Coeur Mining at John Tumazos Conference: Strategic Turnaround

On Tuesday, 07 October 2025, Coeur Mining (NYSE:CDE) presented a compelling case for its strategic turnaround at the John Tumazos Very Independent Research Virtual Metals Conference 2025. The company showcased a significant improvement in financial performance, driven by strategic investments and favorable market conditions. While challenges remain, Coeur Mining expressed optimism about its future prospects, emphasizing disciplined capital allocation and operational efficiency.

Key Takeaways

• Coeur Mining projects substantial EBITDA growth from $142 million in 2023 to over $900 million in 2024.
• The company aims to achieve a zero leverage ratio by the end of 2024.
• Expansion at the Rochester mine and the acquisition of SilverCrest Metals are key drivers of increased production.
• Coeur Mining is focused on operational excellence and strategic capital allocation to maximize shareholder value.

Financial Results

• 2023 EBITDA: $142 million
• 2023 Free Cash Flow: -$297 million
• Projected 2024 EBITDA: Over $900 million
• Projected 2024 Free Cash Flow: Over $500 million
• Q2 2024 Free Cash Flow: Approximately $150 million
• Gold Production Increase (Year-over-Year): Approximately 20%
• Silver Production Increase (Year-over-Year): Over 60%
• EBITDA Margin: Increased from 17% to approaching 50%
• ROIC: Increasing into the mid-20s
• Debt: Revolver balance paid off, previously almost $300 million drawn
• Senior Notes: $290 million of 5.125% senior notes due 2029, callable in February 2026

Operational Updates

• Rochester Silver and Gold Mine (Nevada): $730 million expansion completed, ramping up production
• Las Chispas Mine (Sonora, Mexico): Acquired through SilverCrest acquisition, contributing to increased production
• Palmarejo Mine (Chihuahua, Mexico): Increasing production from areas not subject to Franco-Nevada gold stream
• Wharf Mine (South Dakota): Continued exploration success extends mine life
• Kensington Mine (Alaska): $85 million investment extended mine life
• Silvertip (Northern British Columbia): Initial assessment underway for potential future growth

Future Outlook

• Strategic Goals: Achieve zero leverage ratio by end of 2024, improve operational efficiency, reduce costs
• Expand mine life through exploration and strategic acquisitions
• Capital allocation to maximize shareholder value
• Potential to become opportunistic during lower price periods
• Silvertip: Goal for go/no-go decision in four to five years

Q&A Highlights

• Debt Repayment: Considering whether to pay off senior notes due in 2029 or let cash build up
• Acquisition Targets: Focus on internal exploration and development, particularly at Wharf
• Black Hills Permitting: Permitting new projects is becoming more challenging
• Silvertip Development: Exploring power alternatives and port logistics
• Management Succession: Mitch Krebs open to stepping down if beneficial for the company

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - John Tumazos Very Independent Research Virtual Metals Conference 2025:

John: We’re so happy today to host our old friend Mitch Krebs, Chairman, President, and CEO of Coeur Mining, and our old friend Jeff Wilhoit, that we know from his time at Glamis Gold and Goldcorp. The stock at Coeur Mining has quadrupled or quintupled this year, and it’s still kicking ass. Mitch, tell us why you’re doing such a good job.

Mitch Krebs, Chairman, President, and CEO, Coeur Mining: Thank you, John, for having us. It’s good to see you and appreciate our... I don’t know when we first met, but it’s probably 20, 25 years ago.

That’s a long time, and it’s been a great company, and it’s getting better.

It’s been an interesting ride here, us for sure. Just to your point, I think the reason things are going as well as they are this year is really a combination of a few things. We, over the last five years or so, were investing a lot back into the business in expansions and in exploration. You know, it was some white-knuckle days and months and quarters as we went through that process. We’re now just starting to see the kind of benefits of those investments start to pay off. We added to that then by acquiring SilverCrest Metals Inc. That was announced almost exactly a year ago to the day. It closed in February of this year. We added their Las Chispas mine down in Sonora, Mexico, starting February 14th.

When you combine the benefit from these investments plus the acquisition of SilverCrest, and then you sprinkle in these higher prices and us being, you know, one of the few U.S.-listed, U.S.-headquartered, U.S.-incorporated precious metals mining companies that have great trading liquidity, that just has all kind of come together at the same time, at the right time, and it’s created this huge inflection point for us here this year. You just go back literally to 2023. That’s not even two years ago. Our EBITDA in 2023 was $142 million, and our free cash flow that year was minus $297 million. Our leverage ratio, net debt to EBITDA, was like four and a half times. We had a highly levered balance sheet, and money was going out the door.

Now, this year, fast forward to where we are today, EBITDA this year should be over $900 million, and free cash flow this year should be over $500 million. We’re well on our way here by the end of the year to see our leverage ratio hit zero and start to have more cash than debt, and that’ll continue to build from there. Everything has changed quickly. If I said that we had it planned exactly to roll out this way, I’d be lying. You know, we expected to see an inflection point and this transition into positive free cash flow and the beginning of deleveraging. That was the plan. These higher prices are making that all happen a lot faster than we had had it drawn up. We’ll take that.

