Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. It might be a tough act to follow, John, after that lunch, but I'm sure you're up to it. But today we have John McCluskey, President, CEO, and founder of Alamos Gold. I think, John, you have a presentation that you want to go through. Yeah. And then we can have a conversation afterwards. So, John. All right. Thank you. The clicker is up there. Oh. Good catch. Every year for, I don't know what, the last five or six years that I've been coming to this conference, generally it's Avery Shenfeld who's giving the presentation, and afterwards, or even during, I've managed to get a question in once in a while. I always buttonhole them about the gold price. What's your opinion on gold? Where do you think gold's going? And the last couple of years it's, why have you remained so conservative on gold? Look where gold's going. It should be obvious now where it's going. He's never been convinced. Over time, he's been less, call it less negative about it, but he's never been what you'd call bullish about the gold price, and I was hoping to get that question in this year, but it just goes to show you, the gold price has been just outstanding for the last couple of years. It hasn't been a North American phenomenon, which it normally is. It's generally when the US investors, both retail and institutions, start getting behind it and driving the gold price, and then we're in a gold market. When that happens, typically, it's quite volatile. It tends to build up very rapidly to a peak, and then something happens, it ends, and it very abruptly drops. When it drops, it drops hard. Sort of the expression is, it takes the stairs up and it takes the elevator down. We're not in that gold market now. This is something that I think is very slowly sort of catching on. The gold price has been driven for the last three years by central bank buying, mostly out of Asia, but it would include Russians and countries that do a lot of trade with Russia as well. They've all been buying gold. And we're in a different kind of gold market, and it's not that one that I believe you're going to see drop off very abruptly. And it's not one that we see the gold price only go up when the US dollar goes down. If there's one thing that the panel was pretty clear on this morning, it's that the US dollar is going to continue to strengthen. It's certainly going to strengthen against the Canadian dollar. And here we are, stronger American dollar and a stronger gold price as well. So I think that the setup for gold is tremendous. I think despite the fact that we've had two, three years now of consistently rising gold prices, I think we're going to see that continue. And I think that's very important. At the CIBC dinner this year that they hold in early January, which probably for the first time Don Lindsay didn't make. He just walked into the room. Those who don't understand why I reference that, but it was Chuck Jeannes who gave the presentation, and what he said is, when are CEOs of gold mining companies going to start to talk about the gold price? Because it's so important to our business, and he says, you almost give off the impression that we're somewhat embarrassed about gold, and I've been in gold. I've been in this industry now since the early 1980s, and for most of the time I've been in the industry, it was a bear market, and so you're almost conditioned to be very bearish on the gold price, and it's only from time to time that gold seriously turns. When it turns, it tends to turn hard and can run for a fairly long time. I mean, gold had a really good run from roughly 2004 to 2011, the last time it had a good run. I think we're in another one of those runs. It's going to be unprecedented. It's going to be fantastic for companies like Alamos. We're a very strong company. We're growing like gangbusters. I think we're a lot stronger than our market cap might betray. One little clue is that we've got a higher multiple than Barrick. I think there's very specific reasons for that. One of them is that we're North American focused. I think we're in a market now where investors are kind of conscious of the fact that political risk is one of the big risks that we face as a resource industry and as gold producers. There's so many stories out there of gold mining companies that have been running into problems in Africa, South America, various parts of the world. It's starting to resonate that having your assets in countries like Canada, the United States, and Mexico is just better. When I took the decision back in 2014 to focus Alamos onto Canada, we had one producing mine in Mexico and no other production anywhere else. It was basically Mexico we're all in. Now 90% of our NAV is in Canada. I think that's really important. Virtually all of our growth is being generated in Canada. It took us 20 years to go from basically a standing start to last year we produced about 575,000 ounces of gold. What's interesting about the company is between now and the end of the 2020s, we expect to double that production again, get up towards about a million ounces of gold a year. And this year alone, we're on about a 600,000 ounce a year run rate. And we're going to continue to grow all through organic growth. We're growing our reserves at a rapid clip, and we're going to be investing the capital that grows our production. We've been a great outperformer for the last few years. And that compares us against everything, the S&P 500, the gold price, the GDX, and so on. And that's been driven by our focus on growth, the success that we've had with the drill bit, the astute acquisitions that we've made where we've effectively done accretive acquisitions and then grown those acquisitions and just added more value for our shareholders. All of that matters. All of it has resonated. And I think that's going to continue to underpin outperformance in the future. And this is an industry you've