Royal Gold, Inc. (RGLD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thanks, everyone. Welcome. As Jed mentioned earlier, welcome to the 20th Annual Western CIBC Institutional Conference. My name is Cosmos Chiu. I have the pleasure of hosting our royalty panel today. I've asked each company to make a short 2- to 3-minute presentation. And then thereafter, we'll sit down, except for me, I get to stand for an hour. We'll sit down for an hour or 45 minutes for a fireside chat. And so we'll go in alphabetical order. And it wasn't until earlier today, I didn't realize how close these companies are in terms of alphabetical order. And so I actually had to sing the ABC song to myself to figure this out. But we're going to go with Osisko Gold Royalties and then Royal Gold Sandstorm Gold and then Triple Flag precious metals. I think I got that correct. You can correct me if I'm not correct. So kicking it off, we'll get Jason. Jason Attew, President and CEO of Osisko Gold Royalties to make a quick presentation.

Thank you, Cosmos. And first and foremost, congratulations to CIBC this 28th year. I mean that's really, really impressive. And on behalf of my peers here on the stage, just really, really like to thank our hosts, and it's very, very well done. So very much appreciate. I understand a lot that goes into these conferences. So Osisko Gold Royalties, I'll be very brief. Osisko Gold Royalties celebrated its 10th anniversary just last year. So it's a relatively new company. And the company was founded -- the foundation of the company was on the basis of a hostile takeover way back in 2014, whereas I call the Evil Goldcorp, and I came from Goldcorp, so I can say the Evil Goldcorp went hostile on Osisko Mining 1, which was operating the Malartic asset at the time. And why that's important for context is, as I said, 10 years later, the Malartic asset that Agnico operates is still a cornerstone asset of this company. It is well acknowledged as the most valuable gold royalty in our sector. Since then, Obviously, the company over the course of the last 10 years has now acquired over 185 assets in the portfolio. We have 21 producing assets. We had 3 new assets come on last year. A little bit more about the history of Osisko Gold Royalties because as Cosmos and others know, I'm just over a year in the seat as a CEO. And this was actually one of the first presentations I did last year when I was announced as President and CEO. So just very quickly, a year-on-year review of what we've accomplished as a company. When I did come in, I did see that there were 4 discounting factors that were really impinging the value -- the fundamental value of this royalty company that, again, has a fabulous cornerstone asset. The first one was really effectively the business model. And so when the founder who also founded Osisko Mining came up with a very interesting concept at the time, trying to differentiate themselves around just being a plain vanilla royalty provider, capital provider, came up with this concept of being an incubator or generator model. And so when I came in, I looked at the various investments that they made, and clearly, it was apparent that there was a lot of shareholder value destruction as it relates to, again, taking a company with 2 very different skill sets. Again, the concept was to essentially buy mining assets, work them through the development cycle, which is incredibly more challenging in 2024, 2025 than it was 30 years ago, 20 years ago. and really required a different skill set. So again, when I came in, the whole point was let's simplify our business model, let's just keep it a pure-play company. So all we do now is we're a pure-play royalty stream economic interest provider to assets globally. We prefer them in Tier 1 jurisdictions with high-quality management teams that have very good technical acumen to move the assets forward. And as I said, in good jurisdictions, mainly in precious metals. The second aspect that, again, was impinging on, as I say, the fundamental value of Osisko Gold Royalties was through the period of -- from its founding until 2024, there are a number of governance aspects or weaknesses within the company. There was an Executive Chair, which a lot of folks don't like. He was also running another company at the time. There was a number of related party transactions. You might have heard that the Osisko is part of the Osisko Group of companies. So we made great efforts with the team to untether ourselves from the Osisko Group of companies. So we're completely independent from the Osisko Group of companies. And so spent the better part of the first few months, again, untethering ourselves from the Osisko Group, completely independent, as I say, all we do now is we provide capital to accretive opportunities in the precious metal space. The third factor was when I joined, the company had close to CAD 300 million of debt. So really -- and we exited last year with CAD 50 million of net debt. So really made some great strides and efforts to pay and deleverage the company. And we exited $50 million in net debt, but we also committed to over CAD 300 million of transactions in 2024. We did 3 transactions in 2024 of approximately CAD 300 million in commitments in 2024. And I would say the last thing that was impinging around again the fundamental value was the fact that they didn't have a full-time CEO. There was -- so I was obviously announced in November and very proud to lead the team go forward over the past 14, 15 months. And so I think people understand or if you look at the history, there was a fair amount of drama within the company some 18 months ago. And as I say, it was nothing short of shakespearean. So all that's been cleaned up. Governance being improved. Again, we're really pleased that we have 21 assets that, again, if you know our portfolio, here's our portfolio. We've got 21 producing assets. We do have the highest exposure to Tier 1 mining jurisdictions. So 80% of our net asset value, 80% of our current cash flow comes from Canada, the U.S. and Australia. If you include Chile in that geopolitical risk spectrum, that actually moves up to 95%. And why we think that's important and differentiates Osisko from our peers. And for history, my background is I spent 16 years in investment banking, and I was railing on the fact that the market continued to misprice geopolitical risk. I think given all the events that we've seen over the course of the last 12 months, the various elections that have happened, more obviously a nationalistic tinge, I think that's certainly going to play out to our favor as we go forward. And that's something sacros that we think about as we look to deploy more capital into these very safe jurisdictions. So I'll leave it at there, and I'll pass it over to the next presenter. But thank you very much for your time. And again, I appreciate all the efforts from CIBC this year.