We’re really now, you know, the second quarter was really just the first year, or first quarter, where we really started to show the power of what we’ve created here with, I think it was almost $150 million of free cash flow just in the second quarter. That was really the first full quarter then that we had Las Chispas into the mix and started to see a lot of these other things play out. We’re in the early innings, the early quarters here of enjoying this inflection point. The outlook is great. Prices are making it a little bit easier. I think that’s a long-winded answer to your simple question of what’s been going right for us here so far this year.

Please remember to scroll through your slides there.

Okay, thanks for the reminder. Do you want me just to give a little setup, John? I can start with that for those who might not be as familiar with the company.

Sure, sure.

Okay. This is a company that goes back to 1928, headquartered out in Idaho, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in the Silver Valley. That is where this company got its roots. It’s had a long winding road to where we are today, but we’re now... I’m coming to you from Chicago. We relocated the company out of Coeur d’Alene back in 2013. That was part of kind of a reset, an organizational and cultural reset that I think the company really needed to help get itself built on a stronger foundation, which has taken longer than I ever thought. Between board refreshment, really turning over the asset portfolio, really revamping the team over the last several years, we’ve now gotten ourselves into a really nice position. Here we sit today. We’ll produce this year about 410,000 ounces of gold, about 18 million or so silver ounces.

You’ll see here on this slide, our revenue mix between gold and silver this year is around two-thirds gold, one-third silver. We’re 100% in North America. Three of our mines are in the U.S., two of them are in Mexico. You can see where our revenue mix is tilted a little bit toward the U.S., probably one of the more U.S.-centric precious metals mining companies with about 55% of our revenue currently coming from those three U.S. mines. The locations of those three mines are Nevada, South Dakota, and Alaska. The two mines in Mexico, I mentioned Las Chispas in Sonora, and then our Palmarejo gold and silver mine is in Chihuahua. One thing I’d really like to point out on this slide is just the fact that we have a nice mix, nice balance across the collection of five operations. You can see that little wheel chart there.

We’re not overly concentrated on any one operation. Inevitably in mining, there’s a hiccup somewhere or there’s outperformance somewhere else. Just to have a nice portfolio, a little bit of a diversification across the five and having it be so balanced is something we keep an eye on. The Mexico piece, just to give you a little bit of background there, with the addition of Las Chispas through the SilverCrest acquisition, we thought long and hard about are we ready to add more silver or more exposure to Mexico, given a year ago is when the new administration came in with President Sheinbaum. Our assessment, at least a year in, has been a cautiously optimistic one. Permits have started to flow in a much more regular way.

We had permits that sat there in Mexico for the last six years under the prior administration that we got issued in about six months of the new administration. We were happy to see that. It’s been a much more pragmatic and professional approach to engage with the mining sector in Mexico. The open pit mining ban, we’ll see how that shakes out. I haven’t really seen any open pit permits issued yet, but I think it’s just a matter of time. We’re comfortable with the balance we have between the U.S. and Mexico, although we probably don’t want to see Mexico become more than half of our business, at least for the foreseeable future. These are just some highlights from our second quarter that we issued in August.

I mentioned a few of these already in terms of the real inflection point around the cash flow and the net income. I think it was our fifth quarter in a row of positive earnings, fourth or fifth quarter in a row of positive free cash flow, and I think fifth quarter of meeting or beating guidance. After a period of time where we went through a lot of volatility and as we were investing back into the business, like I mentioned, just the visibility, our control over the business has really improved and our ability to be a lot more boring and a lot more predictable has definitely improved.

We paid off our revolver balance, the remaining revolver balance in the second quarter, and that was a big win because we had leaned heavily on that revolver as we went through an expansion, most notably the one out in Nevada that I’ll talk about at our Rochester Silver and Gold mine. Just over a year ago, we had almost $300 million drawn on that revolver, and that always feels a little uncomfortable. With the acquisition of SilverCrest Metals Inc. and their cash balance that we inherited from them, along with the cash flow from their Las Chispas mine and from the rest of our portfolio, we were able to chew through that revolver balance and retire that completely in the second quarter. That was a big win and a big milestone in the second quarter. I mentioned Rochester a couple of times. You can see here crushed ore tons.

I’ll get into Rochester here in a second, but that was about a four-year investment of about $730 million to expand that project. We’re still in the ramp-up phase a little bit, but that’s behind us now, and that’s one of the key drivers to the company here in this year and as we look ahead into 2026. A little bit of a busy slide here, but what it’s intended to show is just the growth. I mentioned the EBITDA and the free cash flow in 2023. Those are on the bottom charts where it was in 2023 compared to where we project it to be this year. You can see that huge shift. On the top two graphs, you can see it’s the gold production and the silver production and where that was in the prior couple of years compared to this year.