heard it over and over and over. We're famous for destroying value, especially through M&A. I mean, what drove M&A in the last big gold run was basically scale. It was almost this irrational belief that the gold price was never going to go down. And if one thing we know about any commodity is that they're waves. They go up, they go down. That, you know. But investors are crazy. When the gold prices go down, it's never going to go up again. When it's going up, it's never going to go down again. And we've acted differently. When gold prices go down, that's when we step in and make acquisitions. We effectively acquired all this production, all these assets at the bottom of the market. When we acquired Mulatos to get beginning in the very beginning, it was 2001. Gold prices were under $300 an ounce. Nobody was interested in gold. We bought it for $10 million. That mine has gone on to generate something like $700 million in free cash flow. It's just been a phenomenal asset. And it's got decades of production out in front of it. Similarly, in 2015, when we merged with AuRico, when we acquired our Young-Davidson mine, well, that mine was never going to work. That was a lousy transaction, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's turned into a fantastic asset. This year, it's going to produce over $140 million in free cash flow. It's been producing over $100 million in free cash flow since 2020. It's just, it was an amazing acquisition at the time that we made it. It was the first merger of equals in the mining space. And when we took it on, it had about a 15-year mine life. After we finished all the build-out, we produced about a million ounces during that build-out to get it up to 200,000 ounces of production a year. We still had a 15-year mine life ahead of it. But now we had all the infrastructure in place. In other words, it had paid for all its own expansion. And we're doing that with virtually all the assets we acquired. Alamos, Mulatos pays for all its own expansion. Young-Davidson paid up for all its own expansion. Island Gold will do the same. Lynn Lake is, it was a deposit that we bought for $22 million. It was a small deposit. Now it's close to 3 million ounces. We just took a decision a week ago to build it. We'll have it built and running by 2028. It's going to make us a phenomenal amount of money. It'll be a sub $1,000 all-in sustaining costs. And we've got about a 20-year production profile in front of it. So this is essentially the Alamos way. We buy things countercyclically. We invest the capital, and we invest the dollars to build up both the reserves and then the production. And it works. And that's a track record that we've been able to establish over 20 years. And it's not going away anytime soon. This is the last slide I'll leave you with. And it sort of goes back to where I started. We've got a runway in front of us that can see us just in terms of organic growth, take our production from current levels up over 900,000 ounces a year. At the same time, we're going to see our costs come down about 10%. How do we do that magic trick? Well, it's easy. We're adding lower cost production, higher grade ounces, and lower cost production in the future. So this really bucks the trend for the gold sector. The majors have been depleting their assets. They've been diversifying into other metals like copper and so forth in order to address that depletion. It's not Alamos's problem. We've gone from under 2 million ounces in reserves in 2014. We're at 25 million ounces in reserves and resources today and continuing to grow. So that's the essence of the story. Want to do some Q&A? Sure. Thank you, John. Maybe I'll kick it off. John, as you mentioned, over time, you've grown your company through a number of acquisitions. If I talk to, and I've covered this industry for a long time, if I talk to some of your peers, some have had trouble in the past and struggled with integrating new assets. That's not the case for Alamos. As you mentioned, you were very successful in integrating Young-Davidson, then Island Gold. So how do you do things? How does Alamos Gold do things differently? And from that perspective, how is the integration of Magino going so far, especially from the cultural front, but maybe talking about some of the operations as well? We've established a culture in that company right from the start. I knew if ever I had the chance to build a mining company, I would do it differently from the companies that I'd worked at, and I'll just give you a couple of cases in point. I mean, when we made the Young-Davidson acquisition, you know where the management team was day one, the morning the deal was announced, the closure of the deal? We were at Young-Davidson, all of us, and we were there with all the miners, and we all got up and talked to the miners, shook everybody's hand, and I talked to a couple of the miners at that point, and they said, you know, I don't think I've ever met the CEO of a mining company, and that's different. There's a certain sense that you've got head office and you've got all the fat cats sitting in their head office in downtown Toronto or wherever it happens to be. And then you've got the mines out there somewhere. That doesn't work. I don't think the companies that are the most successful behave that way. We get out to the mines. And similarly, when we acquired Magino, day one, when the deal closed, the entire team was out at Magino, shaking everybody's hand, everybody giving speeches, not just me, our COO, CFO. Everybody was there. And everybody was talking to the miners. And that's how you start to establish your culture. It's not sort of a bunch of dealmakers in an ivory tower over there and all the guys working underground in Northern Ontario. They know they're a part of something bigger. The guys that are working at Island Gold understand that the guys working in Mexico, the guys working over in Kirkland Lake, we're all