First Majestic Silver - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Transcript

Speaker 4

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the First Majestic Silver 2025 Q2 Financial Results Conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press *1 on your telephone keypad. If you are participating through the webcast, you can submit a question in writing by using the form in the lower section of the webcast frame on screen. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may reach an operator by pressing *0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Keith Neumeyer, President and Chief Executive Officer of First Majestic Silver. Keith, please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Thank you for that, and welcome, everyone. Glad you were able to join us this morning early. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter financial results and updated 2025 guidance. Our second quarter result news release, MD&A, and financial statements were released earlier this morning and are posted on our website. Joining me in Vancouver for our call today are David Soares, our Chief Financial Officer; Steve Holmes, our Chief Operating Officer; Samir Patel, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary; Mani Alkhafaji, VP of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. We also have Darrell Rae and Joel Faltinsky from our Investor Relations team. We will be prepared to remark or take questions after our presentation. Before we start, I'll ask Samir to read out the forward-looking statement disclaimer. Let's do it, Samir.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Keith. Before we begin today's call, I would like to remind you that we will be referring to certain non-IFRS measures and making certain statements regarding First Majestic Silver and its operations that constitute forward-looking statements in accordance with applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. All statements that are not historical facts, such as statements regarding future estimates and plans or expectations of future performance, constitute forward-looking statements that reflect the company's current views with respect to future events. These statements are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political, and social uncertainties and contingencies.

We encourage you to refer to the quarterly language included in our news release that was disseminated earlier this morning and the disclosure on non-IFRS measures in our most recently filed management's discussion and analysis, as well as the risk factors set out in our most recently filed annual information form. As a reminder, these documents, along with all of our continuous disclosure documents, are available on SEDAR and on EDGAR. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty or reliance on any forward-looking statements made during today's call, and the company does not intend or assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements or information other than as required by law. With that, I will turn the call back to Keith.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Samir. I appreciate that. Before I get into the presentation, I just wanted to make a couple of quick notes. Obviously, a volatile day in the stock market. Silver gold prices are having a down day today, which is unfortunate, but nevertheless, we've seen this constantly. It's just the volatility in the market. Our stock is somewhat affected today by our news, such positive news. I've been on record using the word "record" 27 times, and maybe today I'll be breaking that record. We'll see. There was some news that came out earlier, and I'm just looking at headlines. One headline said we missed our revenue by 30%. The writer of that headline of that article actually didn't realize that we reported in U.S. dollars, and they were using Canadian dollars. I don't know how that happened, but nevertheless, that headline is complete nonsense.

Also, we saw Reuters' announcement or headline that came out this morning that said we had a loss and actually we have a gain. We are contacting these news sources and are trying to correct them. It's just part of the business, unfortunately, we have to deal with. I would suggest people just look at our news release. That's what the facts are. Super record quarter, best quarter ever in the company's history. Strong safety performance, which we're very proud of. Silver production 3.7 million ounces, up 76% year over year. We do have a presentation on screen. There's a number of people that are hopefully watching it. I know some of you are dialing in and don't have access to the screen, but we do have a PowerPoint that we do have available that we are going through to follow my presentation.

We have silver-equivalent production of 7.9 million ounces, 48% year over year. Record quarterly revenue $268 million, up 94% year over year. Now, that's not too bad. We're in line with having a billion dollars in revenue for 2025. It's a pretty exciting place to be. Record EBITDA of $120 million, simulated cash flows of about $150 million. Record cash position, and me as a CEO, I love looking at this number. I see it every Friday, and $510 million in the bank is not a too bad place to be for a company like ours, and that's growing. It should get better. It should continue to grow. Strong balance sheet, as I said. You know, we do have the convertible, of course, but you know, some people look at that as debt, but you know, quite honestly, I look at that as equity.