Same on silver production on the right. You can see that the production levels this year are expected to be like 20% higher year over year on gold and about 60%, a little over 60% higher on the silver production side. Silver production in particular is driven by the Rochester expansion and the addition of Las Chispas from the SilverCrest acquisition. In those little green boxes, you can see the 2025 breakdown by quarter and then by second half. Those are just meant to show that as we go through this year, first quarter was our lightest, second quarter was better, and now in the second half of the year, we’re set up to have even stronger performance.

It’s kind of a back half of the year weighted profile for us to get to those numbers, which is kind of exciting because obviously with more production in the second half of the year at these higher prices, it’s going to just make those financial metrics even more pronounced here in the third quarter, hopefully, and fourth quarter as we end the year. Just to give you a little more detail on the balance sheet that I mentioned, you can see the progression on that leverage ratio on that line chart up on the top from four times in September. It was four and a half times in the prior quarter in June of 2023 to where we project it here now at the end of the year, down to the end and below.

This used to be probably the slide that we spent the most amount of time talking about with investors for good reason. As we went through that $730 million expansion out in Nevada, the balance sheet was leaned on heavily, and that was a subject of a lot of concern, and it put pressure on the stock price. A lot of investors had very much of a wait-and-see attitude as we worked our way through that expansion. Now that we’ve come out the other side of that, this balance sheet slide doesn’t get as much attention anymore, which is kind of a nice change. We also spent a lot of time here at the company talking about return on invested capital, our ROIC. Of course, in the last five years, as we were going through that heavy CapEx cycle, ROIC wasn’t a very impressive number.

In fact, our long-term incentive compensation program has had a ROIC metric in it. A significant amount of our management team’s compensation is tied directly to return on invested capital. It’s really nice to see, I mean, obviously prices help here, but a lot of that investment that I keep talking about is now starting to be reflected in this ROIC metric here now getting into the mid-20s and hopefully continuing to rise as we get into 2026 and beyond. It’s nice to see where we stack up against gold peers and silver peers. We hopefully can, we’ll have a new version of this slide in the not-too-distant future that’ll show us and our sector compared to other industries, whether it’s oil and gas or utilities or even tech, just to give a sense of, you know, this is an industry now generating some pretty attractive ROICs at these prices.

Hopefully, that’ll attract some additional capital into the sector as we screen more and more favorably against other sectors. Another slide we spend a lot of time talking about with investors is just from an inflationary standpoint, what are we seeing? These are four cost buckets that we present on a quarterly basis. These make up together, I think it’s about 65% of our total operating costs. It’s a pretty good proxy for, you know, overall cost pressures that we may or may not be seeing. You can see, you know, over the last 12 months, last 24 months, we’ve really seen these inflationary pressures subside. That’s what’s leading to this amazing margin expansion that we’re certainly seeing. I think all companies in the sector are seeing, you know, costs are staying flat. In our case, flat to slightly down.

With the top line going up, you know, we’re really preserving that spread and delivering some nice margin expansion. In fact, if you go back a couple of slides, you can see on the bottom that EBITDA margin on those bars in the bottom left, a couple of years ago, our EBITDA margin was 17%. Now we’re scaring 50%. At these prices, we’ll probably be on the good side of 50% here in the back half of the year. We’re really in this perfect storm of rising prices and flat costs. Sorry for flipping around here. Rochester, I keep talking about it. We can go a little deeper into what we did there. Just a visual, this is Northern Nevada. It’s Pershing County. It’s about an hour and a half outside of Reno. Closest town is Lovelock, Nevada. I know, John, you’ve been out there over the years.

It started up in the mid-1980s as a fairly small-scale open pit, heap leach, silver and gold operation. On average, Rochester historically produced three, maybe four million ounces of silver, 30 or 40,000 ounces of gold a year. It mined and crushed and then placed under leach about 10 to 14 million tons each year. What we did started in 2020, they embarked on this expansion. The old operation continued to operate just over that ridgeline that you can see. I don’t know if you can see my cursor, but just behind there is the existing, the legacy operation. What we built is basically a new crusher, a new leach pad, and a new Meryl Crowe plant. We just scaled it out massively from what the mine historically was.

Instead of 10 to 14 million tons per year, Rochester can now do more like 30, 32, 34 million tons per year through a three-stage crusher. This picture doesn’t do it justice, but this crusher from end to end, from where you dump ore into the primary to where there’s a truck loadout facility, that’s over a mile. It’s 11 stories high. This thing’s a beast. We finished the crusher kind of first half of last year, and we’ve been bringing that up to steady state levels. The leach pad and the Meryl Crowe plant were done a little bit before the crusher, so we could continue operating on the other side, the legacy side of the operation, to start providing ore to that new leach pad and Meryl Crowe plant.

