B2Gold Corp at Canaccord Genuity Global Resources Conference

BTO.TO - B2Gold Corp
B2Gold Corp at Canaccord Genuity Global Resources Conference
Oct 16, 2014 / 05:00PM GMT 

==============================
Corporate Participants
==============================
   *  Clive Johnson
      B2Gold Corporation - President and CEO

==============================
Conference Call Participants
==============================
   *  Rahul Paul
      Canaccord Genuity - Analyst

==============================
Presentation
------------------------------
 Rahul Paul,  Canaccord Genuity - Analyst   [1]
------------------------------
 Good afternoon, everyone. I think we will get started with the afternoon session. To kick off this session we have Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold, one of the most successful growth stories we have seen in the mining business. Clive and his team have worked together for several years. This is a team that built Bema Gold which was acquired by Kinross for $3.5 billion in 2007.

 B2 was founded in 2007, shortly after the sale of Bema. Five years and it became a producer in 2009 with production of 21,000 ounces. Five years later this Company is on track to produce close to 400,000 ounces this year. Another three years from now, will be at 900,000 ounces. It is difficult to find that kind of growth in this business. Even better it is all profitable growth. This is a team that has created value through exploration, development, operational execution and acquisition.

 B2 has been an important part of this conference since inception. I must say that every year Clive gets on this podium the story gets even better.

 With that I would like to welcome Clive Johnson, President and CEO of B2Gold. Clive, thanks for your time.

------------------------------
 Clive Johnson,  B2Gold Corporation - President and CEO   [2]
------------------------------
 Thanks, Rahul. After lunch is always a bit of a tough spot especially after a [free] lunch I guess but I think everyone has probably come back down to earth now and I am going to take you through the story of B2Gold. Thanks for your kind words, Rahul, and thanks to Canaccord Genuity for their ongoing support of B2Gold. We have a long-standing relationship going back into the Bema days and Canaccord Genuity was a big player in assisting us in our success.

 You have seen these before, the cautionary statement. This is the legal cover your ass slide because certain things I am going to say are going to be forward-looking and therefore might be subject to change.

 B2Gold as Rahul mentioned is a -- I think we are the fastest growing gold producer in the world currently and as Rahul said, we are on track for more pretty dramatic growth coming in just a few years. We have three producing mines, two of them in Nicaragua and one in the Philippines. We are very excited about the Ojtikoto mine in Namibia which we are advancing to production and going to pour the first gold bar in December of this year on budget and on schedule. And that is pretty unusual in the industry unfortunately these days to see a mine coming on budget, on schedule.

 We have a strong record of operational execution. Quarter after quarter we have tended to perform extremely well and meeting our projections and that has given us the ability to see that recognized in the market in our shares and that has allowed us to use our shares and our currency to do a series of acquisitions over the last six years as Rahul alluded to.

 We are in a very strong financial position. We ended the quarter with about $130 million last quarter in the bank and at the end of the year we should have about $100 million based on our current estimates in the bank and we will always maintain a strong financial position. We are generating significant cash from operations even at the lower gold prices. And next year as the Namibian mine comes in our costs are going to drop more. It is going to be a low-cost producer.

 But we do have strong access to capital. I think that people don't realize today that it is a difficult time but if you have cash flow and credibility, there is a lot of money out there for gold companies but you really need that cash flow and the credibility of building mines. We tapped into the markets last year and raised $258 million in what I thought was a very attractive convertible debenture. It is convertible at [3.93] US over a five-year term and it is a 3.25% coupon so it was a very good financing. It was that financing that enabled us to bring Ojtikoto into production and maintain a very strong cash position.

 We have a very strong management team as Rahul alluded to. Bema Gold for me was a journey of over 30 years from an exploration contracting company to an intermediate gold producer that was subsequently taken over by Kinross Gold in 2006 for $3.5 billion. Obviously the best deal Kinross ever did by a long margin. Today our project in Russia is about -- was our project in Russia now Kinross is the Kupol mine, that is about 65% of their cash flow today. It is a remarkable project.

