Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Foraco International SA Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session for the financial community. If at any time during the call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. As a reminder, this call is being recorded today, Friday, October 28th, 2022, and I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Daniel Simoncini. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our Q3 2022 results conference. I'm Daniel Simoncini, Chairman and CEO, and me today is Co-CEO and CFO, Jean-Pierre Charmensat. The news release of these results was issued this morning prior to the opening of the TSX through CNW Newswire. If you did not receive a copy of the release, please visit www.foraco.com. We are pleased to report our best quarter since 2009, with revenue up 30% year-on-year and our bottom line up 70%. We are able to deliver this bottom line thanks to an excellent execution of our contracts by our teams and our renewed prices, which now offset the inflation we have been hit with for the last 15 months. We recorded a similar utilization rate at 57%, but with more heavy rigs being at work now. During the quarter, the metal prices index retreated another 15% from last June, with only nickel and lithium rising over the period. Meanwhile, our growing issues did soften somehow as a growing number of juniors within the industry stopped their exploration programs due to the lack of funding. That freed some workforce, mainly in Canada and Australia, which was a great help. At the same time, our large top-tier customer base confirmed a plan and kept on adding more rigs to our long-term contracts. I will now pass the call to Jean-Pierre Charmensat, who will walk us through the financials. Jean-Pierre Charmensat. Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. Revenue for the Q3 2022 quarter amounted to $91.4 million compared to $70.6 million for the same quarter last year, a 30% increase. This increase in the mining +28% and water +41% segments is the result of the continued favorable market dynamics with long-term rolling contracts and our capacity to deliver. By reporting segment, the mining segment represented 86% of Q3 2022 revenue, and water represented 14%. During this quarter, South America and North America were the most active regions. Revenue in South America increased by 109% to $29.4 million compared to $14.1 million in Q3 2021. New long-term contracts were mobilized during the first quarter of 2022. North America revenue amounted to EUR 27.9 million in Q3 2022, a 11% increase compared to Q3 2021, despite continuing crewing issues. Revenue in EMEA for the quarter was EUR 19 million, compared to EUR 19.7 million in Q3 2021, a 4% decrease, which is a combination of stable activity in CIS, increased activity in Europe and decreased activity in Africa due to the euro-U.S. dollar adverse foreign exchange variance. Revenue in Asia- Pacific increased by 30% at EUR 15.2 million compared to the same quarter last year, reflecting the ongoing improvement of the activity. During this quarter, the geographical activity split was South America 32%, North America 30%, EMEA 21%, and Asia- Pacific 17%. During this quarter, the gross margin, including depreciation within cost of sales as per IFRS rules, was a profit of $24.4 million versus $14.9 million for the same quarter last year, a 65% increase. Ongoing contracts reported solid performances despite crewing issues and inflationary pressure. Most of the cost increases were compensated in our selling prices. SG&A increased by 7% to $6.3 million, compared to $5.9 million for the same period last year, but decreased as a percentage of revenue from 8.3% to 6.9% compared to last year. EBIT, our operating result, was a $18.2 million profit versus a $9 million in Q3 2021, a 102% increase. The EBITDA amounted to EUR 23 million or 25.2% of revenue, a 67% increase compared to EUR 13.8 million in Q3 2021 or 19.6% of revenue. We do not report adjusted EBITDA or any other adjustment to the IFRS figures. Financial expenses amounted to EUR 2.9 million compared to EUR 2.1 million in Q3 2021, linked to the 3.1% increase in the three-month LIBOR interest rate. On a nine months basis, revenue amounted to EUR 245.7 million compared to EUR 200.8 million in year-to-date nine months 2021, a 22% increase, thanks to favorable economic context for the industry and the capacity of the company to deliver. Revenue increased 10% in North America, 106% in South America, and 24% in Asia-Pacific compared to the same 9-month period in 2021. Revenue decreased 12% in EMEA, mainly in Africa, due to the phasing of contracts, logistics challenges, and adverse foreign exchange euro-US dollar. The activity was stable in Europe and CIS. Margins continue to improve. The year-to-date 2022 gross