Thanks, Jason. From my position, it's kind of hard to see the timer, but you might have gone over 3 minutes. So we're going to have to help him catch up guys. Next up, we have Jason Hynes, Senior VP, Strategy and Business Development from Royal Gold. Jason?

Thank you. Thank you to CIBC for the opportunity to present here today. I will be making forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks are discussed in our 10-K filings with the SEC. I've just got the one slide here today, so I'm just going to highlight a few points, and I think Royal Gold has been around long enough that I don't need to give the history. First off, we're consistent in our strategy. We're focused on streaming and royalty investments. We generate about 3/4 of our revenue from gold, close to 90% when you include silver. Geographically, over half of our revenue comes from Canada and the United States, and the balance is mostly from countries with stable, predictable mining industries. Our producing portfolio has good duration and a history of reserve replacement. And with last year's Milligan cost support agreement, a study to be released this year could see the current 10-year life extended by decades more. We're consistent with how we finance investments from existing cash, cash from operations and our revolving credit, and we pay down our revolver draws in the subsequent quarters. The result of this is that we only have 66 million shares outstanding, which is the lowest in the GDX, and we have not done a public equity issue in 12 years. When it comes to size, we're just as comfortable on a panel with mid-tiers like we are today or with our 2 larger competitors. And this is because we have the liquidity to compete for the largest transactions that happen in our sector, but we're small enough that a modestly sized deal adds meaningfully to our growth profile. We're consistent in our approach to dividends. We have 2 goals in mind, growth and sustainability. In November, we increased it to $1.80 per share, and this was the 24th consecutive annual increase. This has got us into the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index, which is another unique attribute to recognize this accomplishment. Lastly, I'd like to think our track record demonstrates the consistent approach that we have. Since 2021, we've closed over $1.2 billion in investments, heavily focused on gold, high-quality projects with experienced operators in stable jurisdictions. Royal Gold and Newmont are the only major U.S.-based gold companies, which positions us well if and when the U.S. generalist investor comes back into the sector. That's it.

Thank you, Jason. Next, we have Nolan Watson, President and CEO of Sandstorm Gold. Nolan?

