Pan American Silver Corp. (NYSE:PAAS) Jefferies Industrials Conference 2024 September 5, 2024 8:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Ignacio Couturier – CFO
Conference Call Participants
Matthew Murphy – Jefferies
Matthew Murphy
Yeah, okay. Up next we have Pan American Silver presenting the story is CFO, Ignacio Couturier who’s been with the company for 20 years.
Ignacio Couturier
22 years.
Matthew Murphy
22 years. And he’s going to take us through a bit of a presentation and then, we’ll throw it open to some Q&A.
Ignacio Couturier
Perfect. Okay, thank you, Matt. And it is a pleasure to be here this morning. So I’m only talking about Pan American Silver. As Matt mentioned, I’ve been in the company for 22 years. As usual, we have a cautionary note. You can read that on your own leisure. So we’ll start off with the map of Pan American Silver. So as you can see, we have a very large portfolio of assets, ranging from Timmins, Ontario, down to Patagonia, Argentina, 11 operating mines. And that’s really a product of the huge growth we’ve had over the last five years.
In 2019, we closed the Tahoe transaction whereby we added two operating mines in Peru, one in Canada and then the Escobal mine that’s currently in care and maintenance and that was in 2019. And then last year in 2022, we closed the Yamana transaction, the Yamana resources transaction. We added one mine in Brazil, two in Chile, and one in Argentina. So we’ve seen huge growth. So within the Silver space, I think we’re quite special. We have the scale with our production, plus we have diversification. So no country represents more than 25% of our overall revenue.
I think very few companies have that level of diversification. In addition to that, we have the largest silver reserves in the world, close to 500 million ounces of silver and a very large gold reserve as well. We also have a very large and extensive exploration portfolio That’s 1.5 million hectares of land all over the Americas, a lot of that is a function of the different acquisitions we’ve had. So there is some value in that exploration portfolio, and I’ll be talking about that a little bit in the presentation.
So we have a long track record of operating and producing in LatAm. I’m originally from Peru, many people from Pan American Silver, especially the senior management are from Latin America. We consider ourselves a specialist in the Americas, specifically in Latin America. Yeah, and it’s not an easy place to operate in, but we’ve had the long-term experience. And you can see here from the map, we have exposure to seven different jurisdictions within the Americas.
So, as I mentioned, we’re the go-to name for investing in silver, especially given our size of our reserve and resources. We have two very important catalysts for growth. That’s the La Colorada Skarn, which I’ll talk about. It is a large zinc, lead, and silver deposit located immediately adjacent to our operating La Colorado mine. And we have Escobal, which I’ve mentioned. It’s 1 of the largest primary silver producers in the world, currently under care and maintenance. And finally, we have optionality on Navidad, probably one of the largest undeveloped primary silver deposits in the world that’s located in southern Argentina. That one we’re still waiting and working on permitting there, but we view that as an option value for our shareholders. But definitely the priorities are the Skarn and Escobal.
Finally, we have a very strong balance sheet as a CFO of the company. We always had a very conservative view on our balance sheet. We’ve always tried to pay back debt as soon as we can and currently the debt outstanding in our balance sheet is mostly bonds that we acquired through Yamana. Two bonds, one due in 2027, one in 2028, and I’ll talk a little bit about that as well. So what differentiates Pan American Silver from other silver producers? First of all is our scale and our size.
Approximately $8 billion in market cap. That’s a function of our production and our reserves and resources. Much larger than most of our competitors. And then it is the liquidity. The next largest company for us, NEO, is not widely held. So, when I think about our peer group 10 to 15 years ago, you would have seen a lot of companies around the same size all bunched together but in the last 15 years we’ve really differentiated ourselves. So for investors looking in for a silver vehicle definitely Pan American Silver is the largest most diverse and most liquid. And this is research we do on a periodic basis. As you can see, we have the highest correlation to silver price.
So for those who are looking for that silver upside. The last year’s performance shows that. And in terms of shareholder returns, that’s including share price performance plus return of value to the shareholders through dividends or share buybacks were one of the highest for sure. So definitely, I’d say the silver market is a very niche market within the metals and mining space. And within that niche market we are the largest and we have the largest silver reserves, the largest in terms of market cap and the most liquid.
So with that I’d like to spend a couple moments talking about the silver market. The silver market is very unique compared to other metal markets. If we look at there the graph on the demand side you will see that silver unlike many other metals has two large sources of demand. One is on the investment side, where here you can see it’s around 17% and the rest is on the industrial side. So it straddles two different markets and We’ve seen it react to market both from the investment side and the supply side.
