working with the territory as we go forward. It's really -- it's a holistic sharing exercise, I'd say.

And Carey, just to your earlier question on the underground development. 10 meters -- I could remember it was 10 or 12 for Q2, but it was 10 meters for Q2 per day, ramping up to 12 meters in Q3.

Okay. And Mike, maybe just as a follow-up to that. I mean, we see the government of Canada has these initiatives to expand the development of the north of building new airports and runways and things like that. Does this potentially put any pressure on the labor availability for the mine?

I mean ultimately, they developed like significant infrastructure activities, there probably will be more competition for labor up there, but that's always the way right now. So I think for now, we watch the situation and see what unfolds, but it's going to take a while for them to build some of that infrastructure. And I think we'll remain flexible as we go forward. I think we also think there are significant labor pools out there, and we're certainly something we're focused on as well. Where do we bring people and from.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Anita Soni with CIBC World Markets.

And firstly, I just wanted to say, echoing Ovais' and Don's comments, congratulations, Clive, on a long career in mining, which we know is not easy. I've known you for, I think, 20 years now. I covered BMI in 2006 that's when I first met you. So I know you've had a lot of success along the way and best wishes on your next steps here.

The first question on grades at Goose. So you had some pretty good positive grade reconciliation this quarter. Can you just talk about like was it areas of the pit or specific areas in the underground mine where you were seeing that grade reconciliation? Could we expect maybe budgeted grades for the rest of the year to also follow suit? Or is there something that we should be thinking about in different areas that you'll be mining in for the rest of the year?

Yes. So you're correct, both open pit and underground to date have been reconciling very well. And we don't see that changing. Through unwell, the open pit and the underground, all of our preliminary testing, everything shows that the grade is going to hold as designed.

Okay. And then secondly, just a question on the tonnage in Q2. I just want to get an idea of what kind of tonnage that you're expecting for the second quarter and what you would expect to exit the second quarter, just so I can kind of figure out the evolution over the next 4 or 5 months before you get the remediation measures in place in September, October.

So you're talking -- I assume you're talking about Goose?

Yes, for Goose.

Okay. Yes. We talked about Goose, where we're going to be kind of sub 2,000 for Q2. And if I'm being -- the reason is we're going to be -- within Masbate, mobile crushers are working right now, but we are, in fact, running them like on a 4-day cycle where we're running the mill. The mill still runs at 4,000 tonnes a day without a problem. So we're basically building up the stockpile in the dome, mining it and then doing the same thing. And then in Q3, we're going to be ramping up as we get the second mobile crusher, which will help us ramp up to that kind of 3,000 tonnes per day, ultimately 3,200 tonnes. That was going to come online kind of in June, July. So we see that through Q3 at kind of 3,000 or 3,200.

3,000 to 3,200 in June, July. Okay. And then just lastly on Fekola, just a point of clarification. From my understanding, the latest -- I know you haven't given any guidance for 2027, but the latest technical report shows, I think, 2 years of a stripping campaign. Is that not correct?

Yes. But we'll still be -- we need 3 months really to get going, and we'll start pushing ore through the mill after 3 months. So yes, we will be stripping while we're mining.

Yes. But I thought the idea was I think that the latest technical report had production relatively similar to 2026. Is that not correct?

No, I think '27 is a pretty good year. Yes. When I say pretty good, as in kind of -- maybe it is when I think 60 to 80 is probably in that range.

We have a follow-up question from Carey MacRury from Canaccord Genuity.

I just want to ask about the outperformance on production in Q1. Is there any of the assets we should expect lower in Q2 outside of Goose?

Well, I think we saw like outperformance across all of them. I think we'll hold on to it, right? Like I don't think we're going to see like a step down in Q2 from any of us other than what we mentioned for Goose just because of like reacting to some of the fire damage and keeping Goose bringing it back up again. So I think the other assets, they continue to perform well. I don't think we expect we'll give back any of the gains that we had.

Yes. I just -- it's Michael. I would just elaborate that Masbate, if you look at the guidance for the year, the midpoint was around 180,000 ounces. And so we think 45,000 ounces per quarter is still a good estimate. It obviously has outperformed in Q1 as it has in certain years. But I think we're not sure that's going to continue on through the year. So Masbate could give back a little bit, but it's relatively small.

Okay. That's great. Also, Clive, I just wanted to say congrats and all the best in your retirement as well.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Clive Johnson for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you all for your good questions.

This brings to a close today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to B2Gold Corporation's Fourth Quarter and 2025 Year-End Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold. Please go ahead.

Welcome, everyone. As you heard from the operator, we're here to review B2Gold's financial results for 2025. The fourth quarter of 2025 brought a solid end to what was an exciting year for B2Gold. The Fekola, Masbate and Otjikoto mines continued outperformance, and the first ramp-up quarter at Goose resulted in the strongest consolidated production quarter of the year. Across our portfolio, we celebrated many milestones during 2025. We achieved record revenue of $3 billion.

In Mali, we produced 4 million ounce since the inception of the mine and received the Fekola underground exploitation approval, producing over 20,000 ounces from Fekola underground in to 2025. We are excited for the future of Fekola underground as a contributor to the Fekola complex as it ramps up to full production.

At Goose, we celebrated the first gold pour in commercial production. This milestone is not the one that we celebrated on our own, and we look forward to many years of operations in Nunavut. Canada is in close collaboration with our partner, the Kitikmeot Inuit Association and Kitikmeot Communities.

In Namibia, B2Gold announced an improved construction decision of the Antelope underground deposit. Production from Antelope has the potential to increase Otjikoto mine gold production, leveraging the low-cost platform and extend the life of mine into the 2030s.

At Masbate, the operations delivered a better year consistent and safe results, achieving the incredible fee for 7 years without a lost time injury. In this strong gold price environment B2Gold is well set up to take advantage with a strong asset portfolio and a flexible balance sheet and with growth capital spending at Goose now complete, the company is in a position to add significant shareholder value over the coming years.

With that, I will turn the call over to Mike Cinnamond for a discussion of our financial results in the fourth quarter and fiscal year. Mike?

Thanks, Clive. As Clive said, financially, it was a strong quarter. GAAP earnings were $0.13 per share or $0.11 per share on an adjusted earnings basis. And those earnings would have been even stronger if it wasn't for the timing of the late shipments at Fekola. Fekola had a very strong Q4, and just the timing of shipments at year-end. We had just over 20,000 ounces that were delivered just after December 31. So not recorded in revenues for 2025, but recorded in early '26.

So revenues, we did record $1.05 billion in the fourth quarter. That included delivering 66,000 ounces -- just over 66,000 ounces under our gold prepay obligations. And as of today, we've delivered January's tranche and we're working on February. So we're nearly there. We'll have delivered into those and they'll be wound up by the end of June '26.

Operating cash flows for 2025 were $896 million, and that included $286 million in the fourth quarter, which is another strong result, and it highlights the continuing cash generation potential of our operating assets in this very strong gold price environment.

Our balance sheet-wise, we remain in a strong financial position. We had cash and cash equivalents of $380 million at the end of '25. We had drawn $150 million on our revolver at the end of '25 as well, but subsequent to year-end, we paid down another $100 million of that. So leaving us with capacity of $750 million on the revolver, a further $200 million in the accordion feature there. So lots of capacity there.

So overall, I think we maintained excellent financial flexibility to fully repay our obligations on the gold prepays, as I said, by the end of June, and complete our other sustaining and growth initiatives, all across our portfolio, and to continue to fund healthy exploration programs. I think you'll see that in our budgets to extend mine lives, and -- but at the same time, also to return capital to shareholders, and I think that's an important one.

During '25, you saw us start to repurchase shares under our NCIB. We repurchased 2 million shares for about $10 million in '25. But subsequent to year-end, we've gone back then we've purchased another 5 million shares for approximately $24 million. And I think you'll see us continue to do that as the year progresses.

Obviously, with the prepaid rolling off, we've got close to an extra $110 million a month coming in now from cash flows post June, where we're currently delivering into those prepays. But a lot of that extra cash flow, I think you'll see us look at that normal course issuer bid and see if we can buy some more shares back given where we think we are and where we think we're going with our assets as we look forward into some very strong cash flow years coming up.

So with that, I'll turn the call over to Bill for operational and project update.

Yes. Thanks, Mike. So I'd say, overall, we're pleased with the 2025 operating performance at our sites, producing approximately 980,000 ounces, which was near the midpoint of guidance. Looking forward to 2026, we're anticipating production between 820,000 and 970,000 ounces.

Production is expected to be lower than 2025 due to the planned step-down of Otjikoto following completion of the open pit mining in Q4 2025 and the expected lower production at Fekola is stripping of Phase 8 of the Fekola pit continues. These decreases will be partially offset by the continued ramp-up of the Goose mine. While we only have a small data set so far in 2026, all operations have performed above expectations.

In Mali, the company expects to receive the approval for the Fekola Regional exploitation permit during the first quarter of 2026, with production starting in the second half of the year.

Gold production at Fekola is expected to be relatively consistent throughout the year as production from Fekola Regional is expected to ramp up in the second half to offset a decrease in production from Fekola Phase 7 as the Fekola pit begins to transition to Phase 8. Fekola Regional is expected to contribute between 60,000 and 80,000 ounces in 2026.

At Goose, we expect the operation to ramp up throughout the year. The crushing circuit, unfortunately continues to be supplemented with the mobile crusher, production during the fourth quarter was impacted by unseasonably low temperatures impacting the performance of the mobile crushing unit, which is not enclosed and is susceptible to operational interruptions and extreme gold.

Initial modifications to improve performance of the crushing circuit in the near term, including the addition of run-of-mine bins and apron theaters were ordered in late 2025. They're scheduled to be implemented in the second half of '26, at which point use of the mobile crusher will cease.

The company estimates that the crushing circuit will be able to operate consistently at an average of approximately 3,200 tonnes per day once these initial modifications are implemented. Capital for the initial phase has been included in the 2026 operating budget. The company is studying a more comprehensive crushing circuit improvement to increase design capacity at existing crushing circuit, to enable it to run at an average of 4,000 tonnes per day. These studies will be finalized in the first half of '26, at which point the company will determine the optimal scope and timing of additional crushing circuit improvements.

Capital for the second phase has not been included in the 2026 budget. And while the studies are currently ongoing, I reiterate, the studies are currently ongoing, the company believes the overall cost to implement these improvements will be in the tens of millions of dollars and not material to the scope of the operation.

At Masbate, the operation continues to perform well with a world-class safety track record. Mine throughput significantly outperformed expectations in 2025 and achieved a record for the second year in a row. We anticipate another year of consistent operations in 2026.

At Otjikoto, the operation had a fantastic year with strong production from the final phase of the open pit, achieving the upper end of its guidance range for 2025. Given the planned completion of the open pit activities, we expect lower production in 2026 as the mine transitions to processing only Wolfshag underground ore, supplemented by low-grade stockpiles. The company has begun development of the Antelope deposit which we believe has the potential to increase Otjikoto mine gold production to an average of approximately 110,000 ounces from 2029 through 2032.

With that, I'll turn it back over to Clive for the intro into the Q&A.

Thanks, Bill. Let's open it up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Fahad Tariq with Jefferies.

Just on Fekola Regional, can you just give us maybe the latest conversations you're having or not having with the government? And what gives you the confidence that the permit could be in the first quarter of this year?

Yes. It's Randall. I'll respond to this one. Over the '25, I think part of our confidence goes to the movement that we saw over the course of the year. This was a permit that took all of the ability of the Malian government to come up with a consolidation that had never been done before in Mali under the 2023 mining code. And so, for us to be able to move that through last year and get to a point right now where we do have the endorsement of the Minister of Mines, the endorsement of the Minister of Finance on this permit has been pushed through. The technical group, the review has been completed and is sitting with the President and the newly formed Mining Commissioner, Hilaire Diarra. And we are in very regular dialogue. In addition, moving forward with the underground exploitation. And as you've seen, Barrick's Loulo Permit get extended.

The government is moving these things forward. It is slower than we would like for sure. But there is constant dialogue on the process. And that's really what gives us the confidence that we're going to see it in the near future.

Got it. And then just maybe switching gears to Goose. I believe there was an internal study that was being done with FLSmidth to figure out the permanent crusher solution and what that would entail, and how would be -- like the specifications for it. Can you just share anything else from that study that came about, if that's been completed? And what that means for the second half of this year at Goose?

Yes. So the study, as you correctly said by FLSmidth was completed. It's been delivered to Lycopodium who's going to be the engineer of record. They're in the process of reviewing that study. And then, of course, it has to go out for -- once the final design is set, it's got to go out for cost bids and we have to come back with what the final study is. So I think we've been very open that we're not really going to have final answers until April.

What we know is that the first part is the apron feeder and the hopper. That's Phase 1. The second half after April, we'll come out with what the final guidance is. But we did -- I think we did talk about this kind of tens of millions of dollars. So the first -- the Phase 1 was -- is $7 million, and all that's in the budget. The second half is tens of millions of dollars, but once again, without having a study, we're probably somewhere in the middle of that. So it's probably something like CAD 50 million at which time we'll be purchasing equipment.

And there is the opportunity. There's two choices. One, depending on what the final decision is, we could hurt it in, so we could bring it in on plane this year or we'd have to bring it up the road next year. Those are the two options, which have yet to be finalized.

The next question is from Anita Soni with CIBC World Markets.

Just a follow-up on Fahad's question on the throughput. Could you just -- I understood the issue with the hopper and the crusher, but what is preventing it from getting to 4,000? I thought that was -- that initial fix is going to be the final solution. Can you talk about the second portion of it?

Yes, I can. It really is a design factor. So we can run at 4,000. We just can't keep it at 4,000 all day every day. And so we can't catch up ever. So if the crusher goes down for whatever for maintenance or there's a blockage or that type of stuff, then suddenly we're behind, and we can't catch up. So this next study is talking about expanding the capacity of the crusher with the safety [indiscernible]

Right. So getting to 6,000 would just allow you to potentially maybe a little bit more, but average the 4,000. Is that the case?

I didn't say 6,000 for sure. I don't think...

No, no. Your MD&A does say something about evaluating going to 6,000.

Well, no, the MD&A really was a different issue related to sending the overall circuit to 6,000. This is completely tied around the crushing circuit.

Okay. All right. And then just on Otjikoto. I wasn't quite clear about when Antelope would come onstream. I think this capital spending is '26 and '27, but is '28 a ramp-up year in the '29 to '32 was where you exceed 110? And then what would '27 and '28 look like in terms of production?

Yes. So the answer is, yes, to the first part, that '27 and '28 are kind of years, which we're continuing to build, with '29 being a ramp-up. I mean, once again, given the fact we haven't even ordered equipment, it's maybe a bit premature to talk about when ramp-up will happen. But we are talking about '29 and then through '32 being production. And what it looks like in '27 and '28 is kind of that -- it looks like -- just look at my numbers here. I see life of mine at Otjikoto kind of 78 in '27 and 64 in '28.

Okay. And then at Fekola, could you give us a bit of a breakout in terms of what's coming from the open pit and the underground? And then also -- so excluding the Regional where you've got -- I guess, with 70,000 to 80,000 -- 60,000 to 80,000 ounces the breakout between the underground and the open pit and sort of what grades and tonnage we were looking at in each?

Yes. I don't have the grades and tonnage in front of me, but I do have the gross number. So you could back calculate for sure. So from the underground, I'm showing 71,000 in '26. And then the combination of Fekola and Cardinal is I'm showing 300,000. So a total of 371,000 minus the Regional.

Okay. And then the underground. Sorry, could you -- do you know what the grades are at the underground or no -- sorry, the tonnage, the tonnage that you would be pulling?

