Gold Royalty Corp. (GROY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. Welcome to this webinar for Gold Royalty. The timing can be better as the closing of the acquisition actually just cross the wire within the last couple of minutes. The format will be as follows: David, John, Andrew and Peter have a presentation laid out on the Vares acquisition. They'll run through that at the beginning portion of this. We will then have a Q&A session. So, there's a button at the bottom. If you could click on the Q&A button, submit your questions throughout the presentation, and we'll get around to that at the end. But less from me and more from David, if you could take it away.

Well, welcome everybody, and thanks very much, Peter, for organizing this. Today, I'm joined by John Griffith, our Chief Development Officer, Andrew Gubbels, our Chief Financial Officer, and Peter Behncke, our Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. And we're delighted to be talking to you today about our newest high quality cash flowing stream on 100% of the copper production from the long life Vares silver copper mine in Bosnia. With 18 years of reserve life, and both expansion and exploration potential, we've acquired yet another foundational asset to complement our royalties on Canadian Malartic, Cote, Borborema, REN, and Cozamin, in addition to the 240-plus royalties across a life cycle of a mine that we have within our very well diversified portfolio, predominantly gold royalties. This is entirely in line with our strategy of getting exposure to polymetallic precious metal deposits, which like Vares have long lives and naturally low cost structures because of the byproduct credits. With over 90% of our business still focused on gold, this provides us with some important metal diversification into a commodity we understand well. Like many of my Board and management, I've spent about half of my 35-year career in the copper business. So it's a metal we understand well, and we provide core competency into, and this is a deposit that fits entirely within our strategic direction at Gold Royalty Corp. And importantly, in addition to all that, copper's fundamentals are staggeringly positive, but we'll get into that in a moment. Before I get into that, I just wanted to touch briefly on our $34.5 million acquisitions to partially fund the $50 million acquisition of the Vares Copper Stream. Having not issued any material equity for cash since our successful $90 million IPO in March 2021, over 3 years ago, we've consistently said we only issue equity if we had a defined use of proceeds and 1 that was materially accretive to our shareholders. This is just such an acquisition, and we're delighted to take this opportunity, now that our financing's closed and we're permitted to talk about the virtues of this very material important acquisition to diversify our cash flowing portfolio of world-class royalties across the Americas. This acquisition, you can go to the next slide, Peter, has been part of a continuous journey of growth and value accretion since our IPO in mid-2021 through 4 distinct platforms. In 2021, after IPO, when we had very strong currency, we didn't hesitate to undertake consolidation. And we rolled up 3 of our competitors over the course of 2021 to vastly increase and diversify our portfolio and bring in cash flowing royalties. When our currency abandoned us over the course of 2020-'22 as the Federal Reserve started to tighten interest rates, and we saw a significant derating of the gold sector, we started to focus on other platforms of growth, including project financing, and the acquisition of third-party royalties, which brought us some very important royalties into the portfolio, like Borborema, like Cote, which are providing material cash flow to our growth strategy going forward. And finally, we've also focused on royalty generation. And through our royalty generator model, we've introduced significant diversification in the early stage of our portfolio that provided meaningful gold diversification at a very low cost. In fact, it's created a profit center for us through option payments, work commitments, and also royalty generation to continue to diversify our portfolio meaningfully in the earliest part of our pipeline. I'll spend a couple of minutes talking about the fundamentals of both the gold and copper price. And I think you've heard me talk about gold fundamentals. It really has been a one-way trade for over 50 years. If you look at the gold price fundamentals since the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in early 1970s, gold price has done nothing but go up, admittedly with significant volatility in the interim period. But from 1971 to today, gold price has gone from $35 an ounce to $2,400 an ounce. And over that period of time, all the major fiat currencies have seen a significant debasement of their purchasing power. In the U.S. dollar's case, for example, there's been a 96% decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. So gold is really an accurate barometer of inflation in the economy that continued debasement of purchasing power of fiat currencies and expansion of money supply. And that's no exception currently, particularly with significant debt loads globally with over 350% debt-to-GDP ratio versus 100% in the last big inflation cycle in 1970s. So, the potential for gold to significantly outperform the real all-time high in the early 1980s, we think, is immense here. When you inflation adjust the gold price at its peak in the early 1980s to 2024 dollars, we're still not close to where we were back in the early 1980s, which would have been $2,800 an ounce in 2024 dollars. So we see significant runway here, particularly as the Federal Reserve and other central banks start to pivot away from higher interest rates even as inflation becomes more firmly entrenched, and gold is reflecting that. What hasn't happened is a significant performance in the gold equities. There's still been a significant disconnect. And on the producer side, that's been driven by increasing costs at the mine site, but also a continued deterioration of reserves due to lack of exploration, particularly among the juniors in the gold sector who have not had consistent access to capital. Similarly, copper fundamentals are driven by a significant supply squeeze, not unlike what we're seeing in gold, but also burgeoning demand led by the decarbonization that we expect to achieve in the global economy over the course of the next couple of decades, which will lead to a significant increase in consumption of copper, but there's been nothing but deterioration of supply due to lack of exploration reinvestment in the sector, much like we've seen in the gold sector, but also we've seen a lack of capital investment in significant new capacity. And even recently, we've seen some significant copper producers come offline like Cobre Panama, First Quantum's core asset in Panama, which was shut down due to NGO activity. That was the 10th biggest producer of copper in the world, completely brought offline. And that's only exasperated the supply deficit that we're seeing in the copper sector, which again will be driven by burgeoning demand due to the decarbonization efforts of the global economy, but also the lack of reinvestment in new supply and exploration in the sector. So having exposure to copper, we think, is a fundamentally sound strategy and, again, part of our strategy to be exposed to polymetallic precious metal deposits with significant long lives and naturally low cost structures due to the byproduct credits that they enjoy. So with that, I think I'll pass it on to John to talk about our pipeline, and also about the Vares acquisition in a bit more detail. John?