We're paying dividends, as all of you know, 1% of revenue. As our revenue increases, our dividends also increase as a result of increased revenues. Our record spending on exploration, 255,000 meters are expected to be drilled this year. We have 28 rigs currently active. That includes Jarrett Canyon. We just had our team down at Jarrett Canyon watching the drilling going on there, and it's looking quite exciting. There's a second rig arriving, I think, next week. That's part of that 255,000 meters of drilling. That's a lot of drilling. The exploration is from Navidad, Santo Niño, and Santa Elena. They're just, you know, it's amazing, those two ore bodies.

We're just internally, we're just putting together a bunch of work on the best way to get into those ore bodies, the best way to develop them, the quickest timelines getting that ore into the mill, and the timelines around all of that. We'll put that information out when we're ready to do that. First Majestic Silver is doing very well. Very excited about that project, and it's making money, which is good. You'll see on this slide, you know, we remain, you know, really the purest silver company of the business. You know, you look at the numbers, you know, we're at 55% silver. Excellon, you know, catching up a little bit. They had a good quarter, 44% silver. After Silver Max with a quarter, 34%. Pan American's, you know, falling a little bit behind, but has increased a little bit as a result of the MAG transaction, 24%.

Out of the group, you know, this is the group that we measure ourselves against, and it's important to us to remain 50% silver or higher, and we've achieved that over the last couple of quarters. Moving on into our cost structures and our production, you'll see we had a great first half of the year. We're on track to hit our guidance between 30 and 31 and 32, and we had a million silver-equivalent ounces for the year. We're seeing Cerro Los Gatos continually deliver, which is great to see. It's been a great contributor to our portfolio. San Dimas is coming along nicely, which is good to see. You know, a few challenges in the last couple of quarters have been quite good. For San Dimas, the costs have crept up a little bit, as you can see on the slide.

We're looking to see that hopefully come down over the next couple of quarters. There is inflation in the system, and you know, Q2, as most of you probably know who are listening, it tends to be a fairly big cash outdraw. That's when you've got yielding bonuses. That's when you've got cash tax payments as well. There tends to be heavy spending in Q2 just in the Mexican mining sector. That's just kind of normal. That should revert over the next couple of quarters. We'll see as things evolve. We'll just move along here. Our guidance, this is information already that's going out to the market, but you can see our guidance on costs. We're within guidance, as you can tell, and we're quite within production guidance as well. Everything's working as scheduled and on time and as expected.

When it comes to capital, we had a pretty aggressive first half getting these exploration programs going and getting the development done. We did front-end the budget slightly, and that was just to get things really kicked off. As a result of the strong production and revenues and spend profits in Q4 and Q1, we did expand some of our projects, and we did come out with a revised guidance earlier in July, as most of you probably have seen. That has translated into higher underground development costs, higher exploration costs. This is all growth capital. It's all very nice to see, and it'll have big impacts on the business over the next couple of years. It's great to be in a strong position to be able to increase our budgets and spend this money where this money should be spent to grow the business over time.

We're happy to be able to do that. On our cash flows, you can see by this slide, very, very strong cash flows. Record cash flows, I'm going to use the word record again. I can't think of how many times I've used the word record. I've got to use it more. Record cash flows, we're very excited about that. I go back to the Treasury again. The Treasury is growing, and that's what I look like, or what I look at, as being a successful business. You don't have to be going to the public markets to raise capital. You're actually generating cash, and that's a pretty good place to be. Talking about some of the things that we're doing on the CapEx side. Oh, yeah. I did, I should go back and just address a couple of CapEx issues.

We are looking at getting the Santa Elena up to 3,500 tons a day. That's in process. We are working on getting Navidad and Santa Elena developed, which I kind of touched on, but we're getting pretty advanced on that. I would, you know, look for news on both of those projects. There's some pretty exciting things going on there. Cerro Los Gatos is getting it up to a consistent 4,000 tons per day. We're there, but consistently keeping it at those levels is one of our major goals. We're actually changing the haulage at Liccatada. We've bought our own fleet, and we're going to be doing self-haulage. We're hoping to see a little bump up in CapEx because we have to buy the fleet, but it'll be a lower OpEx over the next couple of quarters as we start to do our own haulage there.

