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Q1 2007 Eldorado Gold Corporation Earnings Conference Call - Final.

Publication: Fair Disclosure Wire
Publication Date: 04-MAY-07
Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access

Article Excerpt
Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

OPERATOR: Good morning, and welcome to the Eldorado Gold Q1 2007 financial and operational results conference call for Friday, May 4, 2007.

Please note that the call is also available at www.eldoradogold.com.

Your host for today will be Paul Wright. Mr. Wright, please go ahead.

PAUL WRIGHT, PRESIDENT, CEO, ELDORADO GOLD CORPORATION: Thank you, operator, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Eldorado Gold conference call.

Please refer to our forward-looking statements as disclosed in our news release and management's discussion and analysis.

This morning in Vancouver I'm joined by Norm Pitcher, the Company's Chief Operating Officer and Earl Price, Chief Financial Officer. Norm and Earl in a few moments will update you on the operational and financial performance of the Company and provide an update of activities ongoing. We will then open up for questions.

Suffice to say, we are extremely pleased with our first quarter results which clearly support the confidence we have in our planned performance for 2007. The production of 88,780 ounces at cash operating costs of $220 per ounce contributed significantly to our net income of $12.6 million for the quarter.

In an industry whose average cash cost to production continues to increase with margins continue to decrease, we believe we're establishing a valuable position for our shareholders. With both Tanjianshan and Kisladag up and running, we are now pushing forward with the Efemcukuru project where we anticipate completing a feasible study by mid year and continue to plan a construction decision before year-end.

Exploration activities are fully underway in Turkey, China and Brazil and we look forward to bringing you results from these programs commencing in the third quarter. We are particularly pleased with our experience to date in developing and operating in China and are building our resources in-country with the objective of further development growth in China.

At this time, I'd like to hand over to Norm who will take you through an operations update.

NORM PITCHER, COO, ELDORADO GOLD CORPORATION: Thanks, Paul.

Well as Paul mentioned, we are very happy with both the gold production and operating costs in the quarter. And as always, I'd like to thank our personnel throughout the globe who have helped us achieve this.

I will start at Kisladag. The mine and the processing plant both continue to perform very well. As we stated in the last conference call, the block model's doing a good job of predicting tons of ore, tons of waste. (Inaudible) we had really no issues there whatsoever.

On the phase two, which has been the real push for the last several months, crusher installation is essentially complete. In April we reached just under 70% capacity which will put us on plan for the full capacity in Q3 and which will give us about 8.5 million tons of ore to the leach pads this year.

Other phase two projects are advancing as well. We're working on the crusher maintenance shop, the truck shop, a new pregnant pond at the processing plant and we're also adding additional cells on the phase 2 leach pad.

At Tanjianshan, we continue to mine in the QLP pit. We've got one contractor plus our own fleet of equipment as before.

This quarter we'll start stripping in JLG and start mining the oxide ore out of there. The mill is operating as expected and recoveries are actually a little bit higher than predicted so we're quite pleased with that as well.

On the development front, at Efemcukuru we continue drilling with five drills. We've probably got about less than 5,000 meters left in the program now.

We pretty much finished the infill part of it now we're sort of looking more at the down plunge transition zone which is the area between the Middle Ore Shoot and the South Ore Shoot which was under explored previously and also the North Ore Shoot, which I think had only about eight drill holes in it, most of which hit sort of ore grade (inaudible) so we'll continue drilling there. Probably have one more press release on drill results before the feasibility is released.

On exploration in Turkey, the field season is really just sort of getting going there. We've been working on the Biga Peninsula because we can in the wintertime, but now we'll start expanding now into the Demir joint venture and into the pond tight area. We've got fairly projects there that will see fairly significant drill programs this year and we continue to bring the pipeline of grass roots projects along as well.

In Brazil, although we were somewhat disappointed in the final results from the Vila Nova gold joint venture area, we've still got a lot of ground there, we've got over 150,000 hectares, we've identified some new anomalies on that ground already this year. You know, we think the model that we're using in that area is still quite valid so we'll continue exploring there for the rest of the year generating drill targets both at the Vila Nova area and at Tartarugalzinho.

In China, we will have a drill on site this week. We'll be adding another drill towards the end of the month. The targets there are first JLG North, which is an area just north of the main pit that has seen mining in the past by the QI brigades, has never been included in resources and reserves, had some (scoping) in it. You know, we've been in there, we've seen mineralization so we'll start drilling that.

We've also got a drill program at QLT deep underneath the pit to sort of explore the down plunge extension of some of the high grade that we hit in the pit and also QLT (cell) which is simply an extension of the other QLT structure itself. We've also got a couple of more grassrootsie-type areas at Tanjianshan that we'll look at this year.

As Paul kind of alluded to, we've changed our...

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