I will act as chairman of this meeting, and I appoint Roger Richay's second on my left Executive Vice President, General Counsel And Secretary of the Company to act as recording Secretary of this meeting and the capacity of Computer Share Investor Services, Inc. To act as scrutineer for this meeting. Also present at the meeting today are my fellow directors And if you could just briefly stand when I when I call your name, I have one of those Clive Johnson, President CEO, B2Gold, Robert Gaiden. And Jerry Corpan, Evinque, Kevin Bullock, George Johnson and Robin Weisman. Thank you.
All of our senior, officers are here today, but leave it to Clive to introduce those folks during his presentation. Now for the business of the meeting. Notice of this meeting was filed and a notice calling this meeting of shareholders together with the management information circular and proxy form was mailed to the shareholders on May 17, 2019. I have received a declaration attesting to the publication and mailing and the recording secretary will annex the declaration to the minutes of this meeting. These minutes will be available for inspection by any registered shareholder.
The recording secretary has notified me that the scrutineers report is complete and that a quorum is present notice having been given in accordance with the articles and a quorum being present, I declare the meeting to be properly constituted for the transaction of business, and I direct that the report of the scrutineer be annexed to the minutes of this meeting. Before proceeding with the business of the meeting, I would like to remind everyone that only registered shareholders or proxy holders can move motions, ask questions, make comments, or vote. Before addressing the chair, identify yourself by name and show the card provided to you upon registration. I propose that we deal first with all of the routine business requirements of this meeting and then we'll terminate the formal meeting. And as we've done in prior years, just after this, the executive team will give a rather fulsome presentation.
I could promise we'll be entertaining of B2Gold. And after that, we'll be open for questions and execs will remain after this meeting if you want to approach them individually. I propose to conduct a vote on the resolution setting the number of directors and appointing and fixing the remuneration of the auditor by a show of hands unless a ballot is demanded or directed on a particular item of business. On a vote by a show of hands, please hold up your card. A ballot will be taken on the resolutions to elect directors to adopt the company's performance share unit plan and to approve on a non binding advisory basis, a resolution accepting the company's approach to executive compensation.
I understand that each registered shareholder and proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting received a ballot at the time of registration. The first time in business is the presentation to shareholders of the annual consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2018, and the auditors report on the financial statements as required by the British Columbia Business Corporations Act. The financial statements were mailed to the shareholders on April 26, 2019 and are available on SEDAR. Extra copies of the statements are available to shareholders upon request. 3 representatives of the auditor are here today.
If registered shareholders or proxy holders have any questions for the auditor, Lynn Wadsworth, Tristan Shaw, and Eduardo Salas of ChristwaterhouseCoopers are available to respond. The next item business is to set the number of directors of the company.
Sure. My name is, Roger Boucher. I'm
Is there any discussion on this motion? I have a vote on the on the matter by a show of hands. All those in favor, contrary. I declare the motion carried. Next item of business is the election of directors for the ensuing year.
The persons who are proposed by management for election are listed in the management information circular. All of them have indicated their willingness to serve as directors for the ensuing of the company by May 15, 2019. As no such nominations were received, management nominees for election are the only persons permitted to be nominated for election. Could I please have nominations for management's proposed directors?
Sure. I nominate the following persons for the election by Johnson, Robert Cross, Robert Gayton, Great. Kirk Van Von Ganeshi, Kevin Bubba, George Johnson and Robin Weissman.
I would ask for a motion that the 8 persons nominated the elected as directors of the company to hold office until the termination of the next annual general meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed. I direct that a poll be held on the motion and that the scrutineer conduct the balloting and report the results in writing. Balance were handed out to registered shareholders proxy holders when they register for the meeting. If you have filed a proxy and do not wish to change your vote, it is not necessary to complete a ballot. Registered shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make an X or other mark in the square associated with the word for or the word withhold and sign the ballot.
Also, please print your name beside your signature where indicated and record the number of shares that you were entitled to vote. When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are are there any valves to be collected? I declare the ballot to close and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they are ready to report. The scrutineer has advised the recording secretary that the majority of the proxy deposit for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors nominated.
Therefore, I declare that the eight persons nominated have been elected as directors of the company. The author of the company is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Charter Countants. Management proposes that it be reappointed until the next annual general meeting. May I now have a motion that the auditor be reappointed and that the directors be authorized to fix their remuneration of the auditor? Is there any discussion on this motion?
May I have a vote on the matter by a show of hands, all those in favor? Contrary, I declare the motion carried. The next item business is to consider and have deemed advisable pass a resolution approving the performance share unit plan of the company. The background behind this motion, a summary of the a summary of the performance share unit plan and the proposed form of resolution are set out on pages 7 through 11 of the management information circular. The Board of Directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution approving the performance share unit plan.
To take effect, the resolution approving the adoption performance share unit plan must be approved by a majority of the votes cast in person over a proxy. I mean, I have a motion to approve the adoption of the performance share unit plan the form of the resolution set out on page 11 of the management information circular. Is there any discussion with respect poll be held on the motion and that the scrutineer conduct the balloting and report the results in writing. As mentioned, shareholders are the policyholders completing a ballot should make a check mark in the square associated with the word for or the word against and sign the ballot. Also, please print your name your signature were indicated and record the number of shares that you were entitled to vote.
When you've completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection. Are there any ballots to be collected? I declare that ballot can close and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they are ready to report. While we wait for the scrutineers report, we will proceed to the next item business. The next time of business is to consider and if deemed advisable pass a resolution on a non binding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation, as disclosed in the management information circular.
The background behind this motion and the proposed form of the non binding advisory resolution are set out on Page 11, of the management information circular. In addition, a detailed discussion of the company's executive compensation program is set forth in the executive compensation section the information circular. The Board of Directors recommends that shareholders vote for the resolution on a non binding advisory basis accepting the company's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the management information circular. As this is an advisory vote, the results will be will not be binding upon the board. However, the board will take the results of the vote into account as appropriate when considering future compensation policies, procedures, and decisions.
We have a motion to approve on a non binding advisory basis the form of the resolution set out on Page 11 of the management information circular accepting the company's approach to executive compensation. Is there any discussion with respect to this resolution? If there is no further discussion, I direct that a poll be held on the motion and that the scrutineer conduct a balancing and report the ballots in writing. Once again, shareholders or proxy holders completing a ballot should make a check mark in the square associated with the word for or the word against and sign the ballot. Also, please print your name beside your signature where indicated and record the number of shares that you're entitled to vote.
When you have completed your ballot, please hold it up for collection.
Any ballots yet to be collected.
I declare the ballot enclosed and instruct the scrutineer to advise the recording secretary when they are ready to report. And now the report of the scrutineer on the ballots taken on the resolution to adopt the performance share unit plan of the company the resolution on a non binding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation. I declared that the resolution to adopt the performance share unit plan of the company has been carried and the resolution on a non binding advisory basis, accepting the company's approach to executive compensation has been has been carried. I direct the, recording secretary to attach a report of the scrutineer to the minutes of the meeting It should be noted, with real gratification from all of us that we had a voting turnout, just over 80% of our shareholders, which I think is very high relative to any public company out there. So that was great.
And the the percentages for these resolutions were in the we're in the approval of the performance share unit plan was 93% for and the advisory vote and executive compensation was 82% for All of the business for which this meeting was called was called for has been completed. May I have a motion to terminate the meeting? I have a vote on the matter by show of hands. All those in favor. Contrary, I declare the motion carried and the formal part of this meeting is now terminated.
I'd like to turn the meeting over to Clive Johnson to start and kick off the executive presentation. Thank you very
I don't have to do that very often, lower the mic. Thank you, Bob. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming out and, echo Bob's comments about to our shareholders about the tremendous support and the amount of shares voted. You know, we try hard to communicate with our shareholders and it's just great to see that so many shareholders are paying attention to what we're doing and in favor of what we're doing.
So that's quite as Bob said, quite gratifying. I want to start by introducing the guys up in the table beside me here. You met Bob Roger Rishay Bob mentioned next to Roger. It's Michael Sinman, who's our CFO, Senior VP of Finance. Next to him is Dennis Stansbury, who's Senior VP, Technical Services And Project Valuations, and next to him is Tom Gerrigan, who's our Senior VP, Exploration, and Bill Lytle, who's our senior VP operations.