And sorry, on the investment side and the industrial side. On the demand side, we’ve seen that the largest growth has been in the use of photovoltaics. Silver is a critical metal. Its increase has been almost exponential over the last few years and that’s predicted to continue. And also it’s used in electronics, electronic vehicles, Et cetera. And that has to do with silver’s conductivity properties, so directly related to that. So very, very exciting to see that growth in the industrial side.
On the supply side most of it comes from new mine production. Now keep in mind around two-thirds of mine production comes from byproducts. So silver is mostly a byproduct either byproduct of gold mining or byproduct of other base metal mining. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind. Now as you can see, the silver demand has outstripped the silver supply. And in this graph you can clearly see that. So this is obviously extremely constructive for silver prices long term. So we get the question a lot, well — what makes up the balance if the demand is so much higher than the supply and that’s the above ground inventories. And as time goes by, we have seen a rundown on those inventories, but that’s an important fact that the demand has been outstripping the supply.
Before I get into further in the presentation, I’d like to highlight the fact that safety is our number one priority for the company. That’s something that we’ve been working on for a long time to improve. As you can see, here is our lost time injury frequency and severity indexes. Those have been improving over the last four years or five years. And we have been implementing what’s called doing safety differently. It’s a different way of looking at safety.
Now you’re saying, how is safety relevant to an investor presentation? It all starts from there. When we make sure that all our workers make it home safely every day, that’s one of the foundations of making our business a better business, not just for our investors, all the stakeholders and our investors. So this is a huge priority for the company, huge amount of effort from the operating group to make this happen. A little bit about what 2024 looks like. So we are expected to produce between 21 million and 23 million ounces of silver.
We are looking a little bit on the lower side, what that’s expectation within that range on the gold between [880,000 to 1 million] (ph) ounces of that metal. AISC, all-in sustaining cost between $16 and $18 for silver and around $1,475 for $1,575 for gold. These are very competitive prices and costs. It is worth highlighting, if you’ve seen our Q1 and Q2 performance, that the highest producing and the lowest cost quarters are expected to be Q3 and Q4.
So like previous years, our production is back end loaded. A lot of it has to do with just general seasonality. And then the other bit is that La Colorado Mine, one of our premier mines, and I’ll talk a little bit about that. We’ve just finished in the ventilation infrastructure installation, and that’s expected to improve the throughputs in that mine into Q3 and Q4. So as I mentioned, our strong financial position balance sheet has always been a key part of Pan American. Without that strong balance sheet, it would be difficult to grow the company, to react to opportunistic situations where we can grow the company.
So in total, we have over a $1 billion of liquidity available made up by the cash in hand, around $370 million plus $750 million of undrawn in our credit facility. So having that very, very strong balance sheet is really, really important for us. Total debt around $800 million, mostly made up of the bonds that we acquired through the Yaman acquisition. One is due in 2027, the other one is due in 2030. We can talk a little bit about our capital allocation priorities, but those bonds were issued at a time where interest rates were much lower than they are today as you can see the big $500 million tranche was issued at 2.63%, so these are really, really attractive coupon rates to be paying on debt.
That being said as I mentioned we did drawn our credit facility to close the Yamana transaction that is now fully repaid. Same thing when we acquired Tahoe, we drew on our credit facility. We have that repaid within a 1.5 year. So our approach has always been to repay that as quickly as possible. A short note to — note that our credit facility is linked to sustainability linked — is sustainably linked and that aligns Pan American’s ESG performance to its cost of capital. I think that’s just a good way of aligning our philosophy.
So in terms of capital allocation, definitely the three buckets where we allocate our excess capital. One is investing in the business that could either be through capital projects or acquisitions. And you can see in the history since 2010 that has been about half of where we’ve put our cash in. So investing into the future, making sure we replace the reserves that we mine every year, and as I said, reacting to market conditions when necessary. The next part would be return to shareholders. That’s around 36%. And that has been in the form of both dividends and share buybacks. We do have an outstanding normal course issuer bid right now to purchase up to 5% of our issuers and outstanding shares.
We did take advantage of some good market conditions in Q1, and we purchased back around $20 million, $25 million worth of our shares. Share price was much lower than it is today, so we have been very reactive when it’s been important to us to buy back shares. So that’s something that will be continue to play by year. Today we haven’t been buying back shares but it’s good to have that opportunity available when necessary. And finally 15% over the last 10 years in paying back debt and that aligns with what I just said previously, always keeping that strong balance sheet.
