Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. This conference is being recorded and the replay will be available at the company's website at auraminerals.com/investidores. The presentation will also be available for download. This call is also available in Portuguese. To access you can press the globe icon on the lower right side of your zoom screen and then choose to enter the Portuguese room. After that select mute original audio. [Foreign Language] We would like to inform that all attendees will only be listening to the conference during the presentation and then we will start the question and answer section when further instructions will be provided. Before proceeding we would like to clarify that any statements that may be made during this conference call regarding the company's business prospects, operational and financial projections and goals or the beliefs and assumptions of Aura executive board and the current information available to the company. These statements may involve risks and uncertainties as they relate to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should be aware of events related to the macroeconomic scenario, the industry and other factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the respective forward-looking statements. Present at this conference we have Rodrigo Barbosa, President and CEO and Kleber Cardoso, CFO. Now I will turn the conference over to Rodrigo Barbosa. You may begin the conference.

Well, thank you very much for all for participating in this quarter. I'm very happy, glad to be here with you and also announcing another record high results for Aura. As we're going to go through the presentation I will say and I will share with the investors that Aura continues to progress in our growth project. We continue to generate a higher margin, we continue to pay strong dividends and we continue to build the portfolio in order for the growth to achieve over 450,000 ounces that we announced a couple of years ago. With Bluestone we can reach, we can go beyond this and we continue to monitor the market as well. So I'll ask Natasha to share the presentation and as always I'm going to give you the broad overview about the quarter results and then Kleber, our CFO is going to go more in the details about the EBITDA breach to free cash flow and also our net income. If you want to go to the first slide, yes, very well. So as we can see and we already shared with the market production, during Q1 we achieved the 60,000 ounces of gold equivalent production and that it's slightly lower than last quarter as the market knows and will be sharing for the last four years. Mining, especially mining in gold that you have variation, in grades you have variation on the mine that so that sometimes you have changes in production from one quarter to the other quarters. Last year we finished the year very strongly and now we very much in line with our projections, internal projections, we produced 60,000 ounces which is 9% below last quarter and 7% below Q1. Understanding then Apoena as we shared with the market later last year, we're…

Thanks, Rodrigo. Good morning, everyone. We'll start with a summary of the main financial KPIs for the reporting quarter, the last few quarters and in the dotted line here, we have accumulated for the last 12 months. Starting with net revenues, we are reporting $162 million in revenues on this quarter, a 6% reduction compared to the previous quarter, which is explained, as Rodrigo was explaining, by a lower production due to the minus sequencing, but partially offset by higher gold prices. When we see the last 12 months, we reached a new record high with net revenues accumulated at $624 million. When we move to adjust EBITDA, another two record highs, as Rodrigo already mentioned, for the third quarter in a row we have a record high EBITDA of $80 million. So, again, despite the lower production for this quarter, the gold prices helped and then we exceeded the previous quarter EBITDA. In our accumulated last 12 months, such as EBITDA, is reaching close now to $300 million. We closed the quarter with accumulated $295 million. When it comes to net income, we are reporting a net loss of $73 million, basically for the same reason we had losses in some quarters last year, because of a sharp increase in gold prices throughout the quarter and then the increase in the market-to-market liability and no cash losses related to the gold hedges. I'm going to go later in a few pages with more detail about that, but excluding that impact, we see that our adjusted net income was positive, $27 million for the quarter. And then moving to cash and net debt, we closed the cash position at $198 million at the end of the quarter. Our net debt increased to $272 million in the quarter, as expected. In…

We are going to start the question and answer section for investors and analysts. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Guilherme Nippes with XP. You can open your microphone.