profit was EUR 52.8 million versus EUR 36.7 million for the same period last year, a 44% improvement, mainly due to the increased activity and performance of contract. Year-to-date 2022, EBIT was EUR 34.4 million compared to EUR 19.8 million in the same period last year, a 73% increase. The year to date EBITDA for the nine months period was a positive EUR 49.4 million compared to EUR 33.6 million in the same period last year, a 47% increase. For the nine months 2022 period, the working capital requirement was EUR 18.5 million compared to EUR 5.6 million for the same period last year, mainly due to the activity ramp up. CapEx amounted to EUR 14.1 million in cash compared to EUR 14.7 million in cash during the same period in 2021. It relates to acquisition of rigs, major rig overhauls, ancillary equipment and rods. After June 30, 2022, our net debt, including lease obligations, IFRS 16, amounted to EUR 86.9 million compared to EUR 91.1 million at June 30, EUR 100.8 million at March 31st, and EUR 85.7 million at December 31st, 2021. Our leverage ratio improved to 1.5. Finally, we posted an EUR 11.1 million net profit in Q3 2022, a 70% increase compared to Q3 2021 despite the 3.1% increase in interest rate. Our profitability and the strong fundamentals of our industry give us headroom for future improvement of our financial structure. I will now return the call to Daniel for his closing remarks. Daniel? Thank you. Thank you, Jean-Pierre. As you may have noticed, there is currently a curious disconnect between the financial markets and our mining space reality. While the first are selling metals-related stock among others, they probably fear a worldwide recession which may cool down the demand. Most of our senior customers are scrambling to locate, develop, and make ready for production more energy transition metals deposits. It seems the large mining companies are convinced the energy transition will happen no matter what, as climate change remind them every day the urgent necessity to accelerate towards the decarbonized energy. According to a growing number of analysts, world energy source will evolve rapidly from hydrocarbons to metals. We expect the big miners to be right somehow. There are other strange things happening too in the space, like large automakers taking stakes in mines, government declaring strategic emergency on certain metals, and mines opening in Europe as an instance, which is the biggest world market with no or negligible metal production as of yet. This is why at Foraco we brace for sustained and growing activity going forward. Most of our customers are eager to book more capacity earlier than before, and we hope this will translate into another excellent level of our year-end order book. Meanwhile, we'll work hard to keep our profitability at the current level so we can de-leverage our balance sheet quicker. Thank you for listening. I will now return the call to Michelle, who will take the first question. Michelle? Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by the number two. Please stand by for your first question. Your first question comes from Gordon Lawson of Paradigm Capital. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning, everyone. Congratulations on another outstanding quarter. With your NCIB in place, and seeing the sharp decline in your share price versus other drillers, could you talk about your priorities in purchasing shares versus paying down debt? You know that NCIB is a very strict, regulated, mechanism whereby we cannot buy more than a certain number. We cannot buy blocks, for instance, so it doesn't help to sustain actually the liquidity and the stock. That's number one. Number two, of course, our top priority is to deleverage our balance sheet. We do expect the market sooner or later, we'd realize that our stock prices is totally disconnected with the reality. Yeah. I'm seeing that as well. I just can't make sense of the current share price. No. Doesn't make sense. I guess. But, uh- No. There are some medium-sized shareholders out there who are having some difficulties elsewhere and who are selling our stock without any bottom. This is why our stock is harmed on a very, very low volume. That happened during the blackout period when we couldn't buy the managers or the insiders. We couldn't even buy the stock. I see. Okay. Well, hopefully you'll be active going forward. The other question, there was a very large year-over-year gain in the European segment, particularly compared to the previous two quarters. Could you elaborate on what's behind that and if it relates to decreased exposure to Russian drill? I mean, what we call Europe, I mean, EMEA is made of Europe and CIS. Within CIS, now the center of gravity of the activity is moving to Kazakhstan. Therefore, the current contribution of Russia to the quarter consolidated revenue is what, I'm speaking under Jean-Pierre control, Fabien or Jean-Pierre, 9%? Is under 10%, yeah. Is under 10%. Kazakhstan is growing and Russia is decreasing on a quarterly basis. We also have in EMEA Africa, which represent a percentage of EMEA. That answer your question, Gordon? Oh, yes, absolutely. