Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Clive Johnson, president and CEO of ETAGold. It is my pleasure to welcome you to call toward at the 2020 annual general meeting and special meeting of Cheryl's, a B2Gold Corporation. Our chairman, Bob Cross, is typically chairs a meeting. He is recovering from successful hip surgery.
So rather and watch him be up here standing on one leg wincing. We thought that I would, step in step in for him. Bob is on the line and listening. Unfortunately, out of an abundance of caution to proactively deal with potential issues arising from the unprecedented public health impact, coronavirus disease 2019. We are hosting the meeting through this virtual platform accessible to all our shareholders who will follow the procedures described in the managed information to the Internet during the course of this meeting.
I will act as chairman of this meeting, and I appoint Roger Rachey Executive Vice President, General Counsel And Secretary of the Company to act as recording Secretary of this meeting. And Anita Vassi of Computershare investor services, Inc, to act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present at the meeting today are fellow directors Bob Cross, Robert Gaitan, Jerry Korpanning, Machisi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson Robin Weiseman and Leanne Kelly. The other officers of the company with us today include Mike Cineman, Senior Vice President of Finance And Chief Financial Officer, Roger Rachay, Executive Vice President of General Counseling Secretary, Tom Garrigan, Senior Vice President of Exploration Dennis Stansbury, Senior Vice President of Engineering And Project Evaluation, Bill Lytle, Senior Vice President of Operations, Ian McClain, vice president, investor relations, Dale Craig, vice president operations, Edward Bartz, vice president of taxation, external reporting, Brian Scott, vice president, geology, and technical services, John Rahala, vice president, metallurgy, Neil Reeder, vice president, and government relations, Dana Rogers, Vice President of Finance, Randy Record, Vice President of Operations And Randall Chapman Vice President, Associate General Counsel, now for the business of the meeting. Notice of this meeting was filed in the notice calling this meeting together with the management information circular and proxy form was mailed to the shareholders on May 11, 2020.
Received a copy of the declaration of testing to the publication and mailing and the recording secretary will arrange for the declaration to be annexed to the minutes of this meeting These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered shareholder. Anyone specifically requests that it be read at this time. The recording secretary has notified me that a quorum is present. Notice having been given in accordance with the articles in a quorum present, I declare the meeting property constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer may be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. I propose that we deal first with all the routine business requirements and then terminate the formal meeting and carry on in a less formal manner by way of an any for questions from registered shareholders and proxy holders about the company's activities or operations after presentations from management.
As this meeting is being held virtually, I would set out a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. Questions in respect of a motion can be submitted by any registered shoulder or duly appointed proxy holder using messaging icon at the top of the virtual interface. When reading out a question, I will note the name of the registered shareholder or proxy holder submitting the question. In order to deal with all questions in a timely fashion, questions of a similar nature will be answered once and duplicative questions will not receive response. Questions on the formal meeting items will be addressed as each item is tabled.
It would be appreciated whoever have questions and comments a general nature were deferred until the question period after the presentation. If we are unable to address your general questions during that time, a representative of each goal will reach out to you following the meeting with a response. Voting on all matters that this meeting will be conducted by electronic ballot. To allow sufficient time for voting the polls for all matters being voted on will be open following these introductory remarks and closed at the end of the meeting, at the beginning of the meeting, you will see the ballot open on the virtual interface requesting you to start registering your votes. If any motion duty brought before the meeting not included in the circular, the polls for such matters will be opened closed as ID necessary or desirable for the orderly and expeditious conduct of the meeting.
I remind you that only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have properly logged in with their patrol numbers or username will be able to see on this all motions being brought forth at this meeting and will be asked to vote on each business item. I remind you that if you are a registered shareholder and you have already voted by proxy, you do not need to vote again, unless you want to change your vote. If you plan to vote at the meeting, you may choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait to cast your vote until after an item is discussed. Once discussion on all items of business, Before the virtual meeting is concluded, I will give registered shareholders and proxy holders one final opportunity to enter their votes on the open polls. If they haven't already done so, and then declare voting closed on all resolutions.
Devotes simply click on year 4 or withhold or against as applicable. A confirmation message will appear to show your vote has been received to change your vote simply change your selection. That's for me. I'm in a meeting. When the poll closes, the votes submitted on each resolution item will be recorded through the virtual meeting platform.
Total's in favor or against or withheld as the case may be for each resolution item will be tallied the voting is completed. Once the polls have closed, I will report on the outcome of the motion. The final results of the polls will be reported in this Goodyear's report and will be posted on our SEDAR profile. File. And now to clear the polls open on all resolutions including the Circular.
The first animal business is the presentation to shareholders of the consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2019, and the auditors report on the financial statements as required by the British Columbia Corporation Act. The financial statements were mailed to shareholders on May 11, 2020 and are available on SEDAR. An extra copies of the statements are available shareholders upon request. 3 representatives of the auditor are attending the meeting today. If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions with the auditor, Lynn Wattsworth, Tristan Shaw, and Melanie Matthews of Pricewaterhouse PERS LOP charter accounts are available to respond.
The next item of business is to set the of directors. Mr. Chair, my name is Roger Roche, and I am, registered shareholder. And I moved at the number of directors, be set at 9. Are there any questions or discussion on the motion?
If there are no questions or discussions, I direct that a poll be conducted on the motion and that the scrutiny report, the result If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. The next item of business is the election of directors. The nine persons proposed by management for election are listed in the Circular. All of them have indicated their willingness to service directors for the ensuing year. In accordance with the company's advanced notice policy nominations for directors other than those proposed by management must have been given to the secretary of the company by May 13, 2020.
As no such as nominations were received, management's nominees for election are the only persons minute to be nominated for election. Could I please have nominations for management's proposed directors? Mr. Cherari Nominate the following persons for election as directors. Clive Johnson Robert Cross, Robert Gaitan, Jerry Corpin, on Ganyman Tishi, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson, Robin Weisman, and Leanne Kinney.
I would ask for a motion that the 9 persons nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the termination of the next annual general meeting shoulders or until their successors are elected or appointed. I saw a move? I directed a pool we conducted on the motion and that the scrutineers report and that the Scootenier report and the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. The auditor of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP chart of ones.
Management proposes that it be reappointed until the next Annual General Meeting. May I now have a motion that the auditor be appointed then that the directors are authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor. I assume who? Are there any questions or discussions on the motion. If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll will be conducted on the motion and that the scrutineer report the results.
If you haven't already cast your vote, please cast your vote now. The next item of business is to consider and if deemed advisable, pass a resolution of proving the amendment to the restricted share unit plan. The background behind this motion, a summary of the proposed amendment and the proposed form of resolution, are set out on page 9 of the Circular. The board of directors recommends that show us both for the resolution of proven the amendment to the restricted share unit plan. To take effect, the resolution approved in the amendment must be approved by majority that the votes cast through the virtual meeting platform or by proxy.
May I have a motion to approve the amendment to the restricted share unit plan in the form of the resolution set out on page 9 of the Circular? I saw who? Are there any questions or discussion with respect to this motion? If there are no questions or discussion, I direct that a poll will be conducted on the motion and to the scrutiny report the results. If you haven't already cast your vote, cast your vote now.
The next item of business is to consider and if deemed advisable passive resolution on a non binding advisory base accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. The background behind this motion form of the non binding advisory resolution are set out on page 910 of this Circular. In addition, a detailed discussion of the company's executive compensation program, is set forth in the executive compensation section of the Circular. The board of directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution on a non binding advisory basis the company's approach to the executive compensation as disclosed in the Circular. As this is an advisory vote results will not be binding upon the board.
However, the board will take the results on the vote into account as appropriate when considering future executive compensation policies. Procedures and decisions. May I have a motion to approve on a non binding advisory basis the form of the resolution set on on page 10 of the Circular, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation. Are there any questions or discussion with respect to this resolution? So If there are no questions or discussions, I direct that a poll will be conducted on the motion and that the scrutiny report the results.
If you haven't already cast your please cast your vote now. That concludes the matters to be voted on. For those registered shareholders and proxy holders who have not voted on all the resolutions for which the polls remain open, please do so now as we'll shortly close all such polls. The polls on all such resolutions are now closed. I direct the school near provide a report on the results polls.
I now have the preliminary results for the matter set forth. Scoutinier's report for the matters set forth in the Circular. Based on these preliminary results in the Scoutinier's report, I declare that the number of directors of the company has been set at 9. As majority of the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated, the 9 persons nominated have been elected as directors of the company. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP chart of the comes has been reappointed as the auditor until the next annual general meeting and the directors be authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor.
Company has been carried. And the resolution on a non binding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation has been carried After the meeting upon receipt of the Finance Guneer support on the polls conducted during this meeting, Sorry. I got some wrong there. I'll direct the recording secretary to a Chast's report of the scrutineers to the minutes of the meeting. All of the business for which this meeting it was called has been completed.
Following termination of this formal part of the meeting, registered shareholders and proxy holders to ask questions or make comments, we'll be invited to do so. May I have a motion to terminate the meeting? Based on the preliminary results, I look here the motion carried in the formal part of this meeting is now terminated. I would people who have any questions to perhaps or wait until we finish the informal presentation, which we'll begin now. After that, we can answer hopefully all of your questions.
Thank you for your attention for the formal part of the meeting. We're gonna, give you a little review and presentation of 2019 and a little bit about how we're doing so far in 2020. 1 on the screen right now is a cautionary statement slide number 4. And this is a very detailed slide that basically says that certain things that going to say here today will be forward looking and therefore may be subject to change. Slide 5 shows you where we are around the world.
Of course, Vancouver being the head office. Our 3 producing mines in Mali and Namibia, Fekola and Mali, Ochicola and Namibia, and the Masbate mine in the Philippines, and our development project in Columbia Gramalote, and also some exploration development projects in Burkina Fasil. Want to take you through a few of the highlights. I'm going to Bill Lytle's going to get up and talk to you in not too exhaustive detail. We'll give you some color in for how we're doing in operations, how we've done in 2019.
