One of the most encouraging outcomes of mining investment recovery during 2017 was the increase by over 34% of disbursements to brownfield and greenfield exploration activities in our country, given the crucial relevance of increasing the existent operations' reserves and finding new ore deposits.

Today's findings mean more production in the future to support and expand mining contribution to economy; therefore, mining countries like Peru must take actions to keep the interest for exploration alive beyond the evolution of the metal prices' cycle.

We now witness a gradual recovery of mineral commodity international prices, which has clearly had an impact on investments. However, this is an external variable that does not depend on our internal decisions in order to be more competitive, but it is a circumstantial fact in global economy.