Just to give you a sense of where we’ll be this year versus prior years, you can see on those graphs that the silver production historically, like I mentioned, in that low three million ounce range and the gold production in the 30, 35, 40,000 ounces a year. This thing, once scaled up, will be more like seven to eight million ounces of silver a year and 70 to 80,000 ounces of gold a year. We have about a 16-year mine life based on reserves out ahead of us. We’ve got plenty of mine life, and with that scale and the efficiencies that come along with that, we’re going to see our costs coming down pretty significantly, like over 20, 25%. This will be a significant cash flow generator for us for a long, long time. I can’t remember if I have a Rochester photo in there.

I don’t know of the exploration and the land package that we have there. You can imagine since the mid-80s, we’ve been able to kind of methodically consolidate the land position around Rochester to where we have plenty of places to drill. We just haven’t been all that focused on the exploration story of Rochester as we’ve gone through this expansion and that capital project. This year, we’re investing about $15 million in exploration at Rochester. Last year, it was $10 million. The year before that, it was $5 million. We’re not all that interested in adding on to the 16-year mine life, but what we are trying to do is bring in some higher grade material into the earlier years of the mine plan to help juice the economics and the return on that capital that we invested there at Rochester.

As we go through the rest of 2025 and then into 2026, hopefully we’ll be able to talk more about some higher grade exploration success that we expect to see at Rochester. That overall exploration story, the one I talked about at Rochester, is really true across the company. I’m really proud of what this company has done from an exploration standpoint. This slide does a fairly good job at talking about this. We were going through the $730 million expansion at Rochester, which put a lot of strain on the business and on the balance sheet, but we stayed committed to investing in exploration too. It would have been easy to cut exploration to help make it a little bit easier on us at Rochester, but we stayed committed to drilling and it’s been enormously successful.

We’ve invested almost $300 million over the last five years in exploration, really brownfields exploration. You can see across the categories we’ve added meaningfully to all the categories. I think if you add up down there at the bottom, on a gold equivalent basis, we’ve added almost 9 million gold equivalent ounces between reserves and resources. On a silver equivalent basis, that’s something like 600 million ounces. On a cost per ounce basis, that’s a low $30 an ounce for a gold equivalent ounce discovery cost. It’s really added to our mine lives. It’s really helped drive that return on invested capital metric that I mentioned earlier. One of the best poster children for high ROIC from brownfields exploration is at Wharf. Wharf is a mine that we acquired from Gold Corp. John, you remember this?

Oh yeah.

In 2015, we bought that from Gold Corp for $99.5 million in cash. Wharf has been in operation for 42 years. It’s had a five-year mine life now for 42 years. When we acquired it in 2015, it had a five-year mine life or so. We’ve operated it now for a decade. We’ve taken out over $500 million free cash flow. The return on that acquisition purchase price has been terrific. We still have about a six-year mine life today. Through some continued drilling, we think that we can scare the heck out of a double-digit mine life there at Wharf. What’s great about that for Wharf is since we’ve owned it, if we invest $3 to $5 million a year in exploration, we can almost guarantee ourselves a year of mine life.

For Wharf, a year of mine life is anywhere from $50 to $100 million of free cash flow. Putting up $3 to $5 million and getting back $50 to $100, we’ll do that all day long. We’re going to keep doing that at Wharf. That’s really the kind of the best example.

Mitch, there’s a couple of exploration companies just a little bit to the west of you.

Yeah.

Dakota Gold and Solitario Exploration.

Yep.

Solitario is an eight-figure market value. It’s not a big cap, and there’s very exciting exploration results there. I’m surprised you don’t buy both of them out.

Yeah, you know, we know them. We have dialogue with them. I think our priority has been on really focusing on what we have there at Wharf. From a grade profile perspective, adding more at Wharf is a way better bang for the buck than going out and buying anything in the neighborhood. If we can achieve that kind of objective of getting out to a 10-year mine life there at Wharf, we really aren’t in any kind of position to feel like we need to go out and do anything, excuse me, to add to what we have at Wharf. The other thing, this is in the Black Hills of South Dakota, right outside of Lead and Deadwood, and it’s a great part of the country. Excuse me, but it’s changed a little bit.

The profile of places like the Black Hills ever since COVID, a lot of people have moved into that area from outside of South Dakota, oftentimes with not as much of a pro-mining mentality as what there has been historically in the region. I think permitting new things is, even if it’s under the state regime, not as simple as it used to be. I think just the fact that we are the only operating gold mine out there is something that we, it’s a great competitive advantage, and it’s something that we, you know, we’re not too keen to go out and start up something new that would require a whole new permitting process. As long as we have opportunities there at Wharf, that’s probably where we’ll prioritize our focus and our dollars.

It’ll be interesting to watch both of those companies that you mentioned, John, see how they advance and de-risk their investments.

takes a long time to permit a four-inch drill hole.

takes a lot of time to do anything. You know, if you’ve ever been out there, maybe you have, John, but anybody that’s been out there, it’s a pristine, beautiful, like a lot of places where mines are. It’s a beautiful place. It’s getting more and more built up, and it’s getting harder to get permits to do anything.