So discussing the acquisitions, here are the two major acquisitions we performed over the last five years. With Tahoe, we brought in over production of 400,000 ounces of gold a year, 20 million ounces of silver, and that of course is linked to the Escobal mine, which is not currently operational. When we acquired Tahoe, it was already in care and maintenance, and we’ve been, I’ll talk a little bit about the work we’ve been doing to get that mine restarted. It was a $1.1 billion acquisition, and that one brought in around $25 million to $30 million worth of synergies.
More recently, last year, we acquired the Yamana Gold. That brought in around 565,000 ounces of gold production a year, plus around 9.2 million ounces of silver. Total consideration was around $2.8 billion and the synergies there are $60 million plus. So a huge amount of synergies. It was a very logical acquisition for us given that LatAm footprint. Also both companies had headquarters in Canada so that was easy to consolidate and there was some low-hanging fruit in terms of synergies just through that.
Now since then we’ve also been focusing on asset or portfolio optimization. So we did dispose of three major assets last year. Our interest — our 56% interest in the MARA project, that’s a large copper project in Argentina. So we sold it to the other JV partner there, Glencore. And then we sold also our Morococha mine, which is a legacy historic mine from Pan American Silver, plus early stage exploration project, Agua de la Falda in Chile. So with those three acquisitions we brought in around $743 million of cash plus three NSR royalties. Apart from all that we’ve also announced the sale of our La Arena mine in Peru. That’s a mine that has a very short mine life now.
That sale is still pending regulatory approval from the government of Canada. So we’re waiting for that. Hopefully sometime in Q3 or Q4 we can hear back. So that will bring around $240 million or so of cash upfront plus a royalty. So that’s the model we’ve been following, retaining some upside through royalty. Now, with the sale of these assets, we are accumulating a royalty portfolio. We’ll see what we can do with that. Maybe it makes sense for us to bundle it and sell. So that’s something that we’re considering right now.
I’d say, you know, we get asked a lot of the questions, like, well, what’s next on the list to sell? I’d say that might be a possibility. But right now we’re really just waiting for that La Arena sale to close. So hopefully we hear back from the government of Canada in the short-term on that. La Colorado, this is one of our premier mines. This is from the Pan American legacy portfolio. So this is to do with the oxides that we mine, sulfides and oxides that we mine in the volcanics. This is a historic mine. We’ve been operating it for over 20 years now. So the forecast production is around 6.5 million ounces of silver. Over the last few years though it’s been much lower than that between 4 million and 5 million ounces of silver. So we did face some technical issues at the mine over the last few years related to ventilation.
Unfortunately this has been one of the items that have been a major factor in us missing guidance over the last few years. The good news is that we finally installed the ventilation infrastructure, took about two years. As you can see here from the photo, this is the exhaust of the ventilation. So with this, we have seen production rates increase substantially and improve. Even in July we’re seeing now our processing rates go up from 1,100 to 1,400 tons per day up to 1,700 to 1,800 tons per day and the goal is to reach 2000 tons per day.
So once we reach that we will see our cost drop substantially. And production should go up as well. So I think in with that case we will go back to historic production levels of La Colorado around 6 million to 7 million ounces silver a year. Now that’s a good segue into our major catalysts. First on the list is La Colorado Skarn. So this ore deposit is located immediately below our existing mine. We currently mine the volcanics. This is located in the limestone below. It’s quite deep. It’s around 600 meters deep and this is something that we found in 2018 and since then I think we’ve put 250 kilometers worth of drilling.
This is on the graph there you can see on the table you can see our latest resource over 300 million ounces of silver contained. However this is mostly a zinc and lead deposit. So I’ll show that, I’ll show this in a few slides now, relative to other productions, but this has the potential to be one of the largest zinc mines in the world. Total expenditures, capital expenditures, around $2.8 billion, NPV around $1 billion. And in terms of revenue breakdown it’s around 60% zinc, 20% lead and 20% silver. However that silver represents around 17 million ounces of silver production per year.
So that would make it one of the largest silver producers, as you can see from this graph, plus a very, very long life. So we’re currently undergoing discussions with potential partners, especially given the large zinc exposure. So we’re trying to find a structure that works for us and whereby we can somehow structure to keep some of that silver exposure. We don’t have planned going this by ourselves, especially given the technical challenges. It will be a large bulk underground mine.
We’re looking at different caving options and also the size of the total investment of $2.8 billion. So we are actively looking for partners. We’ve had constructive discussions with potential partners. At this stage though, the discussions are more on the technical side. We haven’t really moved into what that structure, that partnership structure will look like yet. So we are having very constructive discussions. As you can imagine, This is a large project, huge amount of drilling information and technical information to share. So it’s going to take some time to bring a partner up to speed with that.