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Good morning, Rodrigo, Kleber, Natasha. Thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on another great quarter. I have two questions here on our side. So, the first one, we have always discussed about stock liquidity and now we have taken the first steps to our U.S. public offering. So, I would like to hear more about the next steps in this process. So, if you could share the expected timeline for completion and if you could also provide additional details on the offering as well. And my second question is about Almas. Costs have been very volatile and actually we're expecting a lower cash cost considering that you had the issues with the contractor during the first half of 2024. And as in the 4Q, you had very low cash costs. So, my question is, I would like to hear your thoughts on that. So, I remember that in Q4, the low cost was due to mine sequencing and the reduction of the strip ratio. So, just wanted to make sure that we understand correctly what happened here in Q1 compared to Q4. So, those are my two questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Guilherme. So, the first question you mentioned about the offering, as we filed already with SEC, I am very limited in terms of what I can share with the market. So, there's nothing much I can add on the top of what has already been published. On the second question on Almas, as I mentioned earlier, gold mines, the nature is not uniform everywhere. So, it varies in terms of grade, width, strip ratio and recoveries. So, as I mentioned last quarter with Almas, last quarter of 2024, it was very, very strong in terms of sustaining cash costs and we shared with the market we should not expect this to continue to happen. What I would invite you is to look on average, to look at the average all-in sustaining cash costs that we had in 2024 and then you can understand that after changing the contractors and increasing a little bit productivity, what could be the all-in sustaining cash costs for 2025 and we also set the guidance. I would just highlight that this all-in sustaining cash cost is very much in line with the guidance that we provided to the market. That's going to the variables, there's a few variables that are important in terms to build the all-in sustaining cash costs, right. The number one is grades, number two is recovery and number three is the strip ratio, right? Because the investment that you take, how much of a non-mineral you take out to access the mineral. So, that will vary according to the quarters. However, during along the year, it should follow one rationale and has lower volatility. It will change from one year to another but with significantly lower volatility.

That was very clear, thank you.

Our next question comes from Edgard Souza with Itau BBA.

Hi Rodrigo, hi Kleber, hi Natasha, congrats for the record results. For us, that are following our 6D re-IPO, we are very pleased to see the company delivering, growing and now improving liquidity and visibility with this new listing in the U.S. So, congrats for this initiative. So, my questions are related to the balance of this record gold prices and your growth projects. We are seeing gold prices reaching record high levels which might stimulate new projects. In that sense, my first question is related to Bluestone. So, how are the negotiations with the government for the licensing of the project? Do you see any changes in the local government positioning regarding the licensing? Maybe this higher gold prices could help there? And still on the growth projects regarding Matupa, we understand that the final decision on the project will depend on how do you unlock Bluestone. But that said, given these record high levels for gold prices, are you evaluating maybe bringing Matupa before Bluestone and starting with the project? And then my last question regarding potential M&As. Gold prices has reached record high levels but copper prices now declined a little bit. I remember that we discussed a few times the lack of availability of copper projects for M&A. But now with gold prices reaching these record high levels, does anything change here? Maybe are there any opportunities in copper rather than in gold for potential M&As? That's it. Thank you.

Thank you, Edgard. So, going to the first question on the Bluestone in Guatemala, I think what we've been seeing is not a change in the mood because of the higher gold prices from the government and the communities. They don't really understand and see that. But on the other hand, the whole new administration in the U.S. and the expropriation and the cease of immigration from those countries to the United States, for example, numbers that either Honduras, Guatemala, 60, 70, sometimes 70% of the total export that the reserves come from people working in the U.S. sending money to the country. And that is significantly reducing since Trump's administration should expect to continue to reduce along the next year. So, now we see a switch, a slightly switch on the minds of governments trying to find solutions within the country to create more jobs and to generate export revenues to bring extra dollars and compensate also this non-immigration to the United States process. We also see some community members that was leaving the United States coming back to the area where we have the project, trying to find new opportunities for jobs. So, we understand that all that changes is giving us more tailwinds in order to expedite the licensing of this project. I would highlight that this project as an underground is fully licensed already in terms of environmental and also with the government. But we understand that before making any kind of decisions, we need to socialize either with the central government and also with the communities, which we are doing as we speak. And in the meanwhile, we are also updating the feasibility study. We are updating the investment designs, the new mine sections and so on. So, as we have more information to share…

Was regarding the M&As for copper versus gold.