Thanks, Dave. It is exciting to be here today to talk to you all about this acquisition. And I think, this slide really captures the transformation of the company since the 3 years plus when we went public. If you recall, we had 18 royalties at that time. We currently, with the Vares transaction, we'll have -- just over 240 assets, royalties and stream. And I think what's really a standout feature for us is those 18 royalties, all excellent assets, but none of them really offering near-term production. So over those 3 years, through our M&A efforts, the 4-pronged strategy for M&A that Dave spoke about, we've really transformed this portfolio and now have this collection of 7 cash flowing assets, including Vares and not just cash flowing assets, but in most instances, truly world-class operations. So it really is a transformational story that we've been able to deliver. And I think, importantly, behind the cash flowing assets that you'll see on the right-hand side of this page is, what I call, an organic pipeline of additional assets that are going to continue to drive peer-leading growth over the next decade or so. And I think -- I'd also like to underscore that many of these assets are not -- they're not single decade assets. They're multiple decade assets. They're going to be producing gold or copper for many, many decades. And I think the last thing I'd like to emphasize on this page is the quality of the operators who are managing these assets. We've got some of the world's best operators, whether it be in gold or copper, operating our assets. And that's a very important point because we, as a royalty and streaming company, not being an operator, we do place a very important reliance on quality operators to ensure that we're adhering to best practices when it comes to ESG. I'd now like to talk a little bit about the Vares project in more detail. So if we really take a step back, as I mentioned, Vares is, by all measures, a truly world-class operation. It's located approximately 50 kilometers from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and operated by Adriatic Metals, who owns 100% of the approximate 44 square kilometer Vares project concession. The project is fully mechanized. It has a modern underground mine with conventional processing flow sheet and access to existing infrastructure in an historical mining district, including power, paved roads, water and, importantly, rail transport routes. The Vares project is focused on the Rupice underground deposit, which has an extremely high-grade silver and zinc dominated polymetallic mineralization. Construction was completed and first concentrate was produced in February 2024, with the first sale expected in Q2 this year and commercial production being achieved in Q4 of this year. The mine has a life of approximately 18 years based upon reserves of 13.8 million tons. Importantly, there is an additional 7.3 million tons of resources, which would bring the total resource to 21.1 million tons. Exploration activity is expected to continue in 2024 and 2025 with the company targeting approximately 40,000 meters in drilling. And Adriatic aims to realize the resource and reserve potential of Rupice as the deposit remains open and still to be fully defined. The Vares stream applies to 100% of the copper production from the mining area over the Rupice deposit. The stream has associated ongoing payments equal to 30% of the LME spot copper price and, importantly, with an effective payable copper fixed at 24.5%. If we turn to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about Adriatic and also about Bosnia. Adriatic Metals went public in 2018 and is listed on both the ASX and LSE. Since the listing, the company has worked almost exclusively on advancing the Vares project. Since acquiring the project in 2017, the management team has rapidly and successfully developed Vares with production, as I mentioned, commencing in 2024. It's a testament to the expertise of the management team, as well as the technical merits of the project, having taken the Vares project from a pre-resource asset to production in a relatively short time frame. As a result, Adriatic has a market cap of just shy of USD 1 billion and a strong balance sheet, which was recently bolstered by a successful $50 million equity raise and implementation of an undrawn $25 million credit line. Talking a little bit about Bosnia. It is a mining-friendly jurisdiction with a strong mining history and highly skilled workforce. Local and federal governments are supportive of the mining industry with a 10% corporate tax rate and a favorable royalty regime. The region has pre-existing mining infrastructure, including roads, rail, water, power infrastructure and, importantly, as I mentioned, the extensive access to rail networks linking European smelters and the seaborne market. Within the country, the project has been granted the status of a project of special importance. Turning to the next slide. We've provided here some guidance to help folks understand the revenue and cash flow from -- that's going to come from the stream. This guidance is based upon guidance provided by Adriatic directly. And just to give you an illustration of how the stream economics work, I'll use 2025 as an example. And you'll see there the guidance provided is for all mine to be between 750,000 and 850,000 tons. So if you pick a midpoint of 800,000 tons, you'll see there the copper grade 0.5% to 0.7%. If we pick the lower end of that range, 0.5%, that means there is approximately 4,000 tons of copper contained in the ore. You'll see Adriatic is guiding to 80% recoveries. So applying the recovery rate, we get to 3,200 tons of copper, converting that into -- well, first of all, applying the fixed payability factor coming back from the smelting operations, it can never be lower than 24.5%. So that equates to 784 tons of copper that report to our stream and converting. That into pounds for those