In terms of the zinc production, from here you can see that it would be top five zinc producers. And that’s at a time where we are seeing some of the current producers like Red Dog or Antamina starting to wind down. So at the time that it is producing six years, seven years from now, it will be one of the largest. So just to highlight, this is a project where we published a PEA back in January. Now we’re working on the pre-feasibility study while we’re looking for a partner.
In terms of the cost, on the cost side it will be on the lowest — on the lower quartile as you can see here now these are cost as of as 2023, however yeah our expectation is to be on the lower side of the cost curve, so very, very interesting project for us. Then I’ll spend a few moments talking about Escobal. This is the mine that’s currently in the care and maintenance. So this is a mine that was placed under care and maintenance because the Constitutional Court in Guatemala said that the Indigenous community consultation process was not completed during permitting. This is a process that the government should have completed.
So as I mentioned, when we acquired Tahoe, the mine was already in this situation and since then we’ve been working very hard on this ILO 169 consultation process. The mine is one of the top primary silver producers in the world at the time when it did operate between 2014 and 2017. It produced over 20 million ounces of silver a year. So relative to our current production, around 20 million ounces has the potential to basically double our silver production. So extremely attractive mine. At the time it had cost below $10. This was over 10 years ago.
We do expect the cost to be higher today, but still we are expecting it to be on the lower quartile relative to Pan America’s other assets. So huge potential catalyst. Now in terms of where the process is today, as I said when we acquired Tahoe, they had just begun the consultation process or the review process. Actually it’s the first table there. And in the last four years we have been, we’ve moved it all the way to phase two consultation. Now, the process did take a bit of a slowdown first during the pandemic, 2020, 2021, the meetings with the Indigenous group had to be live and those basically, it was impossible to advance that during the pandemic.
And then finally in the last nine months or so I’d say the project with a process has been stalled given the political change in Guatemala there’s a new incoming government. So only last week did the government assign a new Vice Minister, Mr. Pacheco, So he’ll be leading this process from the government side. So we’ll be moving forward with that now. And now we’re just waiting for the latest meeting to be booked to continue the consultation. Just to clarify the purpose of the consultation isn’t a referendum on the project.
The purpose of it is to identify the impacts of the mine, and then once those impacts are agreed on with the indigenous group to find a way the company can either mitigate or to compensate for that. So we’ll be moving forward with that process. Now, we get lots of questions on what the timeline is around this. Now, this is a process that’s run by the government. So we’ve never really given a timeline, given that it’s out of our control. However, we’ve been very constructive with our conversations with both the government and the indigenous group on moving this forward.
Finding a couple words on ESG performance, I encourage everyone if you have a chance to look at our sustainability report A lot of information on our stewardship in terms of the environment, in terms of communities, on the social side. Huge part of our effort. Now, I’d say even though in the last few years we talk about it a lot more, this has always been the hallmark of our operating mines, making sure that all the stakeholders are aware of what we’re doing, understand the impacts of mine and working with them is a huge part of it.
So even though we talk about it a lot, I’d say in the last 5 years, 10 years with more disclosure around it. It’s always been a fundamental part of how we run our business. Additionally, we are rated by third-parties. We’ve seen consistent improvement in those ratings over the last few years. So just to recap, Pan American, we view it as the premier silver investment opportunity. We’re the largest, most diversified with the largest reserves. Yes, we do produce more of the gold than silver today, however that silver exposure is embedded in our operations and in our reserves. $7.8 million in market cap. We do have a — we’ve been paying dividends for a very, very long time.
And yeah, with that, I’ll wrap it up and move on to some Q&A, but thank you for your time this morning.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Matthew Murphy
Great, thanks for that comprehensive presentation. Feel free to put up your hand in the audience if you have a question and there’s a mic that will make its way to you. But otherwise, had a few follow-ups to a few points. So on the portfolio optimization, you talked about the potential of a royalty portfolio. You talked about, or the slide had non-core early stage exploration, when you look at the bigger sort of mining portfolio, do you think Pan American has the right mix? Does it have too many mines? Does it — are there any sort of changes that the company is thinking of making to some of the other assets?
Ignacio Couturier
Yeah, thanks, Matt, for that question. That’s a question we get quite a bit, given how active we have been with some asset sales, and also given the fact that our portfolio has mines of different size, different costs, very varied portfolio. So I’d say first of all, Pan American does have the capacity to manage all these mines. That’s something that we have done for a long time. As I mentioned, we’re expert LatAm operators. Our decentralized structure has made it easy over the years to make acquisitions and integrate mines into the way we do things.