And, and, Mike's going to come up and talk about the financial side how we're doing financially and how we did in 2019. 2019 was an extraordinary year for for B2Gold. For the 11th year in a row, we had record gold production. We produced just under a 1,000,000 ounces of gold in 2019. We also realized production from Fekola, Masbanyo Jacobo all exceeded all three mines exceeded the upper end of their respective 2019 production guidance range.
So tremendous performance. Our costs remain low. Consolidated cash operating costs came in at 5.12 for 2019, which was below our guidance, consolidated all in sustaining costs of $8.62 per ounce. This was in the middle of our in the middle of our guidance of between $8.35 $8.75 per ounce. Consolidated gold revenues from continuing operations was 1.15 $6,000,000,000, an increase of $105,000,000 or 10 percent over 2018.
Solidating cash flows from operating activities of $492,000,000. Net income attributable to the shareholders of the company of $293,000,000 or 29 a share. Adjusted net income attributable to the shoulders of the company of $238,000,000 or $0.23 a share. The Fekola mine exceeded 1,000,000 ounces of total gold production 1 year ahead of the original production schedule, you'll hear Bill talk about the Coca Cola the dramatic success that that project has been as a great mine to start with and what we've done to dramatically increase the value of Fekola to our shareholders through expiration and expansion of the facilities. The expansion study we came up with in the PEA during 2019 clearly suggested that it made a lot of sense a bit of a no brainer to expand Fekola.
But part of that was possible because of the way we built Fekola in the first place, which is what we tend to do, build Mills that have the potential to expand at very low cost. If you believe you have the potential for exploration success, Bill will speak to that a little bit as well. We also started construction of a a Fekola solar power plant. I'm sure Bill will touch on that. This is, going to be as far as we know, the largest hybrid solar and heavy fuel oil plant in the world and it's our second.
We built one at a few years back. In Namibia at the Otjikoto mine. So on the cutting edge of green technology in our industry and generally as well, we're very excited about those those projects and the benefits, the environmental upside and the financial upside. During 2019, we amended our was agreement with AngloGold Ashanti who's our joint venture partner on the Gramalote Project in Columbia. It's a fiftyfifty joint venture with the new agreement with AngloGold Ashanti, B2Gold was a appointed manager operator of the Gramalote project.
You'll hear a little bit from Bill. We're getting pretty excited about Gramalote. And we'll be producing a full feasibility study in the first quarter of next year. We we are very positive on the The Gramalote could very well be the next mine that we build. We'll have those results in the first quarter of next year and Bill will tell you some of the reasons why we like it.
We also came up with an updated Permian economic assessment for Gramalote which showed some good economics, which once again Bill will speak to as well. We did sell the or change our ownership structure for our Nicaragua assets via La Mona, the Libertad mines in Nicaragua. Those are the first two projects we started out with 12 years ago and be too gold. The El Limon mine was an underground mine which needed quite a bit of work. We improved that dramatically and had great exploration success turned it into a good mine with a long mine life.
The Libertad mine, we built a new mill there and once again, enjoyed great performance and exploration success. Nicaragua was a great country for us to be in. We were very successful and it was very good for Nicaragua as well. Over the over the 12 years or so. But we decided, last year that the Nicaragua assets were a little small for the kind of projects that Beach Gold has on to and the kind of size of the minds that we're building.
We like Nicaragua. We love the people of Nicaragua and have great employees there. So we found what we thought was an elegant solution which was for us to move on to the bigger mix that we're have been building and hope to continue to be building and developing, but let another company step in called Caliber Mining in to Nicaragua. So we've ended our interest in the Nicaragua assets into Caliber. It's around $100,000,000 deal, but we did it becoming significant shareholders caliber around 34% of the shares.
We would really care about our people and it was very important our legacy for our legacy and for our boys, 2000 employees in Nicaragua that they, they were taken care of and had a good future going forward. So it worked out very well because Caliber was exploration company that expired to be a mining company, and they put together a very impressive, in addition to their good exploration team, they put together an impressive, group of executives with good experience in mining construction and production. So all of our employees switched over to Caliber. It was a really, elegant solution where they continue and then Caliber is doing a good job and we're happy to be a 34% shareholder. And we're very confident that they will succeed with the Nicaragua mines and we'll continue to advance the projects and the company.
So we're happy to be shoulders of of caliber. And they have, I think, a very similar corporate culture to us when it comes down to CSR and the way we treat our people. They're very much similar mine. They've been involved in exploration in Nicaragua for over 10 years. In the fourth quarter of last year, we did something we've always aspired to do, which is to declare a dividend for our shareholders at $0.01 a share.
We were thinking of looking at that dividend at the end of this year probably in fourth quarter to consider whether it was appropriate to increase it given the dramatic increase in our Cash from operations and our free cash flow. Things have gone so well and of course, the gold price helps, but things have gone so well that we've actually announced today that we're doubling that dividend to a $0.02 a common share That seems to be very popular with our shareholders and the whole objective and strategy of the company will continue to be to grow the company some of the cash flow that we earned for the hard work of producing gold and use that cash flow to find more gold mines and build more gold mines, but use a portion of it to reward our shareholders by paying a dividend That's our strategy, our philosophy and I'm thrilled that we're taking steps towards that very rapidly. Mike's going to talk about our financial position, which exceptional. We have been paying down a lot of debt. We paid down $220,000,000 of debt in 2019.
Based on our current assumptions, we're on track to be net debt free by the end of June 2020 this year. That's a great place to be. We also continued over the tremendous exploration program at Fekola since we when we acquired Fekola it had about 4,000,000 ounces in gold resources. We've doubled that now through exploration which is one of the reasons why we've gone through 2 significant expansions. The second one's happening now of the Fekola Mill.
And Tom's going to talk a later here about some of the reason why Tom and his team are so excited about the additional exploration upside. Around Fekola and also in the Anaconda area, some 20 Kilometers North and some of the other exploration projects that we're excited about. We've always done very well in exploration in our history and the cheapest ounces will always be the ones you find and we'll continue and have a great success around all the mines and finding additional gold in while making significant discoveries elsewhere as well. So those are some of the highlights and the guys will flush it out. I don't want to steal their thunder the things they're going to talk about.
But I just put this slide up because we always do and this is our growth profile for the last 12 years. It is remarkable to to think back to just a little over 12 years ago, we created Beach of Gold as a private company, the founders and put up some of our own money to create the company just 12 years ago. So no production, no market cap. It's been quite a journey over the 12 years as we've acquired a project after project built mines acquired Masbate and dramatically improved the mine and continued on this remarkable path of growth and now see us as a 1,000,000 ounce of your producer with a market kept today of around US7 $1,000,000,000 or over US5 $1,000,000,000. A remarkable story of success and we're going to look a little bit into 2020 today as well and talk to you about the plans going forward.
When people look at the slide and I get asked a lot and we've done a lot of marketing lately being helping it virtually, but a lot of marketing with institutions, some of them generalist funds who probably never about a gold company before considering buying some exposure to gold in this rather volatile world that we live in today. And I'll get as people ask some is there a secret sauce? What's the real reasons behind this success? And I do think the keys and I think we've really come to realize that right now going through this, coronavirus. I think the real keys are experience and culture.
And the experience factor of our group, the remarkable experience and you think it's something like 280 years that the executive team have worked in the mining industry, but not just in the gold mining industry, but in the gold mining industry together, 280 years. And that's experiencing everything from expiration to permitting to to negotiating deals to dealing with governments to, CSR ESG Construction production, finance, reclamation, and all of those things. So we have been very good at being able to go around the world to different places and the culture of the country we're in, respect the culture we're in. And it comes down to we talked about it a lot, but I really think the key to our success at this point and the key to our success, remarkable success during the COVID-nineteen pandemic is largely because of this experience when you build gold mines in the past when we were beam of gold, in the forest of Russia where you made 4 100 kilometers of ice roads every year to get your equipments in you have a 5 month window and cheat and we've done all sorts of remarkable challenges logistically and otherwise all over the world in various countries.
Looking for gold or building mines. But the culture is at the heart of it. That culture of fairness respect and transparency that we try to live with every day, I think it's paid dividends dramatically in our ability to grow the company so rapidly yet so well and so responsibly, but it really pays dividends. I think particularly a time like this. There's a great trust relationship between B2Gold.
It's employees the communities in which we work and the governments both local and federally in the countries we work. We've been able to continue to extremely well in all levels of performance focused on safety and health initially as always the top priority during the last 4 5 months of dealing with the COVID epidemic, and you'll hear more about that from Bill. So one of the I think the secret sauce here is about experience and culture and those 2 things together, they equal trust. And we have a great trust relationship. All the countries we work in, we don't have a safety net, but just print more currency and dish it out to their citizens.
There was some sizing the gold mining or the mining industry for forcing people to work while, you know, we stayed home and work from home, but forcing people to work for profit for our gains and the gains of our shareholders at potentially their expense of their health. In our case and many other companies that couldn't be floated from the truth, The responsible way that we've been able to continue to run the mines at the request of the government and our employees. We all have something in common. We all want to keep mining if we can do it safely. These governments desperately need the revenue from taxation.
The people desperately need the jobs and everyone was on the same page. That's trust. That's mute trust and it's having a goal. And I think working together so well with these governments and people and employees for so many years has allowed us to accomplish that. So if anyone tries to tell that we're being irresponsible by continuing to mine, you can tell them it's the absolute opposite of that.
There are certain people that would like to see no mining in the Well, I hope they're ready to go back and live in caves because until we're ready to do that, we need certain metals in the world, but we can do it responsibly. And our company and many others are proof that it can be done responsible Just want to talk a little bit before I hand it over to Bill on operations. And how it compares to the rest of the sector. This slide shows you our production growth, from 2016 to 2019. That's quite pelling especially given the the rest of our competitors.