who prefer [ Imperial ] versus metric, that's 1.73 million pounds of copper, which at today's spot price of approximately $4.5 per pound of copper equates to revenue of approximately $7.8 million. So that just gives you a sense of how the economics work. And then obviously, to get to a net figure from a cash flow standpoint, we do have to pay away 30% of the spot price on copper. And I'd also like to talk a little bit about the economics of Vares. It is, as I mentioned, by all measures, a truly world-class operation. And it will be one of the lowest cost producers of silver globally with an all-in sustaining cost of approximately $7.30 per silver equivalent ounce. And this is underwritten and supported, obviously, by the very high-grade polymetallic reserve base that underpins this 18-year mine life. The low capital cost, and it cost about $189 million to build the mine, really benefited from the fact that Adriatic was able to utilize existing infrastructure in the region, to which I have already referred. Peter, if we could move on, please. So taking the guidance provided by Adriatic and incorporating that into our updated guidance, you'll see here what we've done is provide you with an indication of where our previous guidance was relative to our actual 2023 performance. So we had geos of approximately 2,703 ounces in 2023. And we guided up more than 100% pre the Vares acquisition to a range of 5,000 to 5,600 GEOs. Looking at the Vares acquisition and incorporating that into our guidance going forward, we see a further increase of 27% above guidance already provided to achieve numbers in a range of 6,500 to 7,000 GEOs for 2024. So we compare that to our prior year performance. That's more than 160% uplift in GEOs. And I always like to talk about the benefit of having exposure to copper as -- for those who follow the hockey in Canada, it's like having a power play but not limited to 2 minutes. So, really, really good underscore of our future growth. And I think this obviously is talking about 2024. The next slide takes a look at our guidance or not necessarily our guidance because this is based on analyst consensus numbers, but what we've done is try to show you the impact here that Vares will have over and above broker forecast for the next 4 years. And you'll see here that the range is tremendous between 20% and 50% uplift to broker forecasts. Again, this is taking Adriatic guidance and adding it to the existing broker forecast. And if you think about the number of shares we issued, the implication here is very significant double-digit cash flow accretion resulting from this acquisition. And then beyond the forecast horizon here 2028, we do reference again that we have peer-leading growth underwritten by some of the world's largest gold mines, and certainly in Canada, 3 of the 5 -- in North America, 3 of the 5 largest gold mines, but also obviously, this recent acquisition of Vares. So, we've taken a peer-leading growth profile, and we've significantly enhanced the near-term cash flow on a cash flow accretive basis by being able to close and execute on this transaction. Next slide, please. I think, again, coming back to the history of our company in just a little over 3 years, we've gotten from having 18 noncash flowing assets to having multiple key world-class assets, fueling our growth and fueling our cash flow accretion. Obviously, Odyssey is our cornerstone asset, and Odyssey is ramping up to production. We expect by 2027-2028 a meaningful turnaround as Agnico delivers on the underground development at Odyssey, and that's really where we will expect to see the full impact of our royalty on the Odyssey project. Cote Gold, very exciting, started production in March of this year. The good news there is, our royalty is on the next -- what we call, the plan of the Cote deposit, and it's going to be the part of the deposit that's going to be exploited in the early years. So, again, we expect a tremendous contribution to our cash flow and our growth from Cote as IAMGOLD ramps production up, and we certainly expect to see commercial production later on this year. We're benefiting from Newmont's Borden mine ongoing royalty payments. And the good news there is, as the mine continues to be exploited, it moves into an area that is directly under our royalty coverage. So, again, going to be a nice revenue driver for Gold Royalty. Borborema, a very significant transaction for us last year as multiple assets to [ facets to it ]. We acquired this asset inclusive of preproduction payments and also interest payments in the form of a convertible instrument, those interest payments are payable in gold ounces. So, prior to Borborema achieving its anticipated production and completion in 2025, Gold Royalty benefits from those preproduction payments and gold-linked interest coupons. And obviously, what happened to the gold price since we closed this transaction, we've seen a tremendous uplift in our forecasted cash flow from Borborema. And then obviously, Vares ramping up through this year was expected completion in Q4 of this year. So we'll have revenue in 2024, but I think the real impact is going to be felt next year and beyond. And I think the important point is just to look at the impact that Copper has or the Copper acquisition has on our portfolio. Firstly, on a commodity basis, we're still over 90% precious metals, in fact, gold specifically, when measured on a book value basis. And from a jurisdictional standpoint, we're still very heavily focused in North America, Canada and the U.S.A. specifically. The acquisition increases our exposure to Bosnia by only 7% as measured on a book value basis. So certainly, very compelling from a commodity perspective, as I mentioned, we're a gold company with a copper power play. And I think from a jurisdictional standpoint, still incredibly heavily biased towards the North American jurisdictions. So with that, I'm going to pass on to Andrew.