Yes. Well, I think we're mining of 1,500 tonnes per day there. So I'll have a guy check on where we're on this call just to make sure, but I think it's 1,500 tonnes.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from Carey MacRury with Canaccord Genuity.

I'm just wondering how we should think about ASIC at Goose once you're at 3,200 tonnes a day versus your guidance?

So well, what I'd say, Carey, you can see, obviously, there's an ASIC ramp up in '26 in the budget numbers, and that's based on obviously much lower range production than we see when we get to steady state. So I think you can see us definitely stepping down. ASIC, we're doing an updated Goose study to incorporate, I think, all of the elements of this new crushing study and what we plan to do. But the goal is that we get ramped up to 4,000 tonnes per day, maybe a little bit further into 2027. So once we've got Stage 2 of the crusher remediation done, then you'll see our Goose all-in sustaining cost step down significantly from what we've put out in the budget here.

Okay. And then maybe just on the cash taxes, you've given guidance at $5,000 an ounce. Is there -- would you happen to know what that be at like $4,500 or so is there any sensitivity around that number?

So sorry, what was the second part of your question, Carey, on the cash taxes?

Just like your cash tax guidance is done at $5,000 an ounce, I'm just wondering what that would look like at $4,500 or so?

Well, yes, you could probably -- if you take what's there and multiply very effective average rate of 30% for the step down, that will probably get you somewhere in the ballpark. Remember, the thing to remember with those cash taxes is we're showing you what we think it is, and we have to make assumptions about how much we repatriate from sites, right? So at these higher gold prices, we're pulling up a lot of cash.

And so it's not a linear step down from $5,000 to $4,200 because there are withholding taxes on those dividends. But if you want to quantify it, very high level, what it is, take the difference in the gold price, multiply it by the production ounces and take 30% of it, you'll get in the ballpark of what the impact of cash taxes would be.

We didn't give that cash tax guidance just to show you what it looks like around the whole group because you can see in 2025 cash tax numbers, with over $0.5 billion and withholding taxes and that was $130 million plus. So it's -- I want to remind everyone, all the analysts for your models, you got to put those withholdings in to see the impact of the higher gold prices.

And we pulled back over $1 billion from sites during '25. So we wanted to give you that guidance in '26 as well, just to show you what we see at $5,000 and withholdings somewhere in that $115 million range and $5,000 is the impact for the year.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Clive Johnson for closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you all for those good questions. Sorry, operator, is there somebody else?

I apologize for the interruption. Have you finished your concluding remarks?

Okay. Yes. Thank you, operator. Thanks, everyone, for attending and for your questions.

Thank you. This brings to end today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to B2Gold Corporation's Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the conference over to Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning or afternoon or evening, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. We're here to talk about the financial results of the third quarter of 2025. We had a strong operational and financial quarter. Fekola, Masbate and Otjikoto mines all came in ahead of expectations in the third quarter on the production side, resulting in lower-than-expected cash operating cost per ounce. On October 2 of this year, we announced that we achieved commercial production at our newly constructed Goose mine. This milestone comes just 3 months after the inaugural gold pour, and we look forward to many years of successful operations; in Nunavut in close collaboration with our partner with our partners Kitikmeot Inuit Association.

At Goose, third quarter production was impacted by the previous disclosed crushing capacity shortfall and a temporary delay in accessing higher grade from Umwelt underground. We are now in the higher-grade. To ensure a consistent feed of crushed ore to the mill, the company has implemented the use of supplemental mobile crushing capacity. Permanent modification and modifications are in progress and are expected to be implemented in 2026. Continued use of the mobile crusher will assist in operating at higher throughput until these modifications are implemented. We expect to be at design capacity of 4,000 tonnes per day by the end of the year.

Underground mining of the Umwelt deposit commenced in late October 2025 and will be a strong contributor of high-grade ore at Goose over the next few years. In Namibia, B2Gold announced a construction decision on the Antelope underground deposit. Production from Antelope is substantial to increase Otjikoto mine gold production, leveraging the low-cost platform and extend the life of the mine into the 2030s. In this strong gold price environment, B2Gold is well positioned to take advantage with annual gold production of approximately 1 million ounces this year with both capital spending at Goose now complete, the company is set up well to add significant shareholder value over the coming years.

Before I turn it over to Mike to give us more financial detail, I just want to talk a little bit about the political situation in Mali. We've had some news come out, I think what I think are some responsible headlines from some of the media talking about that it's imminent that a terrorist group organization is going to take over Bamako in the country of Mali. We think that is completely erroneous, and it's a great exaggeration of the situation. Yes, there have been some fuel challenges, particularly in Bamako, but we continue to run the mine as we have for many years now and haven't missed any mining due to any kind of political situation or turmoil associated with that. So the mine continues to run well. We're 500 kilometers from Bamako.

And we look at the situation that the government still enjoys popular support from the population. And they see these organizations that are cutting off fuel to Bamako as foreigners. This is not the bad of the people of Mali from our understanding from the intelligence that we have received. So operations continue. It's nice to see some support from other governments in the United States and others. The U.S. came out and posted -- they supported Mali military and said they're looking forward to closer collaboration, working on intelligence together. There's no Western company that wants to see Mali fall into other hands, and there's a lot of international support gathering.

So we're very confident of our ability to continue to produce in Mali and work very closely with the Mali government. We're expecting the permit for our regional mining and trucking at the Fekola mill. That's imminent. And we received not that long ago the permit to go underground at Fekola. So we think we're on track there. And once again, we're not impacted by any of the things going on in Mali right now, and we're disappointed to see this irrational or not true headlines that are running around and lasted little while. And clearly, that's hurt the value of B2Gold. With the benefit of time, I think we'll see that this is a situation not impacting the mine. With that, I'll hand it over to Mike to give us a financial summary of the quarter.

Thanks, Clive. As Clive said, financially, it was a strong quarter. I mean GAAP earnings were $0.01 per share, but they were impacted by several noncash derivative mark-to-market adjustments. And after adjusting for those onetime items, the company's earnings per share were $0.14 per share of adjusted earnings. And clearly, you can see that benefiting from the strong average gold sales price that we saw in the Q and continues now. The company recorded revenue of approximately $783 million in Q3, and that included $144 million related to the delivery of just over 66,000 ounces under the company's gold prepay obligations.

And by the end of October, we had another delivery into those obligations. So we've now delivered into 1/3 of what we own there, and that leaves us just under 200,000 ounces that we'll need to deliver into by the end of June. So we're in good shape there. Operating cash flows totaled $171 million in the third quarter and or before working capital adjustments, $180 million, which is another strong result, and it highlights the continuing cash-generating potential of our assets and the strong gold price environment. Balance sheet-wise, we continue to remain in a strong financial position with cash and cash equivalents of $367 million at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we drew down -- as we disclosed last time, we drew down $200 million on the revolver. That just helped us manage through some of the working capital timing differences that we have, especially as we deliver in the prepaid.

So we'll continue to do that. But with these gold prices, we expect to repay some or all of it by the year-end. So I'd say, overall, we maintain excellent financial flexibility to deliver to the prepaid, complete our other sustaining growth initiatives, continue to fund the healthy exploration programs that we have and I think continue to return capital under our share buyback plan. So I think that's the summary that I want to touch on in the financial sections. And with that, I'll turn it over to Bill for an operational project update.

All right. Thanks, Mike. So at Goose having key commercial production, the focus now moves to steady-state operations and consistent performance at nameplate capacity. We've identified the source of the crushing issues that impacted performance early in Q3 and have made a temporary fix to the use of the mobile crushing unit. Permanent optimization to the primary crusher and secondary grinding circuits and the installation of the surging capacity are being engineered and designed with a finalized study and remediation plan in December '25.

Use of the mobile crusher is expected to continue until the modifications are implemented. Due to the shortfall of the crushing capacity and temporary delays in accessing the higher grade ore at Umwelt underground, B2Gold has revised its 2025 gold production guidance for the Goose mine down to between 50,000 and 80,000 ounces. Underground mining of the Umwelt deposit commenced in late October '25, and the company expects underground operations to ramp up quickly through the final months of 2025, setting the operation up well for the first full operating year in 2026. The company reiterates the near-term and gold and long-term gold production estimates at the Goose Mine, which includes a production forecast of approximately 250,000 ounces of gold in 2026 and approximately 330,000 ounces of gold in 2027 and average annual gold production for the initial full 6 years of operation of approximately 300,000 ounces based only on existing mineral resources.

Significant construction activities for the first 9 months of 2025 included completion of the mining in the Echo pit and commissioning of the pit as a TSF to include construction of the winter deposition infrastructure. Mining of the Umwelt open pit commenced ahead of schedule with full ramp-up achieved during the second quarter of 2025. Development of the Umwelt underground continued, including development of Fresh Air Raise 1 and 2 to support stope ore production in the fourth quarter of 2025, continued dewatering of the future site of the Llama pit, commissioning of 3 large glycol heating systems, excavation and construction of foundation for the arctic corridor for the camp and construction of mechanically stabilized earth wall for the reclaim tunnel.

In Mali, the site continues its strong performance in 2025, exceeding gold production expectations again in the third quarter. Cash costs per ounce were also lower than expected. Of note, Fekola underground is also performing above expectations despite operations commencing earlier in Q3 on July 30, 2025. At Masbate, the operation continues to perform well with a world-class safety record. Mine throughput has significantly outperformed expectations in 2025, and we anticipate consistent production in the fourth quarter.

At Otjikoto, open pit and underground mining went very well in the third quarter with production also exceeding expectations. During the third quarter, the company approved a development decision for the Antelope deposit. The company has also completed further optimization and believes preproduction capital costs can reduce from $129 million in the PEA to $105 million. Production from the Antelope has the potential to increase Otjikoto mine gold production to approximately 110,000 ounces over the life of the Antelope underground mine. With that, I'll turn it back over to Clive for an intro to Q&A.

Thanks, Bill. Operator, we're ready for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Ovais Habib with Scotiabank.

Congrats on a good quarter. A couple of questions from me. Just starting off with Fekola. Fekola underground seems to be ramping up really well. What are the kind of grades you're expecting going into 2026? And is there a target that you have in mind in terms of ore tonnes mined and kind of grade on the Fekola underground?

Yes, I don't have what the exact grade is, but I think we were targeting about 4.5 grams is what I remember, 4.5 grams and a throughput of about 1,500 tonnes a day. So you can do the math on what it's going to be. It's something like that. And remember, those are replacement ounces of low grade.

And Bill, in terms of the development rates into Fekola underground, is that all progressing well and kind of confident in terms of what you guys are going to be producing in 2026 then?

Absolutely. So the contractor is Byrnecut, the same contractor we've had in Namibia, very good relationships and the development has actually been on or at schedule really the whole way.

Good stuff. And then just moving on quickly to Fekola regional permit. I know we are expecting the permit by the end of 2025. In terms of any sort of predevelopment or anything that you guys can do prior to that? Or basically, you guys are just ready as soon as the permit comes in, you start pre-stripping and then start bringing the ore?

We are, in fact, pre-stripping some. We've been given approval to go out and do some clearing and grubbing. So all of that is happening. Obviously, we're hiring people, getting the equipment. So really, we're putting a little bit of money at risk, knowing that everything we've been told that the permit is coming.

Got it. And then just moving quickly to Goose. Underground grades seems to be picking up as kind of we're going into Q4. Are development rates also picking up as well? And again, I think this is kind of a question that has come up in other mining operations as well. Do you have the right people and kind of equipment in place right now?

Yes. We have the right people for sure. Remember, this is remote mining, remote stope mining. So it is a specialized skill. And we do have the right people on site now, and we see that it will be coming up as planned.

The next question comes from Anita Soni with CIBC World Markets.

I just wanted to ask a few questions on Goose. And I just want to understand the key drivers of the cost increase into -- obviously -- sorry, into the fourth quarter. Obviously, there's lower tonnes are going to be pushed and that's going to impact the numbers. But how do you expect that to evolve into next year? I mean you maintained the production guide for next year. So I'm just trying to get an understanding on what we should be thinking about on costs? Are they going to be as indicated previously? Or will there will be some impact?

So it's Mike. Just on the cost, Anita, for the fourth quarter, we guided that the per ounce costs are a little higher. You're right, then we had before. We've left the production costs that were in the budget for Q4 there, but we reguided down the ounces to 45,000 ounces just on the basis that we're a little later getting into the higher-grade stopes and the total production for the Q. So I don't think those are reflective of the cost going forward. This is just a function of the continued ramp-up.

And then on the cost, as we look forward, the 250,000 that Bill was talking about and beyond into the later years of the mine life. We don't have any change to those right now. We're doing the budget for next year and then also an updated sort of upside like mine case as well that we're looking at. So I think we don't have anything new to put out on those at this point. But certainly, the key message is these Q4 ones are ramp-up ounces. So the cost related to those shouldn't be extrapolated into anything in the future. And we've tried to be relatively conservative in that guidance. We had to re-guide it down just for the fourth quarter. So we've tried to be conservative in that guidance and give a chance to meet or even beat it for the Q.

Okay. And sorry, could you just -- Bill, could you just give me an idea of what's actually going on with the delay accessing on well? Like what was the reason for the delay?

The reason for the delay was lack of equipment parts for Sandvik and then operators to run it. And so it's one of those things that you assume in Canada, these things come on a very set schedule, and it just didn't happen. And so we have rectified the situation. We do have the people on site now, and we do have the appropriate drilling media. So it's been solid.

The next question comes from Don DeMarco with National Bank.

Maybe first off, at Goose, you're looking at some different options regarding the crushing, the optimization of the crushing. Among the options that you're considering, we look forward to the results of your report and so on. But what's the potential magnitude of these range of solutions just to get away from that mobile crushing.

Yes. So we talked before. Remember, the initial one when we were in Denver was the concept of really kind of a very small change. Obviously, we've disappointed on it. And so we've got a third-party consultant coming in that will deliver a report in December. So I really don't want to once again tell you a number and then have to walk it back. But it's still a small magnitude compared to fixing it and getting the throughput.

Okay. And I guess, like whatever you decide, I mean, you got the sea lift coming up and decisions to be made to kind of sequence with that and you'd have things on the ground as needed, I would imagine.

That's correct.

Okay. So in Mali, the regional permits, we're looking forward to year-end to have them. The time frame for getting these permits has been somewhat fluid. What are the reasons behind that? I mean you guys have a good line of communication with the government. You've been out there a number of times. Is it a different priority for the government? I mean from your point of view, what's the reason for the pushing back the schedule multiple times?

Well, I think we're in the bureaucracy of Mali in terms of winding its way through various approval levels. Our understanding most recently is that it's -- we're in the final stages of approval, and we expect that definitely before the end of the year and maybe quite imminently.

Okay. Well, we'll look forward to that. And then -- but I see in the report, too, that you're going to start right away with the stripping once you get that and other prep work and look forward to seeing all that production reflected in guidance next year. So that's all for me.

As Bill said, we've already started some prep work, let's say.

The next question comes from Kerry MacRury with Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe a question for Mike. You drew down $200 million last quarter, and I see you paid off $50 million. Do you anticipate needing to use the credit facility as you go through these prepay payments?

I think you'll see us -- like you said, I think if gold prices stay where we see them right now for the fourth quarter, then we expect that we'll have paid down a substantial part of that line, if not all of it by year-end. I think you'll see us utilize it a little bit as we move through Q1 and Q2 just to manage the timing of the prepaid deliveries and the fact that we already got the cash for those. But after that, the line be repaid and it's off to the races. So I think we'll use it as a temporary inter-quarter thing and it's a relatively small draws. And then as we move forward, we're into these cash flow harvest years.