What we did was already contrarian. You've heard me save a lot. Contrarian in the sense that we were building mines and doing deals and building mines when really very few were doing it over the last 5 years or so. And now we really benefit from that with the Jacobo, Fekola, and Masbate as well. We were contrarian.
We stepped up and we decided to maintain our long term corporate strategy which was to continue to build the company with through accretive acquisitions and exploration success. And dare to go and build mines when building gold mines was very out of favor mainly because of and sadly the failings of so many others in attempting to build mines. It was unpopular, but we did it because we believed it was what our shoulders want us to do in the longer term. So we're up 87% in terms of gold production from 2016, 2019. And if you see from many of our competitors, they were negative or or marginally higher.
In terms of it's been rewarding to see over the last year and also into this year, the the the results of what we've done in terms of the mines and all the work we've done be reflected in the value of the company. Now I've been predicting a rerating on B2Gold shareprints for years. I was way wrong in my prediction when but I was ultimately right, I suppose. I didn't believe you could build in my like Fekola and not have a dramatic impact on the value of your company and therefore your share price, but it was a stubborn market and we are contrarian. It took a long time.
So in 2019, we're up about 34% from the start of the year to the end of the year in terms of our share price and our market capitalized And since that time, we're up about another 34%. So up up almost 70% between the 1 2019, to today seeing a market cap rise to over US5 $1,000,000,000 today and US7 $1,000,000,000 Canadian today. It's been great to see that. Now obviously sending to you with the gold price, but it's not all about that. We were well positioned because of the heavy lifting we did when it was unpopular to benefit from the And it is interesting to note that the average mining analyst target price for the next 12 months would be to gold is around $9 a share Canadian.
So we continue and are very focused on continuing to grow the company. In terms of long term what it's about in the long term. I mentioned we were founders of Beach Gold, and that was one of the founders of Beam Gold a long time before that. And the goal in both of those companies was to was to be international, pursue, be driven by geology, not necessarily geography and try and go around the world and build significant companies that become producers that are very responsible and very profitable. And this slide is pretty dramatic.
It shows the last 10 years from 09 to today and B2Gold share price with an actual increase of 1415 percent if he bought the shares at that time 10 years ago. So one of the remarkable growth stories in our sector and we're very proud of this accomplishment and it's really nice to see it finally reflected in in the marketplace. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Bill. I'll make just a very few summary remarks at the end, but I'm going to hand it over to Bill Lila, Bill is our senior VP operations done a fantastic job with a great team and continuing to build on the engineering team. Bill has been with us for a time he was involved in Bima in Russia and the Far East of Russia helping us do the Julian of mine and the Cupo mine in Russia.
So he's been with our group a long time and has really risen up through the ranks over the last number of years and has done an excellent job as senior VP operations and the results basically speak to themselves, but I'll let Bill speak to them.
Okay. I know that Clive Jess had this slide up, but I think it's really appropriate To start with, if you remember my thesis last year during the 2019 AGM, where we were talking about 2018 and before, I put forth the concept that we had delivered on our promises and exceeded expectations, and I showed a lot of graphs very similar to this showing how we ramped up and how we continued to perform and outperform expectations. Today, I'm gonna talk about 2019, and I believe that I will show quite conclusively that that trend continues. As far as exceeding expectation. But 2019 was an interesting year for B2 in the sense that we weren't building something.
We weren't ramping something up. We weren't commissioning something. And so we talked amongst ourselves on how do we show really what we did, and it really revolves on the operation side about value engineering. So today, I'm going to present to you not only of course our outstanding results for 2019, but also how we created value in 2019, not only for 2019, also going forward into the future. Additionally, I'm gonna talk about the first half of twenty twenty.
I know that the whole year's the whole AGM is supposed to be about 2019 But I think it's important to understand really what you're getting when you get B2 about how we actually manage in a time of crisis. And this is not only for operations. Ken Jones, our director of sustainability we'll be talking later on, on environmental and sustainability. Nannette Cronart, our director of human resources will be talking about HR. So overall, globally, I wanna put forth put forth the value engineering concept As Clive pointed out, record production in 2019, Fekola mine outperformed had had very high throughput or record throughput.
The Masbate mine expanded. We expanded the Masbody mine and and commissioned that in 20 at the beginning of 2019. The Otjikoto gold mine was up 10,000 ounces over where they were in 2018. And, of course, Clive talked about how we rationalize the the sale of the Nicaragua assets. As I said, in 2019, we took a look inward and how do we how do we improve our existing operations?
And that was led by our director of projects, Peter Montano, Randy Reichardt, VP of Operations, John Rahala, the EP of metallurgy. One of the key things we did in 2019 is we fast tracked the PEA into detailed design and ultimately into construction, during the course of 2019. And this played a key, a key role when I talk about 2020 and how we're doing and how we're getting where we are today. It was that decision to to really put forth the effort to go from a PEA all the way into construction, in 1 year, which which is the which is the basis of that. In particular, we we actually ordered our mining fleet to expand the double the mining fleet of Fekola in June of last year.
At the Masbody mine, we expanded the mill. This allowed us, even though we're getting into a harder material deeper in the pit, this allowed us to tint to up our throughput or to maintain our throughput and keep us at 200,000 ounces a year. And at Otjikoto, we took a look at how could we improve the economics? And so we looked took a look at some of our higher strip years later on and decided that it was more economic to develop an underground mind. Not only does that give us in the short term additional ounces, and we'll talk about that when we get to Otjikoto, but it also also offers us some real upside for additional down down plunge exploration at Otjikoto.
And last but not least, we'll talk a little bit about development projects at being Gramalote, Graham Malote, is a 5050 joint venture with AngloGold Ashanti, which we took management of in January of this year. And I'll talk about how that has progressed throughout the year. This just quickly shows what our projections were for 2020. The fact that we're talking about a 1,000,000 to 1,055,000 ounces per year for this year, as of today, I'm happy to say that about operations. You can't talk about operations in isolation.
It was actually very poetic that Clive, one of the first things he said, was health and safety above everything. We don't actually practice that, and he didn't tell me who's gonna say that. But right here at the beginning, I wanted to highlight our health and safety track record. If if you look at some of these statistics, you know, 88% reduction in lost time injury frequency rate, 83% reduction in injury severity. These are pretty, pretty significant numbers.
But the one that is really kinda surprising are really amazing to me. If you look at the last one, this year, we've had one lost time accident for the entire year. This against backdrop of COVID-nineteen, the pandemic where we've had people, remaining on-site for long periods of time. It really speaks to our systems that we have in place and the dedication of our employees to maintain to to ensure that each and every day employees go home safe to their families. And I wanted to put this slide up because I wanted to talk about everyone always asks what does that mean this this reduction in LTIFR?
What does it how does it compare to the rest of industry? And so we actually looked at some of the publicly available data to see where we would place And the reality is is we would be definitely at the top of our industry, if not the top of our industry. There there's two areas that are high in green 1 is for 2019 if you include all of all of our operations to include the Nicaragua assets. Now if you pull those out, with our current 3 operations, you'll see that we're down at a frequency rate of 0.1, which is really industry leading. Now I'm gonna turn my attention to each and every operation individually.
I wanted these slides at the beginning of each slide. I just wanted to commend and thank the people that are on the ground there, Mohammed Diorra, who's the country manager in Mali and Ray Mead, who's the general manager at Fekola, typically They would be coming here to give this speech, but because of of the, the, the COVID-nineteen pandemic, they weren't able to make today. So I'm giving the speech in their stead. But I need to recognize up front that it's really these guys are the ones that are leading the charge. Starting again with health and safety.
If you look at Fekola. They've had a great run. They they remember this is this actually has 2, additional items. 1 is the COVID-nineteen team backdrop, but also we have a major construction project going on there. And so construction is where a lot of times you do things which are non non routine and and they have the potential for accidents.
So we've had one lost time accident at the Fekola project and zero lost accidents during construction, 275 days, now of training the Molly workforce into an internationally recognized management system. So we've gone through we've gone from commissioning into now creating a a robust, system which, which helps protect our employees. I wanted to quickly maybe take a look back because I think it's important to understand where we've come from in this project. This project was designed originally back in 2014, and when we started construction in 2015 as a 4,000,000 ton per annum project, with with a resource, of 4,380,000 ounces. And we have now we expanded that during construction 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 tons per annum.
And then in 2019, we made the decision. We did a we did a value engineering proposition. Where we looked at the overall, operation, the overall enterprise, and we did an enterprise optimization where we looked at mining milling, tailings, disposals, social issues, environmental issues, and basically, it tried to optimize the entire facility. And what that study did is it actually indicated 2 things. One that we should expand the mill because we had additional capacity.
We've so we made the decision to expand to 7,500,000 tons per annum, but it also, brought forth the proposition that we should immediately double the size of our mining fleet and bring some of the ounces forward. So both of those were approved by the board. And we we started construction at the end of last year and now we're into this year. If you look at what the expansion like in in aggregate, the mining fleet expansion was supposed to be was supposed to drive the ounces for 2020. We had to have by the end of Q1, we had to have the fleet, in operation.
That because of that, we ordered, as I said earlier, the equipment in June, The mining fleet ordered was ordered and arrived early. So we were able to put the mining fleet into production a little bit early, and I happy to say that the fir the the 1st phase of the fleet has been operating now for almost 3 months, and the second the second phase of the fleet is on-site now and be commissioning. So that is actually ahead of schedule. The processing expansion, under the direction of of John Rahala and and the guy on-site, Tom Carter, that remains on schedule. When when the COVID-nineteen outbreak hit, we talked to all of our construction personnel and and gave them the opportunity.
Would you like to stay on-site knowing that it could be a longer shift, or do you wanna do you wanna go home? Almost to a person, they decided that they would stay. And so all of the material, equipment is on-site, and all of all of the pieces are in place to finish that. By the end of Q3. Additionally, as part of that, we talk about expanding the tailings facility.