Thanks, John. Okay. As you've already heard, further to our announcement last Tuesday, Gold Royalty agreed to acquire the Vares Copper Stream from Orion for $45 million in cash and $5 million in Gold Royalty shares. That purchase price was agreed following an exclusive bilateral negotiation process rather than a formal sales process, whereby Gold Royalty conducted a fulsome due diligence on the assets, including a site visit. The stream itself, as John already mentioned, was on 100% of the copper produced for the life of mine with no buybacks. The ongoing payments are at 30% of the spot price of copper. And importantly, the effect of copper payability and the concentrate is fixed at that 24.5%, which eliminates some of the variability and does allow for the stream to generate consistent cash flows through the life of the mine. Funding for the cash portion of the transaction is from a few sources. First off, since Gold Royalty is generating positive free cash flow as of last quarter, we are able to use cash generated from operations, albeit modest at this stage. They'll continue to be a feature of our acquisitions going forward. We'll utilize net proceeds from our equity financing, which completed in the last week. And the balance of the funding will come from a draw down from our upsized revolving credit facility. Given the quality of the cash flows from the Vares Copper Stream, we have been able to increase the size of our credit facilities with our lenders, Bank of Montreal and National Bank of Canada. Just move to the next slide. Simply put, Gold Royalty is delivering on its strategy as promised. We continue to responsibly grow our portfolio through complementary M&A. Vares is a great example of this. It adds scale, diversification and cash flow. And as you can see from the graphic on this page, there is a consistent correlation between higher valuation multiples and scale. And this acquisition really does help shift us up that curve. We'll continue that march and continue to work towards closing that gap between ourselves and the mid-tier or midsized royalty and streaming players. In fact, at the moment, at 0.6x NAV for a company that is now consistently generating positive free cash flows has worked very hard to reduce its operating cost to a steady-state level. And as John mentioned earlier, in addition to Vares, which is a fantastic complementary acquisition, we do have a growth portfolio that is head and shoulders above of our peers, certainly the peers in the lower size spectrum. Gold Royalty does represent a compelling value opportunity for investors at this stage. There's no doubt in my mind that we will move up the scale. We will reduce the price to NAV gap as that happens. So we are well on our way. I'll just move to the next page. Following the Vares transaction and prior to that, the Borborema transaction in late December, we have, as a company, been able to attract a number of leading institutional investors and resource sector financiers, who really see the value of our well-connected management team, a team that's been able to negotiate very compelling and additive acquisitions in the last couple of transactions, in particular, to add and complement and improve the portfolio. Those investors also appreciate the quality of those assets we've added as well as the quality of the assets already in the portfolio as well as the growth potential. And importantly, these investors do believe in our strategy and our ability to close that valuation gap between ourselves and the larger peers through our disciplined and accretive growth strategy. So with that, I'll pass it back to David to conclude the presentation.