Yes, it's interesting that we saw this run gold prices and I would invite investors to take a look. The major companies have been appreciated according to the gold price. Medium-sized companies, such as us, has appreciated but yet has not followed the right appreciation that we should have gone with this higher gold price. The market is not at all pricing in gold price or even 3000. The market's pricing lower than these in our shares and not pricing the growth. So, and for the junior mining, it's even worse. Although gold price is reaching record high, we don't see us -- we saw some appreciation in junior mining, but not significant because those companies doesn't have the cash generation, cannot, doesn't have the fund capacity for those projects. And they will go through a lot of dilutions in order to fund the project. So, we continue to monitor, of course, that significant increase can affect because expectations sometimes change from sellers and buyers. It creates a little bit of challenge. The best case for M&As is when gold price is more stable, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have, there's no opportunity. So, we continue to monitor gold mines. The gold industry is very, very segmented, very fragmented. So, there are a lot of producers that is not on the radar of many other investors or many other companies that we can access and we do, such as we did with Borborema. Nobody really knew about that project and we could acquire an increase and even also a blue stone. On copper, yes, we continue to monitor. We like both, right. We are growing on gold. So, we would like to have copper also growing to at least maintain the percentage of 30, 35%. That's one of the reasons that we are investing in Serra da Estrela, but that is more a medium to long shot. We are continuing to monitor other opportunities in copper, but we'll see. It has much less projects in copper available for any kind of M&A and normally they are bigger than gold, but we are growing and we will continue to monitor.

Thank you. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Ricardo Monegaglia with Safra. You can open your microphone.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions and congrats on the results and the first steps on a U.S. listing. There are obvious benefits of listing in the U.S., but not necessarily related to that. I wonder if you have specific liquidity and unlocked assets under management metrics or targets that you could share with us. Maybe a liquidity based on free float would be interesting to hear from you guys. And Rodrigo, a lot has been mentioned on gold prices. We have a lot of volatility in the past couple of years, if you may say. But I wonder if you could share your view on gold prices today and going forward. So do you see structural drivers that are different from recent past, maybe on demand, investor behavior, central bank activity that could sustain gold prices above $3,000 or even more, maybe $4,000? Do you think it's a reality that we may see in the coming months or maybe years? Thank you.

Thank you. So, the first one in terms of the liquidity metrics, what is important for the investors is shares available to buy and the price of the shares. That's it. The investors are concerned about daily trading volume. How much, how fast can I invest $50 million? How fast can I divest $50 million in the market? That is independent of the percentage of the free float. It's totally dependent on the shares available for trade, which is the free float, right. But not as a percentage, but as a nominal and the share price. So the value in dollars that is available to be traded per day is the most important variable for the investors to make a decision either to invest and also to divest. And that's the main variable that we would like to address. In terms of gold prices, as I gave an interview to Estado de São Paulo this morning, I think we have a structural tectonic movement that is happening and moving the gold price up. And I would invite the investors to take a look on those movements. If you believe that those movements are reversible, then maybe gold price can decrease. But if those movements are not reversible, then we should continue to see the gold price to appreciate. Number one is the United States weaponized the U.S. dollars after the war, Russia and Ukraine. The world confiscated and blocked over $300 billion of reserves in U.S. dollars from Russia. And that is the message for any other country that perhaps doesn't feel aligned with the United States. They do not want any more to be invested in U.S. dollars. So take a look on China that has historically over a decade invested in treasuries with a surplus of exports minus…

That's clear. So is there a sweet spot that we can expect on traded volume in dollars that we could envision in the future after all goes in the right direction?

There's not much I can say right now.

Oh, that's Okay. Thank you, Rodrigo.

Our next question comes from Rabi Nizami with National Bank of Canada Financial Markets.

Rabi, I think you might be with the microphone not open.

Thank you for taking my call. And congratulations. Great to see you just hitting larger and larger numbers every year and all time high right now. So just a couple of questions for you, maybe some things to address already. With Aranzazu, there has been some lower throughput and processing recoveries lately. So what kind of measures are you taking to offset that? And what kind of timeline are you looking at for improvement? I know you mentioned molybdenum circuit in the past. Do you have anything new to discuss on that?

No, in Aranzazu, you finished your question or have others?

I have other questions. You want me to ask them all right now?