 So in some ways we were victims of our own success. We didn't want to sell Bema to Kinross but at the end of the day we had 75,000 shareholders and I didn't believe it was our right to say yes or no because we are a public company and I am hoping that more public companies, some of the smaller ones are starting to realize that today that when you are public you work for the shareholders of your Company and they should be respected.

 Very strong technical and financial team. I think that someone made a comparison Bema, B2Gold perhaps to the early days of Barrick a while ago. When you think about the early days of Barrick, they had a really unusual combination. Very strong in the capital markets with Peter Munk understanding how to raise money, when to raise money, how to do deals combined with Bob Smith who was a very well recognized engineer who had a very strong technical team. And I think that is really a lot of what we are about. We do have -- obviously we have learned a lot over 30 years at Bema through some very difficult times and we have carried all of that experience.

 So the key people who helped me build Bema Gold into a very successful Company, all those guys were all the founders of B2Gold and I think that is one of the reasons for our rapid success.

 We have demonstrated an ability to not only find gold but to build mines and deliver results.

 This is kind of the key slide I guess at the end of the day because this tells the story about our dramatic growth so far and going forward. And what you see in the blue and the green are the two mines in Nicaragua and obviously time is not going to allow me to go into great detail on them. But those two mines which we acquired through acquisition and subsequently had some very good exploration success and then we did a deal a few years back with an Australian company called CGA Mining and we acquired -- we did a friendly takeover and acquired the Masbate mine which they had done a good job of building in the Philippines and that added another 190,000 to 200,000 ounces a year. It is a long mine life, at least 15 years, great exploration upside. We like that project.

 In the red you see Ojtikoto, our newest mine that is going to come into production as I mentioned in December this year. Next year we are looking at around 140,000 ounces of gold. In fact it is going to be more than that because what we decided to do already because construction has gone very well, we are actually looking at expanding the mine in the first quarter of next year in its first quarter of production. So we are probably looking at more like 150,000 ounces next year and that will grow to 170,000 ounces in 2016 and it will probably reach 190,000 ounces in 2017 because we found a significantly higher grade zone called the Wolfshag Zone very near the pit. So in our industry, it doesn't get any better than finding high grade near a mill.

 And then finally, we just recently in early October completed the acquisition of Papillon Resources which is another Australian company that had done a very good job of exploring the Fekola deposit in Mali. It is one of the best projects we have seen in years and we are very pleased to be able to do what I think was a highly accretive deal and just closed that. We are putting out 230-odd-million shares of our company at a value of about just under $500 million. So that will bring our production up to somewhere around 900,000 ounces a year by 2017.

 Share ownership; we just put out more shares as I mentioned. But that is not dilutive, it is accretive so we are a little over 900 million shares outstanding. The founders of the Company, we are significant shareholders owning our around 4% of the Company.

 The only thing that is unusual perhaps one of the unusual things about B2Gold is as a group we decided not to take any stock option in the Company because we are founders of the Company. So we believe that we should use our stock options on behalf of our shareowners to make sure that everyone in our Company in the management group in these various countries has skin in the game. I'm a great believer in skin in the game and I think one of the problems in our industry is not enough people have skin in the game.

 I'm not sure about you but if I'm going to invest in a company, I want to know that the management owns some shares in the company. I want to see that they are on the same page as me.

 So from the production point of view and the three mines, La Libertad mine in Nicaragua, we had record production in 2013 almost 140,000 ounces with pretty reasonable operating cost of $560 an ounce. In 2014 from Libertad, we are looking at somewhere between 143,000 and 150,000 ounces of production and our costs are budgeted at $545 to $565.

 El Limon is a smaller mine; it has been in production since 1940 as an underground mine. It is now underground and open pit. It is one of those underground mines that has had a five-year mine life since 1941 and typically you have an underground mine you don't drill it all off. I am pretty confident that El Limon is going to be in production for a long time. In fact, back in 2000, the El Limon mine produced 100,000 ounces of gold and that is because the grade was double what it is today. We are hopeful that our great exploration team can find some of that higher grade but it is a decent mine and we have actually made it a much a safer mine and we have made it larger production in the last few years.