Thanks, Andrew. And maybe it serves us to dwell a little bit more on that slide about some of the strategic investors. And I do want to call them out because they have leaned into the story as we continue to grow it. And in the case of GoldMining, they were our founding company. We were spun out of GoldMining in our IPO back in March of 2021. They've retained every share they've ever owned since our IPO. And in fact have added on an opportunistic basis by buying the market from time to time to continue to grow their share position. Nevada Gold Mines came in through the acquisition of the Granite Creek Royalty that we made a couple of years ago. And for those of you that aren't aware, Nevada Gold Mines is a joint venture between the 2 biggest gold producers in the world, Barrick and Newmont, in the Nevada joint venture, and they've retained about a 7% stake in the company since they took stock for that Granite Creek acquisition a couple of years ago. And again, a testament to our ability to leverage relationships as the Head of Barrick's Strategy Group is an old colleague of mine, and we were able to convince them to take stock and return for the Granite Creek NPI. And they retained that stake and our support of shareholders as well. The Queen's Road Capital, well represented on our Board through Warren Gilman. They helped finance our Borborema acquisition last year through a convertible debenture offering along with Taurus, and also our significant shareholder, having actively participated in our IPO 3 years ago and continue to add stock quite steadily over the last several years as we've grown our business out. And finally, Taurus came to us last year, again, the convertible financing for Borborema, but we also announced a strategic alliance with Taurus. And Taurus has a dedicated royalty fund, they're a private equity outfit based out of Australia. They've raised $200 million towards royalty acquisitions in a dedicated fund. And they could have chosen any royalty company in the university to collaborate with, and they entered into a strategic alliance with Gold Royalty Corp earlier this year to exclusively look at acquisitions over $30 million together. And that expands our geographic footprint. They have boots on the ground, obviously, in Australia, New Zealand and Asia that allows us to expand our focus beyond there. But also on a co-investment basis, we're able to look at larger and larger acquisitions on the precious metal royalty side on a co-investment basis with Taurus. And we have a ROFR, a right of first refusal in anything they look at over $30 million and internally have the same on us. So, it does provide us meaningful access to a deep pool of capital exclusively focused on royalty opportunities globally. Orion has come to us as a result of this acquisition. Again, a very sophisticated and experienced investor on the mining side. So we're proud to have them as a strategic investor as well. And this equity issuance, in addition to help us finance a very important acquisition in Vares, which supplements both our short-, medium- and long-term cash flow profile, it brought in a diversified set of institutional shareholders into our shareholder base and one that was largely retail up to this point. So diversifying our shareholder base was, I think, an important part of hoping to achieve our rerate over time as we crystallize that growth that we see from this very diversified and expansive portfolio of precious metal and a couple of base metal royalties as well. So just to sum up our story, peer-leading growth. We had that before the Vares acquisition in terms of our revenue growth over the course of the next several years. We're seeing a doubling in our revenue this year. And now, it's looking at about 160% to 170% growth in revenue, so well more than a doubling in our revenue as a result of the Vares acquisition, but about 60% compounded annual growth in our revenue right through the end of the decade on a consensus basis, driven by diverse portfolio of assets, again, heavily concentrated in North America and in precious metals in some of the longest life mines in the world. We have royalties in 3 of the 5 biggest producing gold mines in North America. And now we have a cornerstone asset in a silver copper deposit in Vares with 18 years of reserve life with significant exploration potential and short-term expansion potential, which would amplify that cash flow that we've added into the portfolio. And again, because all of our royalties are bought and paid for, there will be no capital calls if they undertake any expansions on that asset. We'll enjoy the upside of the capable operators like Adriatic who continually invest in their existing operations, whether it's in brownfield exploration or whether it's an expansion of their existing operations, we get the benefit of that upside lift without having to actually contribute any more capital into those underlying assets that are providing meaningful cash flow for us and free exposure to the exploration upside within these portfolios. We have over 80 operators that invest over $200 million per annum in exploration in their underlying assets that we have royalties on. Collectively, we have over 120 million ounces of gold exposure within that portfolio. And that's only growing as they undertake their exploration efforts on those assets. They continue to grow that resource profile. And again, we contribute nothing to that exploration budget. That's the beauty of the royalty model, and we have that in spades at a very diversified portfolio. And quite often, as I talk to generalist investors who are increasingly looking at the gold sector, they asked me, how to participate in the junior sector? They're looking for more torque. And I'd say, why participate in the junior sector, you get ETF-like exposure in our portfolio. We generate royalties on these junior level exploration opportunities organically. We do it for free. We actually get paid to generate those royalties. We have a very diversified portfolio of early-stage royalties on those early-stage junior opportunities. So we provide ETF-like exposure without worrying about whether there's going to be dilution as these juniors raise capital because our royalties are at the asset level, and they're fully bought and paid for. And so, you get the benefit of their exploration efforts as they raise capital without having to worry about dilution as a result of their capital raising efforts. So we really provide that ETF-like exposure, but with the benefit of no dilution as they undertake exploration on their assets. And as I said, very diversified portfolio of royalties. Over 240 royalties across the Americas and now globally with Vares now coming in from Bosnia to amplify what's already peer-leading revenue growth in the sector. And with that, we'd be delighted to take any questions, Peter, that might have come through online.

