Coeur D’Alene Mines Corporation Q2 2010 Earnings Call Transcript

The operation sites Rochester, Martha, and Endeavor are all performing ahead of budget, and we continue to see consistent silver production and declining cost at San Bartolomé. At Palmarejo, many important milestones were achieved as part of the company’s ongoing optimization program, which are expected to increase production and lower costs in the balance of 2010. On the exploration side of the business, the company’s strategy is largely focused on drilling activities on large land positions near our existing mines. This strategy continues to generate very cost-effective, near-term additions to the company’s substantial, existing reserve and resource base, and my colleague Don Birak will have more to say about these efforts in a bit.

This slide makes several key points about Coeur and your asset portfolio. First our mines are 100% precious metal, silver and gold with no base metal exposure. Silver production generates approximately 70% of our overall metal sales while gold contributes to the remaining 30%, which will continue to become a more significant part of our metals portfolio going forward now that Kensington has been in production.

Coeur has the leading precious metal reserve and resource base on repeating our portfolio of new mines. At the beginning of this year, silver reserves alone totaled 269 million ounces, and gold reserves totaled 2.9 million ounces at the end of last year. We are maintaining our full-year production guidance today of 17.3 million silver ounces and 170,000 ounces of gold.

Now, I will turn the call over to Leon Hardy for more details on our operations. Leon?

Leon Hardy

Thanks, Dennis. As mentioned, we are very pleased to report that production began ahead of schedule at Kensington. We have completed pre-commissioning of the plant and ramp-up is proceeding smoothly as scheduled. The mine is on track to produce approximately 50,000 ounces of gold this year. Production from the full 150 ton per day plant is expected to average 125,000 ounces annually in its initial 12.5 year mine line based on current reserves of 1.5 million ounces of gold.

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