 The Masbate mine in the Philippines, we had attributable production of about 170,000 ounces in 2013 and in 2014, we are budgeting about 190,000 ounces from Masbate.

 Some of the highlights from the last quarter and the first half of 2014. Record gold production because of course we are continuing to grow and one of the big events is the continued construction as I mentioned of Ojtikoto.

 Guidance for 2014; we will probably come in around the lower end of our guidance at around 395,000 ounces a year. In the second quarter unfortunately we broke our streak of 14 quarters in a row meeting or beating our expectations. We were slightly under and that was because of the Limon mine. We had an accident at the Limon mine which caused us to have to go back in and dewater a section of the mine that was higher grade that we were hoping to mine. It is not that the grade is not there, we have been in lower grade while we dewater a portion of the underground workings. We will be back into that area in November so we are expecting to pick that up in the fourth quarter.

 In the Masbate mine in the Philippines, we put a new SAG mill in in the second quarter which is good news because the SAG mill gives us the potential to expand the mine in the future and putting. In that SAG mill, we are a little optimistic about how much ore we could process by going and avoiding the SAG mill while we were putting the new one in and taking the ore directly from the primary crusher to the ball mills. So we were a little bit behind the Masbate but the Libertad mine has been doing better than expected.

 So I think you will see us come in around for the year around the lower end of our projections but still a respectable number. Our all-in sustaining costs are projected to be $1000 an ounce, somewhere around there and that is going to drop. As we go forward, we have had quite a large capital spend at the mines. That will reduce, and in addition to that of course we are bringing on the Ojtikoto mine which will be our lowest cost mine.

 We also in addition on the financial side we also have a $200 million credit facility with our bankers and that is a revolving credit facility and we are in discussions with the banks now potentially of increasing that significantly, perhaps as much as $350 million. As I mentioned before, if you have cash flow and credibility there is a lot of money out there and it doesn't have to be equity. There is some good debt facilities as we have seen.

 Namibia, it is a wonderful country to work in. We call it Africa light. It used to be German West Africa so everything works, roads are straight. It has got a great infrastructure. It is one of the least populated countries in the world with 2.3 million people, most of them gathered at the northern border where they are involved in cattle farming. It is definitely a country that needs jobs and we are creating some great jobs about 500 people so far. It has got great access and has got great infrastructure.

 We are just a couple of kilometers off the main highway in the country, about a 3-hour drive from Windhoek, their capital. It is in a desert environment but we have drilled and we have hit more water than we could ever use. It is an awesome site to build a mine. There's no small miners around, there are two communities, one is 25 minutes away and one is 40 minutes away. They are far enough away there is no environmental issues at all but they are close enough that that is where we will house our workers in Otavi and Otjiwarongo.

 The government is very keen on mining. It has got a mining history and these jobs that we're creating are going to be very important going forward in Namibia. We think the country has tremendous exploration upside and often in our history and our company we tend to not stop at one mine, we often tend to have two or more mines in the country. Our hope is to continue to be the biggest gold producer in Namibia which we will be shortly and we are working to grow that.

 We are going to generate our own power. The power in Namibia comes from South Africa and South African power is pretty unreliable so we decided that we wanted to be in control of our own destiny by putting in our own power plant. We actually are doing, have done an independent group has done a feasibility study on solar. It looks like it might be viable so we might end up with one of the largest solar power system in Africa and we are having a hard look at that. We'd use solar during the day and then we would use our generators at night and that could be a cost saving as well.

 This feasibility study is now dated, we haven't come out with our new numbers, we will soon. It has gotten a lot better. This is what we bought. We paid $90 million of our shares to take over a company called Auryx Gold, a Toronto-based company that had done a good job exploring the Ojtikoto deposit. Like many junior companies, they ran into that problem of having a prefeasibility study done but no one really was sure that they were going to be able to raise the money to build the mine and that is what we have seen with a lot of junior companies hence the opportunity.