Thank you, David. Thank you, John. Thank you, Andrew. As a reminder, we are taking Q&A questions, click on the button and send them through. We've got quite a few coming through already. There are a few on here, and I think it might be good to address this first, is really running through the structure of the share. You've been trying to simplify it a bit more. Obviously, you've got a 24.5% section on there. There's 40%, there's 100% of the overall copper maybe in, I guess, general or simpler terms, how does this actually work?

Peter, why don't you take that on?

Yes, yes, absolutely. So, I think we've gotten a lot of questions about this fixed payability factor associated with the stream. So to walk through that kind of from first principles, you have the ore reserve, the mineral reserves that are going through the process. Associated with that is a recovery rate. In this case, it's about 80%, which brings us to the recovered ounces or, in copper's case, recovered pounds. Now from those recovered pounds or recovered ounces, they'll go into a finished product, sometimes a dore, in this case, a concentrate. And within that finished salable product, a factor is applied to the commodity on what is the payable factor. So in a pure dore, like in a pure gold mine, that factor might be close to 100%. It's a very pure product. But typically, within these polymetallic deposits, you'll see varying payability rates. In the case of Vares, the copper payability within the zinc -- or pardon me, the lead concentrate is just close to 20%. But importantly, for us associated with this stream, that payability factor for the amount that is owed to us as the streamholder is fixed at 24.5%. So the payable copper reporting into Gold Royalty is always 24.5% of the copper within the zinc concentrate -- or within the lead concentrate, pardon me. Another question I did see come through is, what is the payable factor within the concentrates from the Vares mine? And there are 2. There is a zinc concentrate and a silver lead concentrate. Importantly, the copper associated in the mineralization is fully associated with the lead mineralization in the ore body. So the copper goes with the lead and has that fixed payability associated with it in that con. The zinc concentrate doesn't have payable copper within it. So, I hope that clarifies the flow and the structure of the payability factor.

And just we could -- based on another question that's come through, you guys won't be handling any of the material yourselves. You won't be shipping, you won't be selling, you won't be doing it.

No, no. This is cash settled, yes.

Perfect. Okay. Would you mind just running through sort of estimates on the payback for the stream?

Yes. So to take this one as well. I think, as John outlined with, I call it, the base or the lower case, we're looking at upwards of $10 million a year in annual revenue, if you look at where copper prices are today and the higher end of Adriatic's guidance. So we're approaching a 5-year payback in the current copper price environment, even in a base case or a lower consensus commodity price range, we'd see payback closer to 7 years. So, quite attractive payback for a mine life that's at least 18 years. And we'd expect it to go beyond that with some resource conversion.

Well, it's a really impressive payback considering the life of mine. Given that's the case, why did Orion sort of settle at that price? Why were they looking to sell the stream in the first place? Would anyone be able to take that one?

John?

I think it's a fund. I think they're not -- Orion is not an operating company. So they're not looking for life of mine. They're looking for life of fund. So what they're looking for is an adequate return within the duration of any specific fund. And that means they've got to monetize assets. I think hats off to Orion. They've partnered with, identified and financed the development of Vares. But I think their need is obviously to show a return on any particular fund. They also -- when Adriatic just completed their recent equity offering, Orion also sold down 8 million shares in addition to that placement.

I would note on that, that Orion is still the senior debt provider to Adriatic. So by no means are they selling out of the asset, they're still largely invested and supportive of the Adriatic team, but it is really a monetization effort there on a few of their investments taking some wins off the table.

And a portion of their consideration on this acquisition by us was shares in Gold Royalty Corp. And that's been part of the MO of Orion since their inception is quite often they don't just monetize, they trade. And it's been to considerable success when they have, when they've traded assets into companies and taken stock back, they've realized a second bump, a double bump, if you will, not only a premium in terms of the acquisition price, but also a premium as the company rerates as a result of the growth that Orion is contributing into that vehicle. And that's certainly the case here.

And I guess following up on that. Obviously, it sounded as though from the presentation that this wasn't up for tender, this was an exclusive relationship. How did that -- is that just relationships that you have personally with the team at Orion? How did that come about?

Andrew, do you want to take that?