Going back to the cash flow slide, going back and forth here a little bit, but you can see for yourself from cash flows. We're going to go to our waterfall EBITDA slide. This just gives you an idea of, you know, what our budget is compared to, you know, what actually occurred. Obviously, the depletions and amortization is a big number. I should probably pass this comment because we do get questions on this. I think I should probably divert this to David. Why don't you just cover this question?

Speaker 6

Thank you, Keith. Hello, everyone. Just on slide seven here, you know, we've got the waterfall that shows the difference between net earnings or what makes up the difference between net earnings and EBITDA. You can see there a large portion of that difference is really just the depletion, depreciation, and amortization. About $44 million or so, $44.6 million, relates to Cerro Los Gatos. Really, the PPA, the purchase price allocation bump that was done when we had to allocate, you know, the $1 billion that we paid for the asset to the asset. It went from a book value of a few hundred million dollars to $1 billion. Obviously, that brings up the value and the depreciation as well. We also had a strong production quarter across most of our sites, and that also contributed a little bit here as well.

Really, that non-cash item making up the big difference between net earnings and EBITDA. We had some financing costs, most of which were related to non-cash accretion, but we also had some interest and standby costs, which were about $3 million. We also had an income tax recovery impacting here as well, mainly related to changes in the FX rate on our tax pools in Mexico. Anytime there's big changes from quarter to quarter in the Mexican peso versus the U.S. dollar, we get these fairly large adjustments on the tax side. Ending EBITDA for the quarter was $119.9 million.

Speaker 3

David, thanks. You can explain that way better than I could have. Go ahead and you took that off.

Speaker 6

Thanks, Keith.

Speaker 3

Thanks. Okay, going to the next slide, slide eight. Just some notable comments on the quarter. I already covered some of this stuff during my previous verbiage, but the bonuses, of course, are always June, and tax installments tend to be large at this time of year. We did have some energy disruptions. There were some weather events in June, and water had to use extra diesel. That's Sandemas and so on. There was also integration costs at Cerro Los Gatos, which were one kind of one-time off-cost. You could see those details in the MD&A. They're all there, laid out. If you want to see further details on the impacts, please have a look. You see the details on the tax payments and the dividend payments and so on on this slide. We did get upgraded by ISS on our ESG scores, which is pretty impressive.

This is a big initiative that the company launched a couple of years ago, and our score just continually improves every year. I know many investors don't really pay a lot of attention to this kind of stuff, but we do have a group of investors and shareholders and institutions that really do care about these types of initiatives. We do continually try to improve that side of our business, which is something we take quite seriously, and we're quite proud of it. Jumping to the next slide, slide nine, the Cerro Los Gatos integration. It's been extremely smooth. It's got to be one of our smoothest integrations in the 23-year history of the company. I guess that's probably to do with the fact that it's a new mine. It wasn't one of the old ancient mines we bought in the past.

We've had to go in and basically rebuild and take time and money to do that. In this case, there's no capital required. We're actually even able to reduce the exploration programs a little bit just because they already have a 10-year life of mine. You don't need to spend that type of capital. As long as we replace reserves at our resources that we're mining on an annual basis, that's really the job of the exploration team. They do that successfully, and we expect that they'll continue to do that going forward. The areas like safety, security, environment, health, legal, everything's aligning. We've actually just implemented SAP. You know, we've been using SAP within First Majestic Silver for, geez, almost five years, I think. Getting that implemented at Cerro Los Gatos takes some time, and that was just launched last week. It's really nice to see that.

That's really going to give us an extra layer of controls over that operation and brings it into the whole supply chain and maintenance and so on, matching all the guidelines and policies and procedures within First Majestic Silver. We're happy to see that. Am I missing anything? I don't think I'm missing anything. Okay. Let's move along here. Our financial strength, you know, it's hard to avoid talking about having $510 million in the bank. That's not a bad place to be. That continually grows, or hopefully, it'll continually grow. There are no plans on spending that money anytime soon. We're going to continue with our current budget. Our current budget was released in July. For the balance of the year, there will be no changes to our guidance or our budget on our spend.