Good morning, and thank you to CIBC for having me here. Just real quick couple of minutes on Sandstorm. And I will also be making forward-looking statements, so please familiarize yourself with our cautionary note. Sandstorm is of the big 6 streaming and royalty companies, we are the smallest. Our production last year was about 72,000 gold royalty ounces. We're a gold royalty and streaming company. The vast majority of our revenue is from gold. We have some silver, we have some copper as well. But really, the story of Sandstorm is starting now in 2025 and going forward, we've made a number of investments already, very significant investments in high-quality mines with long lives that will be low-cost operators with strong counterparties, and those mines are being built now. And therefore, our production is going to double over the next 5 years. And so if all I do as a CEO is sit here on my hands and talk on panels for the next few years, our production will double, and that production profile will take us to being the fourth most material streaming and royalty company in the world. One of the reasons over the last couple of years not to own Sandstorm was because to make some of those large acquisitions that we already made, we took on a lot of debt to do it. At the peak, we had USD 640 million of debt. We've been aggressively paying that down. This chart says that we have $355 million. We've actually -- this is -- was made last week. It's already outdated. We have $347 million of debt as we stand here today and dropping. And we also own investments in the debt and equity of other mining companies of worth $322 million on a mark-to-market basis. And that $322 million is generating a much higher yield than our cost of debt. So our debt isn't actually costing us anything net of that investment portfolio. So our free cash flow generated by our streaming and royalty portfolio is true free cash flow. Our debt is evaporating. So we're starting to buy back our own shares now. We feel like we're deeply undervalued. We're the only material streaming and royalty company in the world trading below NAV at this moment, but that is lifting. We've had our largest shareholder who owns 17% of us, Orion has been -- they're a private equity fund that has to sell us eventually, and they've been aggressively selling us down. They've sold us down from -- they own 17% of us. I'm told this morning that they only own 8% of us now, and that's dropping quickly. And so that overhang is going away. And I think 2025, just to finish it off, you're going to see is the beginning of a series of catalysts for Sandstorm. Our next big stream that is ramping up, we own a stream on Equinox's Greenstone mine that's going to give us up to 10,000 ounces per year. We own a gold stream on Ivanhoe's big Platreef mine that is in construction now. That's going to give us 15,000 to 20,000 ounces a year. It's got various stages of development. We've got a royalty on Barrick's Robertson mine. They just got their permits a couple of months ago, and this thing is a go, and it will be producing in 2027 according to them. We have a large stream on the Hod Maden mine, and that's going to be 33,000 to 39,000 ounces a year for us. I've just been told that SSR is breaking ground and doing the early site earthworks and a whole bunch of other construction activities in 2025. The project is slated to be in production in 2028. I just found out last month, a very positive surprise, Gualcamayo. It's a royalty that we had a mine that was not producing. We didn't think it was worth anything and didn't expect anything from it. But the project operator has put forward a $1 billion CapEx plan and put forward applications under Argentina's new RIGI agreement to push that project forward, and we own a royalty, 2.5% royalty that's going to give us 3,000 ounces per year. Plus we get a USD 30 billion cash U.S. bonus payment when they do the construction of that. So we've got $30 million plus $8 million a year for decades. That's probably present value worth $100 million to us. The next thing up is MARA. Glencore has indicated to their shareholders that they're building their Glencore mine or their MARA mine in Argentina. We have a right to buy a stream for $225 million on that. That will give us 20,000 to we think closer to 30,000 ounces a year for 30 years. And that will be about undiscounted USD 1.5 billion to USD 2 billion of cash flow to Sandstorm, which our market cap is only $1.7 billion. So that will be a huge catalyst for us. And in Oyu Tolgoi, we -- 9 years ago, we did a stream on the Entre Resources portion of the joint venture ground on their gold and silver and copper. And we'll get up to 14,000 ounces a year and Rio Tinto has just started doing the development on that portion of the joint venture ground. So we've got 6 major catalysts, massive construction projects by large companies, high-quality assets that will produce at a low cost that really is the future of Sandstorm and the future of Sandstorm is in construction now. And so we're going to have a huge amount of growth from high-quality things. And so that's basically our story. I won't go over the list of catalysts, but it's basically a list of seeing development of all of these things happen as we continue to pay down debt. And so we're not going to be active in the deal space of all these companies. You'll probably hear some questions on the panels about deals. We're not doing deals right now. We're just continuing to strengthen our balance sheet, and we're watching these assets get built. Thank you.