Where do people move from that go to the Black Hills?

You know, the answer is places like California. Nothing against California. I’ll never forget though, John, the first time I moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, this was in the 1990s. I was outside one weekend washing my car and this kid was on his bicycle and he came up and was watching me. I said, "I don’t think I’ve ever met you. Are you guys new?" He said, "Yeah, we just moved into the neighborhood." I said, "Oh, where’d you move from?" He looked down at his shoe tops and he didn’t know if he was supposed to answer or not. He finally said, "My parents told me to promise not to say any, to tell anybody this, but we moved here from California." There was that kind of influx into northern Idaho I remember that really changed the profile of that part of the country.

It’s kind of the same. I see a lot of parallels there in the hills as well.

I’m near the Vasa base in central Florida on the Atlantic coast. There’s a thousand people a day moving from New York and New Jersey to Florida as tax refugees. We’re all rednecks.

It’s like oil and water a little bit, right?

Yeah, it’s like I got away from the liberals and I’m in the free state of Florida, but there’s no gold deposits in Florida for me to point you to.

Yeah, it’s an interesting dynamic, but it does make things a little more, you know, the community reputation, the support. I mean, this is mine. You can go to, there’s a ski resort right next door to Wharf called Terry Peak. You can stand up at Terry Peak and point your ski tips down the ski run and you’re looking right in. It looks like you’re going to ski right into the Wharf pit. Normally you’d think that that would be a very complicated neighborhood, but the support, in fact, we own a third of that ski resort, but the relationship there, the support, in fact, when we mine, this is an on-off leaching setup. You mine the ore, you put it on a leach pad, you leach it for about 18 months, then you actually take the material back off and you put it back into the pit.

It’s an on-off leaching thing. We’re constantly doing concurrent reclamation. What we end up doing sometimes, there’s a great example called Golden Reward, an area there at Wharf that we mined out and then reclaimed and then gave it to the ski hill and helped them extend the chairlifts and they got a few extra hundred feet of run on their ski runs from doing that. It’s just a great relationship. Over 40 some years out there, Wharf has really earned its stripes in the community and that’s a huge advantage for us. Long-winded way of saying, we’re going to stick to what we have there and leverage our strengths and all the upside that we have.

These are a couple of areas on this slide that we’re currently drilling this year that we think is going to give us a big bang for the buck by the time year-end comes around and we update our reserves and resources. These are areas that are adjacent to where we’re currently mining, previously mined and previously disturbed areas within the existing permit boundaries. Those kinds of things, it’s not flashy, but you can keep doing it. It’s great returns, great economics, it’s low risk and keep that cash flow profile from Wharf going. Wharf’s been a dream. It’s the lowest management time asset that we have. It just sort of, whatever its budget is, it meets it or beats it every year and the team has done an amazing job there. I got on the Wharf talking about exploration.

The other place that we’re starting to see some early success is at Las Chispas. This was the asset that we inherited with the SilverCrest Metals Inc. acquisition earlier this year. Super high grade, high margin. We put out a release, I think just last month, maybe it was in August, with some Las Chispas exploration drill results. We’re having a great level of success in the first few months since we acquired it right there in the existing mining area. We’re investing, I think, $18 million this year at Las Chispas. The goal is to replace what we mine, which this year should be around 5 million ounces of silver and 50,000 ounces of gold. Keeping in mind we only had Las Chispas this year, we’ll only have it for 10.5 months of the year since the deal closed on February 14.

You go into 2026, we’re going to see some natural increase in our overall production and cash flow profile because we’ll have Las Chispas for a full 12 months. We’ll also have Rochester running more at its steady state after ramping up that big new crusher for a large part of this year. We’re set up to, you know, those production and cash flow numbers that I talked about earlier are going to be even better as we go into 2026, largely driven by Las Chispas and Rochester. I do want to mention Palmarejo just for a second because there’s an interesting backstory there that I think is worth spending a couple of minutes on. Palmarejo produces about 100,000 ounces of gold and about 6 million ounces of silver a year. It started up in 2010 as an open pit and underground. Then we transitioned to just underground.

When it was built in 2008 and 2009, of course, that was right in the middle of the global financial crisis. There was no capital available to round out the funding necessary to make Palmarejo a mine, except for Franco-Nevada. Franco-Nevada stepped in and provided a gold stream, some financing through a gold stream that helped us complete the construction at Palmarejo. If it wasn’t for them, we would have never finished Palmarejo probably. They took a pound of flesh in exchange for that capital. In that magenta, I think it’s magenta colored box, everything we mine in there, 50% of the gold goes to Franco-Nevada for $800 an ounce. There’s a lot of value being sucked out of Palmarejo by that Franco-Nevada gold stream. It still has been a great mine. It started up with an eight-year mine life in 2010.