So you're gonna hear from today, from myself, Mike, and Tom and Bill, not necessarily in that order. Also we have here, you met our directors and we have our other executives who are here and, and, tremendous executive team, they're all going to be here afterwards. And so, everyone ready to field your questions. And if you get different answers from different VPs, please let me know. We're trying to have us one message going out there.
So with that, I'll start taking a little walk through of the highlights for 2018 and talk a little bit about strategy and where we're going. And then we'll get a financial rundown for Mike. And Bill will talk about the operations and, Tom, some exciting exploration that's going on in the company as well. This cautionary statement, which you'll see in all presentations of public companies is pretty much a legal cover your asset. What that means is that certain things we're going to say today will be forward looking and therefore could be subject to change.
I could say all that in that many words, but that's a lot of words if you want to read the detail. Anyway, it is an important part of our disclosure disclaimer. We're pretty international company as all of you I think know. And today, we're going to talk about the mining operations. Obviously headquartered here in Vancouver and the mining operations in Nicaragua, Maui, and maybe on the Philippines and several other development and exploration projects.
And other countries around the world. There are various stages of advancement, Burkina Faso, Columbia, Japan, which isn't on here. And most recently, Uzbekistan, which is not on here, more exploration initiatives. This slide that you've seen it before and it just keeps getting better year after year. This slide is our annual production growth since the almost the inception of the company.
So 11 years ago when a lot of the senior management from BimaGold, which had been a successful intermediate gold producer, after the takeover by Kinross Gold, we decided to see if we could do it again. So we created B2Gold. So 10, 11 years ago, we had no gold production. We were an exploration company. And over the last 10 years, we've grown to a company that's just under a 1,000,000 ounces this year, and we expect to hit a 1,000,000 of gold production next year.
So dramatic growth, unprecedented growth in the gold mining industry, especially over the last 3 to 5 years. And you'll see from some of my slides, there's very little growth that's been happening in the gold space, but not just growth for the sake of it. This is growth based on accretive acquisitions after sons of due diligence by our team or all of our teams. And then it's a combination of delivering and performing by building mines and running mines well. And a tremendous success of exploration, finding more gold at our existing mines and other operations So you see starting on the left hand side, it was with Nicaragua.
And then we added the Masbate mine in the Philippines, and then we built in the Otjikoto mine in Namibia, And then last year, 2018 was the 1st full year of production from our newest, the world class Fekola mine. In Mali. So you've seen this fairly dramatic growth and also though very importantly low cost production, low cost all in sustaining, per ounce cost somewhere around $800 an ounce, a little over that. Mike's going to talk a little more detail about that. So bottom line, a transformative year in 2018 for B2Gold after a number of years of pretty dramatic growth as I said, unprecedented in our space.
So some of the highlights from 2018, and there are quite a few We hit record production for the 10th year in a row, 953,000 ounces for 2018. This was, 51% increase in our production from 2017. And as I said, the 10th consecutive year in a row of record gold production. Our revenue basically doubled from $17,000,000 to $1,200,000,000 U. S.
Always in the oil figures here are U. S. Dollars. That's a dramatic increase of, as I said, almost double the $516,000,000 from 2017. And because of the profitability of our mines, we had record annual consolidated cash flow from our operating activities.
$451,000,000, which is basically almost triple what we did in 2017. So highly, highly profitable. Significant amount of that was free cash flow, and that allowed us by having that amount of cash from operations to significantly reduce debt as well. So the Fekola mine in this 1st full year produced just under 440,000 ounces of gold exceeding even our expectations. Fekola was built in 2016 2017 and started production in the fourth quarter of 2017, 3 months ahead of schedule.
And it was a tremendous ramp up in start of production, faster than I've ever seen in the gold mining industry. And it's a world class mine and it's a tremendous job by our construction team and by our operations team led by Randy who will introduce to you later. Just a great mine, a great project. And we, we did a great job in every avenue and every aspect of the construction of our latest mine. Also though in addition to that, the other mines performed as well, but, to stay with Fekola for a moment, very low cost, $3.37 an ounce operating cash costs and all in sustaining costs of $5.33 an ounce.
This gives Fekola the ranking of the 7th lowest cost gold mine in the world in 2018. So based on the exploration success, we have significantly increased Goldman, our resource estimate for Fekola. So we started out we were around 4,000,000 ounces in resources and 3,200,000 ounces in reserves. We've done a lot of drilling while we're building it, which is quite unusual in our industry. Most companies, when they're building something they don't continue to explore to see if it gets bigger, which I've always thought was a bit of a mistake.
If you don't explore while you're before and while you're building, the chances are you may regret the size of the mill facilities you build down the road. So we've always been aggressive in pursuing opportunity even at an existing mine in terms of finding out how much gold is actually there. So we now have, indicated resources of five point 3,000,000 ounces and inferred of 1,700,000 ounces at Fekola. And it gets bigger and it keeps growing. So on the back of that, We've decided to initiate last year an expansion study on Fekola.
So this is a little outside the box as I alluded to in our industry. And it's really quite an aggressive approach to sometimes what can be a little bit of an old boring industry. And the approach is to be aggressive, never reckless, but aggressive. So by drilling Fekola while we were building over two and a half years, we were able to significantly increase the size of the resource. Now we're infill drilling to turn the rest of the inferred into resources and ultimately reserves.
But last year, January of last year, we challenged our engineering group, and said to them, what if the job is to write? What if Fekola is much bigger than the initial reserve showed? Which we're now seeing. We didn't know for sure, but we saw where it was heading. So we challenged the engineering team in January to say, well, if it is twice as big, what would you do get more tons through the mill.
And what would you do about the size of the mining equipment? So they started, well ahead of the curve in January of last year doing all the engineering to estimate what it would take to expand Fekola Mill and what would it cost. And Bill's going to touch on this a little bit. But the bottom line is for very little additional money $50,000,000 on the plant to increase the throughput dramatically and about $60 odd 1,000,000 on a new fleet, which repaid over 5 years of mining fleet, a bigger mining fleet, we can dramatically increase production at Fekola starting next year from approximately 440,000 ounces this year to, we think, somewhere close to around 600,000 ounces next year by spending only $50,000,000 in capital. That's pretty remarkable.
That's because of the way we built it with this idea of a view to the future and making sure we didn't regret the size of the mill that we built if we had exploration success. So that positive Fekola expansion study was completed internally at the end of the year and our board was sufficiently impressed to give us the go ahead to commence the expansion and we'll hear more about that. I talked a bit about cash flow and having a significant amount of operating cash flow, $450,000,000 allowed us to pay down $220,000,000 of debt. Taking our debt load from 700,000,000 to 480,000,000. We have one of the lowest debt to EBITDA ratios in the gold space.
What that means is we have a very low debt level given where our company is at and we expect we will continue to see debt reduction as we go forward putting us in a tremendous financial position. We also maintained our strong ongoing commitment to responsible mining and corporate social responsibility, health safety in the environment. These are big important aspects of our business and goals. And we, I think, are on the leading edge worldwide in terms of these initiatives, being good socially in the community being responsible, giving back, working with people to develop sustainable long term jobs outside of mining, as well as in mining. And you'll hear more about some of those initiatives as well.
Last year, we launched our first responsible mining report. There's another one out now. Public in 2018. If you're interested, it's a pretty fascinating read and to see what we do around the world and how we do it. So we're very proud of our success in being a very successful, responsible, rapidly growing profitable gold producer.
But I think, well, I know for all of us, just as important as how we do it and the responsible way that we conduct ourselves and the benefits we bring to the areas of the world many of them, all there is the world, the many areas that we work in. In that report, there will be available outside of anyone's to read the 2018 responsible mining report. In addition to Fekola, the Masbate mine had a great year as well. The very beating projections there. Producing 216,000 ounce of gold and cash operating costs were very low, $5.48 an ounce in all and sustaining costs of 7.44 dollars an ounce.