That's not necessarily because of the expansion. That's because of the expansion plus. John Rahala always talks about the fact that what we're really designing is we're not designing 7a half 1,000,000 tons per annum. We're designing plus whatever we think the optimum is plus 1,500,000 tons per annum. So with that in mind, we didn't want to get caught off-site not being able to place our waste and so we opted to do a double tailings lift.
This year, that has been completed materially ahead of the rainy season. Ahead of schedule and under budget. And then the last the last part of the last component is the solar plant. The solar plant is something that is not necessary to support the expansion. The solar plant was designed by Dennis Stansbury, really to look at reducing our costs long term.
And so, we started it. It's got very good economics, but we felt that during the COVID-nineteen pandemic, because we went to an island facility, which I'll talk about in a minute. We needed the extra space. So we actually halted that temporarily and as soon as the expansion of of the mill gets completed, we'll bring those guys back on right. And within 3 to 6 months, we'll be back and and have that up and running.
And then last but not least, you're gonna see some slides on production But they don't include some of the, opportunities on the upside, some of the exploration success, which I know Tom is gonna talk about. So I'll leave those alone for now. So if you talk about how are we doing 2019, we had a record year there, uh,455,000 ounces, but 2020, we remain on track to beat that and then some. So we we've we've projected 600,000 to 620,000 ounces. We've maintained that guidance despite everything that's happening in the world.
And how did we do that? So when the COVID-nineteen outbreak occurred, the Molly and government indicated to us that we were considered an essential industry. We work with the union. We work with the communities. We work with the people on-site and came up with a plan, and that plan revolved around creating an island type where all of our employees would basically be tested, get on-site be isolated, be quarantined on-site And then when we do a shift rotation, they would be tested when they come out, and the next group would be tested when they'd be going in.
We have taken the step of of purchasing our own PCR, COVID-nineteen virus testing equipment, which is arriving on-site hopefully next week. So operationally, on the mill side, no change, recovery, no change. The grade has been very good and has said, we continue we continue to project that, that 600,000 to 620,000 ounces for the year. Just briefly on a B2 sometimes actually at these AGMs has a very long CSR where where we we talk about the very positive things we're doing community. And because of because of COVID-nineteen and the fact that we couldn't get everybody into Vancouver, we've kind of shortened that.
But I think there are a couple projects which really which are new, which really, deserve some attention. And one is a signature project, which is being led by, the Malian, a CSR specialist there on the ground. The concept is is is in in Western Molly, there's a huge population of artisanal minors. Alright? This includes everybody from from grandparents, parents, all the way down to kids.
And so we're looking for ways to move these people out of this dangerous artisanal mining activity a legal activity into something which can not only create, a a future for them, but it can also create food security for the region. And so what we've done here is we've developed what we're calling the integrated rural and agricultural development And so that's an agricultural develop agricultural development of almost 500 hectares where we're talking about not only not only crop growth, but also husbandry, poultry, you know, all of all the various levels, integrated levels of agriculture This, of course, will will create jobs, but it also will create value for the land, which is there and create food security for for the population. Our initial estimates, we completed a, preliminary feasibility. Our our initial estimates is more than 2000 people will be employed, collaterially from what we're doing at the mine in this project. The concept is we'll have the feasibility done by the end of this year, and we're gonna move right into construction of that phase 1, for next year.
Moving on to the Philippines. Once again, you can't really talk about what we're doing here without talking about the the key people that are in country. That being Chris Acosta, who's the president there. He's he's in Macati in the Philippines, and Dan Moore, who's general manager on-site. Just a quick timeline of of where we've where we've come from.
Just so you remember, we started this out in 2013. Once again, we we've done some value engineering where we replaced the sag mill early on. We have continuously succeeded the budget there. And then as I said, we actually expanded the mill in 2019, on schedule. Talking about health and safety, the Philippines has had an amazing run.
They've got a very staff there. They are now running up onto approximately 5 60 days without a lost time accident. Which in any company would be amazing, in B2Gold. It's actually right now on our 2nd best record, if you behind Otjikoto. So very proud of what they're doing there.
Looking at the project history and development, talking about value engineering, This used to be a contract mine operation. We felt that we could do it better. So we purchased their equipment and we moved to owner operation, and it has an our our mining has definitely improved. We upgraded the mill. We expanded the mill in 2019.
And what we're talking about is 200 to 210,000 ounces this year. This, we see going on for quite a number of years. And after that, we'll be able to process low grade stockpile. So we have a long mine life left at Fate. We do it.
We're in the process of of permitting old lady in blue courts right now, which are the next phases that we'll see over the next couple of years. Just looking at operating and time and crisis. So the Philippines was hit very hard by the COVID 18 outbreak, and they went to a full self isolation. But once again, they did declare mining and essential industry. And we worked with the governor within our province to make sure that we can continue to operate.
We worked with we worked with a voluntary staff there. To continue operating. We did for a short period, reduce the mining or stop the mining, while while we ensured that we were able to bring fuel on-site as soon as that happened, we've we've fired up the mining equipment and continue to operate. So there, we continue to project 202 210,000 ounces. We have looked at that short term period of of when we weren't mining.
To make sure it didn't impact our long term ounces, and and we see no change to our annual guidance there. Ken will talk once again more about Ken Jones, our director of, Sustainability. We'll talk a little bit about what we're doing on on the CSR or on the COVID 19 side. And on CSR side. But it is important to know that that that in the Philippines, food security for the island was once again the critical issue.
And so we we did very early on commit with the governor not only to work on medical supplies, but also to provide we talked about last year, this reef ball project where we're rebuilding the reef, in, in, in a protected area just outside the island of Masbate. And that included more than 2000 plugs in almost 1500 direct corals planted in 2019. Okay. Okay. So Otjikoto Otjikoto is being run now by Eric Bernard, who's the acting general manager.
The country manager and managing director is Mark Daugh, who who previously was the, general manager for the site or was managing the site. Just a a very quick timeline of of how we got to where we're at. This one's in string. So this was a precursor to what we did at Fekola here. We started out at 2a half 1000000 tons per annum.
And then when we finished and commissioned, we immediately to talking about expanding the plant. And so we went from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 tons. After that, the mill has operated so well. We're currently running and budgeting at 3,400,000 tons per annum. Looking at health and safety, as I said, an absolute stellar year, stellar 2 years from Otjikoto.
They're now 2 plus years, LTI free. They they have implemented through the there's a there's a health and safety manager by the name of James White that we hired. They've implemented western best practices there. And what you can see is a pure culture shift away from kind of the, maybe, the historical African mining, mentality to a Western Health safety mentality. Just running through very quickly, some things I already talked about.
The first the first two bullets here, we we talked about expanding in in pouring gold than doubling the 3,000,000 tons. What we're really talking about now is how do we get to the next step? What happens next? Right? This this is something that for the next 10 years, you could run a steady state and it'd be, 165 k operation all day long.
But what we talk about is we talk about a couple things for value engineering. 1, we talked about changing the open pit to an underground where we can get some of the higher grade ounces in to be blended with with their low grade stockpile. We also installed a solar plant there. As part of as part of the underground study, It came back very it came back positive at the end of 2019, and so we're in the process of implementing that. Looking at looking at Otjikoto, once again, operating the time of crisis for 2020, what you can see is that in Namibia, and Namibia has has yet to really be hit by COVID 19.
Very early on, they recognize that it could be a real problem for their country. I think right now they're about 20 cases or maybe even 25 cases at this point, within the country, but they realize because most of their people are located in informal settlements without access to, water and and basic hygiene conditions that they needed to really step on it. And so they put a quarantine in place where they where they where they shut down the major population centers that has recently been lifted. But nonetheless, we continue to operate. We did shut down our mining fleet for a while.
Or we didn't shut down the whole mining fleet. We shut down our waste stripping mining fleet and continue to mine ore, and we continue to process a mill through the mill or process tons through the mill. The reality is is that we continue to project what we guided at the beginning of the year 165 to 175. I put this slide up just because I wanted to talk a little bit about the value engineering. And it it's this is really kinda comes through crystal clear in this one.
If you so you you look at the graph, you can see in 2015 is where we started production. And if you remember, feasibility for Otjikoto had something like, I think it was about 130,000 ounces over 12 years. That was the mine life. We're now 5 years into it, and we're projecting really through 2029. So another 10 years of mine life So 15 years.
But more importantly, if you look, the first discrepancy between the upper and lower bounds there, that's where expanded the mill, and that's where we increased the recoveries from what what the feasibility was of 95% to 98 percent. And then if you follow the green line so the green line is really what we were projecting when we submitted 2019 annual information flyer, which basically that that in that didn't include the full underground development. The yellow line is what's gonna happen when we implement the underground development. So we're talking about really starting in 22 2022 from going between from 165 to more than 200,000 ounces per year. The you probably notice that line cuts off at 2024, and that's because I can't show you what we think is gonna happen with a resource.
Right? So there there is the potential down plunge to continue this, that would be continued to be, processed with the low grade ounces through 2029. Namibia is known for their CSR initiatives, so I'm not gonna we we talk all the time about some of the amazing things they do. But they really they really run the full gamut. And they they get a lot of attention on some of their environmental environmental issues, things like the the Rhino Gold Bar coin or Rhino Gold Bar, where we we don't donate a 1000 ounces, to save the the maybe in Black rhino.
But that's not all they do there. They have a very strong, CSR department, which looks at environment, health and safety, development of small to medium enterprises, and talking about how to improve the lives of everyday Namibians. The last project I'm gonna talk about is not an operational project. It's it's a development project, and this this project is currently being managed by Dale Craig. Dale Craig is the VP of Operations who voluntarily, put his hand up to go down and manage this project.
And it's really important because One of the things that B2 does is we're very flat, very flat structure. It allows us to make decisions relatively quickly, and we know we've got a guy on the ground who knows what's going on. I think everyone's aware of where this project is located at. It's located in in the Antioch region of Northwestern Columbia. Clive likes to always say that if if you were gonna spot in the country or to build a mine.