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks. Your next question comes from Steven Green at Ordinance Capital. Please go ahead. Hi, Daniel. How are you? Congratulations. Like the last caller said, it was an outstanding quarter. Doing a great job. I can tell by your last comments, your closing remarks, that you're as equally frustrated as we are as shareholders, that we having the best quarters we're having, and there's still plenty of room to go. We haven't seen anything in the stock price, but a cut in half. I have a couple questions. I usually plan for 20% margins in my models, but you seem to have, like, getting close to 25% margins now. Is that sustainable going forward? Yes. As long as the market demand remain within this current, let's say, robust environment, I would say the norm in our business, you know, is more 25% than 20%, yeah. If you look back in a similar, not exactly similar, but in a comparable period where we were, you know, 2007, 2010, 2011, we were largely above that. Okay. That's good. The drivers are different today. It was China, you know, who was absorbing most of the commodity growth. Today is an energy transition, so it's more global and we think it's much more powerful. That's number one. Number two, the customer base has evolved in terms of choosing the partners. Back then it was purely, you know, demand-supply balance. The more demand, the higher prices. Today is different. Today the industry is more mature and our large senior customers they choose and they accept to pay a premium even in a not that good market, just because they want quality and reliability. Okay? To answer your question, 25% is what we should have. Well, that's better than I thought. You did 57% utilization this quarter. I thought I heard before. I remember we could probably go up to, like, 70%-75% utilization to be fully all our rigs to be fully employed to take into account, you know, maintenance and that kind of stuff. Are we? I mean, that seems like a lot of future growth if we can get our utilization rates up to 75%. It's a kind of contrasted patchwork today. The 57% are a kind of, you know, global. But we have countries like Australia, which are 72% or 75% already. You have a small country like Argentina. They're up to close to 100% and the demand for lithium is sky high. We can't import. On the other end, as an example, again, you take Chile. In Chile, we have 10 rigs idle because the copper guys are not unlocking, you know, the drilling program yet. Okay. We have a diversified utilization rates. A set of utilization rates here and there, and the average being 57%. This changes slowly from one quarter to another, depending on the seasonality and depending also on the type of risk we roll out. Okay? We can still report 10% growth with 5% more utilization, to give you an example, just because, you know, we are rolling out the most expensive rig, which are usually delivering much better margin and higher revenue. Okay? It's a composite ratio. So two- Yes. Two questions. The bottom line, yes, we still have room to grow, huh? In South America, you mentioned that the copper miners are hopefully gonna come back hopefully shortly. So that's exciting. That'd be nice to get those rigs. Also, I think is the big growth in South America lithium mining? Yes. You know, it's I mean, you cannot open a newspaper or read something on the net today without seeing an announcement on the lithium deal. You know, lithium mineable lithium are more or less concentrated in Chile, Argentina for the solution mining form and Australia for the hard rock form. The pressure to find a lithium deposit is super high. Super high. You guys specialize in water, so that gives you an advantage in South America. Yeah. Because you specialize in water. That is correct. We just have to be very careful, Steven, because as you may know, Argentina is not a simple country to work in because the country is under very fundamental negotiation with the IMF. They have a, you know, currency control system in place, so the money cannot flow in and out easily. We don't want to be trapped at a point of time. We going easy there. Okay. There's opportunity. All right, the last question I have is, I guess Jean-Pierre mentioned this, and it's in the last sentence of your press release here that says, "Opportunities to consider further improvements in the company's financial structure." I guess buying back shares, I guess, is not really the option. I'm assuming that means paying down the debt more