Just a tremendous job, by the team in the Philippines, Ray Mead and his team, they've done an amazing job. To give you the perspective on this, in 2013, when we acquired CGA Mining, the Australian company that successfully built the Masbate mine, this was one of the only ones we have that we didn't build ourselves. But they built it, but it was pretty high cost operation when we first got involved close to $900 an ounce of operating costs Last year, we had a few quarters below $500 an ounce. So not only are we very good at building mines and running them well, we're very good at making projects better. And that's the experience and the discipline that comes from a pretty remarkable team, of executives and also managers on-site, you can't run gold mines from Vancouver.
You better have great teams on-site and you better assist them and empower them with our extremely strong technical executive group. In addition, we had another year of solid production at the Otjikoto mine in Namibia, and that mine has been a great success as well. And it's been a real pleasure to work in Namibia, wonderful country, and we have a very strong relationship with our joint venture partners in Namibia and the great ships in all of our sites with governments that we've earned those good reputations and good relationships with government. Atujakoto, we also you'll hear a little bit about the solar plant. We build a solar plant, very successfully reducing our power costs, reducing our carbon footprint.
It's been a great success and it's getting a lot of publicity around the world. It's one of the first mining companies to move to solar. And the way the solar costs are coming down, I think you're going to see more and more of this We're a little bit on the cutting edge of that as well. Now we're going to be going ahead with building a solar plant at Fekola well. Now we generated around power of these sites.
So the solar plant, the solar plant, helps in terms of the power and the use of the power, it doesn't substitute for generating our own power, but it definitely contributes significantly, as I said, to lowering costs, but also environmentally being very responsible as well. In Nicaragua, we had a great success there in the El Limon mine. By making a new discovery remarkably quite close to the mill that everyone thought in the past to be mined underground. Mine's been in production since 1941. It turns out it hadn't been mined underground, and Tom's team did a great job of making a significant new discovery that's now extended the Lemone My Life dramatically and improved its project economics.
So those are some of the many highlights that we achieved in 2018. Want to talk a little bit about strategy and a little bit more about the way we do it. I talked about Fekola as an example. We have a remarkable combined experience with our executive team of over 2 80 years. Not just 280 years of working in the mining industry, 280 years of working together, which is really quite astonishing.
And many of us that go right back to the beam of days, Some of us have worked together for 35 years or more. I know what you're thinking. We must have been extremely young, Roger, or what? 14, Roger? No, you're older.
16. When we started working together up in Yukon and Tom was just a bit younger, I think. At the end of the day though, just incredible experience group has grown together through many years with Beema Gold, starting out as exploration contractors and building a successful intermediate company. And then we did it again by starting V2Gold. It's that experience that is so, critical to everything we do.
We don't use a lot of consultants and contractors, sorry if you're a consultant or a contractor. We use some and those are the very best for certain things. But it's about accountability. We really believe in accountability. And that's a foundation fundamental principle this company is fairness, respect, transparency, and accountability.
And we want to build our own minds. We want to do our own due diligence. So if we're going to go buy something or spend a much money on something, I want to know what's our guys sitting here and the other executives here that have vetted it, that have done the work with all their experience. To make sure that what we're acquiring is a benefit to our shareholders. Sadly in our industry for the last 10 or 15 years, there's been way too many way too many projects that were bad due diligence, bad acquisitions overpaying bad construction, bad operatorship.
I don't mean to sound critical, I just believe in accountability. At the end of the day, this industry over the last 10 or 15 years has many, many too many companies have failed at trying to do what we do and a few others do successfully. Hopefully things are changing in the industry. In terms of our success, as I mentioned earlier, it's based on accretive acquisitions. If we see a deposit or a company that we like and they're perhaps they can't build the mine themselves, they can't raise the money or they don't have the expertise, then often our deals are done by us going to their shareholders with the blessing of management and doing a friendly takeover offer.
And we've done out on numerous occasions. And then we look to take the operations and improve them either technically, we do, but also in terms of exploration adding more ounces. Great success that we've had as well. BuildingMinds, that's another high risk area in our industry that I don't think it should be all at high risk. There's obviously risk involved.
But at the end of the day, if you think about building, I don't know, a bridge, let's say, and you do, you build a bridge, you do a lot of detailed engineering work with someone who knows what they're doing. Take the detailed drawings and you give them to a construction team who has built bridges before. And most of the time, they build the bridge the way it was based on the drawings and do it properly. If bridges fall down, people die. It's not cool.
In our industry, if a mill is built, it doesn't work properly or it takes twice as long to work or twice as much money to work, which is sadly very common, there's kind of a shoulder shrug and everybody goes, it happens, not acceptable. Not acceptable. Design it well, build it well. We have one of the best construction teams. I think the best in the world at building gold mines.
Our construction team has built mines back to the beam of days, 2 mines in the forest of Russia, and then for beachy gold in Nicaragua. Namibia and now at Fekola. So it's just a great critical part of success. It's building what you design, design it well and build it. Talked about being in a very strong financial position.
It hasn't always been that way. We've had our ups and downs in terms of the market and the interest in gold shares and the interest of the ability to raise money. For gold. Fortunately, I think through prudent due diligence and management and being realistic and not buying that idea that gold has to go higher We've managed to stay in a very strong financial position throughout our history and never stronger than today. We're in fantastic shape looking forward, whether gold goes up or down or stays the same.
I want to talk before passing the mic. I want to talk a little bit about political risk, because sometimes the knock on us may be less so today, for some people was looking at the map we started out with showing all these countries in the world. And people saying to us, well, How can you possibly, you know, manage and effectively run mines spelled all over the world with different time zones and all the rest of Well, I think part of it is what I what I touched on before. It's about the people. You have to have tremendous people in these countries and you have to work with them and support them.
You can't, you can't carry it out by arriving on-site being critical of people and then leaving again and expecting them to fix problems. And I think that's one of our great strengths. Is, is that, those abilities. But I think the secret of political risk is really quite simple at the end of the day. It's not easy.
Believe me. We both spent lots of hours in lots of different countries, sometimes, you know, going through frustrating bureaucracies and lots of other different things. But the real the real secret to succeeding in areas around the world is really delivering on the promises you make. I find it in life, as well as in business, if you deliver on the promises you make, you tend to make more friends than enemies. So we've gone and I've gone and sat with presidents of countries.
And said, requesting a meeting. And I wanted to meet the president of Nicaragua and other countries and sit down and say, here, here's who we are We want we would like to come into your country. We have an opportunity. We're gonna build a gold mine. It's gonna cost just about the money.
We're gonna train this many people, and we're gonna there can be good pay jobs, responsible mining, corporate social responsibility, take care of the environment and pay lots of taxes. And we're going to do it all in two and a half years. I've done that on a number of occasions. And the leaders of these countries, they're pretty impressed with that. They're not quite as cynical as some of us perhaps because they actually believe you.
They think you're going to do it because you're a foreigner from a Western company and they expect you to deliver and they have the right to expect that. So in our case, time and time again, I think part of the reason of our relationships with the government that is so strong is because of the fundamental principles of the company, fairness respect, transparency, and accountability. And yes, we need to be accountable to the governments in these countries that we go to. The mining industry historically has been quite secretive and arrogant. Let's be frank about it.
It's changing and needs to continue to change. One of the areas that is so important is delivering the promises to the governments, because if you promise a leader something like tax based taxes and jobs and all the good things that are gonna look pretty good as well. He's going to tell his people that. He's going to tell his citizens that we've got this great Canadian company that's going to come in here and spend all this money, and we're going to get all these taxes. So if you don't do it, you lose some credibility and also the leaders of countries can lose some credibility with their people as well.
Too often I find that people aren't very good at being honest when they screw something up. It's about accountability. So if you screw something up, if you have a problem with the mine, if you have problem construction, Don't hide, be honest about it, be accountable, work with the governments, work with the people involved to solve the problems. That's accountability. So I think that is such a key point of it.
And our relationships with government, it's not a fluke. Look at these countries on this map here. Chile way back before Chile was a place to be in gold Mining in 1988. The U. S, we built a gold mine in 1989 in Idaho.
19 98 went to Russia, built a gold mine. The first one there, when gold was $2.60 an ounce, not $12.60, $2.60 an ounce. The 2 most negative investments in the world I was told over and over again in 1999 were gold in Russia. We had both of them And I said, well, let's double country and play. 1 of them is going to get better.
You should buy our shares. But it's these kind of experience is country after country, then it was South Africa. These are all the bema ones. And then on to be too cold, it was Nicaragua, and maybe other Philippines. And now Mali, all the different challenges, all the different opportunities.