This would absolutely be the place. It's a it's a project that's been in our books for a long time, and it was previously managed by AngloGold. They did a lot of good work. They spent 10 years developing this thing. And then in the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, we agreed with them that we would become the manager.
We would complete the feasibility. And if it's positive, we would be the people going forward to build and operate this. So in 2020, we we commenced at the beginning 20, we begin we began to look at the feasibility study. We immediately completed a preliminary economic assessment. That economic assessment was positive.
We we ran it at $13.50 goal with an percent IRR, but I put up the graph here which shows what would happen if if it's kind of at current gold prices. This is a very robust project. And we continue to develop feasibility study. Now, there's a couple things about this, which, which is interesting. Know that it's gotten kind of a a bad rep because people talk about maybe it's too low grade a grant, you know, 1 gram per ton.
But the reality is you can't just look at it as as a low grade deposit because this thing has a very good stripping ratio. This thing has very good metallurgy. It has very good infrastructure. The power costs we're talking about are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7¢ a kilowatt hour versus more than double that for some of our projects in Africa. So when you take all that into into effect, we feel very strongly that this has a very real potential to be our next project.
And so we continue to developed a project. Right now we're in the process of running through the various sections of feasibility study. Obviously, key is to is to drill off the resource, to indicate it. So we so we can complete a feasibility study. But we've also made very good progress in in front COVID-nineteen, we were able to get our metallurgical samples out of the country.
So those are at the lab in in in Canada. Most of the metallurgical testing work has been done. We we are currently engaged with Lycapodium out of Australia to do to do the the mill engineering. That process remains on schedule. The mining's the mining fleet size has been sized.
We've we've tested a lot of the other assumptions that AngloGold has had, and and to date, I I'm happy to report that we don't see anything which is which we see as a critical flaw so far in the feasibility study. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Mike Salmon. Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Bill. Well, I think, maybe you start. I think you've just heard, an overview there of some operations and and operating results are in great shape. So I'm gonna paint a picture now also of the company and its financial health, which police report is in very good shape with excellent liquidity. I'm gonna run over, 19 Results again, just summarize them again.
You've heard a little bit from each of the speakers so far related to that. Then talk a bit about our guidance for 2020 and how we've done so far in Q1 and then finish just with a bit of a discussion as to where we are, balance sheet wise, not cash Wise and DadWise. So firstly, on the production side, for 2019, 2019 was a record production year in total 980,000 ounces. That's a record annual total for the company. I should point out that that includes 11,000 ounces being our attributable share of Caliber's results once we restructured the company in, late 2019 as Clive has already discussed.
And that beat our range, our our guidance range was 935,000 to 975,000 ounces. So 9.80, we came in above our our overall range, and it's the 11th consecutive year that the company has grown production wise. And Again, if you look at the individual, operations, they all beat the upper end of the range for cola455,000 ounces or jikoto 177,000 ounces and Masbate 217,000 ounces. And when you take that record production and apply to operating results. You can see it reflected in the excellent cost results.
So firstly, cash costs, On a consolidated basis, it's actually $5.12 per ounce produced or $5.19 per ounce sold and that beat the low end of our consolidated range for the for the year, 5 20 to 5 60. On the all in sustaining costs, side, we came in at the midpoint of the range. So and that reflects the low cash costs that we saw, but also some higher royalties than we originally budgeted because we originally budgeted for a much lower gold price when we set it in 2019, but we ended up realizing almost $1400 an So royalties flow into the overall all in sustaining cost, total. So in the end, we came in midpoint of a range between 8 and 875. Revenue wise 1,300,000,000 for the year.
That includes our share of Nicaragua as well for the whole year and sales of 943,000 ounces at at almost $1400 an ounce. And that turn trend translated into excellent, record cash from operating activities, $492,000,000. And, you know, that was $1400 an ounce, basically, for the year. We're seeing even better prices obviously, as we go through this year, and should comment as well that it it it reflects where we are in our strategy. If if you recall, we've mentioned a few times for.
When we were building Fekola, we we we we made a deliberate decision to do it using cash flow from our existing operations and debt. Not to go to the equity markets and dilute the company. So now we for Kohl's up and running, and as you've heard, it's running very, very well. And that along with the excellent results from our other upper means that we're in the 2nd phase of that strategy, which is generating very strong positive cash flows and reduce an overall download. Just move forward now and just, again, reiterate, I think Bill's already talked, about the consolidate again for the year, but just to remind everyone.
So For 2020, we gave the guidance just over a 1,000,000 to 1,555,000 ounces, led by Fekola at close to 6 5-nineteen-six 20, Ms. Batey, 2 to 210, and Ojikoto 165 to 175. Now, we should point out, and we mentioned this in our, when we and our Q1 results that includes that overall consolidated range does include between 450,501,501,000 expected ounces attributable ounces from our share of Caliber's results. Caliber actually announced at the end of Q1 that there were shutting down their Nicaragua operations for a while just to try and get ahead of the COVID pandemic down there. And, But we're still maintaining that guidance even though there is some uncertainty as to when Calvert will start up again.
I think they have returned something recently. And the reason still maintaining our consolidated guidance is that we did so well in Q1 that we think we're well ahead of the game, and we think we can achieve that $1,000,000 plus guidance range. We with or without, further caliber ounces in the current year. Cash cost wise, 415,455, per ounce on a consolidated basis. So that's basically $100 less than we saw in 2019.
And then all sustaining costs 7.80 to 8.20. So not not quite $100 an ounce less than we saw in 2019, and we gotta remember that there are some significant capital campaigns in the current 2020 year, including some, deferred stripping activities at both, Fekola and Otjikoto Projected revenue for 2020, $1,700,000,000, that assumes, a gold price of $1700 an for, basically the last 3 quarters of 2020. And if we assume that same gold price in, we're expecting to generate cash flow from operating activities this year somewhere around the $850,000,000 mark, which, will obviously be another significant record And then just to check-in and see how are we actually doing in Q1, versus that guidance. Well, I think the answer is we're doing very well. It was a record quarter for us.
264,000 ounces is quarterly production record for the company. Again, a reminder that includes 14,000 ounces of BNR share of caliber. And it also included a rack quarterly production from Fekola of 164,000 ounces Fekola and knocked it out of the park, in terms of grade and also it's benefited as Bill discussed from getting that expansion fleet up and running early. As Patty had budget despite, as Bill mentioned, being down for a week, approximately a week, due to fuel shortages at the site, only down temporarily at an been running fully again and Otjikoto benefited from Goodberry coming from Wolfshag. And again, when you look at that, solid production, in terms of the operating results.
Cash cost wise, $389 per ounce produced, our $405 per ounce sold, well below budget, and and below our guidance range for the year, all in sustaining costs even more significantly below budget at $7.21 per ounce, almost a 100 or basically $100 per ounce lower than budget and well below our guidance range. And that all in result reflect the lower cash costs, as it mentioned, but also the timing of some CapEx, there was some CapEx that we expected in Q1 The due to timing differences, it's pushed out to later in the year, but we do still expect to incur it. Our revenue wise, another quarterly record, 3 $80,000,000, based on gold sales of just under 240,000 ounces at an average gold price of just under announced. And as you all have seen in in the gold price since the end of Q1, I mean, it's it's been $1700 per ounce and above. So very encouraging, and that translated for the quarter into $216,000,000 from from operating activities.
So again, well on our way to that estimate of 850 for the full year from operating activities. Then the thing I wanted to comment on, and I think Clive alluded to it at the start of this presentation was just where we are financially that wise and balance sheet wise. So we started the year, with $200,000,000 drawn on our revolver and approximately 60,000,000 outstanding on various equipment loans. And, you know, that was a significant 2019, our the start of the year was a significant debt reduction already. We'd repaid approximately $220,000,000, by the end of the year.
To 'nineteen. And for the current year with the significant cash flows from operating activities, it was our goal, to be debt free to have paid off or certainly to have paid off the revolver by the end of the third quarter. So where we actually got to so far in to Q1 and where we are today is we did pay off $25,000,000 on the revolver throughout the course of Q1. But then as we saw the the the impact the COVID pandemic around the world, we decided to make a precautionary draw on our revolver. So we drew in early April, we drew down 250,000,000 I'd reiterate purely precautionary measure, just till we saw how, things would unwind around the world and and other individual operations.
And as Bill's testified too, the operations have run very well, barely missing a beat all the way through. So that $250,000,000 just got reinvested, with our lending banks, and it's our and it's our expectation that some point later in the year, and we'll certainly have the option, if not, we'll certainly have the option. We think we probably will repay down that revolver, but we continue to watch the cash that you and just how COVID unwinds around the world. Again, as Clive mentioned, where we are by the end of June. So we drew down the revolver about $250,000,000, we have $425,000,000 currently drawn in outstanding.
By the end of this, month, we expect to be in a very solid cash positive net cash positive position, so putting ourselves in great shape if we do choose to pay down the revolver, a some point, during the rest of the year. The other thing I'd mentioned on the, on the debt side is we do have, a plan drawn a cat equipment loan of approximately $40,000,000. Cat's been a great partner of ours as we've gone through various activities at different mine sites. And with the Fekola, Mine expansion and the significant expansion in the fleet. It's our plan to draw approximately $40,000,000 later in the year.
At the end of Q1, we had $208,000,000, cash and cash equivalents, and we continue generate positive cash flow, again, with these excellent gold prices, $1700 plus, and, again, as Clive had mentioned, we did pay our 1st dividend at the end of 2019, we paid another one in March 2020, and we've just announced our next dividend to be paid at the end of this month. Thank you. And with that, I'll pass, the Portiamante, Tom Garrigan, our Senior VP expiration. Thanks,
Michael. We'll just, talk a little bit about expiration for, 2020. We have a budget for expiration for $50,000,000. That expiration despite COVID has continued on in, around all the mine sites. Our early stage expiration, where we have a budget about $16,000,000 has been slowed down a little bit, but we are still carrying on exploration just to a lesser degree.