Thanks, Nolan. And last but not least, we have Sheldon Vanderkooy, CEO of Triple Flag precious Metals. Sheldon?

Thanks Cos. For those who don't know me, my name is Sheldon Vanderkooy, I'm Chief Executive Officer of Triple Flag Precious Metals. My job as Chief Executive Officer is to drive robust returns for shareholders. What I want to just briefly go over here today is our track record of generating those returns to date and how we look to generate further returns going forward into the future. So we started Triple Flag in 2016, and we didn't start with a portfolio or any endowment. We actually had a clean sheet of paper and we had some financial backing. And what we really wanted to do is build a leading streaming and royalty company. And our first revenues were in 2017. We got the Cerro Lindo asset as our very first transaction. We had 33,000 gold equivalent ounces at that time. And every year since then, we've set a record for gold equivalent ounce production. In our latest year 2024, we had a guidance range of 105,000 to 115,000 gold equivalent ounces. Last week, we announced we achieved 112 GEOs. We're very pleased with that. It's the upper end of the range. And it actually positions us as the fourth largest streaming royalty company, again, from a standing start in 2016. What's even better is this portfolio has longevity. It's underpinned by assets such as Northparkes, that's up there on the screen, also the RV Plat asset in South Africa, very, very long-life assets. And there's also growth embedded in the portfolio. So our -- what we expect in 2028 is to achieve between 135,000 and 145,000 gold equivalent ounces. That's meaningful growth that's already bought and paid for. It's in the portfolio. We don't need any more shareholder capital to drive that. And so we have a really good position in the portfolio going forward even before we get to deal flow, which I'm going to touch on in a moment. So production growth is great, but what really matters for shareholders is cash flow. I'm going to focus first on the chart on the left-hand side there, the operating cash flow and the free cash flow, which in the royalty and streaming model, they are basically the same thing. We don't have OpEx. We don't have CapEx exposure. And you can see that, that profile there looks very similar to the production growth profile. And so that means when we're getting that production growth, it's getting down to the bottom line to benefit shareholders. If you look closely, you'll see it actually is a steeper curve than the production growth. And that, of course, is the gold price effect. So as the gold prices increase and the production prices increased, we've gotten a double barrel effect, and that's driven really robust cash flows. Now this is the way it's supposed to work, but this is the way it is working in our model. Flipping to the other side of the slide, the margins are consistently over 90%. And if you look at that time period, if you think about all the changes there, that goes from pre-COVID to COVID, it goes to cost price inflation. It goes from easy money to tighter money. Throughout that story, we generated over 90% margins. That's very robust. It's very good for shareholders. And it means as we see increases in the gold price, that benefit drops right to the bottom line for shareholders. I just want to make a few comments here on the gold price. Like today, gold is trading at $2,750 an ounce. When we spoke here last year, it was around $2,000 an ounce. If I go back 5 years, $1,600 an ounce, 10 years, under $1,300 an ounce. The longer your time horizon, the better gold works. I think we should be really pleased with how the gold price has performed and also what its prospects are going forward. And I think this really just comes down to fiscal stability. There's no fiscal discipline in the United States or the leading countries. And the central banks at the margin are always willing to print a bit more money, and they can't print gold. And so we're getting that tailwind. So as we invest, we vest on current gold prices and a view on consensus and trailing averages and those sort of things. But over time, we tend to get a tailwind, so we get higher returns than we initially expected in part due to the gold price tailwind. I think it's a very, very powerful part of the streaming and royalty story. So we have robust cash flows in our portfolio, and I want to speak about capital allocation. So the first priority for our capital allocation is the dividend. We went public in 2021. We've increased our dividend every year since. So far, we've increased at a cumulative total of 15%. It adds up over time. It's a very modest burden of our cash flow. But to date, we paid out over $130 million in dividends since we've been public just 3.5 years ago. Our shareholder capital is only $1.75 billion. So we've already returned, we're getting close to 10% of our shareholder capital. It adds up over time. Dividend is not the most exciting part of the story, though. There's a lot of excess cash flow over and above the dividend. What we're going to do is we're going to redeploy that into further streams and royalties to increase the cash flow even further. It's basically a compound growth. It's not a complicated concept. We've given the average for deployment over the last -- like since Triple Flag was started. We've averaged $270 million of deployment. I feel very comfortable we can do that over the next 5 years on average. And I also want to set out our investing track record to show that we're generating value for shareholders as we reinvest these cash flows. So we've invested a total of $2.4 billion. We've actually harvested over $1.1 billion or just under $1.1 billion in that time. And our current analyst NAV, it's not our internal numbers. This is the consensus NAV figures are greater than our invested capital. So it's true economic returns. Most of this capital was actually deployed in the 2020 to 2023 period as we did the RV Plat transaction, we did the Northparkes transaction and the Maverix acquisition. I think this is a really great track record that we're going to look to continue going forward into the future. So what I'm going to leave you with is the investment case to why we're well situated going forward. And I think everyone's heard the Benjamin Graham quote that in the short run, the market is a voting machine. And in the long run, it's a weighing machine. As we increase the cash flow of Triple Flag and the cash flow per share, that increases the weight behind every share of Triple Flag. So right now, today, we are generating very robust cash flows. We have embedded growth in the portfolio. So even without reinvestment of any cash flows, we're going to see cash flow growth going forward. I think we're also going to get a gold price tailwind because our trailing numbers, of course, reflect a lower gold price. And then as we reinvest and compound the growth of our cash flows, we're going to see further growth over and above that. So I think shareholders are going to be very pleased to see what can happen on a cumulative basis if we take a 1-, 3-, 5-year view going forward. Thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone. First off, I have to apologize for calling you out, Jason Attew. It seems like you're not the only one that went over too. I apologize. Good job, Jason Hynes.