working together to achieve the same things. And when we announced our core values as a company, we didn't all sit around in a boardroom and figure out, well, what'll be our core values? We did. We went out and we talked to everybody. And then we sent around a survey. And then the values that we came up with, it was based on all the feedback that had come from the people in the operations themselves. And then we don't forget those values. We talk about our values, and we live by them. One of the things that used to just drive me nuts is when I'd go to conferences and people would be talking about sustainability. And these companies would have three-five years of reserves out in front of them. What the heck? What can you sustain with a five-year reserve life? And I knew the only way that you built a company that made any difference is if the mines had reserves in the order of like 15-20 years out in front of them. Now you can start talking about sustainability. When we took on Island Gold, the company that had it before us, Richmont Mines, they had it in mind to build a shaft, but they could never generate enough money to invest the dollars to drill off an ore body big enough to justify a billion-dollar investment in a shaft and all the infrastructure you would need to support it. So they were stuck. We came in, and we were in the same kind of market that they were in. Gold was $1,285 an ounce. And we started drilling to beat the band. And as you know, the market hated the acquisition, didn't like the fact that we were dumping a bunch. We spent $20 million in our first year drilling the thing. But by the time we had it three years, we had over three million ounces to find. And that was enough to make a call on the phase three expansion. And by the time we were into year two of the phase three expansion, we had six million ounces. And that's net of depletion. And we're still growing. Now when I read analyst reports on how we're doing at Island Gold, they're saying, well, this more than justifies the capital that they're investing, sinking the shaft and expanding the mill and so forth, and they're quite right, but we didn't have all those reserves to find when we made the decision to do that, but the ore bodies, we had very strong conviction that the ore body would continue to grow, which it's done, and case in point, when we acquired it, we paid $600 million, and everybody thought we'd lost our minds. Now I think consensus value on the whole complex is about $6 billion, and that value creation, it's driven in part, you had to sort of see where we were going in the first place. But then you had to have very strong conviction to make the investment even when all your shareholders are telling you it was a really bad idea. Yet it's not easy to tell BlackRock, you guys are wrong. You guys are going to be, you better back us on this because it's going to be absolutely key to what we're doing going forward. And they reluctantly signed on. That was in the end of 2017. We had something like 98% shareholder approval in the end when we did that deal. But I bet you, Scott Parsons here will verify it, almost every meeting that we've had with BlackRock for the last several years, they say, thank God you talked us into doing that deal. We are so glad you guys have done that deal. And that to me is probably one of the most rewarding things about what we do. The shareholders want you to create value, but sometimes they don't necessarily want to play along with all the risk involved that it takes to get you there, and I have to say, in virtually every deal we did, there was always a big dip in our share price after we did an acquisition until we did Magino, and I think it took us 15 years, but I think we're at the point now where the shareholders trust us enough so that if we ever did anything again, it would probably be more welcome than frowned upon. By the way, us, CIBC, liked the Island Gold deal from day one. [crosstalk] Another very good acquisition is Magino, and John, you touched on it with very quantifiable synergies. It's been about two quarters now, John. Any surprises? No surprises at all. I mean, we'd been watching that. The mine was basically right on the doorstep of the Island Gold project, so we'd originally done due diligence on Magino back in 2018. Virtually nothing had changed by the time we were looking at it again in the spring of 2024. They'd sunk roughly $1 billion in infrastructure building that mine. Unfortunately, the mill was somewhat problematic. Well, the guts of the mill are fine, but the primary secondary crusher, the conveyors, the grizzly, just about everything involved in feeding that mill was problematic, to say the least, and we knew that. And we absolutely knew that was going to have to be addressed, and we've been doing that over the last couple of quarters. And we've got it there now. By the end of this quarter, we should be at that rate, that 11,200 tons a day that'll allow us to combine production from both operations into the one mill. Yeah, but no surprises as such. The one positive that's come out of it, I have to say it's a bit of a surprise, is that recoveries have been better. So there's a gravity circuit on the front end of their mill that we don't have on our Island Gold mill. And it pulls between 30% and 40% of the gold, which in and of itself is pretty extraordinary. And that's from one gram material coming out of the open pit. When we batched our material through it, same thing. We got much higher recoveries and most of it at the front end, a good portion of it from the front end anyway. So that's a net positive. The mechanical things that were wrong, we can fix that. But if there's a metallurgical issue, if there's an issue with the block model or something along those lines, that could be a little more tricky. But the block model is conforming to the much more conservative view that we always had on it. And the mill's performing