This year, I think it’ll be, you know, its 15th year. It’s got a good mine life ahead of us. We’ve really been trying to figure out a way to work our way out of the economic toll that that gold stream’s taking on us. We worked with Franco. We renegotiated that once in 2016, slightly. What we’ve been doing is methodically consolidating the ground off to the east. John, you might remember Chris Kruppe and Paramount Gold and Silver.

I visited their mine in 2020. They sent a plane down to take me out of the fields at San Miguel when I was stranded.

No kidding.

Yeah, Jeff would know this. I went on a field trip to Penasquito. 25 people. Six went to Pinos Altos of Agnico. Three went to Minefinders. That was Dolores that now is finishing it. The other guy had a plane to go to Minefinders. Three went to Ocampo.

Yeah.

I was stranded at Ocampo. Chris Kruppe sent a plane to take me to San Miguel and then take me to the airport. For some reason, Coeur wasn’t open for visitors that trip. Maybe the Bandidos were giving you too much trouble.

That rings a bell now that you say that. Okay, so that’s a good.

Anyway, congratulations on finding all the gold at San Miguel. You renegotiated in 2016.

Yeah.

What were the new terms?

In 2016, we increased that gold price that Franco-Nevada pays us from $400. It was originally $400 to $800 an ounce. What we’ve done, the stuff off to the right here in the green, or sorry, in the black box, most of that came from the Paramount acquisition. That was in 2016. Only finally last year, all the stuff in the silver boxes spread kind of throughout that eastern district part of this slide, that was all Fresnillo ground. We literally had been harassing them for a decade, almost a decade, trying to shake that loose so that we could consolidate all that ground over there to the east. We finally got it last year.

What that does is it opens up all that stuff to the east to start creating new mining areas where we can mine the gold and silver, haul it back to the Palmarejo plant, and not have to sell half of the gold to Franco-Nevada for $800 an ounce. There’s a lot of value, not only just mine life extension, but much higher margin production over there to the east. There are some things in that one box in the middle called the mine trend. Those are extensions of existing underground deposits where we’ve already been mining that extend off of that Franco-Nevada ground. Those represent near-term opportunities for us to.

Franco-Nevada continues to own a 50% gold stream at $800 gold within the magenta box, but you have lots of ground you’re mining outside the magenta box.

The plan is to generate more and more from the east. It’ll take some time. We’ll have to keep building a mine life and runway off to the west.

The 2016 revision is the last revision.

Yep, yep, yep. This year, about $18 million, it says it over here to the left, about $18 million is what we’ll invest in exploration. 60% of that money this year is off to the east, outside of that magenta box. We’re serious about moving to the east. The big prize though, John, is over like where you were, San Miguel. Paramount had a whole PEA done on an open pit mine off to the east over there at that San Miguel, La Union, that whole area. We have never drilled any of that material to validate that historic resource and bring it onto our books until this year. We’re starting to do some of that drilling this year. We’ll start adding ounces that already are in the resource category under the old Paramount, Franco-Nevada. As we do that, we can start bringing them onto our books.

I think the future over there to the east will end up being largely an open pit out there at San Miguel. We’re having some really nice drill results over there, and that’ll all be reflected in our year-end results. It’s kind of a long-winded slide here, but there’s a lot going on down there at Palmarejo. Together with Palmarejo, Las Chispas, those two silver and gold mines in Mexico are really key parts of the business going forward. There’s a lot of opportunity to reinvest and generate some really good returns around both of those operations. The last one on exploration I’ll spend a couple of minutes on is at Kensington. I talked about the last five years and the investments that we’ve been making in the business. Rochester gets a lot of the headlines because it was a big number, it was a big project.

Sort of stealthily, Kensington had a big expansion project that we’ve invested in the last three or four years. About $85 million has been invested in Kensington in underground mine development and in underground drilling. In 2022, Kensington’s mine life was down to 18 months based on reserves. This is a mine that was started up also in about 2010 with about an eight-year mine life. With this multi-year program that we just invested in, we’re now happy to see that Kensington’s mine life is a five-year mine life based on reserves. We’ve got a ton more of underground mining flexibility, more working phases, more optionality with that, the benefit of all that underground development. Now Kensington is really set up for success finally as well.

That really helped kind of round out our portfolio as far as getting all of our mines to be good, you know, free cash flow generators with longer mine lives. I think with Kensington, even though five years doesn’t sound like a long mine life, you know, an underground mine based on reserves, it’s about the right place to kind of maintain a mine life. We’ve got a good resource pipeline there to hopefully keep converting and replacing what we mine, and we can maintain that five-year mine life now for the foreseeable future and have Kensington be a nice contributor to the overall portfolio that we operate today. The last operation or last asset that I didn’t talk much about, you know, we have five mines, a well-balanced portfolio, like I said.

Longer term, there’s a growth project that we have called Silvertip in Northern British Columbia, very North British Columbia, like almost on the Yukon border. It’s a very high-grade carbonate replacement deposit. Grade profile here is like 300 gram silver, 10% or 12% zinc, 5% or 6% lead. We acquired this in 2017, and we made a mistake. It came with a poorly constructed mill, and we tried, we couldn’t resist the temptation to make a quick buck by mining this nice, beautiful deposit and trying to process it through that little mill. We shouldn’t have done that. It took us about 18 months to realize that that mill was more trouble than it was worth.