And that's illustrated here. You know, we've drilled close to 9 1000 meters this year and mainly around our major projects, but we have done a little bit in, Uzbekistan and we'll plan to do some later and some of our other sites as the year goes on. I think I just wanted to illustrate a couple of things with the exploration for, Fekola and also I'll I'll do something Gramalote. Expiration at Fekola has been very, very It's a very prolific area and we feel that there's excellent potential to continue to grow the ounces here and I'm going to show you that in a a minute here. But I want you to just see that, since 2014 or 2015 since we commenced expiration, we've really grown the ounces from around 4,000,000 ounces to over 6,000,000 ounces and produced a 1,000,000 ounces.
So it's a net gain of around 3,000,000 ounces with expiration. And what I'd like to show you here is that, the potential to continue that is is very significant. This is a view of the, the licenses around Fekola the areas I'm going to talk about is Cardinal which is immediately beside the Fekola pit and also the the snakes area or Anaconda which is roughly about 20 kilometers to the north of Fekola. Now at Cardinal, hopefully you can read this on your computer screens, at home, but on Cardinal, It's, comes within five hundred meters of the pit. And I'd like to clean brilliant geology here in in finding this zone, but really it was a part of con nation for a condemnation drilling for a waste dump for the north end of the pit that led to the discovery of cardinal.
And it has led to a real discovery, earlier than on. The expiration this year was focused mainly on the snakes area in Mamba. But as we started getting the cardinal, we realized that this had some size potential to it. And we have now shifted all our drilling further this part of the year onto Cardinal to try and get a completed resource done by the end of the year. As you can see for some of the drilling results, my eyes can't read the screen, but, you know, holes, such as, you know, 126.
We had 11 grams over 24 meters, seven grams over five meters 2 grams over 18 meters, 3 grams over 20 meters. Significant mineralization, and any other camp, obviously next to Fekola is the thick, beautiful intersections of Fekola, but it's still significant enough to bear some, detailed study and So we've aggressively put all our drilling on to this for this part of the year, hope to have a resource, by later this year, early next year. And certainly, I know the engineers are already looking at this in terms of mine planning. And when you look at Cardinal, this is a cross section through Cardinal, you can see that it's not that steeply different, fairly flattening dip in, very amenable to open pit mining thicknesses and multiple zones. We'll have more information on this as we continue drilling through the year.
But suffice to say, we're pretty excited it end as as close as you can get to the mill without actually having it in the mill. The other one, we started going, you know, the year of exploration with the mom expiration, as part of the Yanaconda group. Was the area that we had seen significant sulfide mineralization below saprolite below the 760,000 ounce saprolite resource we had. We had earlier on in the year expanded the saprolite resource. We plan to complete a new resource on that.
Also, hopefully later this year, next year. But the drilling in the sulfide mineralization below mamba has expanded it. Initially, we're looking at 4 or hundred meters long. The sulfide mineralization now now calaver covers about 2 kilometers of strike length, which really shows the significant potential of the not only the Anaconda area but Mohammed specifically. So we're very optimistic that the, you know, the 3,000,000 ounces that have been to Fekola has, with combination cardinal and Anaconda has room for some significant, increase beyond those 3,000,000 ounces.
And this is a cross section through Fekola or so sorry, through, Mamba, and you can see it by the red line both through the saprolite, which is in brown and the other colors which represent the sulfides. That's a very cohesive thick ore body. We'll be using the mine, have low strip ratio, hence the reason for our optimism. Now, the other area mentioned a little bit is the Gramalote area. You know, drilling commenced early this year to bring Gramalote to feasibility level drilling.
We were delayed by, by a couple of months with COVID, but are back now to on-site. You can see from this map, it's a very large area. We've drilled about 20 6000 meters now. As of this morning, we have 12 drills turning. We've only lost about 7 weeks of drilling, drilling the way it's going now, we feel we'll be completed drilling by sometime in August and have a resource completed approximately 2 months after that.
Some in October. In this section, I just wanted to show you as a reminder of what a good ore body Kramalote is. It's needed a lot more drilling to bring it from the inferred indicator, but as you can see from this intersection, on this and then look at the red area of this. It's a thick continuous zone of mineralization as Bill says has good metallurgy and a low strip ratio. And just a reminder, how good it can be within the within the heart of it.
You know, the one of the holes here had a a hole 2 26 from this year's drilling 150 meters of a 1.7 terms of gold. Very significant intersection, continuous gold mineralization, and it represents what the heart of Gramalote will be a very thick continuous, easily mind our body. And with that, I'll leave that over back to Bill. Thank you.
Okay. At this time, I'd like, to turn the floor over to our director of sustainability, Ken Jones to talk about environment and sustainability.
Good afternoon. I'm Ken Jones of B2Gold. I'd like to share with you an update on our sustainability plans for the company and some highlights of our social and environmental performance. So sustainability in the mining industry has really evolved in the last several years from an area of how do we make mining sustainable? To now this this message of of the mining industry must truly play a key role in the sustainable development of the communities in which we operate and in the countries.
And in the which we support. And a key part of of sustainability has become now environmental, social, governance risk management and performance, an assessment of of the company's risks in these areas, how do you manage them in performance to to have a lasting and sustainable company. And ESG factors cover a range of areas such as sustainable development, human rights impacts, CSR Investment, community development, environmental biodiversity conservation, but also ESG is is an area of transparency and disclosure for the company and how we report on these performance and risks, to our stakeholders. And with our ESG reporting, we've recently updated our website to include an ESG portal. And this is a centralized, easy accessible location for all of our ESG disclosure.
This is where all of our commitments on social all of our commitments on community development can be found in our policies and standards. It's the location of our annual sustainability report. And in the future, component reports on climate and energy change or water use or artisanal mining, and truly then a location for all of our ESG data for analysts and other stakeholders to access in one place. On our ESG portal, then and the key component of our ESG reporting is our annual sustainability report raising the bar. And this is where we in a concise, comprehensive way can show our environmental and social performance, how we're contributing to various frameworks, including the United Nations, sustainable development goals, and then also economic benefits to employees, communities and governments.
And this is the type of information shared in our annual sustainability report. Our economic contribution, in 2019, we contributed over a $140,000,000 in direct employee wages and benefits a 116,000,000 of which were in the countries in which we operate. In the environment, we have various initiatives to further our water use management practices and reporting practices are climate change assessment, greenhouse gas emissions, our people are one of our most fundamental aspects of the company. We employ over 42100 people around the world. And we try to employ as many local, employees as possible in 2019, over 95% of our workforce was local.
High paying high skilled jobs, and we tried to transition as many of these people into senior management positions as possible. And finally, our communities, how do we invest in our communities, how do we engage with our communities, and learn what principles of protection of their rights do we have? So with all this performance and the good performance that we've been able to report in the last several years, how do we achieve that? So we have in place social environmental management systems at all of our operations, And we have specific standards in place for critical risks, be it resettlement of communities, local procurement, artisanal mining on the environmental front. How do we manage water?
How do we manage tailings? How do we manage biodiversity impacts? And all these standards are in accordance with international best practice. United Nations, declarations on human rights, security and human principles, damn safety, cyanide code management, And all these standards are also then audited by independent third parties to ensure that we are truly performing to our own internal. Stringent requirements.
In the environment, we employ industry best practices via progressive reclamation, be it closure planning. But one area that's been of highlight in the industry is the increased rigor, and focus on tailings management practices due to the catastrophic and banquet failures around the world, over the last 5 plus years. We have updated our internal standards in line with changing industry best practices, and we continue to monitor changes in this area. Internally, we've consolidated, access to all information for all of our embankments. And we're working on how do we share this information with, investors, analysts, and third parties.
And then we're also currently updating our dam risk analyses and conducting third party independent reviews of our embankments at our Otjikoto Masbody mines to ensure that we are up to date with best practice. Other industry best practices that are changing and evolving are around climate change and climate change risk management. We've developed a strategy, that involves assessing and reducing our carbon footprint. We have renewable energy projects in place at our Otjikoto and in construction, our Fekola mine. In 2019, we produced 13% of our electricity consumed at our Otjikoto mine was from renewable solar energy.
And the Fekola mine is in construction right now, the 30 megawatt solar facility that will more than double our renewable energy resource, for 2021. The next step in our climate change risk management strategy is then further integrating climate change risks into policy into enterprise and site risk assessment, and then carrying that forward to business planning, decision making, and design of our operations to make them resilient, to climate change as it comes in the future. And then the last step is then that increased accountability and transparency. And so we will report then on this strategy in external energy and climate reports, and eventually lead to emissions reductions and targets, for the company. On the social front, I wanna share with you a handful of really key social investment, social programs, initiatives that we have.
That really share where we we do get to make a a big change in in impact on the communities that we work with. In the Philippines, historically, there's been challenges amongst the Masbody province in natural disaster planning and and support. So in 2019, we were able to partner with some organizations in the region to provide professional training to over 480 individuals training in first aid, search and rescue, and incident command. And that training proved vital then in a response to Typhoon Camurry at the end of 2019, significantly helping them to save lives and minimize impacts. And in Molly, we have a significant partnership with UNICEF.
It supports vulnerable children, particularly young girls, and associated with artisanal mining. Articinal mining takes children away from safe spaces for for learning. And so the program brings mobile, nurseries, mobile learning spaces, accelerated learning programs to these children, and provides additional support for at risk youth providing them information on healthy relationships, gender based violence, reproductive health, and in general education and training opportunities. In Namibia, we also have several education initiatives to help very marginalized communities in the country. In particular, the save the SUN program is an initiative with the SUN Bushmen.