Okay. So Aranzazu, we are entering in an area of the mind that it's more difficult and has this impact on slightly lower grades. The recoveries this quarter was mostly affected because we are installing flotation cells to recover molybdenum. We saw some molybdenum also coming in our concentrate. And the team was very keen and fast to, within less than a year, implement a project to install some additional flotation cells in order to recover molybdenum and also sell this molybdenum. And these lower recoveries that we had this quarter is due to the adjustment of the flotation cells in order to have the molybdenum as well. So we should stabilize this process and then improve our recoveries along the next quarter. Nevertheless, structurally on Aranzazu, we will see a lower grade compared to what we mined in the last four years.

So in terms of metal mix, how significant is the molybdenum as a fraction of revenue?

I didn't hear your question, Rabi.

What is the significance of molybdenum in terms of proportion in your revenue for Aranzazu?

The molybdenum, it can potentially generate $6 million to $10 million of sales.

Got it, thank you. Moving on to Borborema, construction is going really well on time on budget. Are you tracking all the guidance? Could you give us a bit of resolution on the rate of ramp-up as we move from Q2 and into Q3 and Q4? And when would you expect to hit 100% capacity of that asset?

The ramp-up is running according to our, as we projected. And we should, we continue to share the market that the commercial production, which is not 100%, commercial production is something around above 80-85% for constant days. We should reach that during the third quarter.

Okay. And then in the past, as you finished up construction of Almas, for example, you were able to then move on to Borborema just immediately, and presumably you used some of the same teams on both assets. So do you have a view towards keeping that team busy past Borborema and maybe tying another question into that? Do you have a view on the right number of mines that you would like to have operating concurrently in your portfolio? I understand in the past that you've added mines, you've built mines, and you've also divested mines. So how are you thinking about the correct size of your operating mine portfolio?

Yes, I think keeping the team busy, I think it goes in both directions. I keep them busy and they keep me busy because they build those mines so fast that they push me towards looking for new M&As faster than I thought. But yes, I think you're right. The know-how that we built in Almas now, implementing Borborema, is the same team. And the idea is the same team is already involved already on the design and feasibility study for Matupá and also Guatemala. The team already visited both projects and we will decide which will go first. But we'll be the same team that will build Bluestone and also Matupá. That's why we probably don't want yet to build both at the same time because we will need if we... Matupá it's easier to build, it's something that we already done in Borborema, in Almas, and we have the know-how, the suppliers, I know the whole ecosystem is in Brazil. In Guatemala it's different, we need to pay a lot of attention so we will make sure that we'll play very safe building Borborema, Bluestone. Although it's a smaller plant, but technically it can have challenges that we need to address and also be 100% focused. So we will decide by the end of Q2 or maybe during Q3 which way to go, but it will be the same team.

Thank you for answering my questions. That's good to hear. Building some expertise in-house will be a very good thing going forward. If I can just ask one more before I sign off. On Borborema, the road relocation has been quite topical. Of course you'll tell us when it's completed, but for now could you tell us once you have the permits to relocate the road, how quickly could you implement that into a plan for expanding Borborema? And that's my last question. Thank you very much.

So just wrapping up the last question that you also asked that I didn't answer about the numbers of assets that we believe we can have in a portfolio. Normally major companies, the rule of thumb is six to eight assets. More than that can create complexity, but structurally and our government has designed a decentralized decision-making process empowering the minds so that corporate pays attention to capital allocation and human development and of course setting the whole culture. But with that culture we believe we can go beyond eight assets, maybe eight to ten, but there will be a limit. Now I believe eight to ten will create the complexity for us to manage them properly. And then after that, start recycling. Start going towards higher minds, bigger minds, and then also divesting from the small ones. So that's why I believe it's very important for the investors to pay attention. Now we have a very fast growth and as we grow and start to become over a million ounces per dose of 1.5, that will be harder to accelerate. It'll be harder to maintain this kind of growth and this kind of returns that we are having in smaller projects because the world is fighting too much for super big projects. And then the road allocation, we are progressing a lot of back and forth with the National Agency for Transportation. I believe that we can have the project approved in Q2, perhaps a little bit delayed to Q3. The government is overwhelmed with a lot of projects and work and small budgets to address them, but we are progressing. And after we have the license, we can immediately update the feasibility study and declare the new reserves. And after we do that, then we need to go through two things, the construction of the new road, buying the lands or expropriating the lands and building the new road and also expanding the capacity of Borborema. And we believe we can do that in 2 or 2.5 years after we have the license. We can actually do much better than this, but the bottleneck will be the whole process of getting the land, buying, expropriating and building the road.