Yes. Yes, sure. I can take that. Yes. I mean I think that's one of the testaments of the team we have at Gold Royalty, all of us here, between David, John, Peter and myself, we spent a lot of time in the business. I've spent a lot of time working with Orion in the past. And really, when we look at opportunities, we want to add assets with quality. And we do evaluate the universe, we evaluate the vendors that we have relationships with, and we're consistently in touch with them. In this particular situation, we understood where the asset was at the moment in terms of Vares' ramp-up. We were in touch with Orion early. We understood that there was a potential for monetizing certain assets, certain stream and royalty assets within the portfolio. And we approached Orion with, I think, a fairly compelling value proposition. As I mentioned before, we did conduct full due diligence and got to a stage where we linked arms with Orion, and they did see the value that we had to add and took back shares as a result as well or a portion of consideration seeing the potential upside. So yes, it is, I think, a real testament of the relationships we have and the productivity we take in identifying opportunities early where we don't have to compete in a competitive process.

I should add that Queen's Road Capital has been a significant investor in Adriatic as well, and Queen's Road is a cornerstone investor in our company, is on our Board as we were able to leverage their knowledge of the asset as well. It provided us a bit of an inside track, if you will, and understanding that asset given how much they financed it and have actually visited the site. We visited the site as well, but we're able to leverage their direct relationship and direct knowledge of the asset as well. So really it's been -- Andrew touched on this -- it's really a collection of not only the management but the Board. And continually, since our IPO, we've leveraged relationships on our Board and management to get access to opportunities before our competitors were even aware of them. And it's a very important part of our strategy because, frankly, we can't win in competitive processes. The Franco's, the Wheaton's, the Royal Gold's, they have a significantly lower cost of capital in us. We cannot pay what they pay for assets, it's impossible. So we have to leverage those relationships to get into processes on a bilateral basis rather than a competitive process to make sure that we get value for our shareholders.

Perfect. There have been quite a few other questions come through. And obviously, David, I've heard you speak about gold, and I love to hear when you speak about gold. But this is obviously a copper asset. Perhaps you could give us your thoughts on the copper market and where we're going.

Well, given the lack of new capacity development occurring in the sector, what that tells me, based on my 35 years of experience, many of those years building copper mines is the incentive price for copper is going to be considerably higher than it is today to stimulate supply because the supply deficit is immense and only growing. And again, particularly because of lack of investment in new capacity, but also because we've seen some significant assets come offline recently, including Cobre Panama, which is a meaningful contributor to the supply deficit in the short to medium-term and no line of sight as to when that will come back online. And again, with no meaningful investment, what we're seeing is the biggest producers in the world trying to take over the other big producers in the world, as we saw with BHP and Anglo recently. So they're not developing, so they're buying it. They buy versus build a proposition question that quite grandly gets asked by mining companies is definitely skewed towards buying. They're not building. But as we know, that's a zero-sum game in terms of demand-supply fundamentals. That will not deal with the supply deficit. And so, we're going to have to see a copper price that's at least double where it is today to incentivize new development of new copper assets to fill that supply gap. And we're in excellent position to deliver leverage to that copper price increase through an asset of Vares' quality.

Just on that, obviously, with Cozamin and now Vares. How much more capacity do you have on commodity diversification? Obviously, gold and precious metals are the primary focus here. But yes, I guess, do you now need to wait for more of your existing assets to go into production? Or do you need to acquire more gold assets? Or is there still a little bit more leverage that you can put on other metals?

John, do you want to handle that?

Yes, sure, Dave. Peter, I think the answer to that is, there's definitely more room for diversification. We're still significantly a precious metals company, and in particular, gold, with over 90% of our net asset value still in gold assets. I think if you look at companies -- other companies in the sector, most notably Franco-Nevada, they have significant diversification in the form of copper, iron ore, and oil and gas, and they're significantly lower than we are in terms of precious metals focus, but are still considered a precious metals, fundamentally extensively a precious metals company. So we feel we've got a lot of room for diversification. I think the next logical question is, where would we go? And I'd say, we focus exclusively on the LME traded commodities, so copper, zinc, nickel. Those are commodities that collectively across the Board and the management team, we have experience in. We understand the fundamentals of it. We also understand the mining and processing thereof as well. So, yes, I think we've got more room to diversify for the right opportunity, for the right assets. We'll focus, first and foremost, on asset quality and on good partnerships.

On the question of diversification. Obviously, you haven't just diversified from commodity. You have also diversified from jurisdiction where you have been predominantly just North America. Obviously, as a Brit, who's followed the Adriatic Metals story, I was pretty happy to see this one come through because I think anyone over here sort of knows that Adriatic has been a darling of the London market, and there hasn't been many of those. So congrats on that. But I guess looking further afield, how much scope is there for the diversification outside of North America alone?