And then just maybe on CapEx at Goose. I mean Q3 CapEx seemed a bit higher than what we were expecting. Maybe that's just seasonality in Nunavut. But any guidance on what we should be expecting for growth capital at Goose for Q4?

Yes. So I'd say if you look at the budget that we put out for half 2, it was $176 million. And we didn't give a split, but it was heavily weighted to Q3. So the budget was roughly $130 million for Q3 and then $45 million, $46 million for Q4. So in Q3, the recorded CapEx in the financials was $157 million, but that includes -- we ended up capitalizing a bunch of site general costs and commissioning costs just because of the timing of the ramp-up, which are -- they were budgeted as operating costs. And so we ended up capitalizing them so they flow through the CapEx line.

Like-for-like, the hard assets in the budget, we were $120 million versus the budget of $131 million plus these site G&A costs. So on the capital front, the pure CapEx front that we budgeted we're pretty much on budget. Q4, we did add $15 million to Goose's capital budget. So it's gone from $45 million to $60 million. And that really is to factor in some -- there's still quite a few folks on site that are gradually being wound down, but there are a few more people on site than we thought for a little longer.

So we added that $15 million. So the way to think about Q3 is if you look at the capital and operating costs, we were pretty much right on budget. It's just to split how we ended up. We capitalized some of the site G&A and some of the commissioning costs that we didn't expect. But that was just a reallocation of cost from 2 areas of the budget. And then Q4, yes, adding $15 million for CapEx for Q4. So it goes from $45 million to $60 million.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Clive Johnson for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator. As we said at the outset, a strong quarter operationally and financially, and we look forward to progressing ramp-up at Goose and continuing our strong performance at the other operations. So if you have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to Michael McDonald, and he can put you in touch with the right party to answer your questions. So thanks for joining us today.

This brings to an end today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.

Thank you for standing by. This is today's conference operator. Welcome to the B2Gold Corporation's Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold. Please proceed.

Thanks, operator, and welcome to the call, everyone. We feel we had a strong quarter -- second quarter with strong operational and financial results. Across all operations, we are very pleased with our second quarter results. Fekola, Masbate and Otjikoto mines came in ahead of expectations in the second quarter on the production side, resulting in lower-than-expected cash operating costs per ounce at all three operations.

The operations continue to run well, and we expect to meet our annual guidance. Additionally, a big milestone on June 30, 2025, we celebrated the inaugural gold ore at our newly constructed Goose Mine. This marks a transformational moment for B2Gold and is a true milestone for our staff and partners who have worked tirelessly to reach this achievement.

At Goose, the focus now turns to continuing steady state operations and increasing throughput, full design capacity ramp up to commercial production, which we expect to be achieved in September 2025, which is quite a rapid ramp-up 3 months, and that's typical of our track record of history. In Mali, we have received some very positive news in our view, and that's the state of Mali granting approval to commence underground operations at Fekola. This includes stope ore production, which has [indiscernible. The approval follows a productive week of meetings with senior management and several key individuals in Mali, including the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Mines that advised the Mali government.

I think this is a really important point because for those that are concerned about the future of gold mining in Mali, this clearly underlies the fact that the government of Mali is cooperating with B2Gold, wants B2Gold to be in the country and operate the Fekola mine and the regional expansion. So the next step is working with the state of Mali to realize the exploitation license for the Fekola regional and we're looking to see that in the short term, expecting approval in third quarter of 2025.

During the second quarter of 2025, we also announced positive results of the 2025 Gramalote feasibility study, which demonstrated that Gramalote has meaningful production profile and positive project economics. We're working on permitting, but that involves coming in with a reduced footprint in the production of Gramalote and we already have a permit. So it's a matter of coming back and modifying the permit application.

This strong gold price environment means growth as well, so [indiscernible] gold production of four million ounces this year. And with the majority of growth capital spending at now complete, the company is set up well to add significant shareholder value over the coming years, including production from the Fekola region. But we are looking forward to another strong quarter operationally and financially and as I said, looking to meet our guidance for 2025.

So with that, I think I'll turn it over to Mike Cinnamond, who's our CFO, and Michael will give you a quick review of some of the financial highlights. And then we'll have Bill Lytle, Senior VP of Operations, talk to us to give us a quick update on produce. And then we'll open up for questions. So Mike, over to you.

Thanks, Clive. I mean, financially, it was a strong quarter. Our basic earnings per share were $0.12 per share and adjusting for onetime items, which were actually offsetting, we actually realized $0.12 per share of adjusted earnings. And fair to say that, that definitely benefited from a strong average gold sales price. And just to maybe touch on the sales point too, we were slightly behind budgeted sales ounces in the quarter, but that was purely on a timing basis, the timing of shipments from several of the sites that those ounces were shipped out just after the period end and sold in early July.

Operating cash flow side, operating cash flow before working capital adjustments was $301 million in the second quarter, another strong result and again, highlights the cash generation potential of our operating assets and this gold price environment. Balance sheet-wise, we continue to remain in a strong financial position. We've got cash and cash equivalents of $308 million at the end of the second quarter.

And also at the end of the second quarter, we had the full $800 million available on our revolving credit facility, which was undrawn plus a $200 million accordion feature. I will say that subsequent to June -- the end of June, we did draw down $200 million on the revolver. And that was just -- that was to help us manage working capital requirements as we start to deliver into our gold prepayment commitments over the 12-month period from July '25 to June '26. In fact, we have already delivered the first tranche of those. So we're starting to unwind that position.

With continued strong performance across the portfolio and the ramp-up of Goose, which is now well underway, we were pleased to restate and reiterate our production guidance for 2025 unchanged with full year production expected to be between 970,000 and 1,075,000 ounces, and we expect Goose to still contribute between 120,000 to 150,000 of those ounces. Again, on the positive side, with lower-than-expected cash cost per ounce at the existing three operating mine sites Fekola, Masbate and Otjikoto.

We're pleased to announce that the company has reduced its consolidated cash cost guidance range for those three operations to between $740 and $800 per ounce sold -- or produced, sorry. This is lower than the previous guidance range of between $835 and $895 per ounce. And then with the inclusion of the post-commercial production estimates for the Goose Mine, I remind you that we expect Goose to come into commercial production in September. Consolidated cash operating guidance is now forecast to be between $795 and $855 per ounce.

And overall, on a liquidity basis, we continue to maintain a good amount of financial flexibility to be able to allow us to complete our remaining ramp-up of construction activities at Goose to fully repay or deliver into the gold prepays entered into -- in early '24 and to complete the other sustaining and growth initiatives across the portfolio, and we'll continue to fund healthy exploration programs as well, which we expect will extend mine lives.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Bill for an operation and project update.

All right. Thanks, Mike. I just got back from the Goose, so I may be a little Ferrell during this, so bear with me. As Mike said, on the three operations, we expect to meet or exceed all of our targets for the year, but probably what everyone wants to talk about is Goose. So just going back to what has been completed there. Goose, all the major construction activities, which required -- were nearly completed at the end of the quarter, and the mine ramp-up is now well underway.

The focus for the third quarter now turns actually to optimizing the current operations and increasing the throughput to full capacity. As Mike indicated, a ramp-up to commercial production is expected in September 2025. Things which were completed in the first half of 2025 at the Goose include the completion of the mining of the Echo pit. Remember, that was our tailings facility and commissioning. So we are now placing tails in Echo.

Full ramp-up of mining of the Umwelt open pit in the second quarter. We also had continued development of the Umwelt underground. We completed the Fresh Air Raise 1 already and in the process of developing Fresh Air Raise 2, which will be needed in the second half of 2025. We commenced dewatering of the Llama pit. All these things are required to run the mill correctly. This provides freshwater and reclaim water to the mill.

We developed the Umwelt open pit and underground, and that remains a priority to ensure that the adequate mill feed volumes are maintained. If you look at around the other operations, Mali continued its strong performance for 2025, exceeding gold production expectations again in the second quarter. As Mike said, cash costs per ounce were also lower than expected. Underground after meeting with the government last quarter -- last month, the underground production has commenced as announced on July 30.

The underground development is well advanced with over 9,300 meters of development work plus the installation of all required underground mining infrastructure, having all been performed prior to commencing production. If you remember, we were actually given a permit to do all the development. So even though we were 30 days late on the starting of mining of ore, we, in fact, continue to develop right up until July 30.

So the question I've heard or being asked several times is whether or not we think we're going to get the ounces required from underground, we absolutely see a path to make sure that all the required ounces from underground will be delivered in 2025. The regional project, we continued with our meeting with them. We continue to work with the state of Mali to finalize the approval of the regional exploitation permit in the third quarter of 2025, just kind of late breaking.

We've actually had our first technical session with them this morning. We absolutely see a path towards getting this permit. B2Gold is ready to commence pre-stripping activities with the Fekola regional infrastructure. Remember -- once again, this was one of those facilities where they allowed us to do all of the infrastructure development. So the haul road is in place and all the infrastructure is already in place. We're just waiting on a permit to start pre-stripping.

Subsequent to June 30, 2025, the Fekola mill celebrated a significant milestone with 4 million ounces of gold produced since the inception of the project. At Masbate, the operations continue to perform well with a world-class safety track record, which I think we announced more than 2,400 days without a lost time incident. Mine production significantly outperformed expectation, and we anticipate consistent production in the second half will result in strong 2025 performance and robust margins.

Otjikoto is also going very well. The open pit and underground went well during the second quarter with production also exceeding expectations. During the second quarter, remember, we're working on this Antelope deposit. So we continue to focus on developing that with a target release in the third quarter of 2025.

And then the other development project is Gramalote. We released the positive feasibility study. Work has commenced on the modification of the work plan and environmental impact study, and we expect to be complete in late 2025 or early 2026. We anticipate that the permit modification time frame should be approximately 12 to 18 months.

With that, Clive, I'll turn it back over to you.

Okay. Thanks, Bill. Operator, we're ready to turn over to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And today's first question comes from Fahad Tariq with Jefferies.

In the press release, it mentioned lower-than-anticipated fuel costs in a number of places, not just at Fekola, but also Masbate. Can you just maybe talk about what the expectation was at the beginning of the year when you set guidance? And I'm just curious why it's trending lower than expected?

Mike, do you want to take or do you want me?

Well, I can start -- I'll start. So -- well, when we budget, we typically have a look at the forward curves on the fuel side, usually around September, October. So we use those as the base. And then what we just -- what we've seen and what's been realized with the sites is that, HFO has been about 9% lower than those prices over the first 6 months of 2025 and diesel it's actually been more -- it's been something more like 13% below.

So we made our best estimate back when we set the budget, probably somewhere around the October price because we do our budgeting and sort of finalize it up in early November. And all I can tell you is as we've looked forward, we have taken into account those lower fuel costs when we're looking at the reguidance that we put out on the cash operating side.

Okay. That's helpful. And then on Goose, there was a comment about the CapEx guidance for the second half of this year, $176 million. I'm just trying to reconcile just the overall CapEx at Goose relative to, I guess, what the project guidance -- project CapEx guidance was before, and I think it was reiterated in the May release. Can you just maybe help us walk through that? Like is -- I guess the other way of asking is, is that second half CapEx guidance of $176 million, is that consistent with what you were expecting?

Yes. Again, I can start with that and Bill can jump in. I mean, overall, on the project, we did see some acceleration of costs as we worked our way up to the first go for at the end of half 1. So we probably saw somewhere around about 5% overall and cost increases against the budget. Then what we also experienced as we ran up to that is we did accelerate some CapEx, CapEx that would have been in half 2 in the tech report and actually a little bit from future years, and that totaled about somewhere in the region of $60 million.

And then we also had what we've described in the MD&A and disclosures, we had some mill and process plant upgrades somewhere in the region of $40 million. So approximately $100 million between those two where we pulled stuff forward from second half or -- and then about $40 million that we've added in to the second half. I think that's for further mill and process plant upgrades. And I think Bill can talk to those a little bit.

Yes. Really relating to upgrades, I would say, once again, it was really operability or availability of the mill. One of the things that as we got in and building, we realized a lot of the lines didn't have the necessary valving and piping, the redundancy built in, the ability to do maintenance on the mill while it continues to operate.

So we added, I think I saw from the finance group approximately an additional $26 million on the mill side related to kind of what I would call upgrades or improvements in availability. And I'd say that really relates to a lot of that small stuff, additional pumping, piping, valves and installation of all that stuff.

Our next question comes from Wayne Lam with TD Securities.

Congrats on a good quarter and getting the Fekola underground permit. It seems like you have some good momentum in Mali now. Just wondering what the mechanics would be in terms of getting the Fekola regional permit and what the final points of negotiation might be? And any potential hurdles to getting that permit by the end of Q3?

Yes. So we -- as I said, we went down and we met -- we met with the Minister of Mines. And during discussion, it almost seemed like -- for them, the regional permit has kind of dropped off because they were dealing with some of the other mining houses issues there, which shall not be named on this call. But once we brought it forward, quite frankly, they were a little embarrassed that they hadn't done it yet.

And so they immediately agreed to try and get this thing pushed out by the end of Q3. That was their schedule, not ours. And they immediately agreed to set up a commission and start working on that. So that happened this morning. We haven't heard any outstanding issues other than to hear that it wasn't a yell fest. It wasn't an argument. It was a very constructive discussion, which we think leads to the permit.

Okay. Great. And then maybe just wondering in terms of the ramp-up of Goose relative to the mine plan, you guys had outlined in the plan 125,000 ounces this year, which would be at the lower end of the guidance. It seems like you've been making some good progress there just on the stripping of the Echo pit and the development. But just wondering where you guys kind of see the opportunities to outperform what's been outlined in the plan. Is that on the plant performance? Or is there an upside on the grade profile as well?

I would say both at this point. Once again, you're asking questions right at the front of commissioning. So certainly, we have an aggressive ramp-up plan, but historically, we've been able to beat that. So there is some potential there. There's also some potential as we start to move out of kind of the Echo low-grade material, which remember, the Echo pit was never designed to be kind of a high-grade feeder into the mill.

Into the Umwelt pit, if we can get our head around how can we mine that quicker, certainly, there is some potential there. And so I would say not only on the mill ramp-up side, which admittedly a 3-month ramp-up is aggressive versus many other of our peers, but not really aggressive versus what we've historically done and then on the Umwelt side, if we can get additional grade from the open pit.

Okay. Great. And then maybe just last one, maybe just a follow-up on the CapEx side. Just given the increase in CapEx relative to the $270 in the mine plan, just wondering how much of that would have been brought forward from 2026? Just trying to figure out if maybe we should be anticipating a lower CapEx number relative to the $140 million outlined for next year in the mine plan?

Mike...

Okay. So you're talking about what may be pulled forward from '26 in the second half? Is that what you're asking?

Yes.

Well, I think there's some site infrastructure upgrades where Bill is doing, I think, what he wants to do to pull, to enhance both the MLA and the site that they're about $15 million. There's -- as Bill mentioned, there's $26 roughly related to the mill. So there's $40, let's say, that are -- I think we didn't have to do this year, but we wanted to, to enhance it. And then there's some prepayments on some generator additions that we have. There's another $24 million. So it would be more than $60 million that would be pulled forward from future years.

The next question is from Ovais Habib with Scotiabank.

Congrats on a good quarter. Just a couple of questions from me, starting off with Fekola maybe. In terms of the mine plan sequencing for Fekola kind of going into 2026, does that change now that you have the Fekola underground permit in hand?

