Michael Steinmann : Absolutely. I think I made it very clear from the first call on that the focus now is to find the right partner for that project. As you can imagine for such a large, I would call it this silver sink deposit of the largest in the world, there is quite some interest from the base metal side just because of the long life the underground nature the underground nature and the big specs in production. So yes, that’s absolutely my confidence to work on that — and such kind of an agreement that obviously will reduce our share on the capital, but always stay focused on that very large silver production. As you remember, there’s about 50,000 tonne about 17 million ounces for the first 10 years average silver production, which really will be our focus in any kind of agreement that hopefully we come to.
John Tumazos : Should we also take this perhaps as an expectation that the silver or the zinc prices might rebound to help your economics or that Escobal restarts in Guatemala?
Michael Steinmann : Well, I don’t have control obviously, but the silver and zinc prices are going. I think all the listeners have their view on that. I have my view and I think once we see interest rates move the other direction, we will see a strong rebound on precious metals for sure. I don’t know when that will happen this year, the different views out on there. But just to remind everyone, like last year, we repaid about $400 million debt and we paid about over $130 million in dividends, while we ended the year with record cash in short-term investment balance of over $440 million. So those are very important numbers here and obviously, one of the reasons why we decided at this point in the market where we believe there’s a lot of values, La Colorada is one of them that are not fully included in our share price, but it’s a good time and an accretive time to buy back some of our shares.
Of course, we’re looking forward as you saw there in the quarterly guidance to a stronger and strong 2024, especially the second half when costs come up as we explained with Cosmos earlier in the call. So all that combination and obviously, last but not least, we will continue to work on divestments. We have been, I think, very successful last year on the divestments and we will continue to work on that. So all that together and the fact that we probably created last year dividends sorry, royalties out of those divestments that we did, which I will probably value somewhere in the $150 million to $200 million range at today’s prices. So another kind of big value bucket that we have under our control. So I think it’s a very prudent approach for us to obviously pay the dividend and come out with that share buyback at this time.
Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Craig Hutchison from TD.
Craig Hutchison: Just on La Colorada, can you give us a sense of what the grades will be in the second half of this year? Obviously, there’s going to be a big inflection point. And then how durable are those higher grades kind of going forward? Is it more of a year or two or is it a very short period of time?
Steve Busby : This is Steve. Fortunately, we are seeing the grades at La Colorada that we expect. During Q4, we were about 288 gram silver, that’s close to the reserve grade. It’s what we expect going into next year. It’s really a matter of tonnage. We got to get our tonnage up and the tonnage that we got to increase is in the higher grade portion of the Candelaria Deep Zone. So that’s what the ventilation shaft and the vent fans will give us access to get that tonnage job. But we’re pretty happy with the grades where they are. We’re pretty confident those grades are going to sustain over a long period of time. We see potential to continue to add as we drill out more and more in Colorado.
Michael Steinmann : We have at the moment probably about nine, eight or nine years of proven proper reserves, this kind of throughput. So, yes, they can sustain a long time. Obviously that will be advances on the scar during that time period. But I think there’s a long reserve in the veins later on. Those veins will showing up with the scar and deeper down.
Craig Hutchison: So the plan from throughput perspective is around 2,000 tonnes a day? Is that we should be modeling next year?
Michael Steinmann : Once we get the ventilation up and running, that’s kind of our target, is get above the 2,000 tonnes a day. Once the ventilation fans are running, we do have some development acceleration that we have to do in that Candelaria zone. So, you’ll see it start to ramp up from the current kind of 1,300 tonne a day range. It’ll take us a couple months, two, three months to ramp up from there to the 2,000 tonnes a day once the vent fan is running.
Craig Hutchison: And just in terms of the sort of free cash flow you guys are going to generate here, do you guys anticipate being free cash flow positive in the first half of this year given the higher taxes you have to pay that are usually weighted to the first half or is it sort of a you anticipate free cash flow sort more of a second half story?