But something fundamentally in common, people deserve to be treated with fairness and transparency. And we try to live that every day. This is why we've had such a tremendous success and we'll continue to in going sometimes without us fear to tread. One person's perceived risk that's too scary for them to take on is another's opportunity. And this is not just in our industry.
This is in the world. This is in business. This is in life. But at the end of the day, if you're going to be contrarian, as we've been on many occasions, you're going
to have your
critics because Conturion initiatives by definition are done by the few, not the many. So we continue to stick with this long term strategy that's obviously worked remarkably well at Bema And B2 Global. Bill is going to talk a little bit about our commitment to our employees and training, we have a I won't steal a thunder. We have incredibly high percentage of people in the countries we're in working for B2Gold. Most of them trained to buy bios on our people.
That's a very important part of our commitment to the local communities as well. The other thing I wanted to mention to take this opportunity was this remarkable executive group has continues to grow and we have a few new executive so that have joined us since we last met. 1st of all, Dana Rogers, Dana, can you stand up, please? Dana's, in October of last year, was promoted to position of, vice president of finance, and she's working with Mike and the finance group, and she was originally came to us from Pricewaterhouse as a controller in 2014. And we're thrilled to have Dana join the executive group.
In addition to that, We have Randy Ryker. Where's Randy? I understand it, Randy? So Randy's a pretty familiar face to a lot of us. Randy, most recently, has been architect of a tremendously great success story at Fekola.
Randy's been the mine manager there and he came on board while we were in construction. Make sure that by the time the mill was finished, 3 months ahead of schedule, the trucks were rolling, the drivers were trained, and we were able to fill that mill immediately it's just been a fantastic job, did an awesome job. We weren't surprised at that because we know Randy quite well. Randy was the manager of the Juliana Mine, back in 1999 and Russia. And then the Kupol mine after that in Russia as well.
Tremendous experience not only in mining, it was mining engineer, but also in our business in industry. So Randy has joined us as a vice president operations. We're thrilled to have Randy as part of the executive team as well. Also, very recent acquisition, actually September 1, Randall Chapman will join us. Randall, can you send them?
He didn't get the email about the front row, but anyway, maybe September. Randall's no stranger as well. And you'll see there's a common thread here. We kind of stick around together a lot and just the organization grows organically a lot, which I think is phenomenal. And hopefully it speaks to the culture So Randall is a lawyer and Randall, the last 4 years was associate in house counsel and vice president with Global Corp.
And before that, for 11 years, around the law firm of Lawson Landell, and for many of those years, we were one of his biggest clients. At B2Gold. And he specialized in legal side of finance and acquisitions. So He's come on board as a vice president and associate counsel working with Roger and the legal team. So very happy to have a Randall on board as part of the executive team as well.
So with that, I want to turn it over to Mike who's going to talk about, give us a quick rundown on the highlights of the financial results of the company. Followed by that, Mike's going to introduce Bill, Bill's going to get up and then after that, it's going to be Tom and then I'm going to see it a few words at the end.
Alright. Thanks very much Clive. Unless I really like that, that slide with the 280 years of collective experience. And, I just wanted to confirm the rumor that is, in fact, true that, Dennis Stansbury, that old guy sitting to my left actually represents about a 140 of those years over himself. I'm going to walk us through some of the financial highlights and some, some stuff looking forward.
Luckily Clive already told you most of what I was going to say. So I'll try and put it in a little more detail around it and maybe stay in a different accent and you can all pretend it's different. Okay. So firstly, just to talk about what we did do in 2018. And on the production side, we'd originally guided between 910,950,000 ounces and We later reguided between $920,960,000 ounces.
And in the end, we came in at the upper end of that guidance range with a record 9 33,000. And that production was most significantly led by the 1st full year of commercial production from Fekola, which just had an excellent year. More tons, better grade, better recoveries, everything you could hope for in the startup of a mine in 1st year of commercial production, but should stress that it was also very ably supported by record production at Masbate mine and consistent strong performance at Ojikoto. So really some very good, operating results And those more than offset any underperformance that we had in Nicaragua due to the social unrest in the country during the year. And when you take that record production, you look at what its impact is on your operating metrics.
You'll see a very significant benefit to both our cash operating costs and sustaining costs. So cash operating costs are your are your measure of direct costs, I guess, from your operations? And they came in at $495 an ounce which is below the low end of our guidance range of between $5.05 $5.50. And then all in sustaining costs, which is a measure used by consistently across the mining industry now, and by all analysts. It's a measure of all your costs, what's your direct operating costs and then it gets allocated other things like production taxes and your capital to come up with what's the total cash cost to you, your mining operation.
So This year, 2018, we had $7.58 an ounce, which again was well below, our guidance range of $7.80 to $8.30. So Excellent performance led to record annual gold revenue and record annual cash flows of just over 450,000,000. And that cash flow, just a quick comment on that. When we were set out to build Fekola and on the way through, there was a very definitely decision made to try and do that without using going to the equity markets and raising equity to do it. We decided that we'd take try and take the cash flow from our existing operations and also use that facilities to finance Fekola thereby reducing the dilution to our shareholders.
And we felt confident that we could manage our way through, which we have. And so that was part of one of the strategy, but now that Fekola's turned on and running very nicely, and we'll talk a bit more about how we see it going forward. The second part of that strategy was to start using those operating cash flows to repay debt. And we took the first step on that second part of the strategy in 2018 when we repaid convert, we had an outstanding convertible note of $258,000,000 and we repaid that October 1st. So it's good to have a plan and it's it's good that we've been able to execute it and we're proceeding with that second part now.
And just looking forward a little bit to 2019, We had record results in 2018, and we expect to see record production and forecast again in 2019. We've guided between 935 975,000 ounces. That will be weighted more to the second half than the first half, just due to mine planning, but the total number we expect to be another record. On the cost side, our cash operating costs we've guided between $5.20 $5.60 announced that slightly higher than 'eighteen, but that's that's due to, some slight increases in fuel prices and in labor costs. Then on the all in sustaining cost side, we're a little higher again.
We're 8 $5 to $8.75 an ounce, but still very competitive. And that reflects a slight increase in the operating costs, but also some quite significant pre stripping development activities that we need to do at both Fekola and Ojikoto during the year. And in fact, we'll see the benefit of those stripping activities in the second half of the year when see higher grade ore coming from both those sites. And that again explains why our production is weighted more to the second half than the first half. Gold revenues again projected to be somewhere in the $1,200,000,000 area, but let's hope the gold price rallies that we're seeing and the sort of the better markets that we're seeing continue.
And hopefully, we'll see that number higher. We have projected cash flows from operating activities this year, $400,000,000 for the year. A little lower than 2018. A couple of reasons for that. 1 is we have to make significantly higher cash tax payments.
In 2019 when compared to 'eighteen. And also in 2018 benefited quite significantly from Fekola when it was in that first your production, you benefit from inventories and higher grade stockpiles that it had in the ramp up phase. And, so when you put those two things together, we're coming in slightly below where we were last year, but still excellent cash flow generation of $400,000,000. And I think looking forward, we'll give more guidance on this think when we go through certainly the budget process and put our 2020 budgets at the end of the year to start next year, but we certainly expect to see a significant jump in operating in free cash flows again when we see the new Fekola expansion project, moving forward and coming online. Clive mentioned, that expansion is two parts.
There's an increase in the mill capacity, but there's also an accelerator mining. Strategy, including stockpiling and pushing more high grade material through the mill quicker than the original feasibility study. And we expect that to significantly benefit cash flows for 2020 on onwards. How are we doing? If you look at year to date, Q1, we're doing great.
So far, we're on well on our way to meeting guidance for the year. Production's ahead of budget again led by excellent performance at Fekola Mesbate. Our cash costs are below budget, due to favorable operating costs and mining costs at both Masbate and Oj Kodo. And cash flows from operating activities, $86,000,000, in the first quarter, but again weighted to the second half of the year. So we still expect to meet or beat that $400,000,000 target that we put out there already.
