Letter from the Chairman Norman B. Keevil Chairman of the Board To the Shareholders While 2011 had been a year of record revenues and profits, with strong production and demand for most of our products,  results in 2012 were lower as a result of a number of well-reported factors. These included difficulties in the European  Economic Community, debt and electoral unrest in the United States, lower growth and leadership changes in China, and events in the Middle East, to cite just a few. It has been observed that recovery from a globally synchronized financial meltdown often takes years longer than from  more typical business cycles, and this time certainly seems to fit that model. Conditions in 2012 resulted in lower prices, earnings and cash flow for Teck and, similarly, for most of our peers. Many of these peers in the mining industry have announced leadership changes and write-downs of recent acquisitions, and  have embarked upon a period of capital retrenchment and project deferral while they re-examine their ongoing options in an “uncertain future”. It is worth observing once again that in our experience the future has never been certain, and that a balanced, long-term  business strategy that allows for this uncertainty is called for. It was just a few years ago that the term “super-cycle” was popularized, reflecting ever-increasing demand from aspiring  people in emerging markets. As we noted in this letter in 2009, this did not mean cycles had been abolished. Today, in  early 2013, some pundits would say: “The super-cycle has ended”. Neither conventional wisdom is likely valid. At the same time, it is more difficult than ever to build new mines, exacerbated by interminable permitting delays and  increasing capital costs. Our Antamina project stands out as one of the last major mines to actually have been built on  budget, and many of the aforementioned write-downs have been a function of escalating construction costs.  It is a time of change, as always, and this company has been built by recognizing and embracing change. 2012 was a year in which we celebrated both continuity and evolutionary change at Teck. We have been in the mining  business for 100 years since Teck-Hughes Gold Mines Ltd. was formed to explore and develop a gold mine in northern  Ontario, but the company has changed many times over those years as our world has evolved. A brief historical review  may be of interest.  Teck-Hughes remained a gold company for its first half century, adding a second mine at Lamaque in Quebec in 1934,  but with rising costs and a fixed price, the gold mining business became increasingly difficult. Teck-Hughes turned to  exploration for other metals, participating as part of a six-company syndicate in a geophysical survey that discovered the  important Mattagami copper-zinc deposit in 1957. However, none of the six were in a position to develop it, and it ended  up being built and controlled by Noranda. Ironically, Teck-Hughes in 1954 also drilled into what would much later become  the important Hemlo gold deposit, but the grades weren’t high enough in those days to spur its interest further and the  claims were dropped. Teck would later return to this property in the 1980s. Meanwhile, two external events would have an impact on Teck-Hughes. Temagami Mining Company was building a new copper mine that had also been discovered, by my father, as a result of geophysical surveys; and a group of  Teck 2012 Annual Report 6