However, yes, we were always looking for opportunities to upgrade that portfolio. We do have some mines that are kind of reaching their end of life now, like Dolores and next on the list would be Cerro Moro and La Arena, which, you know, currently we’re undergoing a sale process. And that one also has a, has a lower mine life. All that being said, I would say that, you know, we’ve been very careful in the past to not advertise too much when we’re considering selling operating mines. Back a few years ago, we did that with Lakeshore and ultimately we decided to keep that mine. We very publicly stated it was for sale and in that period we did find that very demoralizing to our workforce.
So I’d say we always continue to look for opportunities to optimize our portfolio, improve our portfolio, but especially on the operating mine side, that’s something that we don’t openly talk about too much.
Matthew Murphy
Got it. Okay. We have a question up front.
Unidentified Analyst
[technical difficulty]
Matthew Murphy
It was a question about tax pools.
Ignacio Couturier
Yeah, that’s a great question, Lakeshore not really at the end of the day, the operations we have in Canada at Lakeshore. We already have a net loss situation there. Our head office is a loss situation. So, yes — we got losses, but nowhere really to use them. So, there was no real advantage in Canada for that tax pool.
Unidentified Analyst
A follow up for that. Are you guys looking harder at M&A potential in Canada to utilize those tax pools?
Ignacio Couturier
Yeah, I’d say we’re looking everywhere throughout the Americas and of course, yeah Canada is a is a very desirable jurisdiction as I mentioned we are Specialized LatAm producers, but we have had a really good experience with Lakeshore and there’s other great opportunities in Canada. So Yeah, that would be a bonus to be able to use some of those that the tax pool in Canada and Canada is somewhere we’re looking as well.
So I’d say yes, stay tuned and definitely Canada is another jurisdiction where we’re looking at potential acquisitions.
Unidentified Analyst
What’s the time limit on the tax pools? When do they start to evaporate?
Ignacio Couturier
Oh, it’s a stepwise. So over time you slowly lose some of it. So it’s not, you don’t lose it all at once. So as I said, over time you slowly start using it. Now there’s a lot of tax planning going on, so we do try to find ways of bringing some income into Canada to use those tax pools. So there’s some clever tax planning behind that as well. But anyway, that is something that we have and that’s high on our priority as well.
Unidentified Analyst
And what’s the lay of the land in Mexico?
Ignacio Couturier
Well, as you guys know, Claudia Sheinbaum is now transitioning to be the new President. She is a continuation of the Morena Party, so AMLO’s party. However, we have seen, I’d say, a little bit of softening of the rhetoric, specifically around open pit mining. You know, AMLO with his new mining reform, wants to ban open pit mining completely. Sheinbaum has now stated that she would consider it under executive order for strategic interest of the country. So I’d say let’s see how it goes. There is slight softening of the rhetoric that we’ve heard from AMLO side, But it’s still early days. It’s still early days. So let’s see how it goes with Sheinbaum.
Now, we get a lot of questions, how does the mining reform affect Pan American? Well, in the immediate short-term, not really. Our Mines are underground. La Colorada Skarn will be underground. We own all the concessions. And the concessions that we do own, we’re working. So there’s no immediate effect on Pan American. But obviously, it’s something that we’re monitoring closely.
Unidentified Analyst
Matt, I’ll let you ask a question.
Matthew Murphy
Had 1 on this Escobal process of the new Minister, Pacheco. Do you have a sense of how long it takes for a minister to get up to speed? How up to speed do they have to be on the process?
Ignacio Couturier
Yeah, well you know what — there’s been a huge amount of work done on the project. Both the indigenous group and the company have had a lot of external parties come in and do studies. So there is a learning curve to get up to speed with all the information from environmental side, from social side. So yeah, Mr. Pacheco has a lot of homework to do, just to catch up with what information has been collected, what information has been exchanged. But the good news is that up to this moment, really, we had no representative from the government leading this process. That’s something that’s now changed.
Now, I’m not surprised. For those who follow news out of Guatemala, there was a very messy transition from the old government to the new government. So this project was not high on the priority list for the first few months of office. Only now, when dust has settled a little bit, now they’re looking at this and they’ve assigned someone to move the process forward.
Matthew Murphy
Yeah, well with that we’re pretty much out of time. So no, we covered a lot of ground. Appreciate it.
Ignacio Couturier
Okay, Matt, that’s great. Thank you very much. Thank you for hosting us.
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