Good training Katie. So finally, just wanted to comment on our financial position at year end and at the end of Q1. Clive already mentioned, we did reduce our overall in 2018 from $700,000,000 to start of the year to $480,000,000. The main component of that being, the repayment of the convert that I talked about earlier. When you look at that strong operating cash flow and the increases that we're expecting when the expansion projects implemented at Fekola, we're confident that if sometime in 2021, if we want to be debt free or certainly no revolver drawn on the revolver, we could be in that position.
So that gives you an idea to kind of cash are expected to generate. On the subject to the revolver, it was, $500,000,000 with $100,000,000 accordion feature, which basically says was $100,000,000 available for another lender wanted to come in. We recently upsized that and we closed it. And that from $500,000,000 to $600,000,000 and also to increase the accordion feature that, that amount that's available to the new lenders if they want to come in from 100 to 200. So we now have capacity on the revolver in total, including the accordion of 800,000,000 I just want to clarify a couple of points why we did that.
We've seen some speculation as to why we upsized that. And really there's 2 answers to that. The first one is because we can and it was time to do it. We're in a strong financial position. It was time for us to revisit the revolver and revisit the terms and we did that.
And, we bumped it by $100,000,000 because it's always nice to have that little bit extra. We shouldn't forget if we look back 2 or 3 years ago when we were building Fekola and And the gold price plummeted significantly. We found ourselves having to look at alternative financing negatives to get Fekola finished. So when it's available to you, you should take it. And, the second thing is the carrying costs and the revolver are low.
Only paying 50 points or so on undrawn amounts. So it's a low cost to have that facility in place and we think it's prudent to have it in place and benefits of the company to do so. My own couple of comments would be on goal prepayment. $120,000,000 was one of the financing mechanisms we used when we were filling in financing gaps along the way on getting Fekola Belt. And we've just delivered those final ounces.
And so that's another part of the strategy. In Q2 of this year, we delivered into the final ounces there. So there are no outstanding gold prepayments now. And finally, on the Fekola fleet side, we finance Cola with a great, equipment facility with Caterpillar Financial. And, we fully draw in utilize that fleet and As we look forward to the Fekola expansion, it's likely probably that we'll go back and seek to finance some of that fleet as well.
So again, caterpillar part of that family. I should give a shadow to the banks that we do have in our existing revolver. Just to mention that it's co led by HSBC. ING and Scotia. And also in the syndicate, we have CIBC at BMO and SocGen.
And in particular BMO, BMO is the latest, addition to that syndicates. So welcome again to the B2 family. It's great to have another North American bank. In there. And with that, I'll pass it over, I think, to Bill, who's going to tell us how operations actually January, all of these magnificent results, so we can actually report them to you.
So kind of a tough act
to follow. You've got Clive telling you all these great things. You've got Mike telling you all these great things and you know that Tom's going to tell you all these great things for sure. It's also hard in the sense that over the last 3 or 4 years when we've done this, we've been building or commissioning And it's real easy to talk about our world class construction team and how great the commissioning has gone. So when we were talking about this year, we were trying to figure out what we're going to do on the operational side.
And I think Clive said at the beginning, One of the things he challenged us at the beginning of last year was we're not building something. Let's take a look inward and see who we are as a company. What can we do better? And so the operations group really took that to heart. And we spent a lot of time this last week looking at our metrics.
And so my thesis today is that through a holistic approach to accounting, legal, engineering, exploration operation, we've added significant shareholder value, not just through construction, but through operations. I wanna start like we should with health and safety. It's B2's intention that every employee goes home every day, safe to their family. How does that happen? It's certainly, it's not by accident, pun intended.
We have implemented significant management systems, starting really in 2013 and carrying on through today, you can clearly see the downward trend where we are now below industry standards for lost time accidents. That's just one metric obviously in health and safety, but it is a key one which shows that what we're doing is working. And you can even see in 2019, we've been able to maintain our numbers below industry standard. So it's clear that we're that the systems we have in place are working. Now the next, the next bunch of slides are the operational slides for each of the sites.
I just want to tell you, basically, it goes like this. There's 3 slides for 3 or 4 for each mine site. The first slide is intentionally very busy. Because that's kind of a snapshot on what we've done since we had the project. And I'm not going to go through each one of the bullets we'd be here all day.
The second slide is what we've done in 2018. And both Mike and Clive have hinted or indicated what we've done, but I'll try and expand on that a little bit. The 3rd and or 4th slide are the wow factor slides. And be, don't be afraid to oh and ah when these come up. Really, that's where that's the crux of my thesis showing you what where we've added value.
And maybe unlike some of the other presentations, we've done them the historical order that we acquired the project. So we're not saying that any project is any more important than any other one. What we're saying is that from the beginning, we had continuous success and built upon that success. Starting with El Limon in 2009, And this once again is a repeat trend when you look at each of the slides, we've always tried to optimize the mill throughput and the mill production. And that, that's really the the excellent work of our VP of metallurgy, John Rahala.
And as you do that, obviously, you include you increase your ounce profile But of course, if you're not, if you don't have great exploration success, you decrease your mine life. So what I've shown here on this slide is not only, not only have we had great success on the milling side, the exploration team in 2018 increase the resource at Limon Central. If you remember Limon is a mine, which, as Clive said, I think you said, 1941, but let's say mid 20th century. It's been in operation since the mid-twentieth century with a very short mine life for a long time. But through the exploration success recently, We've now extended that life to more than 10 plus years.
We have actually started production in El Limon Central when we get to the 2019 guidance, we'll talk a little bit more about that. As I said, the second slide will always be, what did we do in 2018? Well, 2018 in Limon, we were basically at the bottom end of our guidance. And you might say, well, that, that is not that great, but the reality is with the political unrest in Nicaragua, we think that the team there did an excellent job the fact that they weren't able to get operational permits, things like explosives or reagent permits, they were able to continue to work throughout the crisis and maintain production at the low end of guidance, we think is an absolute hit. Here's the UNOS slide for Limon.
Basically, what you see here is over over the time that we've had it, what is the resource? And what you can see really in 2017 2018 is Limon Central coming online. And as I said, that's basically increased the life of mines of more than 10 plus years. So Limon is one of these projects that works well when you have both an open pit and an underground operation working together. And because they now have identified this large open pit resource, this project will continue to function at a very high level for many years to come.
Libertad also acquired at the same time as Limon. When we acquired it, it was basically a failed heap leach with a concept to go to a to go to a mill. We quickly converted that into a mill and then started operations there. And once again, when you see the when you see the wild slide, you'll see that there it actually had a fairly short mine life. The concept was really to push it through the mill quite quickly.
And as of 2019, we continue to have several years of mine life left. And that's primarily a result once again of the political instability in the country. We had to replace some of our high grade material with low grade material and push it through the mill. It was a choice that we made it at the corporate level and at the and at the country level. The workers had indicated that they would rather continue to work in some capacity than just take a holiday while things were being resolved.
And so we agreed with that and and they pushed through. And it's not a bad year considering the low grade that they had pushed through. So here's the Eulina slide. This is the production in 2009. That's what we purchased this on bottom line.
The gray line along the bottom is what we pay is what we pay to buy. The gold line is what we've actually produced. So you can see, obviously, over the course of the life of the mine, we've gone for more than double the ounces, and it continues to operate today. The Otjikoto mine. Once again, same the same concept where we buy it.
We continue to optimize the mill production, increase the mill throughput, and have exploration success. This one came with the expansion almost immediately after commencement of operation from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 tons per annum, currently running at 3,400,000 tons per annum. And the excellent success In 2018, the Otjikoto mine basically performed exactly as we thought it would. We spent the payer year in the Otjikoto pit, with the grade throughput and recoveries basically at or above where we thought it would be. And it came out right above the midpoint of our guidance.
This is an interesting slide. So once again, this is this is the Otjikoto ounce produced. And what you see in, in the gray and the green line is the 2013 feasibility, once again, that's what we designed to. The gray is what we've been producing since that point. And then in 2019, based on our new mining plan, you can see the increased downs profile.
Additionally, if you look at the right hand graph, what you see, you see the tons milled. So once again, we started out at 2,500,000 tons per annum. Quickly ramped up to 3 and now running more than 3,400,000 tons per annum through the mill, recognizing again on the left hand graph that we haven't decreased the life of the mine. I wanted to throw up a second, oh, in our slide for Otjikoto simply because this is one of the things that we're really proud of there. There, we've started out mining at a mining rate 45,000 tons per day.
