Norm Pitcher
Analyst · HSBC. Your line is open
Thanks, Paul. Good morning, everyone. Hopefully not a dry eye in the house after that, those kind words, Paul. Anyway, on to the operations, in Turkey, both Kisladag and Efemcukuru performed well during the quarter, both from a gold production and cost side, especially Efemcukuru with cash costs of $472.00 per ounce. In China, pretty normal quarter for Tanjianshan, not much to report there. Jinfeng production was where it should be for the quarter. The sales were about 5,800 ounces low as the refinery had an issue with transportation of our dore [ph] at month's end. At White Mountain, grade was a little bit lower during the quarter which affected gold production and cost. However, we expect that to pick up in Q4 and remain on track to meet guidance for the year. On the development side, development activities continued during the quarter, including modifications to the crushing circuit at Kisladag and engineering design work on the Phase IV expansion. In Greece, work suspension aside, underground development and refurbishment at Olympias continued, along with retreatment of about 120,000 tonnes of tailings. We also progressed on Olympias' Phase II, including geotechnical design and procurement of flotation cells and a ball mill. At Skouries, prior to the suspension we were making good progress on the earthworks with some improved weather and in the plant site. We were also able to get into the ravine bed of the first tailings dam area to begin work on the lower dam infrastructure. At both Certej and Tocantinzinho, we continued with optimization studies during the quarter. And at Eastern Dragon, as we discussed in the last conference call, we needed to redo a geologic report that is part of the mining license application. Approval of that report has taken longer than anticipated, so we know expect to submit the mining license application in November. On the exploration side, a fairly busy quarter for exploration. We had some good underground results from Stratoni, in the press release, before the suspension happened; also some decent results from our Magura project in Romania which is a combination of epithermal veins and stockwork zones. And in China, we continue to get good results from the northern deeps zone at White Mountain. With that, I will turn it over to Fabi.