Thanks, everyone. First off, I have to apologize for calling you out, Jason. It seems like you're not the only one that went over time. I apologize. Good job, Jason Heights. You're fighting back. But let's kick it off here in terms of commodity prices. I think Sheldon tried to allude to the fact that gold prices has increased in the past year because he became CEO of the company. I don't know if that's true. But let's talk about the gold price. I'll give each speaker here a chance to talk about commodity prices. What I'm interested in is what's your point of view on gold prices, precious metals prices, how that impacts the company, your company and the industry. And as we all know, Donald Trump is now President, once again, how that could impact commodity prices, both precious metals and base metals. Maybe we'll kick it off. Jason Hynes, do you want to kick it off and let me know your thoughts on what you believe on commodity prices and how that impacts Royal Gold?

Absolutely. Yes. I mean, we're very bullish on gold at Royal Gold. But there's a lot smarter people out there that are predicting commodity prices. My job is really to get into the best assets at the best price. And we have to make decisions in the context of the commodity price environment that we're in today. Environment doesn't mean today's spot price. It doesn't necessarily mean today's gold price or yesterday's or tomorrow's. You need to factor in where you think prices are going to go. Now whether -- where we are in a cycle, I'd say, historically, the best investments that royalty companies have made has been countercyclically because the quality of opportunities kind of goes down as prices go up just because the operators with the best projects generally have stronger balance sheets and are in better shape. And ultimately, we're competing against equity and debt. So we want to continue to grow. We're bullish on the gold price, and so that's what we're going to do.

Nolan, you want to talk about gold prices, copper prices, overall commodity, your composition and your current portfolio, do you want to expand?