So remember, we always talked about having it after Q2. So our life of mine showed it really coming online in July. So the underground permit doesn't really change it other than we have done a little bit more development than what was in the life of mine. So we may be able to steal some additional ounces, but I really think that's more of a 2025 issue, not a 2026 issue. And as far as 2026, we're still working on the budget and where we're going with that. So I don't really want to comment on where the ounces will come from in 2026 just yet.

Got it. And then just, Bill, in terms of -- what would be the current grade of the underground stockpile that you have on site? And what would be the grade that you're expecting from the stopes that you're currently mining?

You're talking at Fekola?

Fekola underground, yes.

I don't -- I'd have to look that one up for sure. Let me just -- I did actually report to the Board what it is. So -- let me come -- during this call, let me come back to you on that.

Sounds good. Sounds good. No worries. And then just kind of moving on from there. In terms of -- you're targeting about 25,000 ounces from the underground in 2025. I guess this is kind of my follow-up question from my previous one, but is there a target that you have in mind for 2026 for the Fekola underground that's kind of -- is there a range that you can talk about right now?

Yes. So remember, we always talk about the fact that we thought we could produce about 80,000 or 100,000 -- between 80,000 and 100,000 ounces of the underground. But remember, that replaces lower grade ounces. So the reality is you're going to get kind of probably 50% of that. So we're kind of targeting that 50,000 ounces a year.

And just coming back to your previous question, I see the total underground tonnes mined, this is kind of development, which is on the stockpile right now is about -- just about 35,000 ounces at just like 2.7 grams per tonne. And then once again, I'm speaking out of turn, but we're at least double that in the stopes we'll be mining.

Got it. And then just moving on to the regional permit side. Assuming you get the permit by the end of Q3, is that what you're targeting? Are you comfortable with the 160,000 to 180,000 ounces of production in 2026? Kind of -- that's kind of going by the tech report that was presented earlier this year.

Yes. I mean there's no changes to what the actual mining looks like from the tech report. Clearly, once again, in the budgeting process on where the ounces are going to come from, that may shift around some, but the ounces haven't changed from the regional from what was on the tech report.

Sounds good. Okay. And then just quickly moving on to Goose. I'm really looking forward to that commissioning of the Goose in September. Bill, how is underground development progressing there? And do you have kind of now the right people and equipment in place in terms of what you were targeting for the underground? This is at Goose.

Yes. So first of all, I remember like when I first joined these calls, Clive declaring, I think, to you that you only get three questions. So let's start with that. This is question #4. I'm going to take it. Things are going well. We've kind of hit our stride. We have, as you know, turned over a bunch of people in the underground.

We have -- there's a new mining manager, which came in this year, new technical services manager. All those people are in place. We also brought in additional equipment on the [indiscernible] program this year for the underground, so the answer is yes. We now have the right people. And yes, we now have the right equipment. There really isn't an excuse for the site not to be able to deliver.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Anita Soni with CIBC World Markets.

I'm just going to ask 2, so that I will make up for Ovais' extra question there. First question was your commercial production. What's your definition of commercial production? I just want to clarify because everyone has different definitions.

Yes. I think it's the same thing we used at Fekola and Otjikoto. So it's like, an average of 65% nameplate throughput over 30 days.

Okay. And then what's -- from your perspective, what's the next milestone in terms of like the ramp -- like, I guess, it's year-end, what are you targeting for -- like what's the throughput ramp-up you're hoping to get to by year-end? And then for how long?

By year-end, we want to be at that nameplate, 4,000 for sure.

Nameplate, 100% for the whole quarter?

Well, I think it's like 92% or 93% availability. It's something like that. I forget what it will be in the tech report.

Okay. And then last question, I guess, so I did ask three. Just in terms of the optimization plans that you're looking at. In terms of the -- doing a winter ice road less than -- I think you said less than annually, what would that entail? I would assume that it was kind of a -- is there a way to do an ice road that's like not at the ice road timing? Or was it every other year? Or what are you looking at like every 15 months or so? Like I'm just trying to understand that phrase.

Yes. Well, it can't be every 15 months. The ice road must be almost always between February and kind of that May 1, let's say, May 6. So that is the ice road date. The question you're asking is actually one that -- that's almost like engineering interest. So the question really revolves around fuel is the first problem. If, in fact, you need 80 million liters of fuel, which is what we're sending down the road every year right now, it would have to be every year.

But now let's say -- because we just don't have to tank it to do anything less than that. But now let's say that we actually are successful by putting these medium-speed generators in, which saves about 10% of that. And then you say, okay, now we're going to put our wind farm in, which is 50 megawatts. Could you get to a point where the number is less than half, then you suddenly say, okay, now can I increase my reagents to make up that difference in the off years and do it.

Those studies there are obviously very preliminary, so much so I'm not convinced that 80 million liters is actually what we're going to use this year. For example, right now, we're sitting here in August, and we still have 70 million liters of fuel sitting on site. So how does that really add up once you get into full production, and we just don't know yet.

Congrats on some strong ops this quarter.

The next question is from Lawson Winder with Bank of America Securities.

Well done on the permitting success in Mali. What I wanted to ask is, more around jurisdiction as it pertains to Colombia, in particular, and Canada. So acknowledging B2Gold's historical success at being jurisdictionally agnostic and focusing on asset quality instead, I think feedback from the market would suggest that the market likes the pivot to Canada.

How do you think about assets in Canada? And what's B2Gold's appetite to add more assets in Canada? And then conversely, how does Colombia then stack up in terms of jurisdictional risks? And is that at all a headwind today for a potential sanctioning decision on Gramalote?

Yes. I think we're definitely interested in doing more, more things in Canada. But once again, we're project driven. From a geopolitical point of view, we want more diversification. So definitely, we're looking for additional opportunities in Canada. Gramalote in Colombia, we quite like what's been happening there. I mean we do have a permit for our larger operations. So we need to go back and modify that permit.

But we've had very positive support in Antioquia, local population and government in Antioquia and also some segments of support from the federal government as well. But I'm glad you raised the question because I want to segue a little bit into talking about M&A. We will not surprise the shareholders with a development project M&A. We're very disciplined. We build one mine at a time. And we think Gramalote looks very interesting as a project for us to do financially, we'll be in a strong position to do that.

And we like what we see in the feasibility study. I think it will be a very good project for us. We've got to get through the permitting process and then make a decision when we go forward. But I just want to underline again, no M&A for development projects. Potentially in the future sometime if we find an opportunity to increase our gold production through some kind of a deal, we will have a look at that of course, it just makes sense. But at the end of the day, we're not going to surprise the market with a major acquisition of a development project.

Fantastic. And if I could just get one more in on Goose. In your update earlier in the year, you highlighted the potential for an expansion in the processing capacity. Today, now that you're approaching commercial production, what's the latest thinking on timing of that expansion of processing capacity? And has there been any change in thinking on the magnitude?

Is this a what have you done for me lately, question?

Fair enough.

All right. So the answer is, as you know, we've got several studies in the hopper. One would be we got a flotation circuit, which you might be able to add. The other is, would you put -- expand the mill capacity, go up to something like 6,000 tonnes a day. Those are all due really -- first look by the end of this year. And so I think we're -- I can't remember we're talking Q1 next year, we're talking about putting it out the results.

But at the end of the day, those are very, very early on in the study where they go. But we think they're all very real. And just so you know, we talked about some of these optimizations. The mill will run at more than 4,000 tonnes. It's just a question of can you keep the availability up. So by doing -- by increasing some of these optimizations we've already put in, like I said, these valves, piping and everything, there is the potential we could just squeak out some additional capacity as it currently stands. No promises. We're saying 4,000 tonnes a day.

And the next question comes from Francesco Costanzo with Scotiabank.

Sorry, I didn't mean to jump in the question queue here. I think Ovais and the others have already asked all the pertinent questions. So apologies for that.

And the next question comes from Don DeMarco with National Bank Financial.

So it sounds like things are moving along well in Mali now. I mean you've got -- we'll look to the regional permitting. But [Technical Difficulty] what was the reason for the delays? I mean was it the government focusing on Barrick and maybe other stuff? Or is this kind of the norm in Mali? I mean [indiscernible] benefits from optimal mine performance from a tax point of view.

Yes. So maybe I'll take that, we were just down there. There's a couple of things there. Remember, there was this whole shift in the government. And they readily admitted that they didn't really know who is doing what. So you had the Minister of Finance working on this kind of updated mining code and the Minister of Mines didn't know where his mandate ended and the Minister of Mines started. We highlighted that.

We had a chance to meet with the Prime Minister, and they were visibly embarrassed and said that, that's a nonstarter for them and they will get it rectified. So certainly, I think some of the other mining issues in Mali play a factor. I think the fact that there were some big disputes out there that they had to pay attention to took up some of their bandwidth, but ultimately, they also didn't really know what each other was doing.

I will say that all three ministers we met, we met Minister of Mines, Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, they all apologized perfusely. They all said that they're committed to getting this done. Remember, this is -- they've got a big stake in this, too. So they want to go as quickly as they can, of course, legally to get us this permit and get us going.

Maybe just to add a little bit -- if I can just add a little bit to that, similar to one of the questions you've asked about further negotiations with the government to get the permit for the regional. There is no further negotiations. We're enacted the terms negotiated in the MOU last September to sort of clarify that. We're not in a negotiation mode. We're just getting the permit done and working closely with the government to do it.

As Bill touched on, revenue side for the government of Mali, which obviously they [indiscernible] the fastest way for them to get revenue from gold mining, would be to get us that permit because they own 35% of the regional. So they're on the same page as us wanting to get that permit and get going with this, as soon as possible.

Okay. That helps. That certainly clarifies things because that would have been our impression as well. So that's encouraging for the future. But sticking with Fekola then in Mali. So I saw production is up 35% quarter-over-quarter, grades are elevated. So Bill, do you expect this to continue into H2? What was some of the drivers here in Q2?

Well, some of the drivers really revolved around being -- finding additional ore kind of on the margins of what -- where the resource model was. And it was -- quite frankly, it wasn't higher-grade ounces, but it was ounces -- it was tonnes that would have been considered waste that we ended up being able to process through the mill. We also had a very good run with the mill. The mill had a very good quarter. And those were the two main things.

So, obviously, I can't predict what's going to happen outside of the resource model in Q3 and Q4, but the mill is kind of firing on all cylinders. And one of the things that we've been very open about is that, even if we don't get tonnes or get ounces from the regional stuff into the mill in 2025, we still feel very comfortable with our range that we put out there. And so that obviously would mean that we're going to get additional ounces from somewhere else.

That was the pre-stripping.

Yes, Clive, it's actually a good point. Even if we get the permit in kind of, let's say, August or September, there is still a pre-stripping campaign, which we have to do before we can start trucking tonnes down to the mill.

Okay. Okay. And then just for a final question, shifting over to Goose. I see that the ASIC for Goose is lower than what it was in the tech report by a bit. What are some of the efficiencies that would explain this delta -- favorable delta? And is there a read-through for lower cost at Goose in 2026 versus the technical report? Or is some of the CapEx that you kind of pushed forward also provide read-through for lower ASIC in 2026?

Maybe I'll talk and then I'll let Mike correct me. So when we wrote the technical report, really, the information we had was what was created by Sabina for the feasibility study and the actuals we had during construction, right? And so in construction, there's all these inefficiencies where you're flying stuff in, you've got the wrong crew.

What we've seen as we've now been able to tighten that up and particularly around the mining side is that we're probably a little bit worse than what Sabina had promised the world, but a lot better than what we had seen as kind of a developer. And so I do believe that the costs that we're now presenting on the mining side, in particular, and hopefully on the milling side will carry through. And we're going to see those -- I think -- I can't remember what we said they were ultimately going to be our all-in sustaining costs, but they were coming down, and we do see those as real.

I'll only add part of the -- part of the impact in '25 numbers is we're using post-commercial production, which is basically post September. So you have a production split there between Q3 and Q4, but you also have some of this CapEx that we pulled forward and accelerated. So it's already incurred. So that has some impact on the post-commercial production numbers.

And the next question is from Carey MacRury with Canaccord Genuity.

Congrats on the quarter. Maybe just a question for Mike on the accounting around Goose now that you're ramping up production. Are we going to see OpEx starting from now at Goose or is that going to come after commercial production?

No. Yes, you're right. Like in the new world order has been for a few years, all results will go through the P&L and all production reported [Technical Difficulty] post commercial production.

And that's baked in the OpEx guidance you've given us, I presume?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. And then maybe just back on Fekola Regional, assuming the permit comes in the near future here, is that still an attractive area from an exploration focus? Or do you see better opportunities elsewhere, just given the economics of that area now?

I'll get to answer the exploration upside. Yes. One of the areas that we see upside is the -- beneath the oxide resources that pretty much covered, and we have sufficient oxide ounces to keep us going there for quite a while. So the big push is to actually pursue higher grade fresh or sulfide material beneath the pits or -- beneath the oxide zones within the Fekola regional. And that's really where a lot of the oxide is.

The other is looking at the underground, obviously, pursuing that as we develop the underground, we'll be able to drill down plunge. So there's nothing to suggest that, that is closed off. We'll certainly be pushing that forward. And there's also a potential for picking up parallel shoots to the main zone at Fekola underground as well. So that's really where the potential is. On Dandoko, which is part of the Fekola regional, I think we've pretty much covered that. There's not a hell of a lot more there, but that's it really.

Can you speak to your exploration budget?

Yes, we have $62 million budget or globally. Bulk of that is at Goose, just about half. And then obviously, ongoing drilling in Mali, pursuing extensions of the Antelope deposit in Namibia and also looking at potential for surface material in Namibia to complement and to help the throughput as we look down the road at Otjikoto.

It needs more than just the stockpile to blend the high-grade ore material that we have there. So that's where it's at and then also pursuing new areas using and leveraging off our experience in Masbate in Philippines. We're looking at opportunities in within our movement, but that's all very early stage. I guess that's where we're at.

Okay. Great. Maybe one last question for me. Just on Gramalote again. Were you guys -- did the feasibility study kind of meet with what you're expecting? And I guess what I'm asking is, if we get through the permitting for the next 12 to 18 months, right in a $3,000 gold environment, how likely is this to move forward?

Well, I think we -- like what we saw in the study, it didn't come as a surprise to us. There's been a ton of work done over the years by EGA and by ourselves and by the combined joint venture over a long period of time. We know 100%, of course, but there's a lot of technical work and a lot of studies that happen before really [indiscernible] it's what it is.

So I think it's well defined. So we had expected the feasibility study to be close to the PEA. And I think when you look at that project with the potential to produce 240,000 ounces a year, the gain in Gramalote, there aren't many of those rounds. We own 100%. We don't buy it. We like the economics. And I don't know how you would -- if you don't build that, what are you going to do in terms of projects such as gold mines that you own, and we believe it's in a good jurisdiction. So at the end of the day, right now, I would say it looks very favorable, also a part of the upside of capital from the company.

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, there are no further questioners in the queue. And this does conclude today's question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Clive Johnson for any closing remarks.

Thanks, I think you asked good questions, and I think we covered a lot of ground there. One final question I have for the analysts, if anybody can figure out the market, I'd like to know how you can come up with a good quarter like that and see the stock down. That's a bit of a surprise, but the market always have surprises for us, I guess. So thank you very much for participating in the call.

Today's conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation, and you may now disconnect your lines, and have a pleasant day.

[Presentation]

That was a great video. Welcome to the 2025 Academy Awards. Seriously, good afternoon. My name is Kelvin Dushnisky, I'm Chairman of the Board. I'd like to welcome you and call the 2025 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders of B2Gold to order. We're also hosting the meeting through a virtual platform.