 So they did the right thing by their shareholders. They looked for a deal and we paid them a good premium but we are able to do a highly accretive deal. So for $90 million, we bought the initial deposit which is 1.3 million ounces at a grade of 1.42 grams.

 One of our rules in acquisitions is we won't pay for ounces that might be there. That has gotten a lot of companies in a lot of trouble. Our business is way too tough. Finding gold is way too hard to pay for ounces that might be there. We really don't want to do acquisitions that need exploration success to justify them or a higher gold price to justify them and I think we have been very disciplined in our acquisitions in that regard.

 So this was the initial feasibility study. This had an 11-year mine life and then the first five years of that mine life we were saying we would produce about 140,000 ounces of gold at a cost that was about $525 an ounce; all-in sustaining costs at around $700 which is pretty attractive especially in today's lower gold price environment.

 As I mentioned before, construction is on budget, on schedule and starting in December of this year.

 We made a discovery nearby called -- I mentioned Wolfshag earlier. It is a much higher grade. We are mining 1.42 grams right now and stockpiling, getting ready to start production. The Wolfshag zone is another inferred resource with 700,000 ounces of 3 grams, more than double the grade.

 So given that discovery, we decided to build Ojtikoto with a view to expanding it. So we built it and have built it to process 2.5 million tonnes a year. We decided to upgrade in 2015 to 3 million tonnes per year which will increase our production to about 170,000 ounces. That is not bringing in actually the higher grade Wolfshag zone, that is simply mining the main ore body faster. Wolfshag will come in a bit later on. And we've have done that, we are doing that expansion -- originally it was scheduled to be done by the end of 2015. Construction has gone so well that we are actually doing the expansion now.

 So by the end of the first quarter, we will be at -- we are expected to be at 3.1 million tonnes a year and looking to increase that production as I mentioned to 170,000 ounces and then we will start bringing in some of the higher grade Wolfshag ore. It is a good acquisition that has become a great acquisition.

 Here are some of the pictures of the site. The construction team here is our team. I think one of the things that separates B2Gold from many gold producing companies today is that I really believe in accountability and I think we have had a real lack of that in the gold sector. What I mean by accountability is the people that come to me, our technical team and they recommend an acquisition. I want it to be our guys, I want them to be around when we build it so we can look back and see if we did the right things in terms of due diligence. We do very exhaustive due diligence on projects and it is our team and always our team that does the due diligence.

 In addition to that, we do something that very few companies do these days and that is build our own mines and that is about accountability as well. So the team that is building this mine right now and finishing off Ojtikoto, they built El Libertad mine for us in Nicaragua, they built the Kupol mine in Russia for us and they briefly stayed with Kinross to finish that and then they all came back to B2Gold. They like our corporate culture and they're doing a great job here.

 This team is going to take a couple of months off. They tend to go down to Cabo and Mexico and drink tequila and fish and chase the girls around and then they are going to come back and they're going to build the mine in Bali starting in January.

 So it is wonderful to be able to stand here and tell you that we have the confidence in this team to be very confident they are going to again build another mine on budget, on schedule this time in Mali.

 On the right-hand side of this slide, the blue outline is the main Ojtikoto deposit so that is the one that we bought and that is the one that has the 1.3 million ounces or 1.42 grams. On the right-hand side is the Wolfshag zone, the much higher grade Wolfshag zone.

 So Wolfshag we are doing -- we have infill drilled it. The results are looking very good. We will come out with a new measured indicated resource early first quarter next year. We know we are going to be open pinning for maybe two or three years and then we will go underground. There is very good grades underground at Wolfshag and we also believe we will end up going underground at Ojtikoto as well. So there is lots of legs to this thing.

 And also these are two zones, we don't really know what else is out there. Namibia is covered by a layer of calcrete and the layer of concrete is 5 meters to 20 meters thick but it masks everything. It is very hard to find out what is below the calcrete. The Ojtikoto deposit was drilled many years ago, a company that was drilling a base metals geophysical anomaly and they hit -- they actually almost did an assay for gold, they accidentally found a gold mine.