Yes. So we're predominantly a gold company. Copper is probably our second most material metal for us. I'm very, very constructive on gold long term. I do track the data of Central Bank buying and selling, and it's been very constructive for gold for the last couple of years. My only concern for gold, if there's a downside scenario is if the U.S. dollar gets so strong countries that have to protect their own currencies. For example, the Bank of Kazakhstan just started selling some of its gold to protect its currency. So there is a scenario where that unwinds a little bit very long term, I'm super, super constructive gold, which is why we're focused on gold. At Sandstorm, if gold is just $2,000 an ounce, our shares are worth 25% more than what they're trading at right now. So I don't have to think too hard about the gold price. We're just buying back our own shares, knowing that the answer is somewhere above that $2,000 number.

And Jason, how does that impact acquisitions or deal flow? Or how does it impact how you run your business? And maybe can you remind investors in terms of your composition as well?

Yes. So Cosmos really, really good. First of all, I'm very pleased that we're actually talking about the most important commodity that underpins our business. I don't think enough CEOs in our sector actually talks about the macro factors and things as I think we all agree, we're going to be in a very constructive environment for at least in the near term. And by near term, I mean 2 to 5 years. Our business, 97% precious, and that's what we're focused on and continue to focus on deals around the precious aspect. I take Jason's point around, again, there's a lot of smart people out there that economists and others that predict what's going to happen with the gold sector. And you just have to think some of the smartest investors that, again, globally, people would know, you talk about Paul Singer and Paul Tudor Jones and Pierre Lassonde and others that, again, we've had a very, very constructive 2024. And if you look at the macro factors that were driving the 2024 gold price appreciation, none of that's changed going into 2025. We've got continued geopolitical strike. As Nolan mentioned, you've got central banks being very active. You've got the potential countries that are looking to essentially get themselves away from the dependence from a U.S. dollar perspective. And so again, none of these factors are going away. I think given everything that's gone on in 2024 and the elections globally, and we're seeing, as I mentioned earlier, kind of the nationalization theme and Ben, I think that is also very constructive for our commodity goal. The question with respect to how then does this group deploy capital into an environment like that, that's again, very constructive. From -- I can just speak from our perspective. Again, what we try and do in order for us to provide accretion on a cash flow on a per share basis is we don't try and do transactions based on spot. Again, there's a lot of people that predicts, including your CIBC economists. So we typically would do transactions that would supersede our hurdle rate around the consensus pricing. And we need to be disciplined around that because nobody up here has a crystal ball as to where, again, the commodity price is going. And so if you take the consensus price and you actually make a spread over above your weighted average cost of capital, you're actually doing your shareholders a very, very good turn. That's not always easy, clearly. But what we've seen, at least in 2024 is there's still very much a dislocation between, again, spot gold in particular, and a lot of projects that are out there that obviously are supported or underpinned by the gold and silver price in particular. So we're very bullish on precious. We'll see what the next few years provide. But again, we've all got businesses, and I'll just talk to the Osisko that because we're so royalty-centric or royalty heavy, our margins are 96%, 97%. So every incremental dollar that we see in appreciation of gold price goes right down to our bottom line. So I think we're in a very good position. It's a very constructive tape, I think, for all of us go forward.

And Sheldon, anything else you want to add? As you mentioned, you became CEO was $2,000 an ounce. Now a year later, it's over $2,600 an ounce. Number one, could you remind investors of the composition of your company? And number two, not everything goes in a straight line, but if it does go on a straight line in terms of commodity prices, gold prices, does that make your life easier? Does it make your job easier? What would you like to -- if you had a crystal ball, what would you like to forecast?