Before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge that we are gathered today on the unseated territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

I'll act as Chair of the meeting, and I appoint Randall Chatwin, Senior Vice President, Legal and Corporate Communications, to act as recording secretary of the meeting; and Deanna Hintersteininger of Computershare Investor Services, Inc. to act as scrutineer for the meeting.

Also present at the meeting today are the following directors and please stand as I call your names. Clive Johnson, President and CEO; Greg Barnes; Kevin Bullock; Liane Kelly; Jerry Korpan; Thabile Makgala; Lisa Pankratz, who isn't here in person, she had to attend to a family business, but she sends her regards; and Robin Weisman.

Now I'll introduce the officers of the company with us today. Also, please stand as I call your names. Mike Cinnamond, Senior Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer; Bill Lytle, Senior Vice President, Operations and Chief Operating Officer; Randall Chatwin, Senior Vice President, Legal and Corporate Communications; Victor King, Senior Vice President, Exploration; Dennis Stansbury, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Project Evaluations; Eduard Bartz, Vice President, Taxation and External Reporting; Andrew Brown, Vice President, Exploration; Ninette Krohnert, Vice President, Human Resources; Michael McDonald, Vice President, Investor Relations, Corporate Development and Treasury; Peter Montano, Vice President, Projects; Dan Moore, Vice President, Operations; John Rajala, Vice President, Metallurgy; and Neil Reeder, Vice President, Government Relations.

Now for the business of the meeting. The notice of this meeting and the accompanying information circular was filed and the notice and access notification and proxy form or voting instruction form was mailed to the shareholders by May 14, 2025. I have received a copy of the declaration attesting to the publication and mailing, and the recording secretary will arrange for the declaration to be annexed to the minutes of the meeting. These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered shareholder or a proxy holder.

I propose that we waive reading the notice of the meeting unless anyone specifically request that it would be read at this time.

The recording secretary has notified me that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting properly constituted for the transaction of business and I direct that the report of the scrutineer be annexed to the minutes of this meeting.

I propose that we first deal with all of the routine business requirements and then terminate the formal meeting and carry on in a less formal manner by way of an opportunity for questions from registered shareholders and proxy holders as well as a presentation relating to the company's activities and operations.

As this meeting is being held in person and virtually, I'd like to set out a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. For those attending online, questions in respect of a motion can be submitted using the messaging icon at the top of the virtual interface. When reading out a question, I will note the name of the registered shareholder or proxy holder submitting the question. In order to deal with all the questions in a timely fashion, questions of a similar nature will be answered at once.

For those attending in person, only registered shareholders or proxy holders may ask questions or vote. Before addressing the Chair, identify yourself by name and show the card provided to you upon registration. Questions on the formal meeting items will be addressed as each item is tabled. Questions and comments of a general nature will be deferred until the question period. If we're unable to address your general questions during that time, a representative of B2Gold will reach out to you following the meeting with a response.

Voting on all matters at this meeting will be conducted by ballot. For those attending online, to allow sufficient time for voting, the polls for all matters being voted on will be open following these introductory remarks and closed at the end of the meeting. Momentarily, you'll see the ballot open on the virtual interface requesting you to start registering your votes. I remind you that only registered shareholders and proxy holders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or user name will be able to see on the screen all motions being brought forth at this meeting, and will be asked to vote on each business item. To vote, simply click on your choice for or withhold or against, as applicable. A confirmation message will appear to show your vote has been received. To change your vote, simply change your selection. When the poll closes, the votes submitted on each resolution item will be recorded through the virtual meeting platform.

For those attending in person, I understand that each registered shareholder and a proxy holder received a ballot at the time of registration. Registered shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make an x or other mark in the square associated with the word for, withhold or against, as applicable, and sign the ballot. Also, please print your name beside your signature, where indicated, and record the number of shares that you're entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. I remind you that if you are a registered shareholder and you've already voted by proxy, you need not vote again.

For any motions duly brought before the meeting not included in the circular, the polls for such matters will be opened and closed as I deem necessary or desirable for the orderly and expeditious conduct of the meeting. If you plan to vote at the meeting, you may choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait to cast your vote until after an item is discussed. Once discussion on all items of business before the meeting has concluded, you will be given one final opportunity to enter your votes on the open polls and I will then declare voting closed on all resolutions. Voting totals for each resolution item will be tallied once the polls have closed. I will then report on the outcome of the motions. The final results of the polls will be reported in the scrutineer's report and will be posted under B2Gold's SEDAR+ profile.

I now declare the polls open for all resolutions included in the circular.

The first item of business is the presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2024, and the auditor's report on the financial statements. The financial statements were posted on SEDAR on February 19, 2025, and mailed to the shareholders on April 9, 2025. Copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. The auditor is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants and representatives are attending the meeting today. If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions for PwC, they are available to respond.

The next item of business is to set the number of directors. Could I please have a motion?

Mr. Chair, my name is Randall Chatwin. I'm a registered shareholder, and I move that the number of directors be set at 10.

Thank you. Are there any questions or discussion on the motion? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll be conducted on that motion and the scrutineers report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now.

[Voting]

Are there any more ballots to be collected? If none, we'll proceed to the next item of business.

The next segment of business is the election of directors. The director nominees proposed by management for election are listed in the circular. No other nominations have been received in accordance with the company's advanced notice policy. And accordingly, management's nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election.

Could I please have nominations for management's proposed directors?

Mr. Chair, I nominate the following persons for election as directors: Kelvin Dushnisky, Clive Johnson, Greg Barnes, Kevin Bullock, Liane Kelly, Jerry Korpan, Thabile Makgala, Basie Maree, Lisa Pankratz; and Robin Weisman.

I would ask for a motion that the director nominees be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the termination of the next AGM or until their successors are elected or appointed.

I so move.

Thank you. I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please do so now.

[Voting]

Are there any more ballots to be collected? If none, we'll proceed to the next item of business.

The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Management proposes that the auditor be reappointed until the next AGM.

May I now have a motion that the auditor be reappointed and the directors are authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor?

I so move.

Thank you. Are there any questions or discussion on the motion? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please do so now.

[Voting]

Are there any more ballots to be collected? If none, we'll proceed to the next item of business.

The next item of business is to consider, and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution on a nonbinding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. As this is an advisory vote, the result to be nonbinding. However, the Board will take the results into account, as appropriate, when considering future executive compensation policies, procedures and decisions.

May I have a motion to approve the form of resolution set out on Page 25 of the circular?

I so move.

Thank you. Are there any questions or discussion with respect to the resolution? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and the scrutineer report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please do so now.

[Voting]

Are there any more ballots to be collected? If none, we'll proceed to the next item of business.

That concludes the matters to be voted on. If you have not voted yet, please do so now as the polls will close shortly. We'll take a moment.

[Voting]

Thank you. The polls are now closed. I direct the scrutineer to provide a report on the results of the polls.

I now have the preliminary results from the scrutineer's report for the matters set forth in the circular. Based on the preliminary results, from the scrutineers' report, I declare that, as a majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the director nominees, the director nominees have been elected as directors of the company, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has been reappointed as the auditor until the next AGM and the directors are authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor, and the resolution accepting the company's approach to executive compensation has been carried.

After the meeting, upon receipt of the final scrutineer's report on the polls conducted during this meeting, I direct the recording secretary to attach the report of the scrutineer to the minutes of the meeting.

All of the formal business for which the meeting has been called has now been completed. Following termination of this formal part of the meeting, registered shareholders and proxy holders who wish to ask questions or make comments will be invited to do so.

May I have a motion to terminate the meeting?

I so move.

Thank you. Based on the preliminary results, I declare the motion carried, and the formal part of this meeting is now terminated.

If attending virtually, I now invite registered shareholders or proxy holders who wish to ask questions or make comments to do so via the virtual meeting platform. If attending in person, please first raise your hand, and upon being called on by me, identify yourself by name and show your card.

Are there any questions? There being no questions and the formal part of the meeting having been concluded, I declare the meeting terminated.

We'll now have members from our executive team provide an update regarding our operations, projects, sustainability, human resources and exploration.

But just before I invite our CEO to lead the presentation, I'd like to thank all of you for attending today. I'd also like to comment that, to all the B2Gold employees in the room, we'd like to thank you. 2024 was a challenging year on many fronts, and the Board is very grateful for your perseverance and commitment. It was a busy year for your Board, too. There was significant accomplishments across all of the committees, and I'd like to thank my Board colleagues for their vigilance and enthusiasm throughout the year. Importantly, we welcomed 2 new members to the Board this year, complementing the directors' skill sets in 2 very important areas, projects in operations and capital markets. And I'm referring to the addition of Basie Maree and Greg Barnes. I've known both of them for many years.

I've had the pleasure of collaborating with Basie, in fact, when we were both at Barrick. He rose to the level of Chief Technical Officer and also when he was a very effective Chief Operating Officer at Allied Gold. What I didn't know about Basie, and I just learned last night on a personal mode, is he happened to be the judo champion for South Africa for his weight class when he lived there. So fortunately, I never had any dustups with Basie. I recommend the same for you.

Many of you will know or know of Greg Barnes. Greg, who until recently, when he retired from TD Bank, was one of the mining industries' most recognized and accomplished analysts. He consistently ranked at the top of his peer group. And all of us for whom he covered had a high degree of respect for Greg. He has deep understanding and always very balanced in his analysis. More recently, he's now focused his attention on improving his golf handicap, which we understand is happening, which I find a little annoying, to be honest with you, and I'm jealous. But we are fortunate to have attracted 2 individuals of their caliber to the Board. And I think it reflects their sense of respect and appreciation for the company.

Personally, I'd like to thank all of my Board colleagues for their support and the executive team for helping us fulfill our obligations as a Board. And finally, on behalf of the Board, I'd like to acknowledge and extend our sincere appreciation to every member of the B2Gold family around the world for all their hard work and dedication and their commitment to the company.

So thank you very much, and I'll now turn it over to our CEO, Clive.

Good afternoon. Thank you very much, as Kelvin said, for coming out to join us and those on the meeting virtually. I'm going to walk you through a few introductory slides and then hand it over to a lot of our executive team, as Kelvin said, to give you some details of what we've done in 2024 and the very exciting future we see in 2025 and beyond.

This is a cautionary statement, which means basically, there are certain things we're going to say maybe -- or will be forward-looking and therefore, may be subject to change. I call it the legal cover ass slides.

And Randall, do I have to read this out?

No.

Oh, good. Well, that's encouraging, isn't it? So I think most of you will know where we are on the world, but we'll go through it quite quickly. Head Office, of course, is here in Vancouver; and our producing mines of the Fekola complex in Mali, the Masbate gold mine in the Philippines, and the Otjikoto mine in Namibia. And you're going to hear quite a bit about each of those mines today. And you're going to hear a story about the Back River Gold District and the Goose project, which is becoming a mine in the next few weeks, as we anticipate acquiring the first gold. But I won't steal any of Bill's thunder. He's going to update you and talk to you about the remarkable job that everyone has done up there in bringing this project production.

We had some tremendous meetings this week. It's something we do every year, and we bring all the management teams from around the world from all the mines with their management groups, their country managers and the key people running the mines, et cetera. And they come and they present to the other executives of the various mines and management. It's a very interactive process. It really gets to the exchange of views. And to me, it's just a great example of what we can do. But I think it's gone unusual, so having everyone share their experiences so we can have the metallurgists from the Philippines at Masbate talking to the Otjikoto management team and technical team, and that kind of exchange is tremendous to see. So we had up to 40 people in the boardroom at certain times in this last week, and I found that -- I'm sure I've heard from so many employees and management of how much they think that's an extraordinary experience. So our key principles of fairness, respect and transparency were definitely in evidence this last week.

This is a slide that talks about our production growth, which is very impressive. We started this company about 16 years ago at zero and have grown dramatically with various successful mines throughout the world, as we pointed out. It looks great for about 10 years here. In fact, the first year, in 2024, we didn't meet our guidance. We had to reguide on production, on our costs. The good news about that, as you'll hear today, is that we've broken that one year where we had to reguide, and now we're back on track. And this year, we're projecting to be back up in that 1 million ounce a year range. So the success is back on track. We'll talk about some of the reasons why, as the guys take you to the presentation, guys in line.

So total gold production for 2024 was just over 800,000 ounces. Originally, we projected about 850,000 ounces. Cash operating costs were $889 an ounce, and all-in sustaining costs were $1,465 an ounce. Obviously, with today's gold prices, that's a pretty attractive cost point to be at. In production, we continued our industry-leading safety and sustainability performance. The Otjikoto mine and Masbate mines continued their very strong performance in beating guidance. It was the Fekola mine that had challenges both in equipment failures and also in the delays from the Malian government, getting the necessary permits we needed to start trucking ore in the north, what we call the regional areas. But that permit is forthcoming, and you'll hear more about that as we go through the presentation.

One very important thing that happened last year is we did sign a memorandum of understanding with the government of Mali. That was after over a year of negotiations. The government of Mali brought in their 2023 mining code. The reason our permits were delayed was partly because that mining code was somewhat delayed. But we had a very successful negotiation at the end with the government, and I think it was a real testament to that fairness, respect and transparency part of how we run the company. We are highly thought of by the government of Mali. They're quite comfortable telling us that when we see them, and they hold us up as an example for how they want all gold miners to perform in their country. So that was very successful, and as you'll hear today, all of the -- we're enacting all the things we agreed to in that memorandum of understanding and so is the government of Mali.

The other positive thing that happened in 2024 was a positive preliminary economic assessment report in the Gramalote project in Colombia. What we have coming up shortly, in a matter of weeks, is the final feasibility study for Gramalote, which we expect to be positive, and that very well could be the next mine that this company goes out to build. So first thing is the feasibility study, then we'll look at where we're going to make a development decision. As I mentioned, we expect it to be positive and are looking forward to further developing this great asset in Colombia.

On the exploration side, we executed another year of aggressive exploration with a budget of $61 million, and the significant focus on that was enhancing the Back River around the Goose area where we have an 80-kilometer belt of banded iron formation, and Vic's going to talk to you about why the geologists are so excited about that, but significant exploration around our existing mines and also grassroots exploration and brownfields exploration, looking to expand the reserves and resources but also looking for new discoveries, something we've done well.

I think one of the things that sets B2Gold apart is that we started an exploration, as did our predecessor company, Bema Gold. It's very unusual to see an exploration company become a gold producer. Those people that are looking to find an economic deposit normally get taken over by a company, hopefully, on a friendly basis, who's actually a producing company that can construct lines and produce them.

A long time ago, we said why can't we be all of that, why can't we be very good at exploration and entrepreneurial, build our own mines and run our own mines. So clearly, we've done that very successfully. And I'd like to think that's one of the keys to our success. Yes, we're becoming a bigger company. But to me, part of the challenge is to retain that entrepreneurial spirit, that exploration vision, the willingness to go where others fear to tread. I'm pleased to say that we've become a much larger company, but that passion, that passion for exploration, that passion to continue to be entrepreneurial, is very much still in place today.

Talking about growth going forward, we mentioned the fact that 2024 Kelvin touched on it was a challenging year, and we'll go into some detail about that. The good news is that we have really turned it around. And in the first quarter of this year, we were back on track for where we had expected to be. And the first quarter results were excellent. We're looking for a very strong year in 2025, enhance our guidance, so back up to approximately 1 million ounces a year.

This slide talks about Goose's commercial production optimization, which I touched on. So the golden goose is about to lay its first golden egg. The Goose project construction and development is on track for first production, as I mentioned, literally in a few weeks from now. And all plant construction activities were completed on schedule, process plant development on schedule and mining so far has been very successful and is ongoing. There's optimization studies to maximize the long-term value of the asset. So we have studies going on internally to look at ways to reduce costs to Goose mine and also to increase production.