Okay, our next question comes from Marcelo Arazi with BTG. You can open your microphone.

Good morning, guys. Two questions on my side as well. Can we expect dividends to remain elevated at these high levels even during more CapEx intensive cycles? And on a second question as well, we also noticed a slight increase in leverage this quarter. What levels of leverage are you comfortable with maintaining going forward? Could we see Aura sustaining higher leverage in order to keep dividends high? Thank you.

So dividends, we continue to share that we would, our idea is to continue to pay the 20% of EBITDA minus recurring CapEx as we are growing and as gold price continues to appreciate as we maintain the cost at the same level reduced. So we should see EBITDA going up and then proportionally the dividends also can follow this movement. Exception was this quarter that we paid extra due to the receivables of Serra [ph], but then for the next quarter, the 20% of EBITDA minus recurring CapEx and we've been actually paying a little slightly above that along the next year. That's what we should expect for the company. In terms of leverage, we had this slightly increase during this quarter, mostly because of two transactions. One, we finished the construction of Borborema. So we had all the expenses of Borborema and not yet we don't have the EBITDA, right? So during the second semester, we'll see this deleveraging process because then we don't have invest in Borborema anymore and then we have the EBITDA. And the second one is the acquisition of Bluestone. Either the cash we paid, but also the debt that comes with the project that also impact our leverage, but nothing that is take us from the comfortable zone. On terms of leverage, we are super comfortable at 1.5 times EBITDA. 2 times EBITDA could be acceptable on the process of we finish the construction of something and we see that the leverage very fast or you do some acquisition and you'll see that the leverage fast. So that's where we would like to maintain our net debt EBITDA.

Thank you. If I can ask another one. On Guatemala, is there any timing that you could share even regarding some financial details in order for us to model the project?

Yeah, we should do. We expect to do one PEA that will not fully optimize mine sequencing some process by June, but at least we can provide the market what we expect to be the CapEx and the cash flow and returns, not including some optimizations. And then we are doing additional work to go through the feasibility study by early next year, perhaps late this year. And that full feasibility study will also include mine sequencing optimizations in the project that we believe that will be -- can boost even more other results.

Perfect. Thank you, Rodrigo.

The Q&A section is over. We would like to hand the floor back to Mr. Rodrigo Barbosa for the company's final remarks.

Well, thank you again all for the earnings call. Again, we are super proud for the results. And I would just give a brief overview. And then for those that doesn't follow our story and has entered recently, we are walking the talk since 2020. And when we did our re-IPO and the issues of BDRs in Brazil, we told the market that we would generate value in three variables. We would develop our greenfield projects. We would increase our resource and reserves. And we would also continue to grow through M&As. And we would do all these three while we would be able to pay significant dividends. If you look back and what where we are right now, what we've done, it's significant progress since then. We built Almas on time, on budget. We acquired the Borborema. We updated the feasibility study. We built the Borborema. We acquired the Bluestone. We increased production. We increased resource and reserves. And also we provided one of the highest dividend yield in the world in the gold sector to our shareholders. So we are walking the talk. We're delivering significant results. And as I mentioned, we are right in the beginning because right now we are at closer 270. Our guidance is 260,000 to 300,000 ounces after we reach 500,000, 600,000 ounces. And we also address this daily trading volume that we believe that we can significantly provide higher returns for our shareholders. So walking the talk, we are happy to be here and all of that with a very, very high standard of safety in our operations. So I thank you all and I will keep the market informed as we progress in our news and in the upcoming future.

Thank you. Aura's conference is now closed. We thank you for your participation and wish you a nice day.