Yes. So Triple Flag, like last year, 2024, 100% of our revenues were precious metals. It was about a 65% gold, 35% silver. So quite a good silver rating weighting. I actually agree with everything that's been said on the panel here today, very constructive on the gold price going forward. Obviously, a rising gold price benefits our business. And it's not just the deployment. It's also the existing portfolio produces more cash flow. And that's just so basic. It almost doesn't need to be said, but the share prices just haven't caught up to the increase in the gold price yet. I think there's a dislocation right now between the valuations and where the gold price is at. So I think investors still have a nice opportunity there. In terms of capital deployment, the best candidate for us to deploy capital into, I'd say, is byproduct. So we're really looking at a copper project and then trying to provide financing to help that operator either expand or build. by providing financing on the gold stream front. So I don't think that a rising gold price actually handicaps our ability to grow or deploy capital at all. I think it's an unequivocal positive for our sector. And I guess the one metal we didn't touch on was silver. And I think silver actually has a really good bullish story to it, and I'm quite excited about that going forward, too.

And maybe we'll stay with you here. As Nolan mentioned, he doesn't want to do any deals in 2025. How happy are you that Nolan said he doesn't want to do any deals in 2025? And maybe you can talk about potential deal flow. You kind of touched on it by products from copper companies, maybe one aspect, one area of opportunities. So maybe, number one, how happy you are your number two, where are those opportunities in terms of 2025?

I actually don't know how to respond to a comment. I'm going to dodge that question. I'm asking I'd say neutral on it, but I wish. And the other part of -- I know you got me. I've forgotten the other part of your question.

Actually the real question is, how has the opportunity set in terms of this coming year compared to last year -- how would you look at it?

Yes. So the pipeline is a constant question, right? Like how is the pipeline looking? And we're always like -- it's really as a funnel at the top end, it's robust. It's pretty deep. I think you've heard similar things from all of our peers and competitors. Comparing to prior periods is always interesting. I mean, last year, there was 3 really large streams out there that people thought were coming to market. One of those did get transacted on in December by one of our peers. The other 2 are actually haven't been transacted on yet. So they're out there. Maybe they're off the front burner, but they're there. But the portfolio -- the pipeline is quite deep. What I think is really interesting is when you look at the total amount of capital deployment in the streaming royalty sector over time, streaming has become a much more accepted form of financing. Even when we started Triple Flag in 2016, it was seen as an alternative. So the classic mix was debt and equity. And maybe you look at streaming, maybe you don't. I don't think anyone looks to raise a significant amount of money for a mining project today without having a stream in that mix. And it's not a stream versus debt or equity. It's really a stream as part of the capital funding there. So there'll be an equity component. There will be a stream component and there'll be a debt component. And there's a lot of factors that actually make that a much more robust financing package from the operator standpoint. One thing is we share production risk and we share timing risk with the operator. And that actually can really help alleviate risk for the operator. So overall, when I look forward and I say, okay, Triple Flag deployed $270 million on average over our history. Can we replicate that? I'd be really disappointed if we only replicate that. I'd really like to exceed that over the next 1- to 3-year period.

And Jason Attew, what do you think? How happy are you -- you can dodge that question once again. But in terms of the real question, what is the competitive landscape out there?

So I won't dodge the question, we know Nolan for some time. I mean he says he's not in the acquisition business in 2025. However, he's always not going to be in the acquisition business. And he certainly has got the relationships in the pipeline, and he looks at stuff as we know. But with respect to the pipeline, I agree with Sheldon, it's quite robust. What we did see, at least from an Osisko perspective towards the end of 2024, though, given there are a number of streams, both silver and gold that were coming from, as Sheldon described, copper projects, expansions or development. And we did obviously see towards the end of 2024, the copper price didn't have the same momentum as the gold price. So we did see some of those processes wane. And so what, in my mind, it will take is some more momentum, some more confidence from boards to actually say whatever the copper price it takes to essentially make the final investment decision, whether it's $4, $4.50, $5, whatever it may be, those transactions then will certainly come back into play. And so again, the gestation for a lot of these deals and getting back to the Nolan question, the gestation for these deals can be multiple years. And so it's not we're static here. We all get into a process. We've got 6 weeks and the winner comes out, whoever structures it or the best cost of capital. But look, I think from the Osisko seat, it's a very competitive landscape for sure. It's interesting that there's $2.5 billion to $3 billion of royalties and streams in terms of funding that's done every year. I think all of us up here, and we've got one of the big behemoths in the room with Paul Brink of Franco, and they obviously will get more market share than we will. But again, speaking from the Osisko, we pick up about 10% of that, $2.5 billion to $3 billion and likewise with the intermediate peers here. So there's certainly a place for the intermediates in terms of deploying our capital, at least from the Osisko perspective, smartly that increases our cash flow per share. We've got a very good pipeline. As I mentioned, it's not as frenetic as it was 6 months ago, specifically with those copper projects, but that could turn very, very quickly depending on what happens with that commodity go forward.