The SUN Bushmen are one of the most marginalized groups in the area, the last integrated, 1st nations community in Southern Africa, heavily impacted by loss of lands and without access to quality education. And so B2Gold has partnered with a development fund to build 5 remote schools over the next 4 years that will provide one of the most marginalized communities with access to quality education. And lastly, I wanna touch on on something that's impacted all of us, the COVID 19 pandemic. It's definitely impacted B2Gold and and the communities in which we operate. So since February of this year, we have been really monitoring the COVID 19 outbreak, how it impacts our operations, how we need to then support our communities.
And we have provided in Mali, over half a $1,000,000, for medical supplies and also directly to the government. In their COVID response. In Namibia, the focus of our support has been in hygiene and sanitation and food security, and the townships around our operation. And in the Philippines, the focus has been on providing basic food and medical supplies and requirements to the villages around the mine. And also while B2B2Gold is a international company, we do face ourselves in Vancouver.
And so it's our responsibility to support the Metro Vancouver area. And so we've donated over half a $1,000,000 to support 3 local organizations, supporting housing assistance, food security, and health assistance to some of the members most at risk in our community. And that does it for me. That wraps up my update for B2Gold Sustainability Plans, and our social environmental performance. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Ken. I'd now like to turn the floor over to our director of human resources and net crew note.
Thank you, Viola. Good day, everyone. For several years now, our HR department, our management and our employees have been guided by our approach to people management. Policy and statement, which sets our standards and defines our principles that we work by the we live by that we organize ourselves, manage and respect our workplaces, buy. So this had served as well to provide a sustainable and respectful work environment for all our employees.
We are committed to providing decent work and respect for human rights and freedoms and this is supported by our policies and practices as well as our code of business, conduct, and sees. We participate actively in human risk assessments and we implement actions accordingly, and we provide human rights training to our employees as well to support our efforts. And through this, we ensure a coordinated and a multidisciplinary approach to supporting our environment. During 2019, there were 2 major events that impacted local employment as well as overall manpower, the first one being in Nicaragua with our employees transferring to to Caliber, which, we we were very happy with leading the legacy in the country as Clive stated earlier The other major event that is an ongoing, part of our operation in Mali is the transitioning of our employees that are currently with labor consultants over to our own B2Gold Employment contracts into a direct employment relationship. We've successfully deployed this program and we have been able to bring those figures down to less than 50% of employees still with our labor broking companies And we remain actively involved, in managing our employees that are currently still under labor labor supervisory contracts, right through their employment practices from recruitment through to managing payrolls.
And taking care of health and safety in all of those environments. At the end of the process, we foresee that we'll be taking on 1800 employees through this process, which we're really excited about. Throughout recruitment and returning talent, our 4 values remain crucial to us being fairness, respect, transparency, and accountability. And we show that throughout our practices, supporting were 42017 employees that we had at the end of 2019 and going into 2020 as well. Have a very low staff turnover, voluntary staff turnover of just over 5%, which we're very proud about.
It shows our our intent and our relationships are strong relationships strong focus on local communities and national employment as alluded to by by kin and just to support those environments we prioritize this specific, philosophy we prioritize that into our approach to people management. We had that strongly embedded in our content performance standards and we we have, under study programs in place that that we, deploys out our operations. We have a high level of national employment, 95% throughout the group at the end of 2019, And we're very proud of our diverse work culture, but equally proud of the success that we've had in localizing our workforce. Part of our succeeds and I guess part of the secret sauce as Clive mentioned is that we have ensive HR departments in all our areas, and they provide direct support to our employees and management, making that we stay compliant, that we stay competitive, and that we provide direct support. And through that, we we are we are agile, and we are responsive to the needs and the growth and the changes within our very unique in which we operate.
Developing talent is crucial part of of of just operating in any environment. And we are we are we are proud with with what we do there. With with all our employees in in in all our areas. We've we've had a significant shift to focus supervisory level support as well as leadership skills training. And we have, embedded programs in into our operations and we are continuing to build on those.
And this together with our internship and graduate programs, we have at all our minds, as well as our internal hiring and and promotion philosophy really strengthens the the the localization strategies that we have, the gender diversity strategies that we have. So so it really stands in good fit with all our with all our assets. As far as facilitating healthy relations go, we quite we're quite excited always about how we engage with our employees. We have a very open and frank engagement with with employees. And and we do it very well either through through unions or through, through employment committees that get established for various, for various reasons and to facilitate to facilitate the discussions and dialogue in the workplace.
In November 2019, the Masbate operations received a national award as I've landing labor management committee for industrial peace in the Philippines. And this was really because of a very strong commitment that they have towards employment employee engagement in the area. And, also in Namibia, we we've had a very strong employment engagement, a roll out over over quite an extensive period of time engaging with our employees. And this is culminated into a, a culture organizational culture program that's called Atishivanwe, which means we are 1 in in 1 of the the local country, country languages then. And this is really support the people, people and culture component of of what they are, but are aiming to do in the country in support of operations and just embedding the strong relationships that we have there as well.
Gender diversity has been on our agenda for several years. Now we've we've successfully completed a group wide employee consultation process that, culminated into a diversity and inclusion statement that we're very proud of saying that that we were able to implement that this year. It sits, it sits a road map for us and through that, we are starting to consider short and medium term plans that we will implement to ensure that we that we really follow a thoughtful process, because what we want to achieve, we want that be sustainable. So we we're taking it step by step, looking at the areas that we can that we can crews that can build on and those areas with recognizing employment barriers, whether that be be identified through employing etchmen or through our own policy reviews, we are, we're definitely on the road, to building a strong the diversity.
The
the the strong training internal review processes that we've implemented across the company has now been reviewed with with the focus on on doing the diversity and we will extrapolate from that and build a stronger long term view on on enhancing gender diversity in our workplace. But in the interim, we were quite proud this year as well to welcome our second email member to our board and, that that shows that we are. We're focused on the topic. We have 12% gene day representation by females at the moment. 20 percent of senior positions are awful by by ladies.
That brings us to a more current David, which is the COVID-nineteen response that so many employers are currently dealing with, our our regions have implemented mitigating actions to be prepared, but also to be agile and to be responsive to the environment, while we consider all our national guidelines that put out in the respective areas. We have ongoing engagement with internal and external stakeholders we've we've we've become so aware of how important engagement is during during this time, we really saw much uncertainty for so many people. We've retained a full staff compliment, and we had no adverse effect on employee pay or benefits, which we are very fortunate for, to be able to provide job security for 4 employees with ongoing remuneration. Implemented additional health and safety measures for employees at sites, and also those returning to office environments to make sure that we follow back best practice and and provide the the necessary health and health and safety in in the workplace. We remain agile as we navigate this but what's often to refer to, as a very uncertain reality that we're all dealing with at the moment.
And we've strengthened our business continuity plans from an our perspective, but underpinning all of it is the strong and very much paramount focus on duty of care for our employees' health, safety and well-being.
Thanks, Nannette. Thanks to, all of our speakers.
I'm not
going to keep you much longer here. Thanks for your, attention. Just want to talk a little bit about the we are here for the general meeting. So the just talk a little bit about the preliminary results from the We had a tremendous representation by our shareholders with really quite a remarkable 82.81% of the shares outstanding would be to go over voted, which is really extraordinary. I think typical for a public company, you'll often get 40% of the shares voted, maybe 50.
We get this quite often, but it's a great, we like it. It definitely tells us our shareholders are engaged. They care enough to vote and that means they're they're reading material. And, obviously, it's a pretty strong endorsement of the board of directors and the company. The numbers, the directors, as we mentioned, at 9 was was approved, and the, directors were all individually approved as with the auditors and the district insure unit plan, etcetera, high approval numbers.
I want to talk a little bit about the board because I think there's a potential the, disturbing trend here or something that worries me about the future of being a public gold mining company. There's a lot of scrutiny now as there should be in terms of directors and management and are they acting in the best centers of the shoulders of money. Unfortunately, we've seen many examples over the last 20 years or so in the gold mining industry where you can make a strong argument that perhaps some directors and executives were not, in fact, acting in of all the shareholders. And that came into some understandable criticism and scrutiny. So lately we've had a lot more attention paid to compensation, paid to board experience, paid to board independence, and all these things.
And there's a couple of companies SS and Glass Lewis that our companies have specialized in recommending to various institutions how they should vote on on proxy materials and vote on these various issues. And many institutions use them to advise them on how to vote when they get a circular from us proposing directors, etcetera. And we've had our we've had some some battles or at least some some times where we felt that we were perhaps being shoehorned into a box with other companies when perhaps we didn't necessarily belong and we've always just asked people to judge us for who we are don't don't penalize us for the yields of others judge us for who you are and what we're doing. So we have a I think a tremendous board of directors. Very diverse, very experienced and a group that's been with a lot of us for a lot of them for quite a while.
Some of them founding directors of the company But there's a trend with a couple of institutions. Unfortunately, they weren't major shareholders, but a couple of institutions who've some of the directors have voted to withhold their votes instead of voting 4. So some of our directors had repouvals or fours in the 80 percentages rather than the rest of us in the 90 percentages. And and I've got some issues with that to be frank with you because one of the one of the institutions, they look at ISS and Glass Lewis, but then they do their own work which does great. They have the right to vote as they wish.
But they are taking a very hard view of independence of director And basically if you look at our situation, this one institution decided to withhold the votes for 3 of our directors who've been with us for a long time. And they they withheld the bills because they these directors have been with us for longer than 10 years. And somebody just decided that after 10 years, you can no longer be independent. Not sure what happens after 9.9. But after that sense here, you can no longer be independent and independently management, I found out to be honest with you, quite observed.
Some of these directors were founding directors of the company. Beach Gold remarkable success from 0 ounces of gold production to 1,000,000 ounces a year from 0 market cap to CAD7 1000000000 market cap has partly been driven by the board and the board's support of management's vision for the company. These are excellent directors, but this idea that we're supposed to turn them over, refresh the board because they've reached 10 years. This isn't some old American companies who have directors around for 20 or 30 years or like some of the politicians. I get that.