I think we're going to be extremely careful in that regard. I should emphasize that Bosnia is actually an EU candidate, so it's on the ascent. I think what the Taurus strategic alliance gives us is a broader geographical footprint into Australia and New Zealand. They have boots on the ground there. So that opens us up. And that's certainly -- those are certain jurisdictions that we covered it in the past and looked at assets in the past. So there is some diversification to be achieved, but we're going to be very careful about what jurisdictions we go into. At the end of the day, royalty companies are a collection of contracts. And we have to ensure that we're in areas that have a rule of law around the enforcement of those contracts. And we feel that in all the jurisdictions we currently find ourselves in, we have a high degree of comfort that our contracts are going to be respected. And the jurisprudence around that will ensure that we have the sanctity around those contracts. We always start with the geological model and convince ourselves that there's significant integrity and upside around that geological model, and we build ourselves up from the ground up in terms of our due diligence efforts. And then we want to ensure that whatever jurisdiction we're in, whether it's first world or second world that we have an operating team that has significant experience in operating in that jurisdiction, as well as having the rule of law around it. So we're going to be very careful about what jurisdictions we go into.

There's been quite a few questions about payability. Perhaps Peter Behncke, if you wouldn't mind sort of running through that again?

Yes. Yes. So, to just kind of summarize it on the whole deposit levels. So if you look at the 64,000 tons of copper reserves with the total tonnage and grade, if you apply the 80% recovery, 24.5% payability, simple math, 64,000 times 80% times 24.5%. You're getting between 27 million to 28 million pounds of payable copper within the deposit. So, to simplify it in very simple terms, that's just the base case there of what's associated with this stream.

Perfect.

And if I could just add -- sorry, if I could just add to that, I mean, one thing -- the reason why it is so important for us is, when the concentrate is sent to the -- I don't know whether it's Glencore or one of the other 3 parties, and the payability factor, if Glencore comes back or whomever the processor is, comes back and says, okay, the payability factor for this time period is only 15%, then Adriatic only receives that payability factor but under the stream terms, they have to pay 24.5% to us. So that's 1 of the reasons why this is such a critical factor for us, is it avoids any deviation, particularly on the downside, in terms of payability coming back from the smelters.

Okay. Perfect. Another question that we had come through earlier via e-mail was actually more around M&A. Obviously, coming out of the gate, David, you mentioned you had very strong currency and you put it to good use in 2021, and there was a couple of acquisitions that you took advantage of that. I guess they're just -- there seems to be -- there has been a slowing in the sector in terms of M&A in general, especially in the royalty space. And I guess, is the strategy for Gold Royalty still to see growth through consolidation of other royalty companies? And if so, what's the catalyst to ramp that back up again?

Yes. Really, it comes down to currency. And we have not had the currency given our significant discount in net asset value to use our currency to do M&A. There isn't an accretion case to be made for M&A. And that's why, frankly, when it comes to M&A, we've sat on our hands since 2021. When the Federal Reserve started tightening interest rates early in 2022, we saw a significant [ DRE ] in the gold sector, not least of which was our currency. And we recognize we didn't have the currency to go out and do something on an undisciplined basis just to grow for growth's sake. So we focused on the other platforms of growth that we have to do accretive deals, whether it's project financing as we did with Borborema last year, whether it's third-party royalty acquisitions as we did with Cote more than a couple of years ago, or whether it's royalty generation, which is a very cost-effective way for us to grow the early side of our pipeline. And we've added 2 to 3 royalties per quarter doing that effectively at 0 cost just through asset equity, and that's become a profit center for us because we generate north of $3 million a year of option revenue on those properties that we farm out and take royalties back in return. So we go where we can, where we can do accretive deals. And right now on the M&A side, it's really not an accretive proposition. So we've kind of set on our hands on M&A and focus on the other planks of growth. And that's a competitive advantage we have. There isn't anybody else in the royalty sector that grows through all 4 means. But we have to be disciplined in terms of exploiting those various platforms on an accretive basis.

Perfect. We're coming up to the hour mark. So thank you, gentlemen. Just before we do wrap up, if there are any final comments or any final thoughts, happy to take them. Otherwise, we'll wrap up.

Well, listen, thanks for your attention, everybody, this morning and your questions. We're always delighted to take questions on a one-on-one basis with any of you. Please don't hesitate to reach out through our website 1-800 number through our info e-mail. Peter, myself or any of our management team would be delighted to get back to you with any detailed questions you might have.

Great. And just on that, we have recorded this webinar, so we'll be putting out on Mining Network, and it will also be on the Gold Royalty channels. And I assume it will be -- we'll actually send it out to everyone who's registered as well. So, if you do want to watch anything back, you will be able to. John, David, Andrew, Peter, thank you all very much for your time, and thank you to the audience for coming along with us.

Thank you very much.