We're currently do doing more than double that, and we're gonna kinda go another 25% again. We're talking about getting up to 120,000 tons per day. That requires a real concentration on productivity and efficiencies in the mine. Masbati, I don't think that anyone anyone, hasn't heard that it has been an absolute star in our portfolio. As Clive indicated, when we bought it, pretty high operating costs.
We thought that we could do better. And it turns out with the team on-site, we've absolutely been able to optimize it. And that's been done through a lot of ways. Certainly, we have expanded the mill there once again, our concurrent ongoing theme. We have replaced the contractor for those that don't know, as Clive said, B2 believes in accountability.
We almost always do our own mining. And then, and so there we switched to owner mining. We replaced the fleet. And just recently, we expanded the plant in what's what's really interesting is last year, we had we were above guidance while an expansion was going on. So you think about building something while you're operating it and the tieings and the downtime, we continue to beat guidance despite the fact that we were tying in.
These are the results for 2018. As I just said, We were above guidance 2200or210. We ended up above that at 2 16. Operating costs were excellent. And, I'm not going to spoil the surprise on the next slide.
It shows our historical tons our ounces produced versus our operating costs. So as I said, in 2013, we were up around $800 an ounce. As Clive correctly pointed out, last year, we were below $600 an ounce, and we were projecting that again for this year. One of the things that actually I'm probably most proud of at Masbate and for those that have actually gone on either an analyst tour or site tour, is the environmental status there is amazing. If you look at the reclamation work, they're doing the ongoing reclamation best in class, if you haven't followed the the the Philippines, there was a time a couple years ago where basically they came in and did an audit of all the mines, shut down most of the mines.
And, B2 is one of the ones that was able to keep operating, and we've been used by the government there really as a poster child of responsible mining. Fekola. Fekola, same story. You started out at 4,000,000 tons per annum in a feasibility came out of the gate at more than 5,000,000 tons per annum in 20 18, we were above 6,000,000 tons per annum, and we can and we're now in the process of expanding to 7,500,000 tons per annum. So once again, you would think that perhaps you're going to shorten your mine life and you're going to curtail the issue curtail the social issues.
But the reality is, as we have continued through exploration success, which I'll talk about in just a minute what that does for operations, we still have a 10 year mine life. Came out of the came out of the gates, like a house on fire, produced more than almost double what we thought the first quarter. More than 40,000 ounces above what we had projected in 2018. And in 2019, we'll get to that slide later on, but we continue to be ahead of budget So here's the 2018 guidance. This really is 2018 results.
This really is a result of the higher throughput and some of the high grade stockpiles that Clive had alluded to when Randy came on-site. We started up the mining fleet. We're able to get ahead on the mining side and get some high grade stockpiles, ready to go for 2018. This slide is one that we've been using a lot recently simply because there's a lot of people that really don't kind of understand this expansion that we're talking about. Certainly, Tom's group has had significant success in expanding the resource, as part of that, as, as Clive mentioned earlier, he challenged us to say, if it is true, what are you gonna do with it?
So so we took a good hard look at it, And we actually did, we engaged a consulting group called Whittle Consultings Consulting that came in and did a full site wide optimization. And the results of that study showed basically that if you do a couple of things, if you expand your milling rate to 7,500,000 tons per annum, which was kind of a tipping point for us because that's where our SAG Mill could produce is a 7,500,000 tons brand without expansion. And if you expanded your mining fleet, basically to double, that you could move some of the ounces forward and really increase your NPV. So we did that. And then when we put it out, there was a lot of, there was a lot of naysayers in the market saying, that perhaps because it's a PEA, you may have some inferred material.
This may not be real, but the reality is when you look at these, particularly in this graph, right here, these two graphs, which is why it's up there, the left hand side is, was our existing or is our existing mining plan up until PEA. And what you see is if you were to overlay that on the right hand graph, really through the first five or six phases, all of the material that we're talking about for the next 4 or 5 years are an indicated. So what you're really talking about is way out at the end of the mine life in phases 8 and 9 in the brown and the red zone up there on the right, you have some inferred, which Tom and his group are busy in filling right now. So for the 1st 4 or 5 years, we're fairly confident that the numbers 550,000 ounces average over the 1st 5 years are very, very real. And as Clive alluded to, next year, we're talking with something with a 6 in front of it.
Once again, the UNR graph, what you've got here on the left, is the green line at the bottom is what we had in the 2015 feasibility. The black line and the gold line above it is what we're currently projecting. And if you look at the if you look at the right, same story as some of the other mines looking at the production rates for the mill, What you can see is that we have consistently outperformed not only what we design, but then what we had projected going forward. So if see that, like I said, we've been up about 5,000,000 tons per year in 2018, almost 6,000,000 tons this year, which we're going to be over. And then ramping up 7,500,000 tons by the third quarter of next year.
Now just to talk about 2019 as a as as a best guess. Remember, this is forward looking, but what I think in the first quarter, we've already projected that certainly we haven't reguided anywhere. And just going forward from that, if you look at if you look at the Fekola mine, through this month, we're confident that we remain at or above guidance. If you look at Namibia, same story at or above the mid range of guidance anyways, the Philippines, once again, above guidance at this time, both Nicaragua, both Nicaragua and assets. We just had a very interesting week with the technical group.
And while they, there has struggled a little bit this year, plan that they have does show them making guidance for the entire year. So we're not regriding at all at this time. We continue to say that we are on or above guidance the whole project for the whole company. Taking a holistic approach to the operations doesn't mean just jamming the operations out and making sure that we get our money and we go home. As I said, we we've from a health and safety standpoint, we spend a lot of time making sure everyone gets home safe, but we also want our workers to be happy with us.
We have more than 97% of our employees are hired locally across the globe, and that's out of more than 5000 employees. We have 13% women representation in the workforce, but of that, of our senior staff, more than 22% are females. That number, that number seems low when you look at it, but I the based on what we've just recently learned through our gender diversity study, again, with similar size operations, it's pretty typical. We're obviously trying to improve that. We just completed a gender diversity study.
And, we're in the process of creating action plans to try and include more gender, more women in the workplace. We do have we did implement a people management policy in 2018. Which was then rolled out into all operations talking about, the anti harassment, non bias, gender equality policies. We're in, we're in the process of now turning those into procedures at all sites. Very small turnover, very low turnover, 4.9%.
We are unionized at 3 mines. We have a very good relationship with those unions. And those those sites where we do not have unions, we certainly have, regular management meetings and, committees where we can interact with all On the social side, there is, there is a big push for this ESG content, environmental, social, and corporate governance. We score quite highly in those regards. And that, that's due to a lot of the work that we've already done.
Certainly, at all of our sites, we do associate economic think back assessments. Some one of the things that we've done recently, we've gone through all of our sites and done human rights risk assessments. We're very big on making sure that there are grievance mechanisms in place at all our sites and that we have stakeholder engagement plans for all sites to make sure that everybody that is either affecting or can affect or is affected by the project has an opportunity to voice their voice or their support or concerns about the project. And I guess maybe before I hand it over to Tom, I just wanted to introduce a couple of people Clive indicated, obviously, that Randy record had become a VP. In his place at Fekola, we've asked Ray Mead to move over to Fekola.
He stuck up his ante He's had plenty of experience in Africa and wanted to go back. So Ray's going to be the general manager at Fekola. He was previously at Masbate. And then, taking his place is Dan Moore. Dan Moore will be the GM and president and CEO of, PG PRC in the Philippines.
And, his number 2 is Ryan Russ. So we, we, once again, Clive's talks about this up and coming group of people that are internal to B2 and once again, it's the case. And then the last thing I'd like to announce is that we have finally gotten some help for Ken Jones. Ken Jones previously was the manager for HSE and permitting, over 5 mines, quite a, quite a hefty task. We've hired Darren Perry to work the HNS manager and Ken will now focus exclusively on the environmental.
And with that, I think I'll turn it over to you, Tom.
Thanks, Bill. I'm just going to through some of our exploration here. I'm not going to go through all of it in detail. I don't think we have enough time with all the projects that are now going on. Here's a map of the world that you can see Most of our exploration projects are around the mine site.