How many tons a day was it?

Oh, you know, it was permitted for 500 tons a day, but we struggled to ever get close to 400 tons a day through that thing. There were flow sheet issues, there were lead dust issues. We were just chasing our tail there, and we said, you know what, what are we doing? This is a beautiful ore, let’s not lose money trying to mine it and process it. We transitioned into what it really was, which was an exploration project. Since then, the size of this thing has grown from like 2 million tons to over 10 million tons. It’s a huge system. We’re kind of on the edges of it, we think, and there’s a lot of potential there to grow this thing as we continue to drill. What we’ve done now is we’ve kicked off what we now call in the U.S. an initial assessment.

It used to be a preliminary economic assessment, but now it’s an initial assessment. We kicked that off earlier this year. We’ll wrap that up next year. We’ll see if we have a viable project there to justify going into the pre-feasibility stage next, followed by a feasibility stage. In the meantime, we’ll keep drilling to not only expand the resource, but start converting some of that resource into reserves to kind of support an initial project there. The goal is four or five years from now to have Silvertip in a position to be a go-no-go decision for the board and for the company.

I think, you know, with Canada’s enthusiasm for supporting critical minerals projects through funding, through permit expediting, maybe there’s an opportunity here to make Silvertip a project for us longer term that could bring some more silver production into the mix and do it in a project that’s worthy of investment and, you know, some of this cash flow that we’ll be generating, allocating it to Silvertip to be that future leg of growth up there in British Columbia. That’s just another piece of the business that’s out there.

If you have 10 million tons, you could support a 1,500-ton a day mill and only use $0.5 million tons of your resource.

Yeah, I think the work we’ve done suggests that it’s not cheap to operate up there. It’s remote. The power situation, it’s generator, at least currently, at least, maybe that will change with some investment from Canada and some other things that are happening up in that part of the world. You probably need to be at 2,500 tons a day to make the thing work. Still, your point’s valid that we can take that existing resource and start converting some of that to really hang an initial project out there.

It’s not on hydropower or grid power?

No, not yet. You know, maybe in the next year.

How long do you have to run the mine?

I don’t know, Jeff, if that’s a tough question to answer. Off the top of my head, it isn’t a good answer. It’s a hell of a long way. Maybe, you know, this is about a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Whitehorse. There are some other things, other projects in the area, and I know that Yukon and British Columbia are talking about extending line power out in that direction. I think that would be one of the keys to kind of unlocking Silvertip as well as Port Bridges.

The longer you wait, the more the infrastructure comes to you.

I think so.

My kid, Rudy Franck at Seabridge.

Yeah.

My grandfather’s best friend went back to Greece once and was pissed off that the village wasn’t electrified. He wrote a check for $600,000 to run a power line 20 or 25 kilometers and electrified the southern half of the island. Twenty-five thousand people got electricity by accident by slicing onto the power line. You don’t want to be the one that builds it. You want to be the one that slices on.

A fast follower. Yeah, exactly. Something’s going to happen up there. There are some other things besides running the line power. There are some interesting new power alternatives that we’ll take a look at as we go through the study phases. We’ve got to get off of diesel generator power. We need to figure out some of the backend port logistics, which there’s some good stuff happening up in that part of the world on that front as well that could, I think, help benefit a project there at Silvertip. A lot of work to do, but it would be an exciting addition that would be really high margin, long life. It would bring in a different metals mix a little bit with silver, zinc, lead.

Looking at another five or six million ounces a year of silver out of Silvertip down the road would be a nice addition to the 18 or what should be 20 million ounces next year of silver production to give us a nice long mine life overall as a company of pretty sizable silver production. That’s pretty much all I have. Obviously, as a U.S. mining company, we’re very proud of not only our safety performance, but overall our governance profile, our environmental track record, just our reputation, not only nationally, but most importantly within the communities where we operate. We’ve been the safest mining company in America now for three years in a row. Not too shabby for a company like ours.

Couldn’t be prouder of who we’ve become as we’ve grown up as a company and really have become a much more mature, well-run, professional organization that, historically, John, it wasn’t always that way here. It’s been a long, long journey, but I couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve been able to do with this company. We’re just so well set up right now, both from the things we’ve done to the company and then some of the benefits of the macro external environment we find ourselves in. It’s combined to really create a really exciting time for us and really an exciting outlook as we look ahead.

The next six months of your cash flow would be enough to pay off your $300 million or so in debt.

Yeah, you know, I’m just going back to that. Here’s the trick on those five. John, you’re talking about the $290 million of 5.125% senior notes due 2029. That’s been a question we kick around and debate a lot. Those are publicly traded notes. They become callable in February at par, February of 2026. The question is, is that a, you know, it’s a patient, flexible, low-interest piece of paper. Do you allocate money to taking those out or do you leave them there? You know, our credit profile is only going to get better. Our credit ratings are only going to get better. Maybe we let cash build up in 2026.