better than we expected. So net positive. That sounds great. John, as you mentioned, you've built your company around North America, in this case, Canada and Mexico. In the past several years, you've focused on Canada, now making up, as you said, 90% of your asset base. Two parts. Number one, does that give you more opportunities in terms of potentially expanding on the other end of your asset base, which is in Mexico? How do you view Mexico? And the other part is that, as you talked about, even organically with your portfolio now, you could get to over 900,000 ounces a year annual production. You're that close to a million ounces. Do you care about a million ounces? How should we look at it? Who doesn't care about a million ounces? That's a nice number. But we could actually get to that million ounces through a further expansion at Island Gold. We're going to be looking at that over the course of this year. We should have another study out probably late third quarter that looks at a further expansion of the Island Gold complex. It would probably see the underground go from 2,400 tons a day to, say, 3,000 tons a day as a next step. And the open pit going from its current 10,000-ton-per-day rate to somewhere between 15 and 20. So that's what we're looking at right now. That would push us over a million ounces. And that's all strictly organic driven. But would we rule out the idea of going and acquiring another asset in Mexico? That's the question. And the answer is yes, but not now. I've seen Mexico go from very, very difficult times, and then they've been very encouraging, and things have been very positive, and then it goes back to difficult again, and so it's been up and down virtually all the way through, but if there was one consistent thing, it was no administration ever adequately addressed the issue of the narco traffickers and that whole element of the social breakdown in Mexico. It has got progressively worse over time, and Obrador did not do any good whatsoever. I would say that this new batch coming in, they're very idealistic and very ideologically driven, and so right now, they haven't had the reins of power ever. Now they're sort of getting their first taste, and as the realities of running things start to set in, they're going to have to back off on some of their more ideological approaches. And one of them has been, they've been relatively anti-mining. For some reason, they don't like open pit mining. I would say that it's mostly through a lack of understanding. I think the more they get to know their own economy, the more they realize that all those jobs created in the remote regions, up in the Sierras and so forth, those are all created by the mining industry. The maquiladoras, they're all along the US border. That creates lots of employment. There's lots of jobs in the city if you want to work in a restaurant or dry cleaner or something like that. But if you're up in the middle of the Sierras, up where we are, I mean, there is nothing within a 200-kilometer radius of where our mine is. And I mean nothing. Little villages here and there, some cattle ranching, a little marijuana growing here and there. It used to be more of it a decade or more ago. But most of it's gone. There's no profit in it anymore. Canadians and Americans have all their own marijuana. They don't need marijuana from Mexico now. So the reality of it is we're not only just a driver of economic activity in the region where we are. The amount of social good that we do there just can't be discounted. We've transformed lives in that part of the Sierras. We've given thousands of scholarships to kids that have been able to obtain matriculation through going to schools that we built. The elementary school, the high school. We built the church, the medical clinic, the town hall, the town square. We've basically created a life for these people. I remember the first time when we had the school opening and they put on this thing where the kids were all marching around with a Mexican flag and doing things that kids up in Canada do. They're wearing school uniforms. And they were showing a lot of pride in their school. And their teachers got up and gave speeches. The rooms were heated. They had proper lighting. The teachers had a place to stay. I mean, a teacher doesn't come from Hermosillo, a city of a million people, to a little village like Matarachi, where you've got maybe 300 or 400 people at the time. It's quite a bit bigger now. But they don't do that because there's nowhere to live. And there was no fresh water, no power. We transformed it all. I mean, just creating the freshwater plant, sewage plant, all solar driven, by the way. There's no power there. It really transformed the lives of those people. And the state was never going to do that. There's no votes there. They're not going to do that. But they've come up and they've had a look at what we're doing. And they're very pleased with what we've done. So they know we're a force for good there. We also paid $80 million in taxes last year. We'll pay them another $80 million in taxes this year. That's not exactly something you just quickly discount. And over and above that, I would say that we've created the next phase of this project. We're going underground. So it's not an open pit mine. We're not going to use cyanide. We're going to produce a concentrate on site and ship that. We're going to backfill the tailings into the old open pit. It's going to be dry stack tailings. I mean, we have made this. Our next phase of growth is going to be dead easy for them to permit. So I think it's going to be good for us. And I think over the next six months, you're going to see more positive signals coming out of the Sheinbaum administration. And maybe in a year or two time, it's going to be time to look at Mexico again. Thank you, John. That's all the time we have. We're certainly looking forward to it. Thanks, John. Thanks. Appreciate it.