I mentioned the Fekola permitting process. We are pleased that the government recently consolidated our exploration licenses to the north of Fekola. That was an important step, and now we're looking for the government to issue us a permit for our underground mining and also a permit to start production from the regional project, which is to the north. So the opportunity is to truck ore down from north of Fekola to the Fekola mill.

This is a pretty exciting slide when we look at the implications for the company going forward. We have the opportunity to see an additional 750,000 ounces of new production for the company. Now some of that will fill in for some of the mines to start declining in production, but it's a great place to be in terms of having the growth profile. So obviously, the first one is the Goose projects soon to be mined, which will produce 300,000 ounces of gold a year for the first 5 to 6 years, but no one thinks that that's going to be the end of production from Goose.

When we put in the report, a technical report on a project like this, you can only use the mineral reserves. You can't use resources. The resources are developed into reserves by more drilling. We've already seen some of that, and we're confident that we're going to continue to expand the mine life of the Goose mine. You'll hear all from Bill about what an extraordinary project this is. You'll hear about the logistical challenges, some of which you saw in the video that we showed. Our Bill is a humble guy as our construction team is, but I'll tell you, they've done an absolutely amazing job of turning this project around. When we acquired it, there were some surprises along the way about what needed to be done to successfully build the mine. Our team was able to turn it into a B2Gold project and very quickly adjust and very quickly meet the schedule that have been put off before to produce gold by the middle of this year.

The Fekola Regional, I mentioned trucking ore, that can add another 180,000 ounces of gold production a year. As I mentioned, we're hoping to get the permit in the third quarter of this year to start that. The roads are built, the facilities are there. All we have to do is dig the ore off the ground and stick it in a truck and take it 20 kilometers or less down to the Fekola mill. So that's another 180,000 ounces of growth by expanding the Fekola Complex.

Gramalote, I mentioned briefly, Gramalote is the Colombian project that we're completing the feasibility study, should be out in the next couple of weeks. As I said, we're expecting a positive study. But that can add another 230,000 ounces of gold production to the company. And the Antelope deposit, which is a significant new discovery in Namibia, can add another 65,000 ounces a year to our production profile.

So that's over 750,000 ounces of potential growth for the company from existing assets. You don't have to go and buy the ounces, and we don't have to find them. These are projects for you.

So that's one of the reasons why everyone talks about mergers and acquisition in our business. I am very pleased to tell you that that's not something we need to do. We need to get value for our shareholders for the existing assets. And as you can see, with these milestones coming up in 2025, we're well on track to realize the growth, extraordinary growth, that we see the potential for B2Gold going forward.

So the corporate strategy. We're going to continue to maintain the highest standards. You'll hear today responsible mining, government relations, health, safety and environmental stewardship, and corporate social responsibility. We are a world leader in many of these, we're very proud of that, and you'll hear more detail as we talk about some of the exciting things we're doing in the local communities and our commitment to these high principles, all coming from what I believe is that fairness, respect and transparency piece. We take care of the communities we're in, and we are very environmentally responsible. Those are incredibly important to the entire, not just the management team, but I would say throughout the company.

We're going to continue to maximize profitable gold production from existing mines. We're always looking to expand. We've done that successfully in a number of the projects -- actually, in all of the projects. And we're going to work to increase mineral reserves and mineral resources in our existing projects.

We're also going to, as I mentioned, focus on organic growth by advancing the pipeline of development projects that we've talked about, but also doing a significant amount of brownfield and greenfield exploration. We've always had a good history of acquiring projects often from companies that are smaller than ourselves and building them very successfully. We're also, I think, one of the most successful exploration companies in the world as well. So this year, there's another significant budget for that. The other thing we'll do is maintain. We've done an excellent job -- Mike Cinnamond is going to tell you all about it, but we've done an excellent job in becoming financially powerful and strong and maintaining that as we go forward.

The elephant in the room here is probably why has the stock price performed so badly. Well, you see the highest gold prices that we've ever seen. These are gold prices we didn't dare to dream about. Obviously, we're benefiting from that because of our fairly healthy all-in sustaining cost of around $1,400 an ounce. So when you do the math, obviously, there's a lot of cash flow generated. But the primary reasons why we struggled last year to get value for our shareholders, and that was really frustrating, to be honest with you, but the reasons were, I would say twofold.

One, because of all the noise around Mali, and there has been a lot, there's been a change. As I mentioned, the mining code, there's been concerns by some shareholders and by the media and some analysts, which I do understand there was concerns about where the government was going and what the future is going to look like in Mali for gold mining. That's why I'm pleased, as we said, to report that we have done a very good job of working with the government and have reached an agreement with the government going forward. It's interesting to note that, of the 7 Western companies working in Mali with mines at various stages, out of the 7, 6 of them have reached an agreement with the government. So we're not alone, and we're looking forward to growing that agreement going forward. When we first went to Mali in 2014, it was considered to be a very good country to go gold mining in. They had a stable government, they had a reasonable tax regime, et cetera. So this last year, there have been challenges around that. As I said, we're pleased to report that we're moving forward.

And the other reason why I think our share price didn't respond as many gold producers did, to the gold going up so high, was that we were building a mine in Northern Canada. If you look at the history of our group, we built 2 mines actually in Northern Russia, which has a lot of challenges. So it's not unusual for us to go to the Arctic and now to build a mine there. Yes, we live in a time of skepticism in the market, somewhat understandably, where there's been too many mines that did not succeed in construction or did not live up to the promises we made. So that's one of the reasons why I think we were delayed in getting a response in the marketplace.

But we're about to change that, with the Goose mine coming into production imminently. With the other development projects advancing, as I told you, I really believe this is the time we're finally going to start getting the value that we didn't get last year and we're looking forward. We've started to see a little bit of it in our stock price. But I think, with the catalysts we have in the company going forward, we're going to see a significant, I expect, rerating in the shares of B2Gold.

So I'm going to leave it there and then let some of these other management people get up and talk about all the exciting areas of the company. And I'm going to start with Mike Cinnamond, our Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President. Thank you.

Thanks, Clive. So I'm not going to take you all the way through the financials for the year. We've got those results out there. Clive has covered a lot of the highlights in his introductory remarks.

But I did want to talk a little bit about some of the financings that we did this year and last year and early this year, just to help us move forward and achieve all these things that we're talking about and we'll be talking about and telling you what we're doing at different sites. And that really puts us in good shape. One, we were able to access the capital markets because of the company's track record, how well the operations run, we're able to access those markets, raise financing. And also, I just want to finish my remarks here by talking about what kind of shape we're in now and how we can look forward and what we can enjoy as we go forward.

So firstly, I'll just talk about some of the findings we did in '24. We did prepaid gold sales of $500 million early in the year. And we use those funds for the ongoing development of the Goose project, which Bill is going to talk a lot about, and also for general corporate purposes. November, we refreshed our Caterpillar equipment loan facility, increased it a little bit to $35 million. And Cat's been a great supporter of B2 all around the world over many years at the various projects we've got. And I think you can rightly expect that you'll see them continue to support us in the future on the fleet side.

Then in December, we refreshed and extended actually our revolving credit facility. So we increased that to $800 million. That's a 4-year money. We used that -- or we will use that as we go forward for things like development of the Fekola Regional project, which Clive alluded to; the Antelope project in Namibia as we start to develop that, an exciting new project for the Namibian operations. And also another key thing that we'll use that revolver for is managing our working capital needs, particularly as we deliver into the prepaid gold sales ounces, which we will do over the second half of '25 and the first half of '26.

In January of this year, we did a convertible debenture, so that $460 million. That's a 5-year money, again, to put a little bit longer-term money, long-term debt into our capital structure. And one of the key things that, that was useful for is it helped us reduce interest costs. The coupon on that debenture is 2.75%, significantly lower than what we see on the revolver. So we felt that was a good use -- a good way to finance what we had drawn on the revolver. And so it's good to put that kind of debt into our structure. And it also allowed us to free up the whole amount of our revolver so that when you get to March 31, we had cash on hand of $330 million, but we also have a fully undrawn revolving credit facility available to us with $800 million capacity and an extra $200 million accordion feature if we chose to add any more to it.

Also, I want to comment that we do have an active fuel hedging program ongoing. You've certainly seen some volatility in the fuel prices, especially very recently. But we've had an ongoing policy of hedging up to 50% of our operating fuel means for 12 months out and 25% of a further 12 months out. So we felt that was a good idea to protect the cost that we had in our budget. So we continue to do that, and we will continue to do that moving forward.

And looking forward, I think I really want to end by saying these are financings that helped us do what we've been doing. As being described and will be described in more detail, we've been very busy building a new project, planning for the expansion at Fekola. And we've set ourselves up for good shape to start harvesting cash again. This is a cyclical business. If you think back to when we built Fekola and then expanded Fekola, then we saw a bump in the gold price then, and we really had some significant cash flow years. Now we've had some reinvestment years, especially with Goose. We've reinvested there. We've already put some of the infrastructure in place for Fekola Regional, and we're just waiting for a permit there. And now we set ourselves up well from when we deliver into these fuel hedges post that date, middle of next year, then we'll start January in significant free cash flow, again, enjoying this gold price and adding extra cash to our balance sheet and allowing us to plan for the next thing.

So I just wanted to give you a sort of overall picture there. And it's my pleasure now -- this is the picture of our next speaker. I would say this is a fairly recent picture of our Senior VP, Ops, Bill Lytle, but this is the fully current version of Bill Lytle, and I'll invite him up to the stand.

It's always tough to go after convertible debenture discussions.

Okay, so you saw this chart earlier, Clive had put it up as the growth chart. And in it, there was very -- he talked about the 2024 actuals and the fact that we did have a down year. But I'm not up here to talk about the negatives. For me, this meeting is always a bit of a victory lap, okay? So I'm here to talk about what we did right in 2024. And the first thing you should notice is the line that's above there. That's actually our cumulative operating costs per ounce sold. And what you can see there is that B2Gold continues to manage the cost of producing ounces. So sometimes it's not just about the ounces that you produce, sometimes it's about how many dollars have you produced. We don't mine gold, we mine dollars.

And I wanted to point out thinking about really who we are as a company and where we operate. I was looking at the various sites. And you could say, okay, we operate in the cold environment, but we also operate in the hot environment. We operate in the desert, but we also operate where it's very rainy. We operate in densely populated areas. We operate where it's very sparsely populated. We operate where ASMs are, artisanal miners. We operate where artisanal miners aren't. We operate in areas that require strong conservation, both aquatic and in the biosphere. We operate open pit. We operate underground.

So what you can see is it's not just lucky that we've been successful, the fact of the matter is, is we have in our group, some of the finest world-class specialists that you can really bring together. And I want to say that all of this is operated, all of this is owned and managed actually, by the VP of Operations, Dan Moore, sitting right here. And as we go through this, I will give a shout-out to some of the people that make me look good because I stand up here giving the numbers, but the reality is it's really the team that does it.

Before I switch to the next slide, I just wanted to bring everyone into focus a little bit. So since our 3 operations have been in production, we have produced approximately 9 million ounces. Okay, that's 9 million ounces. That's 4 million from Fekola, 3 million just passed at Masbate and almost 2 million at Otjikoto. So think about that as we go forward and what our opportunities are.

It always starts with safety, okay? And we use this in all of our presentations. And if you look at some of these numbers, some of them are ridiculously good. I'm going to steal from Clive. I hate to steal a Clive-ism, but Clive always says that if you really had to go to a site and you only had one day to do due diligence, what would you look at? You'd look at health and safety and you'd look at housekeeping, right? So when people look at us, they should get an idea of how we operate as a company because, if you look at our 3 operations, our 3 operating mines, they are right at the tip of all of leading industry indicators.

And how does that happen? The reality is that B2 has their own health and safety management system which was developed, I think, originally at Masbate, but Ken Jones, the Director of Sustainability, used to be in health and safety, and he adopted it, implemented it at all the sites. Darren Parry, who's our current Health and Safety Manager, who's about as passionate a health and safety guy as you're going to find, has been with the company for 6 years. And so these things have evolved over the last years to become what I would consider a world-class health and safety management system.

So when you talk about things like Masbate going almost 7 years without a lost time incident or you talk about all 3 operations not having an accident where someone actually was hurt and they couldn't work for an entire year, these are things which are leading standards. At the Goose, we have had some incidents because it's not a mature system yet. We're still working our way into it. But our commitment is that we will bring the health and safety system that we use around the world right back here to Canada to make sure that everyone goes home safe every day.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this slide, I talked about it a little bit already. Just looking at 2024, what you can see is, yes, we had a down year for ounce production. But if you look at our cash operating costs, our all-in sustaining costs, we did quite well. As you saw from that previous graph, we were still kind of right where we had promised the market would be, so once again, delivering on what we said we could do as far as operations. we can't control everything that happens on site, but we can commit that the things we can control, we will control best-in-class.

So this one, this is a slide I just want to show kind of where our ounces come from. And if you look at it historically, Fekola has been the flagship asset, sitting there at more than 50% of production. And that, in the short term, is not going to go away. That is a very good asset for us, which we are continuing to expand into the region, which I'll talk about later. But what you need to realize is the Goose, which is a world-class asset which is located in this Tier 1 jurisdiction, everyone considers it a very stable jurisdiction, is getting ready to come online. So the ounce production globally is going to start being reduced from Fekola. Remember, we're talking about more than 300,000 ounces over the first 5 to 6 years at the Goose for production.

Now I'm just going to just briefly blow through each of the mines individually and talk about them. So in Fekola, this is mostly about 2025. What you can see there at the top of the slide, that's what we're proposing. But let's just think about what this project was. So this is a project that we brought on -- we started construction in 2015 and brought on in 2017. Remember, we started this production -- or we started this mine at 4 million tonnes per annum. We're currently running as the base case, 9 million tonnes per annum. So we brought it in. We expanded it. We've upgraded it. We're now running almost 10 million ounces. I think the budget says $9 million, so I'll stick with $9 million. And how do we do that? It's a team effort.

Dan Clark is here. Dan Clark is the new General Manager, Ray Mead was there for many years, who was at Masbate. He has retired. So we've got the next group stepping up. And as part of that, we've actually now brought, I call them the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, but 3 of them are here today. We brought in the Malian group. Birama Cissé is now the country manager; Ibrahim Traoré is now the resident manager, which is the #2 position on site; and Issa Diarra is now the VP or the CFO for West Africa.

So what you're seeing is this growth of the next generation of B2 coming up and as we continue to expand our global footprint, people stepping up and continuing to impress me. Think about this. The original of what we purchased had a 14-year mine life and about 3.45 million ounces. I already said we've mined 4 million out of there. The current mine life, remember from the beginning, was 18 years at 7.75 million ounces. So what you can see is we have definitely added value with that asset. We've taken it from a 4 million ounce producer to a 4 million tonnes per annum producer to a 10 million, 9 million tonne per annum producer, 225% increase in the overall life of mine.

And once again, if you look at this, what I wanted to highlight here is some of the statistics across the top. You can see the life of mine profile as we've gone is very, very steady with the exception of 2024. So in 2024, Clive alluded to it, we had 2 incidents happen. One, we had a human error where a guy tipped over a key piece of equipment, put it out of production for 3 months. It's a real tribute that it was only 3 months that we were able to claw that back. And then the second part was we didn't get our regional permits. So all those ounces, which we thought were going to happen in 2024, are now late into 2025 and maybe 2026. But remember, those ounces didn't go away. They're still there.