There’s nothing wrong with your being the bank of Coeur and having a big mountain of cash ahead of your geologists. If your geos discover something and your engineers define projects, instead of having to raise debt and equity, you already have the money.

I mean, what a novel concept, right? Exactly. Over the last five years, as we’ve been through this heavy investment cycle, our cash balance from quarter end to quarter end has been in the $50 million, $60 million, $70 million range. That’s lean out of necessity. You look at a company our size, most companies in our sector will have 15% of their market cap in cash and available revolver capacity. We have a $400 million revolver. If it’s a $12 billion market cap, we could let our cash build up and still be in a, you know, not in a lazy cash position. I mean, I want this business to.

That’s all building cash and not having a revolver, and not paying the fees.

Exactly. You know, this is a company historically that when prices have reversed themselves and have been down, this company’s always had to kind of fight to keep its nose above the waterline. When you’re in that kind of position, you end up having to do things that are oftentimes value destructive. You know, you issue equity.

You don’t need to fire the geologists, fire Jeff Wilhoit and IR, and cut costs and cancel this FS and issue stockholder credit.

All those suboptimal things. We can now be in a position as a company, if we play our cards right, to be the kind of company that can not only make money through the cycle, but can be opportunistic, you know, when other companies are struggling. That’s when you’ve seen this more than I have, but companies that go from good to great oftentimes are the ones that take advantage of opportunities during the worst periods of time. We’ve never been in that position as a company. I’d like to think that we’re building a business here that can be. That, I think, is something that not that I look forward to a period of time when prices are low again, but at some point they will. I want this company to be able to thrive during those kinds of periods of time.

Mitch, how old are you?

I’m 54 now.

You got a good 10 years left or more if you want to work.

I think, I mean, I guess so, but this is.

Management suggests since cessation is not a problem right now.

You know, like my predecessor John, he was in this role for 25 years or 30 years. There comes a point where it’s too long. Maybe we build the business up to a point where it’s of a size and scale that is better in the hands of somebody else, whatever makes the most sense. I mean, I don’t want to be a lifer. This is my 15th year, if you can believe it, in this job. I feel, in some ways, I feel so energized now after having lived through some near-death experiences. You know, we’re only getting going here in terms of having the sun shine on our face, right? There’s a lot of fun to be had, I think, as we look forward.

Super, congratulations. Thank you for your time. It’s good to see you when times are so good.

Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it. For everybody that listened in, I appreciate you taking the time to.

We like to hear how our old friends are doing. Since 2008, we’ve hosted 148 companies fought out for $130 billion combined. We’re not an IR firm, but we like to hear how our friends are doing and listen to people that own five real projects.

Congratulations on your track record. Wow.

I read the reserve and resource reports and the PEAs and try to decide who’s fooling friends and who’s kicking ass.

You have substance. I mean, you’ve seen it all.

I just enjoy studying all the different companies.

Thanks for giving us a chance to tell our story.

It’s always a pleasure. In regards to Jeff, and I hear the Bears are getting better.

Just when the Cubs are flaming out, you know, all optimism now is shifting to the Bears. We’ll see.

My big sacrifice today was that I was hosting meetings. I didn’t listen to Mike Tomlin’s 12:00 P.M. news conference. The Steelers had their bye and everybody’s coming back from injury.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah. The Steelers’ whole division lost their quarterbacks and got hurt. Baltimore is 1-4.

Yeah.

They’re 8.5-point underdogs on the Rams. This is like 2008 when Brady went down, and the Steelers got to win the Super Bowl without having to beat New England.

Yeah, I mean, you’re right. Everybody’s kind of falling down and the Steelers are.

The Steelers have their division on a platter. Whether they go further is up to them.

Rodgers, man, who would have thought?

He likes playing for the Steelers better than the Jets.

Oh, yeah. I feel bad for Justin Fields. You know, he was our quarterback here in Chicago, went off to Pittsburgh, and now it’s the Jets. That’s a whole other.

I think if he had hurt his feelings when Tomlin sat him down for Russell Wilson, it probably was a mistake by Tomlin.

Yeah, I wonder. I don’t know. I feel bad for him. You know, you just.

You can have all the guys who have a budget in baseball that can keep your players.

Yeah. We’ll see. You know, the Cubs are probably soon to be in the offseason, and then we’ll see who’s gone and who sticks around.

Is Dennis still alive, your predecessor?

No, he passed away, gosh, many years ago, probably a good eight years ago.

Oh, it’s a shame he didn’t live to see $50 silver twice.

Yeah, yeah, that’s true. He’s looking down on us smiling.

Okay, you have a good night, Mitch and Jeff. Thank you.

Thanks, John. Thanks, Jeff. Take care. Bye.

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