We do have a number of other projects, away from the mine. As Clive says, we're now active in Uzbekistan, and we're now active in Japan, and we're also active in a few other places that we haven't mentioned yet. Current budget for exploration this year is, over $43,000,000. Most of that is being spent in West Africa, actually specifically has been spent around, Fekola That's where we're certainly most excited. Expiration beyond that, we're active in, around all the mine sites.
I won't get into the much detail outside to say at, in Nicaragua, the exploration that we're doing there is, related to near mine site expiration, converting inferred indicated, testing ideas or aiding the mine and projecting ore. And then, some new areas in and around the mine, certainly at, all the mines, we still view them as having good exploration potential. At Otjikoto, exploration is focused exclusively right now on, down plunge and near mine targets or parallel ore shoots as we see them. We're drilling on a parallel ore shoot right now. And then we'll focus on down plunge for both Wolfshag and Otjikoto itself.
I'll go in a little bit detail at Fekola later. I've got a couple slides on Fekola. I do want to make a comment on our grassroots exploration, early stage exploration. As Clive has said many times, we're not going out right now and doing major acquisitions. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for it, but one of the reasons I like to talk about is, you know, we spend a lot of time looking at assets and there's no real value out there.
We've looked at a lot of things we're not seeing the value. I mean, there's other reasons we're not doing, but that's the reason that I like to drive to. And because of that a couple of years ago, I presented the Clive and the Management group is to say, why don't we start doing early stage exploration evaluations like we used to do when I started out in this business, around the same time as Clive just a few years ago. And we started doing that. We have crew of people who spends all their time evaluating projects around the world.
And with that, we've generated a number of, things that we're working on right now. Some of them such as Uzbekistan and Japan, you're aware of, we're sort of aware of, other we'd like to keep under the radar right now as we're developing targets. So current expiration, you can see on the left is the 2018 drilling that we do and, in 2019, where we are at at the end of the May. As you can see, you don't find anything if you don't drill. Now Fekola is where we're spending all our and certainly we've had success to date.
But in my opinion, and certainly the opinion of our exploration group, we're still early in the exploration cycle for Fekola. We still see Fekola in the areas to the north and the conda and to the south of Fekola as having excellent potential to find more. You know, we found our a small saprolite resource, to the north of Fekola called Anaconda. We're still doing exploration drilling on that. We see that as having great potential to expand satellite resource itself.
And then the sulfide targets underneath that, we've had a number of really good hits, and we are advancing exploration On Fekola itself, you can see the drill holes are plogging up here in a nice bright green dots, that we're working on right now. Fekola, we view Fekola as being open to the north. It's open to the south. We think there may be potential for other shoots underneath Fekola. And pro and probably most significant.
The engineers have found more ore for us by just lowering the costs. It's nice to do some exploration without having to actually do the work. And then we see some potential to the west of Fekola, on, at least 4 parallel structures, dear Fekola. Which, we don't see as being as big as Fekola, but certainly have potential to add some resources. And this shows in much more detail the amount of drilling we're doing around Fekola you can see with the red and purple dots to the north of Fekola and to the south of Fekola is most of our drilling right now.
We're focusing on taking our PEA pit, converting all that inferred indicated, as I'm going to show on the next slide, the long section, which, hopefully you can see that. Well, the blue line off to the right is our new PEA pit the black line that runs through the middle is our current reserve pits. So you can see that the PEA pit with the infill drilling we're doing now is significantly adding to the reserve base of Fekola. Now what I want to say about this slide, what I find is important about this slide is the far right hand side is the red line which is our actually our resource pit. You know, I know I'm not supposed to add things up, but I always have trouble remembering.
So there's 7,000,000 ounces out there. In that resource pit, now you can see the PEA pit has gone to the boundary of that. The resource pit is to the boundary of our data. Our drill data, which is really important, which means it's wide open to the north. So that our resource has taken everything we've found so far.
Now what's happened is since the PEA, you know, the guys are working on other things at lower costs. And because of that, we had the feeling that our reserve pick can move even further to the the north or to the right hand side of that. So we've now done, we're now doing infill drilling in the resource pit. So by the end of the year, we hope to have all our resources within the resource pit in an indicated category, which will then allow us to take advantage of the new costs at the engineering group is generated and we'll hopefully, we'll get, a larger reserve beyond what we have now on the PEA. In addition to that, at the south end of the Colop pit, we started doing infill drilling on some, some resources that we had identified some time ago.
And we're finding that we should say we're finding. We believe now that there's a potential for another ore shoot that's going to run underneath the Fekola pit, which, you know, does open up a pretty large area for exploration. So we just started doing exploration drilling on that. So in summary for Fekola, as I said earlier, I think Fekola is still a really early stage in the exploration cycle. Even though when you talk about a mine that's got over 5,000,000 ounces, that's a pretty big thing to say.
We see big potential up at Anaconda. We think Fekola's wide open down plunge. The way the costs are going, we think they can be developed from open pit and potentially later on if it keeps on going underground mining. So in summary, I'd like to say, thank you for everybody for the support from the board because you don't find anything, if you don't get support from them and,
over to you Clive. Thanks,
Tom. Just a couple of additional points I wanted to make thank a few people and then, What are the problems without writing speeches, which I don't do? Hopefully, it's more interesting for you because I don't read a speech because I don't write a speech. Part of the problem is you can kind of lose your place or hand over the mic when you're not supposed to yet. So if you looked at the slides that were coming up earlier, there was a few graphs that Mike had to flip through because I didn't cover them.
We switched the order to the slideshow yesterday. So These slides were earlier, but we moved them. Now, it's about accountability. So, normally, someone in my position might blame someone else here, tech guy, whatever, about the slides. But no, it's about accountability.
It's my bad, my fault. So here we go. So the other thing I want to talk about where does this put us in the world and where the elephant in the room or at least the one somewhat disappointing factor for many of us as shareholders those of us in management of the board is the fact that with all this amazing stuff we've done, how come our share price has not risen dramatically. There are the good news is there are 17 mining analysts out there, a lot of them are very good analysts who have a target price over the next 12 months at 5.40 Canadian a share, for B2Gold based on where we stand today and our projections. So why are we trading at less than $4 a share?
Part of the reason I touched on before is the fact that unfortunately, we're one of the few bright spots in a very negative scenario over the last number of years in the gold production space. This graph shows you over 10 years the share price performance, our performance versus the TSX Gold Index. So an index of gold produce and the gold price itself. So we're in the gold, the gold price is in the green and the gray is the TSX gold index. So it's quite interesting because Over the last 10 years, the gold price is actually from then to now is up 40% that the index, which is the index of old gold producers or significant gold producers, listed in the Toronto Stock Exchange is down 48%.
So when anybody, when anyone wants to blame their poor performance, as a gold producer, not all, but many, obviously, it's an index. Many, want to blame it on the gold price, it's just not the case. It's not true. There's other reasons I touched on them before, unfortunately, some pretty bad management. But look at us, we've actually done remarkably well when you look at us on a 10 year base up 3 23%.
Now according to 17 mining analysts, we're fairly significantly undervalued now. So this, graph should and hopefully will be even more impressive as we go further along. This is another way of looking at it. This is V2Gold versus our peers of projected production growth profile. So from 2016 to 2019, we had a remarkable 70 4 percent increase in profitable gold production.
Yet if you look at the slide and look at some of the other gold producers, Very few grew at all in that period of time. And many on the left hand side, including Barrick, Eldorado, Yamana, New Gold Kinross, Acacia, not to name names, but they actually had a drop in in gold production as well. So we've been venturing. We've been doing something quite unusual in the last 3 to 5 years, which is acquiring good projects, building good high quality gold mines, growing production profil production and finding lots of gold and managing all of our affairs, I think, remarkably well. So it gives you an idea of what an out performer we've been.
Now this outperformance as I said, has not been fully, reflected in the marketplace. At the end of the day, it's hard to be the only boat that doesn't go over the tide. So when people get negative on the gold sector and there's a lot of negativity out there today, unfortunately, that hurts us and our shareholders. Because people frankly lost so much money in the last 10 years on on gold shares that they become very negative on the sector. So we're bucking the trend.
We'll continue to do that. Because our long term growth strategy is paying off dramatically as we can see today. Here's another interesting one. Our job is to create shareholder value and do it responsibly. This graph shows you the history of creating shareholder value.
