Good morning. My name is Ina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Taseko's First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Bergot, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Ina. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining Taseko's first quarter 2024 results conference call. The news release and regulatory filing announcing our financial and operational results was issued yesterday after market closed and is available on our website at tasekomines.com and on SEDAR+. I'm joined today in Vancouver by Taseko's President and CEO, Stuart McDonald; Taseko's Chief Financial Officer, Bryce Hamming; and our COO, Richard Tremblay. As usual, before we get into opening remarks by management, I would like to remind our listeners that our comments and answers to your questions will contain forward-looking information. This information, by its nature, is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the stated outcome to differ materially from the actual outcome. For further information on these risks and uncertainties, I encourage you to read the cautionary note that accompanies our first quarter MD&A and the related news release as well as the risk factors particular to our company. I would also like to point out that we will use various non-GAAP measures during the call. You can find explanations and reconciliations regarding these measures in the related news release. And finally, all dollar amounts we will discuss today are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise specified. Following opening remarks, we will open the phone lines to analysts and investors for questions. I will now turn the call over to Stuart for his remarks.

Thank you, Brian, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our quarterly conference call. As usual, I'll start with a brief overview of the quarter, and then I'll turn it over to Bryce for some more detailed commentary on our financials. It's obviously been a very busy few months for us here with construction activity ramping up at Florence, the buyout of our JV partners at Gibraltar and also our recent bond refi. But before we get into that, let's start with brief comments on Gibraltar operations. The mine has been running smoothly and our production results are generally on plan for the first quarter. Gibraltar produced 30 million pounds of copper and 250,000 pounds of molybdenum. Grade for the quarter was 0.24%, which is right around where we expect to average for the year. As we've previously talked about, one of our two concentrators were shut down for a planned major maintenance in January. The mill was down for about 12 days, but actually, since it's come back online, our total mill throughput has been very strong, averaging just over 90,000 tons a day, which is 6% over nameplate capacity. Copper recoveries for the quarter averaged 79%, slightly lower than planned on higher throughput and also milling of some partially oxidized material. In terms of costs, our total site costs were consistent with the prior quarter with Q4 last year, but lower copper production and a lower capital strip allocation had an impact on our unit costs. And our C1 operating cost came in at USD 2.46 per pound for this quarter. With a realized sales price of $3.89 per pound, we were able to generate $50 million of adjusted EBITDA and $60 million of operating cash flow. So overall, strong financial results, and Bryce will provide…

Thank you, Stuart. Yes, it has been quite a busy start to the year between the various financing, operating and construction initiatives. So just to add a little more information about the bond refinancing to start. We're very happy with the outcome of this process, and we moved very quickly into refinancing mode after closing of the second Careview transaction in March. Being able to refinance and upsize the new notes to $500 million with an 8.25% coupon is quite attractive, seeing bank debt is more than 9.5% at the moment. Originally, we expected that we would be refinancing later this year with the expectation that interest rates may have started to decline by now. As the expectation of lower rates diminished in recent months and weeks, we made the decision to move forward sooner as the high-yield market was open and constructive. And even though we are in a much higher interest rate environment today as compared to our last bond financing in 2021, the credit spread within the high yield rate is historically low and notably better for us by more than 2% than it was for Taseko in 2021. An important factor that investors looked at was our increased ownership in Gibraltar since our last issue and our flexible payment terms we achieved with those acquisitions. Today, our production and financial metrics are 33% higher than in early 2021, with copper prices more than $1.5 more per pound. And the fact that our deal was roughly 4x oversubscribed, shows that bond investors are now able to see the credit rerating that will come with Florence cash flow in the not-too-distant future. Having two copper producing cash flowing assets will make a significant difference to our credit profile and our objective of deleveraging in the years ahead. The…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Craig Hutchison from TD Bank.

Just a question on the TCRC. It's obviously very positive to see you guys are going to recognize negative TCRCs. But can you give us a sense in terms of what percent of your concentrate that you expect to produce, say, this year, next year in 2026 is actually under contract?

Sure. Craig, it's Stuart speaking here. Essentially, we are -- we have sold -- previously sold all of our material for the current year for 2024. But what happened with the Cariboo deal. We got about 50,000 tons of concentrating back for the shipments that were scheduled for the second half. So those have been remarketed at negative TCs. So that's 50,000 this year in the second half. And that's, I don't know, roughly 40% or 50% of our shipments -- maybe 30% or 40% of our shipments in the second half. And then for 2025 and 2026, we've now sold 220,000 tons of concentrate, 160,000 tons of that in both years was what we've just marketed. So -- and 60 -- the other 60,000 tons was sold previously under a long-term deal. So that gives you an idea of what we've been done. So the new -- it's pretty significant. It's 75%, 80% of our production in '25 and '26 that we've just sold in the current market.

Great. And just a question on transportation costs, just kind of looking year-over-year, it looks like they're up 100%. I know some of that is just you're recognizing you have only a larger interest in Gibraltar, but can you give us a sense of why they're up so much? And is that something we should be modeling going forward?

Craig, Richard here. Really, the story in transportation cost is we've had to utilize trucking to move concentrate from Gibraltar down to the coast for over the last few years, and it's become a regular part of our business. We're working hard to get back to being able to rail at all. So that's really the -- I guess, the objective on a go-forward basis. But we'll continue to utilize trucking as a backstop to inefficiencies and being able to rail the concentrate.

Okay. But what's the sort of limitation on the rail side of things? Is it more cars or give us a sense of what that issue is.

Yes. It's quite complex, but I guess to simplify it would be it comes down to how fast the cars are cycling on the route back a number of years here -- just over two years. There was a route change where the car has now started traveling north instead of going south out of Williams Lake, and that added cycle time to the car's returning. So that's been one of the challenges. And then the other obvious one is when you get FM events like the flooding or the port strike last year impacted our back to concentrate up at site, which then we had to resort to trucking to be able to move.

Okay. And just another question for Gibraltar. The decision or the consideration to restart the oxide SX/EW plant, what's some of the factors that you're thinking about there? Is it just sulfuric acid prices? And can you give us some kind of sense in terms of what the production would look like if it was to restart?

Yes, Craig, Richard again. Really, the driving factor there is having sufficient oxide ore placed on the dumps to justify the capital investment and the operating cost to be able to kind of restart that plan and then run it sustainably. I think as we've indicated previously, 2026 is the time frame we're looking at. But also looking at with some of the additional tons that have been placed on the dump at the end of this -- end of last year and through the beginning of this year, looking at potentially trying to accelerate that. So work is underway in that regard.

Okay. Great. Maybe one last question for me. Just on Florence spending. Can you talk to the cadence of the spending here throughout the year? Should we expect a significant uplift in Q2? Or is it more starting big spend starting Q3, Q4?

No, I think you're going to see a step up in Q2, probably another step up in Q3 and then kind of steady, steady for a couple of quarters from there and then ramp back down a little bit in -- as we get later on in 2025. It's going to pick up here definitely in Q2.

[Operator Instructions]

I think we're good operator. So we're going to probably stop it there and look forward to chatting with everyone again next quarter.

That concludes our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect.