Earnings Call Excerpt
Barrick Gold Q4 and Year-End 2005 Results Conference Call (ABX)
February 23, 2006
Executives:
Gregory Wilkins, President and CEO
Peter Kinver, Executive Vice President and COO
Jamie Sokalsky, Executive Vice President and CFO
Alexander Davidson, Executive Vice President, Corp. Development & Exploration
Jamie Mather, Vice President, Investor Relations
Analysts:
John Bridges, J.P. Morgan
John Hill, Citigroup
Steve Butler, Canacord Adams
Victor Flores, HSBC
Mark Smith, Dundee Securities
Barry Cooper, CIBC
Michael Fowler, Desjardins Securities
John Tumasas, Prudential,
Tanya Yugastonic, National Bank Financial
Carey Smith,Heywood Securities
Mike Durose, Scotia Capital
Brian McArthur, UBS
Presentation
Jamie Mather, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you operator. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. We issued our fourth quarter results yesterday and if you have not received a copy of the report they are available on our website at www.Barrick.com, or by contacting the Investor Relations Department. Greg Wilkins our President and CEO will chair this conference call. Also available on the call will be Peter Kinver, our Chief Operating Officer, Jamie Sokalsky, our CFO and Alex Davidson, Executive Vice President Corporate Development and Exploration.
Management will be making forward looking statements during the course of this conference call and for a complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties and factors which may lead to our operating performance being different for the estimates contained in our forward looking statement, please refer to our fourth quarter report or our most recent AIF filing. And now I’ll turn it over to Greg.
Gregory Wilkins, President and CEO
Thanks, Jim. Good morning everyone. Thank you all for joining us this morning. As Jim said, we put out our year end Press Release and reported on the fourth quarter the guidance on where we’re at for 2006 as we currently see it, and progress in a variety of funds. I’m sure you’ve had a chance to read all 93 pages and have detailed questions, but perhaps we can shed some light on it and you know obviously we stand ready to ask questions as you absorb this material.
Fourth quarter you know is a great quarter for us. It turned out exactly as we anticipated it. We earned $175 million of 32ยข a share and when we looked at it on before special items basis, our earnings actually fore folded over the same quarter in 2004.
Operating cash flow was also much stronger up very significantly. And that’s in spite of the fact that we’ve actually used a lot of working capital and inventories as we’ve built up some of the new lines, in fact, we had some gold from Valedero that was in bar form at the end of the quarter, which will be moving into sales in 2006. So cash flow could have been higher had we got that sale done but still the numbers were very impressive and it showed a continuing quarter over quarter trend and those we’ve shared with you in the past and you know our goal really has been to try and drive continuing growth and financial performance in sales which you’ll see in a moment. We’ve had some pretty good success on that front.
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