If you go to the far left side of January, of 9 and look at where we were trading at below a dollar a share. And then you look at where we are today, with a market cap of 3,900,000,000, the market cap then was a few 100,000,000. We have in terms of creating shareholder value, an increase of 743 percent, if you bought the shares back in January of 2009. So frustrating to not getting the value for what we built. I do believe it'll come, but quite impressive, I think, in what this is really all about.
And this is what happens when you start a company as an exploration company. In ten short years, you go from 0 gold production to 1,000,000 ounces a year or just below 1,000,000 ounces a year. Just want to talk a little bit about where we're going and then I'll take a few questions if there are any. I know it's the long session, but you can see why we wanted to give you an informative view of everything that we're doing. So where are we going and what are we going to do?
Well, we're going to continue to do what we do well, which is optimize profitable gold production with the remarkable teams we have at our existing mines. We're going to continue, as Bill talked about, our social responsibility where they continue to try and be on the cutting edge and an industry leader in responsible mining and government relations in health and safety and in community social programs. There's a video after this that, is worth watching that will highlight some of the pretty cool stuff we're doing in terms of environmental protection and the operations. I think you find it interesting and informative. We're going to continue our strong financial performance to maximize our cash flow operations, continue to reduce debt.
In the longer term, the view of this company, what we aspire to be in the future is a company that not only continues to be profitable, take some of that money and puts it back into funding and building more gold mines and growing, we also aspire to be a dividend paying company as well. So I'd like to get us to the point and see us at the point where we take some of the cash from operations we generate and put it back into building more mines or expanding mines. I'll also take some of that cash and dividended out to our shareholders as a reward to our shareholders. But that's got to be balanced out between growth versus dividend. I think that many people own shares in this company because we're profitable, etcetera, but because of our remarkable ability to continue to grow and add shareholder value.
And frankly, I'm not that interested in doing this if we're not growing. That's what we do. We do it as well or better than anybody else. So we're going to continue to grow, but as we get bigger and more cash from operations, we will look to, to start a dividend policy. I'm not going to promise when, probably won't be next year, but in the not to just in the future, have a balanced company good production, good cash flow, good growth, and also pays the dividend to the shareholders as well.
We're focused on in house in in house organic growth. You can see why. We really don't know yet how big Fekola is. It's already basically doubled in size on a resource basis since we acquired it. And as Tom shown you, not only is it open to the north, there's lots of other exploration targets in and around Fekola.
So we're very focused on getting value for Fekola. And this expansion that's coming up rapidly and it's going to be dramatic for Fekola. There's a lot of built in value that should come out of will come out of that expansion as well. So we're going to continue to explore around our mines, where we've had great success, continues to look at advanced exploration opportunities, whereas Tom said, some early stage exploration opportunities around the world. We have one of the best gold exploration teams in the world, and that team, many of that team have been together for 30 plus years, and continues to grow and continues to improve and impress.
The cheapest ounces will always be the ones you find, not the ones you buy. We've done a combination of buying accretive ounces but also founded off a lot of them in our career at BEMA and B2Gold. We're not pursuing any significant acquisition of a development project. I've said that many times, lady and I apparently keep up to say and keep needing to say it over and over and over again. There's a nervous market out there and they're very scared that mining company, gold mining companies are going to screw it up, unfortunately, some have.
At the end of the day, we are extraordinarily disciplined about what we do and what we acquire. We've probably looked at 600 projects last 10 years. We've done 5 deals. At the end of the day, Tom alluded to it. We don't like a lot of the quality we see out there in development projects.
But with our shares treating where they are, why would we use our shares to go out and buy ounces when we've got so much of value in a company that's not reflected in our share price? So it's about organic growth. It's about exploration. It's about expanding our existing operations and keeping it out for other opportunities. We will probably one day get back to major acquisitions, such as Fekola, which we bought for $500,000,000 U.
S. Which now looks like a phenomenally cheap acquisition. We'll get back to that, but it are chiming on our terms. Over the last 3 to 5 years when we are building 2 mines in Africa, there was hardly anybody was doing. Acquisitions were growing, as we pointed out.
So we did the heavy lifting when it was unpopular. We put ourselves in a remarkable position of having all these great assets and the ability to grow organically. Others will now struggle to grow or they'll need to grow and they'll do it by acquiring things. The competition is going to get heavier to acquire gold projects. Fortunately, we don't have to participate in that.
We're never going to buy anything that needs a higher gold price and or expiration success to justify the purchase price. That sounds like it should be a straightforward strategy in our business. Sadly, it hasn't always been. So at the end of the day, we are very disciplined in our approach of continue to, but I just want to say it again. We're not pursuing any major acquisitions at this time.
So with that, I just want to quickly wrap up by thanking some people, our executive team here and in the front row to some amazing bunch of people to work with. So the professionalism, the, the way that this group conducts self and the way we, I think, work together, I I think, is very rewarding and, quite extraordinary in terms of the transparency, the communication and the mutual respect and the ability to grow together. It's been quite remarkable. Thank you all for your efforts. I want to also thank our management teams from around the world and many of them are here.
We have representatives here from Nicaragua, from the Philippines, from Namibia and Mali, and also from some of the countries where we have development and exploration projects. Tremendous management teams. We bring them together every year here, we've been, it's been a week of tremendous meetings and exchanging ideas about how the different minds do different things like, social issues or mining itself, for all the other things we do, and we always like to get everyone together and share the information, but also make sure that people that manage these projects around the world get time and FaceTime with the executives with the board. So thank all of you and the Synchrony remarkable management team around the world. I also want to thank our joint venture partners and the governments of which we work with, very great relationships there.
And I think I talked about the fact that we feel we've earned those great relationships by our performance. I also want to thank all of our employees around the world, 5300, whatever it is now. And also this remarkable stuff we have in Vancouver, incredible ability to grow very low turnover rate. And, were very couldn't do any of this without our remarkable employees. You know, I talked a little bit before about, I look at beachy gold.
I call it the United Nations of beachy gold. Because I think we ate last time we added it up with all these projects around the world, but there are people, there are citizens of 35 companies that work for B2Gold. 35 countries. Sorry. That doesn't mean we're in 35 countries, but it means citizens of 35 countries work in our operations, in total.
That's an absolutely remarkable. And I find that to be very rewarding. At a time where there are powerful forces in the world that want to turn the clock back on globalization and mutual cooperation and respect. I'd like to think that B2Gold is an example For the world, frankly, about how people can work together, people from different countries, people of different races, people of different religions can work and cooperate together. And that's what we're very proud of, our ability to do that.
And I think that starts with the board, the executive group, That stuff starts at the top. You don't fake that stuff. And that's part of this fairness, respect and transparency that we talk so much finally, I'd like to thank the other people that help us do our jobs and help us with whether it be consultants, contractors, lawyers, auditors, etcetera. Great team of people that help us as well. And finally, of course, our shareholders.
We have a remarkable supportive group of shareholders as we've seen today, even though they're frustrated and a little disappointed as I am in the and as we talked about the share price not reflecting remarkable growth that we've seen did well. But I want to thank just the shareholders everywhere for their support and what we do. We take being public very seriously we work for the shareholders of this company. And I'm so pleased to see the turn out the amount of shares that we've voted. That tells me that they're paying attention, and it's very rewarding, and humbling to see that in fact, they seem to understand our vision and share our vision for the future.
That's really, most of what I wanted to tell you. We do have a video that's starting now. If someone was to have a washer break, while that's happening, that's okay. Go ahead. But I think, you know, you might find it interesting to watch it.
It shows you some of the remarkable, just some of the remarkable corporate social responsibility programs we do. This is something that we're very passionate about. And I think you'll see it when you see this video. So actually before I guess we'll do that, I will take some, see if there are any questions you want to ask me now? Or you can also corner me or everybody else outside the room for with a beverage and a piece of cheese and a cracker afterwards, if you like.
Are there any questions that any shareholders would like to ask at this time? Okay. Well, I will take that to mean another full and complete presentation So the video is coming on right now. And, thank you all so much for your time. Thanks for coming out, Friday afternoon.
And, as we said, hope to see you for a refreshment afterwards outside. So, thank you all very much.