quickly because that I guess people don't like to have so much debt in the company when the shares seem like they're so subservient to the debt ownership. Can you elaborate a little more on what that means, the company improvements in the company's financial structure? You said it, Steven. It's exactly what we hope to do, is to pay out the debt quickly and deleverage our balance sheet as quick as we can because the market we hope. We are hopeful the market will allow us to generate much better cash flow. You did EUR 5 million this quarter. I mean, will that be accelerated? Yeah. Yeah. Until next year, and then we have the possibility to early repay part of the debt before the end of the debt period, okay? This is what we mean, that if we generate more revenue and more margins, we have more flexibility to repay the debt and reduce our financial expenses, and improve our ratios. Well, I'm, you know, like I said, I'm always very excited about this company. You know, I've been here for a long time. The company is in such better shape than it was even at its height when the stock was $5, you know, in 2012 or whatever. Yeah. I hope we see something soon. I mean, it's just very frustrating. It is very frustrating. We just have to find the right shareholding structure, convince our current shareholder to be more active and not be passive and sleeping, to animate a little bit the stock, to have some insider trading. The problem being is that nobody knows, but it's a fact that Jean-Pierre and myself as controlling shareholder, we cannot participate in any trade of the stock. We blocked. Okay. Because I would have loved to buy a ton of stock of Foraco at $1. Okay. But we're working on that, Steven. I mean, we have the same frustration. We have the same interest. The company is worth much more than what is, you know, worth today, I mean, by the market. We all know that the current situation is kind of volatile on the market. The market is getting confused. Not on Foraco only, as you said, you know, but on the fundamentals of what the world is going to consume, you know. Right. Last week there was Trafigura, which is one of the biggest trader in the world, commodity trader in the world. They said the copper stock, the physical copper stock was about two weeks- Hmm. Worldwide. Nobody cared, you know. Let's be patient and we are 100% convinced that there will be a kind of moment where you know the real value of Foraco will crystallize. Okay? I hope. Well, thank you for everything you do. Thank you. Thank you for your support, Steven. Be well. You too. Your next question comes from John Bayer of Ascend Wealth Advisors. Please go ahead. Thank you for taking my call. I wanna focus on the water side. We've got droughts and water scarcity globally, and I'm wondering how you are looking at that from the standpoint of expanding your operations or your focus on that area. Certainly the demand for metals, materials, and so forth, as you just discussed is out there. Everybody knows it. They're not reacting to it. Water is certainly another very critical thing, and I'm just wondering if you could share some thoughts on that. Thank you. Thanks for the question. I'll try to be very short. You have two destinations of the water, okay? You have the water for human beings, you have the water for industry or agriculture. Foraco is involved in the water for people only in West Africa. This is just a legacy of the past. We've done that 50 years ago, and we are still one of the main players in this area. The point is that, you know, we drill for water, but water. We don't create water. What we do is usually we link our water services, drilling services to our mining services because each and every mine in the world has a mining challenge. It's a kind of, you know, tender to the main locomotive, which is the metal industry. We try to accompany our customers into the needs for processed water. Inevitably, the processed water, which is groundwater usually, is becoming more and more precious for the local communities, and therefore there are a lot of contentious relationships between these two. We don't want to be caught in the middle, but we can help them to drill monitoring boreholes, to check the water table level, how it reacts, how it goes, if it shrinks, if it increases, et cetera. We can build some dewatering wells or injection wells for our customers. We are not, in a sense, looking at the general world water depletion problem and positioning ourselves everywhere because the world is too vast and every country has already their own water well drillers. We try to focus and to remain and to target on the high tech end of the water well business. This is usually industrial installations that we drill either in the mines or in the vicinity of the mines for the local communities. We are typically overwhelmed