We are looking at some interesting investments in 2026, but we'll discuss that at a later date, when we get closer to January when we put our guidance out for 2026. I think that's it for my presentation. This is the first time ever, and just so the listeners know, we've actually done a PowerPoint presentation. Usually, we do these fairly formal type discussions, but we tried to formalize it, and that's why we decided to create some slides, which we've shown you today. Let's open up the call for questions.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Keith. We'll now proceed to the question and answer session. Once again, to join the question queue, you may press *1 on your telephone keypad. You'll hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press *2. If you're participating today through the webcast, you can submit a question in writing by using the form in the lower section of the webcast frame on screen. Our first question is from Wayne Lam with TD Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Hey, thanks. Good morning, everyone. I guess first question, really nice to see the smooth integration of Cerro Los Gatos and, you know, really the operational improvements being made across the entire portfolio. Just wondering if you could maybe help walk through some of the synergies that you've kind of outlined with the integration. Can you provide maybe a bit more detail on the improvements needed to sustain the 4,000 tons per day there and what the timeline would be to achieving that?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Wayne, for dialing in and listening today. I appreciate your question. I'm going to pass your question on to our Chief Operating Officer, Steve Holmes.

Speaker 2

Right. Yeah, thanks for the question. At Cerro Los Gatos, we have a situation where the plant capacity is a bit higher than the mine, and that's been that way for quite a few years. What we're doing is we're accelerating the mining rates and the ramp development downward in Cerro Los Gatos to basically provide a more continuous supply of ore matched with the plant's capacity. That'll take some time, but we put a plan together to execute on that. So far, we've been pretty successful in doing that. It's really about making sure the mine can support the capacity of the plant. It's a matter of accelerating development, particularly in the ramp systems in the northwest zone, central zone, and even in the southeast deep zone, which is developing now, which is a big part of the future of the ramp.

Speaker 3

Wayne, does that answer your question?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I was also wondering, that ties in with the synergies portion.

Speaker 2

Right. On the synergies, we've identified many synergies, some of which come from Cerro Los Gatos to First Majestic Silver, and many of which come from First Majestic Silver to Cerro Los Gatos. Some examples, Wayne, would be, for example, we've instituted as part of First Majestic Silver's operating practices a really strong reconciliation process within Cerro Los Gatos that allows us to really measure what we actually achieve versus our plan. We've seen some really significant opportunities to improve overbreak and reduce dilution in the deposit, so we're working on that. On the other side, we noted that Cerro Los Gatos has a robust business improvement process that's based on lean principles, some of which we were applying within First Majestic Silver, but they also have some really good processes that we are applying now through the First Majestic Silver operations.

These synergies are two-way streets where we're drawing on the best that we can see in Cerro Los Gatos, and we're providing the best processes and technology that come from First Majestic Silver into Cerro Los Gatos. Those are just two examples.

Speaker 3

You mentioned the new contracts that we're renegotiating on the exploration contractors.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Mani just brought up a point there. We have a lot of different synergies. One of them, for example, is there are three different exploration contractors doing exploration work at Cerro Los Gatos. We have a major contractor that does most of our work in Mexico that we're quite comfortable with, that gives us very good rates on exploration work. We've integrated that contractor now into Cerro Los Gatos and saw significant savings in exploration work that was being done. That's one example. Another one is we've looked at all the major consumable contracts like bulk oils and things of this nature, and we've been able to utilize some of our major suppliers to integrate into Cerro Los Gatos to give Cerro Los Gatos just lower costs overall. Bulk oils is a good example. Some of the ground control supply was another good example as well.

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Yeah, it sounds like quite a few opportunities there. Maybe at Santa Elena, you guys are also starting to delineate quite a few new discoveries. Just wondering if you could provide a bit more detail on the sequencing and advancement of some of those new veins. Maybe some color on when Ermitaño gets mined out. When does Santo Niño come in? Sounds like that's pretty advanced. Does Navidad give you that bigger step change in tonnage, and how far out would that be?