 So what is the potential? Well, who knows what else is out there and we are going to be doing some exploration to see where we go.

 This is a longitudinal section, taking a slice of the Ojtikoto and having a look at it on the right-hand side you can see it comes to surface and we have some really good grades here, some of the grades are 10 grams of 60 meters of 10 grams at depth so that is obviously -- that is underground mining material.

 The newest acquisition I mentioned was the takeover of Papillon Resources and this has just happened very recently. In fact, we close in October and this is the first time we have really been able to come out and talk about this as one of our assets and we are very pleased with that. I think I mentioned earlier it is one of the best things we have seen in years because it has got very good grade, very low strip ratio. It is open pitable and it is also in a very prolific gold belt.

 Mali -- in the west of Mali, the southwest corner of Mali, there is -- and Senegal, it is right the border -- there is a gold belt there that has about 40,000,000 ounces plus in about 100 km. This is elephant country and we think this is going to be another one.

 So there is many -- the big guys are here, Anglo Gold is here, Randgold, so it is a very good place to be doing our business. Very good workforce. It's a country that desperately needs jobs as well and a couple of these mines are actually starting to get a little long in the tooth. They will be shutting down so the government of Mali is very keen. Some of our team is down there now talking to the government of Mali; they are very keen to see this mine go forward and be built.

 In 2013, they had successful democratic elections. There have been some issues in the Northeast of Mali which the UN has come in and helped them push out the terrorists and the separatists groups into the desert in the Northeast and I believe that is an ongoing commitment. It has never affected any of the mines in southwest Mali. They have never lost a day of production. It is a long way away and I am very confident the problems will remain a long way away. The government needs these mines to continue to produce.

 They recently came out with the New Mining Act in 2012 so we are not concerned that there is going to be any major changes there and as I mentioned, the government is very keen. We are ready to go in terms of permitting. Papillon did a great job of getting the environmental permit in May of 2013 and we have a mining permit now as well so we are ready to go.

 We are doing a final feasibility study here by the first quarter of next year but we are not going to wait for that. We are going to have boots on the ground and start construction in January and this is something we have done before. The Kupol mine in far east of Russia which is extraordinarily high grade, we actually started shipping equipment from Vancouver to the far east of Russia to build that mine after 20 drill holes with no feasibility study and no reserves. Lots of people wouldn't do that. We did that and it is today one of the richest gold mines in the world and that is how you do it rapidly.

 Doing things rapidly doesn't mean that you do them poorly if you know what you are doing, if you have a team that can pull it off.

 So Fekola has 4,000,000 ounces in their measured indicated resource. We think that is going to get bigger. We will come out with our resource for Fekola in the first quarter of next year. I am expecting it to be larger than the resource you see here.

 They had done a prefeasibility study that said it could produce over 300,000 ounces a year for at least eight years. I think that is very conservative in terms of the mine life. I fully expect this mine to be in production for 15 or 20 years.

 Great exploration upside, our guys are just chomping at the bit to get down here and start drilling some holes. But once again, we didn't pay for the exploration upside, we never do. We think we will see it here again. But just as it sits today, it is going to be a very profitable gold mine.

 And here is a look at their prefeasibility study. So basically they had projected operating costs of around $500 an ounce, a little over $500 an ounce and all-in sustaining costs at around $700 an ounce. Very similar actually to the numbers at Ojtikoto.

 So if you combine 300,000 ounces a year as I said for the first eight years and we expect it to go much longer and cost at around [525] to [700] all-in sustaining, a very attractive project in today's market.

 We do have two other assets in the pipeline and if you do believe gold is cyclical then these are assets that could very well be put into production after we finish building. What I have committed to our shareholders is that we will not try and build two gold mines at the same time. I think that would be a mistake. We want to keep our team going and we want to keep using our team to build mines.

 You can see from our projected production, it's obviously pretty dramatic but the Kiaka is another project that could come into play. It might need a little help from the gold price. It is a very good size 5,000,000 ounce deposit in Burkina Faso, another good country to be in in West Africa.