by the demand. Therefore, because, you know, a water well rig fully equipped is something like $3 million-$4 million. Our investment capacity is limited and therefore we cannot ramp up as quick as the market is ramping up. We are accelerating in the water, but at a very controlled pace. Usually it is linked to long-term contracts we do have with the senior miners. Okay. Sorry to have been a bit long, but I hope I answered your question. Yeah. Well, that. Yes. I appreciate that. I guess I'm looking at it as well. I think the mining industry is lumped in very much like the traditional oil and gas industry, that they're bad actors in destroying the Earth and so forth. Given this big surge in the ESG movement and so forth, the fact that you have exposure and experience in water drilling, albeit in conjunction with mining operations, would that not possibly be an area or a focus that you could look at as an add-on to your existing operations that would therefore perhaps paint a better color or provide more interest in folks to help move us out of the price range that we're in, because you're being perceived as more environmentally friendly and so forth. Kind of a big picture thought. Yeah. throwing that out there for you. I mean, you know, we need water as much as we need minerals. I mean. I understand what I mean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, okay. Number one, we don't do any greenwashing, okay? I mean, we are truly. Right. Faithfully drilling for water, for fresh water, in the world. Yeah. Number two, we do believe. Let me give you a very simple example. We do believe that our little action, because we still have a very, we are a little company, but our little action can help out our senior customers a big deal in terms of, environmental protection. Of course, you have to move earth to get access to a deposit, of course, right? This is a given fact. To give you an idea with an example, we recently performed the first inclined water well near a huge open pit, which was built, you know, decades ago. In doing so, we were able to dewater the bottom of the open pit in a much more efficient way, and that would, t hat will save our customers gazillions of ton of rock scrapping. Because we are much closer to the action. And our dewatering is much more efficient because it dewaters exactly where the miner wants to take the deposit out. And that can be, we say, quantify as multi-million-dollar savings and much less environmental damages. Okay? Yeah. It's a little example of, you know, where we can help. We don't pretend that Foraco is a green value. We don't do greenwashing. If you remember well, two quarters ago, we published our first ever ESG report. As far as I know, maybe I'm mistaken, but we are still the first mining and water drilling company to ever publish such an ESG report with our greenhouse gases impact, et cetera, et cetera. Okay? Mm-hmm. We are very sensitive to that, and we do our best. Of course, we still have diesel engines. Yeah. Well, I didn't mean to imply that you were a bad actor or anything like that. I mean, don't- No, no. I didn't mean it that way. I get your point. I'm looking at another, you know, possible area to go in. Let me ask you another question, shifting gears for a minute. What is your outlook or your situation on your personnel and labor crews, that kind of thing? As I said, I mean. Steady, turnover? Yeah. Yeah. Sure. The turnover is. After COVID, we had a ton of turnover that we reported in the years 2020, 2021. Because that disrupted heavily, you know, the circuits and the fly-in fly-out schemes. Sure. Today we have been helped somehow as a kind of contradictory effect by the slowdown within the junior space. The juniors were full speed ahead for, you know, in the years 2020- 2021. They sucked a lot of crews in the industry to crew their own greenfield campaigns. They came to an abrupt stop over the last quarter, and that freed a ton of good guys who were lured by, you know, higher premiums and stuff because this is how the juniors can attract people. We are presently enjoying a much more stable position. Therefore, our, let's say, no-show or half crew impact is getting negligible as of today, yeah. That's good to hear. Very good. Thank you much for your comments. Thank you again for taking my call. Thank you. My questions, rather. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one now. There are no further questions. At this time, I will turn the conference back to Mr. Simoncini for closing remarks. Thank you, everybody, for listening to us. Wish you a great weekend, and we talk next February for our full year end results. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude your conference call for this morning. We would like to thank everyone for participating, and you may now disconnect your lines.