Also this year, we have the underground coming online. So the underground is something we've been talking about. All of the development is now done. We were waiting on a permit. We have submitted that permit or that technical study. It doesn't even require a full permit. It requires us to update our existing operating permit. That is now in the to and fro between government and company, and we feel that, that permit -- or that approval is imminent, which will allow us, in 2025, to add 34,000 ounces and kind of, on average, over the next 4 to 5 years, 50,000 ounces.

Looking at Otjikoto -- sorry, Masbate. We've moved around. I get you. Okay, looking at Masbate. So Masbate, remember, this was acquired in 2013, and we also upgraded the plant there to produce 8 million tonnes per annum. As I said, it used to be Ray Mead there. We've switched over Ryan Rusk, who's been there a long time, as he moved up to the GM. Cris Acosta, who's been with the project a long time, still continues to be the President and Country Manager.

The original life of mine for the Masbate mine was 22 years for slightly more than 3 million ounces. You already heard me say they've just passed over their 3 million ounces. Their current life of mine, we've added 4 years to that, is 26 years for a total of 4.4 million, a 146% increase. So what you're seeing once again at Masbate is a stable operating team, a kind of best-in-class approach. This is one of those that when you think about a project that is less than 1 gram per tonne mining, but then you look at the operating cost or the all-in sustaining costs at $1,300 or $1,370, it points to the fact that they are doing everything right there. They are looking at every nickel and how, in fact, you can operate that. So just going to 2025, very good production so far this year. We're on track. We've had some records as far as throughput. If you look at the ounce profile, we're above budget for Q1. The costs remain below where we told the market they would be. So overall, a very good production profile for Q1 so far for Masbate.

Now I can go back to Otjikoto. So Otjikoto is one that is near and dear to my heart because this is one of the ones that as soon as my first job really kind of managing the project as a VP, this was my project. And if anyone knows anything about me, you know that I'm passionate, not just about production, but I'm very passionate about sustainability and community social investment, all of that stuff. I took it into production in 2015, and then it was handed over to Mark Dawe. Mark Dawe is normally at this meeting. Just so everyone's aware, Mark Dawe recently this year passed away from cancer, which was a real blow to the company, but the only reason I'm mentioning this is because the team that stepped up after that, that's Eric Barnard as the General Manager, and John Roos as the Country Manager, have done a fabulous job. They picked up the beacon and they've carried it like there was nothing missed.

We continue, what I would say, to manage best-in-class across the entire operations. Every person that goes to Otjikoto Mine says that it is, quite frankly, the best run mine that they've been to in their career. So hats off to them. So that project started out -- that was a 12-year project with 1.34 million ounces. The current life of mine, look at it, if you redid it, it would be 19 years at 2.35 million ounces, a massive step-up. And we'll talk once again about the potential to expand that.

And like the other projects, if you look at their stability, what you can see is, year in and year out, they have delivered on exactly what they said that they were going to do. Exactly what we told the market, that's what they've delivered. Between Masbate and Otjikoto, it's kind of a test to see who can be the straightest line every year and deliver, which tells me, one, they're not sandbagging, right? We push them on the -- when we go into the budgets, we really force them to think about where they're spending money, and we challenge them. But at the end of the day, they are doing what is absolutely right for the shareholder.

So growth projects, I don't just want to talk about ounce profile. We will talk about ounce profile, for sure. But I also want to talk about the fact that we're doing so much more. If you look inside each of the projects, and I know that Ken is going to talk about some and Ninette's going to talk something about this, we really focus on making the project valuable for all stakeholders. That means that the government is happy with the project, the community is happy with the project, the employees are happy with the project and, of course, the shareholders are happy with the project. And that's really what we try and focus on. We don't just look at it as a single asset developing ounces. It has to be a global concept.

Okay, so if you look at the Goose, this is the Back River project, I guess this is probably what most people want to talk about today. That's why it went to the front. The Goose project is right on the cusp of producing gold, okay? We've told -- I think we've been very public that by the end of Q2, we've committed to producing gold. So I'll just tell you kind of where we're at. When I was there, I just came down 2 weeks ago, we were in the process of commissioning the tailings line.

Remember, we had to empty the Echo pit because that was going to be our tailings facility. That tailings line was commissioned. We had to, in fact, get the powerhouse up and running to make sure we had power. At the end of May, the powerhouse came online. We had to make sure we had material on the stockpile. We're currently sitting with more than 55,000 tonnes of plus-10 grams waiting to come into the mill. We had to make sure that we had a crusher available. We are currently crushing material. We had to make sure that we had water to the mill. Two weeks ago, they started up and started running water to the mill. So as of today -- or as of yesterday, the mill started to turn.

We think on Saturday, we're going to start running material into the mill. So we'll start with waste, then we'll put some low grade in, and then we'll switch to high grade. So we feel, knock on wood, barring some unforeseen issue, that by the end of this month, we will see gold coming out of the Goose mill. Then we have 3 months in our schedule, we've got 3 months to ramp up to commercial production. That's what we'll be going back up there to focus on. So we feel pretty good that we're going to see gold here shortly and that the commissioning schedule is well within our reach.

Yes. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what this really looks like because it's actually 2 projects almost, right? It is really a logistics project where it's on time, on-cost delivery, right? So it's like a FedEx project. And that's happening year round. What you have is, remember, we're shipping stuff to Quebec, then we're taking it up in the Arctic ocean putting it in a laydown area, letting the snow and the winter come and then hauling it back down to the Goose. And on site, it all magically happens, right? There's a certain time of the year, you get your supplies. There's a time of the year, you order your supplies.

And as Clive indicated earlier, this is not our first rodeo. This is not the first time we did this. We actually did it in Far East Russia and we did it with the same team. So the team that did it in Russia, Dmitri Maliouguine, and I know he's not here today, led that team and now we're doing it again. And I can tell you, I don't believe that there's anybody better in the industry at doing this, right? You can say in a lot of places, they've got great miners, they've got great metallurgists. But to find someone that knows how to ship on ice roads, how to build ice roads, how to make sure on-time delivery happens, how to make sure everything is put together, that's a rare skill and B2 is very lucky to have him.

So the marine laydown area, well, you can just read the statistics, right? This year, we brought down 4,000 containers, 80 million liters of fuel, right? That is enough to get us well into March and April of next year with a sufficient spare capacity for the fuel. Everything went off, I'm not going to say without a hitch, but everything arrived on time. It says 90% on the concrete pour. These all these statistics are out of date because we're literally every day doing it and getting ready to produce. What I will tell you is that the mining remains on schedule. The milling, as of this morning, remains on schedule. The tailings facility is ready. The powerhouse is ready. And quite frankly, everyone is getting pretty wound up about potentially seeing some gold soon. I think that's probably you, too, Clive.

Okay. So I've got a couple here on the Fekola Complex. I remember the situation. So we have the Medinandi license, which is where the Fekola operations is. And then we have Menankoto, which is that confluence of the 3 permits to the north. The underground is in the Medinandi license. We've already talked about that. What we're really talking about now is this kind of Menankoto area. That project, we had talked about last year putting it in production. They were still messing around with the codes during that time. So it didn't happen. I will tell you now that, that project is ready to be submitted. So that project has been reworked based on the government requirements and we're just waiting really for them to formalize, I think, the numbering and the actual GPS coordinates for the new license before we can submit. But that is ready to go, okay?

But probably what's most important for this group is that several years ago, we actually built all the infrastructure there. So that project is sitting there, basically in care and maintenance right now, waiting for the permit. So when I say completed, the road to Fekola -- from Fekola to the Menankoto area is done. All of the infrastructure is in. The shops, the offices, everything is in. So we're just waiting on that permit. So when we talk about the second we get the permit, we're ready to start, that is really the fact. And the fact is the government also wants this project because, as Clive pointed out, it could be as much as 185,000 ounces a year to the project. So it is right on the cusp. I'm not saying that we will see ounces this year. I can't promise when the government is going to approve that. But let's say it takes them 3 months, we still have 3 months that we have to pre-strip, right? So I think there's 20,000 or 25,000 ounces in our budget this year. It doesn't matter. We've got plenty of other sources to actually mine if, in fact, it doesn't come.

And that's what this slide is about. We actually currently have the ability to mine from 4 different areas, right? You got the Fekola Pit. You've got the Cardinal Pit. You've got the Regional that I just talked about and, of course, you have the underground. So we're getting into this where we have optionality where we're able to pick and choose where we want to mine and make sure that, on an annual basis, we can level it out and meet our production targets. And this just talks about kind of where it's at for the Fekola Complex. It's more legal than anything. But basically, what it says is they have continued despite -- it's tough to really talk about it because it's kind of this boring plotting legal process where you've got to get all the documentation submitted and submitted. All of that's happening. The government is definitely engaged with us. The government is definitely saying we want this. And every time they ask for something, we turn it around. So we feel confident that this is going to move forward.

Talking about Otjikoto. So Otjikoto had originally -- I think last year, we were talking about transitioning to underground, right? The open pit was ending. We're going to now produce a couple of years of underground. Then we're going to go to low-grade stockpile. The exploration team, and I know -- I think Vic's going to talk about this, has kind of changed that narrative. They've now identified a second underground area, which currently sits with a resource of just under 400,000 ounces. And I have to tell you, it is inferred because remember, this is underground. So most of the ounces are always inferred. So the first thing that we're talking about really is getting a design, getting a crew in there, getting an exploration drift in there and drilling this thing off. So we can see a path, and Clive already talked about it on his growth chart, we can see a path for this thing coming in and adding ounces kind of in that maybe '28, probably '29 time frame.

And yes, so we did a PEA on it. We're just in the process of finishing up the feasibility internally for this. And what you can see is that the economics look very robust for this. We think that this is absolutely an additional ounce developer for the Otjikoto mine. If you look at the production, you could see as much as 65,000 ounces a year out of this area.

And then I think this is the last one, it's Gramalote. So Gramalote is a project that's been in and out of the conversation with B2 for a long time. B2Gold, we originally were partnered with AngloGold on it. And it was tough because the whole concept was both parties want a 200,000 ounce a year, so it had to be a big project. And for years, we were trying to make this thing fit, a low-grade deposit with high ounce production into something which had reasonable capital cost, and we just could never get there. So somebody had to exit the project, and luckily, it was Anglo. So at the end of the day, B2 now has taken this thing up and really scrutinized exactly what's going on there and thought about is there a sweet little project here. Originally, we started -- I think we actually started at, could it be, 3 million tonnes per annum. And then we ended up -- I think we ended up at 6 million tonnes per annum, and that's kind of where we set to be maximum.

So at the end of the day, we did a PEA. The PEA showed robust economics and not too bad capital cost, which really is the key to this project. You've got to keep the capital cost down. I know that, that feasibility study is done. It's in final review right now so I can't tell you what the results are. But I know over the next little bit that B2 is looking forward to putting something out on the results of that study. This is just what it looked like, the PEA. This was from the PEA, not from the feasibility study. But if you talk about a 2.5-year construction period, there will be some permitting changes that have to happen, but we had meetings this week that said, if, in fact, the Board likes this project and it goes forward, you could see this thing once again, in late '28, early '29, making gold. So as Clive said, there's this whole path to more than 700,000 ounces which B2 already owns. This is not stuff that we have to acquire.

And then normally, I would talk -- I spent a lot of time talking about the stuff I'm passionate about, all the stuff that is related to biodiversity and the CSR stuff and all of the social stuff we're doing. But at the end of the day, I wanted Ken Jones to talk about it. So I'm just going to tell you that while it's exciting that we are very good at operating mines, it's equally as exciting to show that we are responsible citizens. And the fact is, when you talk about sustainable mining, you're talking about the things that are coming up next. And that's really what the communities care about. And we do that, I would say, better than most.

And so I think with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ken Jones, who's the Director of Sustainability.

Thank you, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. It is a pleasure to speak to you today. Before I jump into my comments about B2Gold's sustainability performance, I'd just like to take a minute. I've had the privilege to come up here the last couple of years and I get to speak about all the wonderful things that B2Gold has accomplished, and 2024 has been another exceptional year. But I'd like to take a minute to recognize a few members of my team that continue to make this positive update possible year in and year out.

We have a small sustainability team here in Vancouver. And as I identify them, if you could please stand up. Damien Tredwell and Bruno Cardoso are our Environmental and Permitting Manager and our Corporate Social Responsibility Manager, respectively. They are the ones tirelessly out at our sites, providing the technical guidance and management guidance to help our sites achieve our corporate objectives. Christina Jaworski and Marina Lobato lead our sustainability strategy, our risk management processes and our ESG disclosure. And Pegah Khosravi Nia brings innovative technologies and opportunities to our operations to lead our decarbonization pathway. This is the team that sets the environmental and CSR policies, standards and direction for the company. And I'd like to thank them for their commitment to B2Gold and for their instrumental contribution to B2Gold's performance that I get to share with you today. Thank you.

So with that, let's talk about how sustainability continues to be a cornerstone for B2Gold's success. At B2Gold, sustainability is not just about compliance. It's about how we create long-term value across all stages of the mine life cycle. It's about how we earn and maintain our social license to operate. And it's about how we ensure our growth is responsible, inclusive and resilient.

Our commitment to sustainability starts with people. And a critical part of that is investing in our employees and our communities and supporting local businesses and economic growth. In all of our operations, we prioritize local hiring, skills development and supplier engagement. We are incredibly proud of the fact that over 97% of our employees at our operations are nationals. And personally, I find it incredibly rewarding to be on a mine site. And depending on how your visit coincides with the rotation schedule of the few, the small number of expats at that site, that if you don't overlap with them, you might be one of only a few foreigners on that mine site. That's a direct result of B2Gold's commitment to not just hiring locals, but training, upskilling and, most importantly, providing opportunity across the entire workforce.

And we know that mining can and must be a driver for long-term economic opportunity. That means not just jobs but good jobs, and not just contracts but real business growth. We focus on the development of small and medium enterprises within local communities and regions surrounding our operations. In 2024, at our 3 operating mines, we spent over $600 million in our host communities. And in our Goose project in Nunavut, of the $420 million committed to suppliers and contractors last year, nearly half of that investment, $200 million, went directly to Kitikmeot-qualified businesses. We partner with local institutions, vocational programs, indigenous organizations and government authorities to build capacity and ensure representation at every level.

Our FEMA Project in Mali, a partnership with Global Affairs Canada, improves conditions for women and children in artisanal and small-scale mining communities in the region surrounding the Fekola Mine. And our relationship with Kitikmeot Inuit in Nunavut is vital to both B2Gold and Inuit to ensure that B2Gold is able to operate the Goose Mine and the Kitikmeot Inuit benefit from our business through employment, training and contracting opportunities. These investments in people and business create shared value, build resilience and strengthen the future for our host communities and for B2Gold.

B2Gold has always been proud of its commitment to our communities, and 2024 was no exception. From Mali to Namibia, the Philippines and now Nunavut, we supported programs that respond directly to community needs and priorities, whether it's food security, health services, arts and culture or job creation, these are long-term investments in human well-being. In Mali, the Goungouboto Agricultural Project now supports over 300 families and serves as a model for similar investment as we work to expand our regional operations. In Namibia, as that operation approaches the latter stages of its mine life, we focused investment to ensure resilience with the surrounding communities of Otavi and Otjiwarongo, supporting water distribution and primary school education initiatives.

In the Philippines, training programs offer national certification and various skill sets including scaffolding, electronic products assembly and servicing, welding and digital job qualifications. Partner industries play a critical role by providing employment opportunities to program graduates. And in 2024 alone, the Masbate Mine was able to help generate over 600 local jobs, contributing meaningfully to community growth. And in Canada, at our Goose project, programs like the Redfish Arts Society offer welding training and employment opportunities to vulnerable Inuit youth, an example of how mining can be a bridge, not a barrier, to community aspirations.