 We took over a company called Volta Resources that have that same issue. They did a prefeasibility study and the market wasn't buying the fact that they were actually to going to be able to finance it and build the mind so they did the right thing again by their shareholders and they did a deal with us. We were able to pay them a good premium but do a highly accretive deal. We paid $63 million worth of our shares for this or $11 an ounce. Within that 5,000,000 ounces at a gram, there is a higher grade core of 2,000,000 million ounces at 1.5 grams. We are doing a feasibility study now to see if we can maybe start mining at that higher grade and they did a very aggressive large study, the gold price was higher to be fair to them and it showed some pretty good numbers from a prefeasibility point of view. But they were talking about 12,000,000 tonnes a year. I think we will be looking at building something a little bit smaller than that but it has the potential to add probably 200,000 or 250,000 ounces to our production. As I said, it might need a bit of help from the gold price. Good asset, good country. As I said if gold is cyclical, if you believe it is cyclical then I expect us to build this mine.

 Finally, we have a joint venture in Columbia with Anglo Gold Ashanti and this is one we've worked on for quite a while. Anglo is currently the operator but the 49% interest we have is very strong because we have to unanimously agree every program and budget for each year so when Anglo gets a little carried away as big companies do sometimes with their budgets, we are able to say no, we don't agree. And we have discussions and then we have always tended to agree a [program] budget. The bottom line is they did a prefeasibility study which we can't call it that because of 43-101. We can only call it a preliminary economic assessment. But frankly they have done a lot of good work, a lot of drilling but a lot of metallurgical work, a lot of engineering. A lot of the engineering is to feasibility standards. This one once again if you believe gold is cyclical, Anglo and ourselves have decided that we want to wait for a higher gold price to put this into production.

 So right now what we are going to do is continue getting the permit. We are working on environmental impact assessments. It is in the best part of Colombia, it is in Antioquia, the Government of Antioquia wants this mine built and the Federal Government is supportive of getting it going as well.

 So another potentially and this one, Anglo's PC said that it could produce 317,000 ounces, cost around $664 an ounce. We have 49% of that.

 The biggest issue I have with this project is the capital cost of over $1 billion. Big companies tend to spend big money on building mines. I think if we were to build this, our capital costs would be significantly lower which would significantly improve the economics.

 So we will see where we go. It is a good asset, we like it and we are going to get the holding costs down to a minimum for next year and continue to pursue a permit.

 CSR activities; I don't have time to talk a lot about this but I would just say that we are on the cutting edge of the modern mining. This is not your grandfather's mining company. We are extremely responsible. We have tremendous programs in all the countries that we work in and we are very proud of that. We change the lives of thousands of people around the world in a positive way.

 So going forward, you are not going to see a lot of deals out of us. We have done a series of deals I think they have all been very good and have all been accretive. Now it is time to realize our production growth and be very focused on that. We are not deal junkies. We have looked at 400 projects since we started this Company. We have done six deals. That tells you a couple of things. One, there's a lot of crap out there. There is a lot of bad projects out there and very few good ones and I think it also tells you how selective we are in our acquisitions.

 The other thing that we are really good at is exploration. Bema was started as an exploration company. Bema was one of the very few exploration companies to ever successfully turn into a gold producer and most exploration companies as you all know, don't produce and I don't recommend they try. They should be bought out, they should be taken over by producers and now they really don't have any choice.

 The interesting thing in this industry I find is that the producers aren't very good at finding gold. They really never have been for the most part. I don't think they are hungry enough. So when we were transforming Bema from an exploration company to a producer, I found myself with a challenge. I wanted to bring in the mining engineers to help us become a producer but I knew that if I brought in the engineers and had our explorations report to them, they would all quit. The reason they would quit is because they like to go and have the freedom to do what they do which is explore.