Speaker 3

Yeah, Wayne, some of that information is not yet public. We've put out news around Navidad and then Santo Niño in the winter. These are three major discoveries. I've mentioned to people that our geological team is suggesting that these discoveries are larger than Ermitaño. Time will tell. Our maiden discovery, or our maiden resource, was released in our AIF earlier in the year, and it was 30 million ounces at Navidad, which included, I think, did that include winter as well? We just.

Speaker 2

It did include a portion of winter.

Speaker 3

Yeah, okay. A portion of winter and then Navidad. The drilling is continuing. Then we discovered Santo Niño, which we haven't had a resource around yet. Our whole focus is, you know, how quickly can we get these ore bodies into the mill? We're doing a bunch of engineering work. Steve's spending a ton of time right now with the team to try to figure out the best way to get into this and how to develop it, where to build the attics, where to build the tunnels. Once we have all that done, which hopefully will be by, you know, end of the year, maybe Q1, we will put out some guidance on that. We'll be able to answer your question at that time.

Speaker 1

Okay, perfect. Yeah, sounds like a lot to come and excited to hear about those new opportunities. Thanks for taking my questions.

Speaker 3

Yeah, thanks, Wayne Lam.

Speaker 4

Once again, if you have a question, please press *1. Meanwhile, I'll pass the floor over to Mr. Darrell Rae, Investor Relations at First Majestic Silver, to take us through questions submitted from the webcast.

Speaker 5

Hi. Okay, yeah, we'll take a couple from the webcast. Gaylene, this one's likely directed towards David. David, what is your total, or First Majestic, what is your total debt outstanding? What was paid in the last quarter in interest, and what are you expecting to pay in 2025 or 2026?

Speaker 6

Yeah, just to answer that question, what was paid in the last quarter is about $3 million. It's included in the financing bucket of the EBITDA slide. It's part of that $7 or so million dollars. We're not looking at changing or increasing our debt levels at First Majestic Silver, even though our balance sheet is very strong. If we had a use for that debt or a project, then we could look at it. As Keith Neumeyer said, right now, our cash balance remains super strong and it's increasing. We've got internal projects lining up for which we'll probably disclose once the ideas around those are further developed in early 2026. For now, we've got our convertibles outstanding. We're happy with that level of debt. At the right time, we'll see what we do with that.

Speaker 3

Just a comment about debt. You know, I know the analysts out there look at convertibles as debt, but I don't. I look at convertibles as equity. They're convertible into equity. Therefore, I call it equity. That $230 million is based for the majority of the company's debt, which is convertible.

Speaker 6

Super low carrying costs on those. Also, if we were to think about renewing that or what other options we have, the rates right now are super attractive as well.

Speaker 3

Yeah, the rate on that $230 million, for those who aren't aware, is 0.375%. The lowest coupon done in the history of mining companies. It's not a lot more. Anything else?

Speaker 5

Okay, yeah. Another question, probably for you, Keith, is First Mint up to full capacity? If not, when is this likely to happen?

Speaker 3

No, it's not. When full capacity is measured by, basically, man-hours and shifts, the equipment could produce more than it's currently producing, but it's limited by man-hours. We could put a second shift on and double the current capacity if need be. The budget is to do 100,000 ounces a month. They're slightly behind that. The budget is, no, not the budget, but the goal is to get up to 10% of the company's production through the mint. We're currently just shy of 6%. It's not too bad, you know, after one year of production. This is a startup business. It's brand new. There's competition out there that we're dealing with. It's a profit center. We're making money, and we're trying to grow it. As I said, we're trying to get it up to 10% of the production of the global production of the company.

Speaker 5

Okay, that's great. Gaylene, any more on your end?

Speaker 4

We have no further analysts in the queue.

Speaker 5

Okay, that's a final question from the webcast.

Speaker 4

All right, I'd like to hand the call back over to Keith for any closing remarks.

Speaker 3

Thank you everyone for joining in today. I'm sure there'll be many people that'll be listening to this online after the live presentation. I would ask that you do look at the news release and read through it. If you have further questions, please contact the company. Go to [email protected] or just dial us in and ask for either Darrell or Joel. They'll be happy to answer any of your further questions. Thanks again, and have a great day.

Speaker 4

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