There should be some limit or at least a view of that. But at the end of the day that you're arbitrarily going to say someone's served more than 10 years. They're not an independent director. Have a real problem with that. Most of our showrooms don't feel that way and most of our show was voted for our directors.
Similarly, they've decided that if you if you if you gain a director or if you take over another company, on a friendly basis as we did with with ORIX and Volta, and 2 of the acquisitions we did over time. And those each of those acquisitions, we invited 1 of the direct of the other company to join the board, Kevin Bullock, in the case of Volta. And Bagani Mathesy, in the in the case of Orax. Now, we invited them to join the board 1, they knew the project that we were acquiring, we seemed to make some sense for continuity, but 2, because they're very highly qualified mining engineers who each specializes in a different the world, we thought they'd be great directors and they are. So some of these institutions have decided that they're not independent either because they I guess they can't possibly be independent because took over their company so therefore they're indebted to you for life to management.
Once again, yeah, I think it's absurd. At the end of the day, there seems some institutions with Rotter as have unqualified directors who they believe are independent, rather than qualified directors who are intelligent people who can actually make a decision and have great decisions that have supported the shareholders for 12 years so far and counting. So similarly anyone has worked for the company, myself or does work for the company, George Johnson, who our senior VP operations for for a period of time. And Leanne Kelly, our our our newest director, they're not independent because they work for the company. That one I get a little bit more.
But at the end of the day, I'm disturbed by this trend of institutions when they deflect their muscles. Yes, they have a right to vote. Yes, they're shareholders. But I don't think they have wait to shortly before an AGM call you up and sort of intimidate you by the things they might vote against if you don't look to change your company to the way they like it to be. We run our business well.
We're not looking for a free pass from anybody, but judges for who are and what we're doing. And maybe they should spend more time focusing on running their business than trying to run our business. At the end of the day. B2Gold has been a great success story for many institutions. If you look at some of their other investments over the last 10 years, I don't know if you can say quite the same thing.
So let's stay in our lane. Let's our job. We're not looking for a car launch at all, but at the end of the day, for us to continue to run this company, we need to be able to compensate our employees adequately, and we need to have a strong board of directors, and we need to be shareholders who objectively evaluate us, but don't lump us in with other companies that are not as good at what they do. We're not as responsible. On that I just I do want to just acknowledge that we have to be by the way, we've refreshed our board of directors with 5 new directors since we started the company.
So clearly, we are refreshing the board and we're going to continue to add to the board. We had a Robin Weisman over a year ago, who's tremendous. She's a well known tremendously experienced IFC banker with worldwide, experience. She's a tremendous addition to our team and Lianne Kelly joined us most recently and Lianne has got a tremendous reputation in ESG and she started out as a geophysicist actually in the exploration in our business, but has evolved into one of the most qualified CSR ESG experts anywhere in been the architect and the driving force behind our responsible mining report. So we really appreciate Liam coming on to join the board even though she's not independent yet at the end of the day.
So I just want to finish up with a little bit of where we're going. Obviously, remarkable year in 2019 2020. You've seen what we've been able to do and continue to do even throughout something like this COVID-nineteen virus. We just had such a wide reaching impact. We're very proud of our ability to continue to do what we do so well.
So going forward, we're going to continue to minimize the impact of the pandemic, which I think we've done an excellent job of. We're going to maintain our high standards of responsible mining, our government relations, health and safety, all the things we've outlined today. And we're gonna continue to optimize our profitable gold production. At least we've got 5 years ahead of us as we see it from the 3 main mines. We've got about 5 years ahead of us around a 1,000,000 ounces a year.
And when you look Cardinal next to Fekola and the potential additional potential Fekola and also you look at Gramalote, we think that we have the potential and the potential at Otjikoto Underground to further extend that 1,000,000 ounces a year for longer than a 5 year period. We're going to continue to look to maximize cash flow. We're going to reduce debt as Mike about getting near zero debt. And we're going to focus on organic growth. We've got the Gramalote projects, which we believe has a great next potential to become a large low cost gold mine that fits very well with our criteria.
We're not going to build it because we own 50% of it, but we like the looks of that and we'll know by early next year. And we're also pretty intrigued by the upside as you've seen around Fekola and other things. We're going to continue to look at exploration. We have one of the best gold exploration teams in the world as evidenced by the successes over the last 30 years at Beaman Beach of Gold, and I will continue to look at exploration in our own right, but also exploration joint ventures. With the junior companies.
Finally, we will consider the potential for acquisitions. I've said for years that we were not likely to go out and do a major acquisition, it'd be too gold, partly because weren't getting the value of what we had at Fekola and partly because we were busy in the mines that we were building. We like the pipeline as I've said what we have today, but we also are looking at the industry. We've had a good re rating of our shares and that does give us the possibility to look around to see if there's any opportunities where we could add value by acquiring a project production development relates to these expiration. But I must say that we're going to continue to be extremely vigilant and extremely, tough on acquisitions in the sense of our standards.
We've made many acquisitions over the years that have been each of them have been a great success in their own right. We're not desperate for an acquisition. We don't see the need to grow that way in the short term given what we have on our plate, but I'm just suggesting we're open to the possibility now if it makes sense of adding accretive projects to what we're doing. So that's really most of what I wanted to thank you. Before I take a few questions, I do want to just thank some people, obviously, I think that, When I look at 2019 and so far in 2020 and what we've accomplished, I really how can you do all of this with others from people that we have around the world and you're going to net talk about some of our people that about how proud we are of of what we've been able to do.
All of our employees around the world and we miss you We don't get to get out and see people as much as we used to not that long ago. Hopefully, whatever the new normal is will include our ability to get down and see these hardworking people. But these people all over world that have really stepped it up at a time with COVID to be able to maintain the health and safety standards that we sent out for this company in 2019 to be able to maintain shortening. That takes the dedication and commitment of all of our employees. And I'd like to think it's a reflection, as I said earlier, about the fairness respect and transparency with which they're treated.
I think we get that back at times like this. So thank you to all of our employees. The Vancouver workforce, you know, we had over 100 people in Vancouver and we we called it pretty early to encourage to get people to work from home. Everyone's done a fantastic job and haven't missed a beat. I think as part of the fact that we've been doing this internationally for a long time, you can't run mines from Vancouver.
You have to have great people site and they have to be well supported by Vancouver as well. But to the mine managers and the country managers who would normally be here with us, we miss you guys too. Incredible leadership in incredible, incredible job of of what they do, beyond, given the the recent circumstances. To all of the contractors and consultants and bankers and lawyers and brokers that play an important role in in what we do thanks to all of them. I wanted our executive team.
I just am always amazed by the ability of this team to continue to perform and to grow, it's truly remarkable. It's an honor to, to be your president. The board of directors, I mentioned, we've got a great board, tremendous experience, tremendous support, lot of things we've done have been contrarian at times, but they've been right. And we the board has stuck by us and believed in our long term strategy for growing, a company like beach of gold. So normally we have a party tonight and about last year, it was about three hundred people at my home.
We'll miss that too. We'll miss everyone who comes and enjoys us in celebrating the accomplishments that we've had over 2019 and to date in 2020. But I must say it's something usually say at the party, but I'll say it here. And we're very proud of the cultures you've heard of B2Gold, but I think that I refer to it often as the United Nations of B2Gold. At a time in the world where there's powerful people that are trying to divide us and trying to emphasize the differences that may be there between us or exaggerate differences.
Maybe beachy gold can be a little example for the world. And now we treat people from all races, all religions, all genders, and we strive to to eliminate discrimination everywhere and treat people with fairness, respect, and transparency. You know, in beach of Golden 2019, people that worked for beachy gold came from 33 different countries. Think about that. 33 different countries.
That's the United Nations of B2Gold. And perhaps in our small way, we can be an example for the world of how we can all get along, how we can respect each other. Now we can work together. Clearly, we have a strong corporate culture, and I guess if you have a culture, maybe a company can have a personality. I think Beach a gold is a big heart and a deep soul.
So with that, I'll open up for her and see if there's any questions. I see a question on the screen here. Robert Pritaili, I believe. Do you have a framework for dividends compared to capital expenditures and exploration such as dividends to investors of approximately 20% to 40% of free cash flow. Sounds like it might send him a question to me.
Did you make it?
I think what I'd say is we don't have a firmly established framework based on percentages. What we are doing though is we we're very we consider frequently. And we also have a need to balance, cash flow that will be used for capital expenditures and growth. Versus returning to shareholders. So as we noted before, we did do our starter dividend of $0.01 per share.
Starting the first or the last quarter last year. And since then, was our plan to come back and reevaluate that dividend closer to the end of this year? When we got ourselves into a net cash, positive cash position because of the positive results of the company that we've seen already this year, we actually decided to accelerate that, as I mentioned. So we have doubled up that dividend now to $0.02 per share as of June. As we go forward, I think the key is, we know there are certain decision points that are coming up for the company.
For example, with Gramalote. We're moving forward with, finalizing the feasibility study. So we should get ourselves into the decision point early next year to know what we want to do there. And part of that will be to evaluate how we're going to deal with the any CapEx that would come with a positive decision to build that operation. So I guess in short, we'll continue to reevaluate that balance between returning cash to shareholders and our needs for CapEx.
And that'll be an ongoing process as we move through the next year to 2 years and on beyond that.
Just to add briefly to that, I think I mentioned earlier, the idea is to continue to, grow the company, but also, as as we can grow the dividend. And I think it's a great combination. That's a combination. A lot of people are looking for a lot of generous ones we talk to these days. If they're going to get into the gold space, get some exposure, they want a well run company that pays the dividend as well.
So we feel we fit the bill there. Okay. Well, I there's no other questions. So I would Thank you all very much and, for joining us in this virtual experiment of a virtual reality and a general meeting. Thank you.
And once again, thanks to all of you for, your support and your attention.