 In my opinion, exploration is like R&D. So why would you have a company that is producing something and have the R&D report to the guys who are the discipline guys who have to produce the gold, produce the ore every day. So I guess that changes up a little bit. I decided that we would hire an actual engineering team and George Johnson, our Senior VP Operations has a great team and has done a great job. When I hired George in the late '90s I guess I said to George, just one thing you need to know, the explorationist won't be reporting to you. He said why? And I said because they will quit and he was fine with that.

 So at the end of the day, the explorationists, the BPs and everyone else reports to me. It is a very tight small group of nine of us. Most of us as I said were with Bema for many, many years and I think that is one of the keys to our success. So we became a producer but we didn't lose our entrepreneurial flair and we didn't lose the ability to find gold.

 So don't rule out us making another major gold discovery. All the projects that I have talked about, time doesn't allow me to talk about the exploration upside, we think they all have significant upside. So we will be continuing to explore those as well.

 So back to this slide, I liked it so much I put it in the presentation twice. There isn't another company out there today that has this kind of growth profile and as you have heard in my presentation, there is not a lot of arm waving going on to realize this production.

 I mentioned financing. We will add some financing for Fekola. It is going to be $300 million to $400 million, probably more like $350 million to $400 million total. We will do a fleet with Caterpillar again. We don't do contract mining. Why would we? We do our own mining so we will probably do an $80 million lease facility with Caterpillar and there is a lot of money out there as I mentioned.

 The high-yield bond market is very available to us. Last year we were thinking of doing a high-yield bond. The interest rates started to get a little bit away from us so we did the convertible instead. The convertible market, the high-yield bond market are very much available to us. Sometime in the first six months of next year we will do a form of financing. We don't have to do equity. If we choose to, we can finance the further growth of the Company with attractive debt facilities.

 Thank you very much for your time and thank you to Canaccord for having the conference and for including us.




------------------------------
Definitions
------------------------------
PRELIMINARY TRANSCRIPT: "Preliminary Transcript" indicates that the 
Transcript has been published in near real-time by an experienced 
professional transcriber.  While the Preliminary Transcript is highly 
accurate, it has not been edited to ensure the entire transcription 
represents a verbatim report of the call.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT: "Edited Transcript" indicates that a team of professional 
editors have listened to the event a second time to confirm that the 
content of the call has been transcribed accurately and in full.

------------------------------
Disclaimer
------------------------------
Thomson Reuters reserves the right to make changes to documents, content, or other 
information on this web site without obligation to notify any person of 
such changes.

In the conference calls upon which Event Transcripts are based, companies 
may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding a variety 
of items. Such forward-looking statements are based upon current 
expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ 
materially from those stated in any forward-looking statement based on a 
number of important factors and risks, which are more specifically 
identified in the companies' most recent SEC filings. Although the companies 
may indicate and believe that the assumptions underlying the forward-looking 
statements are reasonable, any of the assumptions could prove inaccurate or 
incorrect and, therefore, there can be no assurance that the results 
contemplated in the forward-looking statements will be realized.

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN EVENT TRANSCRIPTS IS A TEXTUAL REPRESENTATION
OF THE APPLICABLE COMPANY'S CONFERENCE CALL AND WHILE EFFORTS ARE MADE TO
PROVIDE AN ACCURATE TRANSCRIPTION, THERE MAY BE MATERIAL ERRORS, OMISSIONS,
OR INACCURACIES IN THE REPORTING OF THE SUBSTANCE OF THE CONFERENCE CALLS.
IN NO WAY DOES THOMSON REUTERS OR THE APPLICABLE COMPANY ASSUME ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY INVESTMENT OR OTHER
DECISIONS MADE BASED UPON THE INFORMATION PROVIDED ON THIS WEB SITE OR IN
ANY EVENT TRANSCRIPT. USERS ARE ADVISED TO REVIEW THE APPLICABLE COMPANY'S
CONFERENCE CALL ITSELF AND THE APPLICABLE COMPANY'S SEC FILINGS BEFORE
MAKING ANY INVESTMENT OR OTHER DECISIONS.
------------------------------
Copyright 2018 Thomson Reuters. All Rights Reserved.
------------------------------