Of course, creating long-term value also means caring for the environment, and 2024 was a year of continued progress on climate action, water stewardship, and biodiversity conservation. We're making real strides on our decarbonization pathway, with over 20% of our electricity now coming from renewable sources. Earlier this year, we nearly doubled the size of our solar plant in Mali, which now eliminates over 60,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. We also brought a new third-party solar facility online in Namibia, the first to be registered under the country's modified single-buyer program. In the Philippines, in the second half of this year, we will commission 8 megawatts of solar capacity, expected to reduce our diesel consumption by over 3 million liters per year. And in Nunavut, we're advancing permitting and design for wind power at Goose where we aim to meet up to half of our electricity needs through renewables.

On water, we've implemented site-specific water management plans and a global strategy that takes a watershed-based risk-informed approach, recognizing that water connects people, ecosystems and operations. And our biodiversity work continues to push beyond compliance, from restoring a traditional Arctic char fishery historically used by Inuit and Nunavut to studying chimpanzee ecology in Mali, adding critical data and knowledge for conservation, to protecting coral reefs in the Philippines and black rhinos in Namibia. We're not just reducing our impacts, we're helping ecosystems to recover and to thrive.

And all of this comes together in how we operate. Across our 4 cornerstone operations, beginning with Masbate in 2013, then Otjikoto, then Fekola, and now Goose coming online here in 2025, we are embedding sustainability into every decision we make, from how we plan infrastructure to how we partner with indigenous and local communities to how we measure and report performance. These achievements are not separate from our core business. They're what make our business possible. From exploration through to closure, our approach to sustainability that enables us to keep building trust, reducing risk and unlocking new opportunities across all the regions where we work.

Thank you again for your time and the opportunity to share this update. It's a privilege to be a part of a company that continues to lead with purpose and invest in growth that is not just profitable, but sustainable. Thank you.

And now I'd like to introduce Ninette Krohnert, our VP of Human Resources.

I was told step 1 is to lower the mic following Ken. Good afternoon, everyone.

The last decade of company growth has allowed us to improve and strengthen our HR approach in supporting the company over different phases of operation, from exploration through construction, steady-state operations, the closure planning, and also expansion projects like we've seen in Fekola. Even though every project is unique, we are able to build on learnings and apply best practice to follow a consistent B2Gold approach, but with the ability to speak to the uniqueness of each of our sites and have the agility to do so. As such, each operation has their own fully fledged HR team to deliver the local services and support while corporate HR provides guidance on policy and governance and other support resources and toolkits.

Globally, we maintain our focus on key KPIs, being local employment; as you've heard from Ken on equity, diversity and inclusion, which we refer to as EDI, respectful workplaces, employee retention and governance. In support of these focus areas, in the last year, we've joined the International Women in Mining; launched a global internal mentorship program in support of EDI and local content, local employment; and we're continuing our multi-year global HR management system implementation and the investment into that to help us optimize the execution of our people strategy.

Specifically here at the corporate office, we continue looking at avenues to enhance our employee experience and engagement as well as the employee value proposition. We continue to support our global mobile teams, our expatriates, and ensuring compliance in the various jurisdictions in which we operate and where we assign our talent to. And for our corporate office, we're implementing a performance and goals management program to provide feedback to our employees, to help them with their career growth and also provide them with the opportunity to have career development discussions with management.

Moving over to Fekola. A major focus over the last year has been employee relations. As you've heard from Bill, we have, as part of our senior management team locally in Mali now, our country manager, our local Fekola resident manager, and also the CFO taking charge of the region. Our employee engagement have kicked up a gear, with our GM holding regular town halls and providing regular updates to our employees, offering engagement opportunities. We're also offering various employee events, celebratory days, as well as recognizing days that are important to our employees and talent locally.

Our HR team in Fekola has expanded their approach to talent acquisition as well as onboarding programs, welcoming new talent into the workplace. And they've also expanded EDI engagements, training, and the internal and external support programs to further EDI. Training and development has also been a key focus and will definitely continue to be as we advance our local content, build capacity at supervisory and management levels, strengthen talent pipelines and enhance engagement with our staff representatives.

Masbate maintains their proactive engagement via their local employee engagement committee to foster a collaborative work environment. They've successfully recently passed the Department of Labor and Employment's annual inspection that demonstrates a very strong compliance standards, and they've received recognition for this work and the outstanding contributions to the world of work. The training and development work covers multiple levels of work, as you've also heard from Ken, from graduate level through to technical skills training as well as, again, focusing on equity, diversity and inclusion.

In Namibia at Otjikoto, the main focus is on facilitating the transition to underground mining and providing support to management teams and employees who are affected and involved in open pit operations. This is down through a change management process that heavily relies on transparency, open communication and strong engagement, taking center stage, that offer regular training and development opportunities. And this will continue throughout the transition phase, alongside employee career assistance hub and interview skills workshops that are deployed for our employees, as well as various other support and wellness programs for our employees as well as their spouses and partners to navigate the process. All of this and other work is guided and supported by Namibia's very successful Atushe Vamwe, We Are One, culture program. This program also drives all other HR, EDI and engagement work in Namibia.

Now here in Nunavut. Following a very intensive talent acquisition construction period that is still ongoing, the focus shifts to operational readiness and ensuring that we have the appropriate HR skills and frameworks in place for operations, but also to further embed the B2Gold way of work: respectful workplace philosophies, governance, EDI, and local employment. Local employment remains a core priority in terms of recruitment, workplace support and assistance programs, and key partnerships and engagements. As we enter the next phase, an on-site employee engagement committee has been established that mirrors the Masbate model that has been so successful. And this is to ensure management remains close to our employee experience as the project matures into operations.

As you will note on this slide, a summary of what I've just spoken to. Governance and the advancement of social performance matters remain part of our service model while we support the operational needs. As one of our next global initiatives, the company will this year conduct its first global employee experience survey. As a growing company, we want to ensure that we have a true understanding of our employees' experience being part of B2Gold, what truly matters, what our strengths are, what the areas are that we need to delve deeper into to ensure we remain an employer of choice.

I want to also take this opportunity to thank the HR teams across the world for their steadfast support to the company. I think I speak for all of us when I say that the pride we feel watching the Nunavut video is the same pride we feel for their accomplishments at all of our sites. Thank you.

And with this, I hand over to our Senior Vice President of Exploration, Vic King.

Thank you, Ninette. Good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to quickly start by recognizing the sterling effort of the exploration team with Andrew Brown, our VP Exploration; ably assisted and supported by Tyler McKinnon at Technical Services and Claudia Gordillo with the geoscience team here in Vancouver; and then, of course, all of our teams ably led at our mines and exploration sites all over the world.

To start, looking back at exploration highlights for 2024 and 2025 to date. You'll note that approximately -- we spent approximately USD 10 million less than the budget for 2024. And that was primarily due to not initiating some early-stage drilling in Kazakhstan and the Philippines and Cote d' Ivoire. Notwithstanding, we did complete more drilling than planned, resulting in a lower all-in cost per meter drilled. That is a very useful metric to assess exploration efficiency.

At Back River, infill and extension drilling at the Goose project significantly enhanced our understanding of the geological controls on mineralization, producing improved models and resource estimates. Drilling between Goose Main and Nuvuyak identified a new discovery that we've called Mammoth, and a busy and successful summer program on our regional targets identified numerous drill targets that will be tackled this year. In Namibia, an initial resource estimate was released for the Antelope deposit, a new underground discovery that Bill has already mentioned. A feasibility study is currently underway and, should that be positive, would lead to enhanced production at Otjikoto for years to come.

In Mali, an underground mineral resource estimate has been completed, down plunge of the Fekola open pit and approximately as well, approximately 240,000 ounces have been added in a satellite open pit proximal to the Fekola infrastructure. In the Philippines, to leverage off our experience in the country, a wholly owned subsidiary, B2Gold Philippines Exploration, has just concluded an agreement for our first project in Eastern Mindanao.

Looking at our exploration focus for 2025. We have a budget of USD 61 million, of which more than half will be dedicated to a major exploration effort at Back River, split between brownfields exploration at Goose and greenfields exploration on multiple regional projects. Brownfield projects will include -- will also continue at our main mines and operations at Fekola, Otjikoto and Masbate. Greenfields exploration is planned for newly acquired projects in Kazakhstan and the Philippines. And we continue to look for and evaluate new projects for acquisition joint venture and/or strategic investment.

Focusing now on Back River where our large land position, including multiple projects, extends over more than 80 kilometers of prospective banded iron formations that host the mineralization in this district. At the Goose Project, we will be drilling extensions of the Umwelt and Llama deposits followed up and also following up on the Mammoth discovery that I mentioned earlier, as well as drill testing another of new targets on the Goose permit. Approximately 12 meters of drilling is planned for this project.

A significant push will be made on the regional projects, following up on targets identified in the successful summer program at the other projects at George, Boulder, Boot, Del, Beech and Needle, 13,000 meters of diamond drilling will be allocated there. In addition, further surface work, including mapping tool sampling, airborne geophysics will be undertaken to define more targets for follow-up in 2026.

This map shows up the magnetic signature of the folded banded in formations that host the mineralization at Goose. It shows the distribution of the deposits that contain the published resources, which include Umwelt, Llama, Echo, Goose Main and Nuvuyak. And also illustrated here are numerous targets in close proximity to the Goose mine infrastructure that remain to be tested, some of which will be drilled this year.

Focusing now on the 2 main deposits at the Goose Project. Shown here are 2 long sections, Umwelt on the left and Llama on the right, both deposits outcrop at surface and consequently start as open pits, transitioning to underground mining, both are high grade with some spectacular intersections, which are highlighted in the slide.

At Umwelt, 10.5 grams tonne over 21 meters and 19 grams over 16 meters were intersected in infill drilling last year, confirming the continuity of a high-grade ore shoot that has been drilled to a vertical depth of approximately 800 meters below surface. This year, we'll be stepping out a further 250 meters from our deepest hole to extend this deposit. At Llama, shown here on the right, impressive results include 29.5 grams per tonne over 14 meters and 14 grams over 28 meters. Further infill drilling will be undertaken at Llama underground to convert what is currently an inferred resource to the indicated category. In addition, we will be drilling the sparsely drilled Llama gap where nearly 20 grams per tonne over 25 meters has already been intersected. Like Umwelt, Llama is also open down plunge.

This project section illustrates the exciting discovery made at what we now call Mammoth. It is located between the Goose Main deposit, which outcrops at surface; and Nuvuyak, which comprises one of our highest grade underground resources. The discovery hole intersected nearly 18 grams per tonne over 11 meters. In addition, drilling at Nuvuyak itself intersected 6 grams over 29 meters, extending the deposit 200 meters down plunge.

As previously mentioned, our 2024 summer program identified multiple targets on several of our regional projects. Time limits me to provide only one example of the many of these projects that will be followed up this year -- or are being followed up this year. To illustrate, at Boot, which is located approximately 20 kilometers north of the Goose mine infrastructure, 2 targets, Hammer and Rooster, already have significant drill intersections close to surface, shown here, and are ready to follow up. The geophysical signature of the mineralized units highlights the potential for further targets on this project; the same for all the other projects that we have in the Back River district.

Moving on now to Namibia and our Otjikoto mine, where we have a budget of $7 million for 2025. Shown here is a linear magnetic signature that tracks the mineralization from the Otjikoto and Wolfshag pits at the top of the map, southward to our Antelope discovery, which Bill has already mentioned. At the core of the Antelope deposit is the Springbok Zone, where we announced an inferred resource of 465,000 ounces at 5.62 grams per tonne. This is now being used to inform the ongoing feasibility study that Bill mentioned, for a new underground development that will add production and extend the life of mine at Otjikoto. Drilling has already identified potential to extend the Antelope deposit over what is now 6 kilometers from the Springbok Zone northward towards the Otjikoto Pit and southward to, what we call, the mag offshoot target.

In Mali, a USD 9 million budget has been allocated for 2025. Drilling is being undertaken on both the Medinandi permit where the Fekola Mine and infrastructure are located and the newly consolidated exploration permit at Menankoto. On the Medinandi permit, drilling continues to infill and extend the Fekola ore shoot, where underground mining is expected to commence shortly as mentioned by Bill. This long section highlights the continuity of that Fekola ore shoot and particularly with the recent drilling that has confirmed grades and widths that are concurrent with the existing mineral resource model and estimate that we have. Additional exploration upside will be tested to the north. Bill also mentioned that drilling beneath the underground development, beneath the main ore shoot itself, we've intersected what may be a parallel offshoot -- ore shoot. Grades of 4 grams per tonne over 12 meters and 6 grams over nearly 14 meters are very encouraging and are being followed up. On the Menankoto permit, the focus is on extending high-grade open pit-able sulfide resources at the existing zones, which include Mamba, Cobra and Taipan.

At Masbate in the Philippines, the 2025 budget is USD 3 million, and the focus continues to be to identify and drill test zones, which are shown as the yellow circles, and occur within 3 to 11 kilometers south of the main Masbate infrastructure. Staying in the Philippines, we have, as I mentioned earlier, incorporated B2Gold Philippines Exploration to leverage our experience and reputation that has been built at the Masbate mine. Country-scale prospectivity analysis has drawn us to focus on Eastern Mindanao, which is on a portion of the prolific corridor defined by the crustal-scale Philippine Fault that is shown on the map. This is elephant country as highlighted in the graph showing the 25 largest gold and copper gold porphyry and epithermal deposits in the Pacific region. BPE has just concluded an agreement on our first project in this area, and we expect field work to start within weeks.

Lastly, a listing of our strategic investments supporting junior companies with projects that have great potential and solid technical management. Members of our exploration team continue to provide technical support and guidance to these companies, as prescribed in the associated investor rights agreements that we have that went with these investments.

The value of our portfolio has grown and is now worth $112 million led by the outstanding success Snowline at their valley deposit in the Yukon. Founders Metals has provided us with our first step onto the Guiana Shield in Suriname, the geological terrain very similar to West Africa, which we know very well. AuMEGA Metals exposes us to the potential of a 147-kilometer Cape Ray corridor in Newfoundland. And lastly, our investment in Prospector Metals gives us the opportunity to be involved in an early stage but exciting project at the Mike Lake in the Yukon.

With that, thank you very much. And I'd like to hand it over to Clive for closing comments. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for your attention. I know it's been a bit of a long presentation, but I think you can see why there's so much information to cover. We wanted to give you a fulsome story about what we're doing. And you can probably see why we're very excited about 2025 and going forward at B2Gold.

Before we open up for Q&A, I just want to thank some people. First of all, I want to thank all of our stakeholders, and we couldn't do this without the tremendous people throughout our organization and all the other people that support what we do. All of our employees, 6,500 employees, all around the world.

I'd like to thank our executive team. It's a real pleasure for me to work with such a great team; also, the directors for their advice and support. And we've been a great, strong group, a very diversified Board and they've been very helpful in guiding the management of the company. I'd personally like to thank Kelvin, who's been a great addition as the Chairman of the company, and I appreciate his support and guidance.

I'd also like to thank the governments in all the places we work. At the end of the day, we were very fortunate. I think we've earned it, to have very good government relations. And without those government support in what we do, it would be very hard. I'd also, of course, like to thank our shareholders for their support not just in good times but in challenging times as well.

So thank you all for coming here today, and I will welcome any questions that anybody might have. There's a couple of microphones I see around. Are there any questions? And we can answer or any questions that have come in online. Okay. Well, I guess that was a pretty complete presentation on the lack of questions. So once again, thank you all very much.