And then Jason Hynes, would you agree in terms of these opportunities coming from these base metal projects or maybe not as robust these days? And the other -- maybe as an add-on, what we've seen is some of these larger mining companies in 2025 divest some of their noncore assets, much like Newmont. Were you surprised that we didn't see more royalty streaming company participation in some of these deals?

So first question first, I agree with what Jason said. It's not particularly frenetic or crazy. I answered a little bit with the last question where I said, high-quality operators have very strong balance sheets right now. So you're not seeing a lot of big stream opportunities in high-quality projects in places that Royal Gold is willing to invest its money. Third-party royalties, on the other hand, they're independent of balance sheet. So that's been a very robust growth opportunity for us over the past several years. And what was your second part of the question, sorry, Cos?

The second part of my question is, I guess, we've seen some of the larger companies this year divest some of these...

M&A. Absolutely, absolutely. Everybody talks about how M&A and divestitures are going to be a huge growth segment for the royalty and streaming space. And I've yet to see it other than the deal that Franco-Nevada did with Lundin at Candelaria getting on nearly 10 years ago, there's been pretty limited. So it's always challenging. M&A, you've already got a buyer and a seller. And when you've got 2 parties and you try to insert a third party into a negotiation, it complicates things quite a bit. So we've -- we always look at it as an opportunity set. We study it, but we've yet to see it really become a pipeline for growth for our industry.

Perfect. And Nolan, lastly, you've heard what Jason, Jason and Sheldon said about the potential market for acquisitions, change in your mind in terms of how you approach 2025? And if not, then I'll ask a follow-up question.

No, not changing our mind. We're definitely not doing deals in 2025. But I think one of the things that Jason said is a really important point in our business, I think there's a misconception that the deals we do this year are deals that we started working on this year. Sometimes you have to work a relationship for 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 6 years, 7 years before you actually land the deal. And you've got to identify the opportunities several years out from when these people are going to need capital to start building relationships and be there for them along the way in smaller ways that they choose you as a partner. And so although we plan on doing no deals this year, we are very busy behind the scenes on a corporate development perspective, not on opportunities that we think will transact this year, but on opportunities we think are going to transact 3 years from now and building those relationships today.

And then so Nolan, as a follow-up, as we talked about, if you're not going to be potentially not as active in the acquisition market in 2025, let's focus back on your portfolio. What's one asset you believe is the most mispriced in the market today in your portfolio? And the investors can play a lot, put it on a piece of paper because I'm going to ask the same question to each of the speakers here and see if we match up.

Yes. That's an easy one for us. It's Mara. I would say our Mara stream option, we have the right to buy a $225 million stream on Glencore's #1 copper development project. You are one of the only analysts in the entire world that covers us that actually has a model on it. Virtually all the other analysts are scorcher and just assume we're 0, and haven't been doing their homework and haven't been talking to Glencore. And that asset alone, we think, is going to cash flow to us at today's gold prices over the life of the money cash flow, just shy of USD 2 billion on an undiscounted basis for us. Our market cap is only $1.7 billion, and most analysts have it as 0. So that's -- thank you for the softball question.

So what Nolan is trying to say is I'm a good analyst Next, Sheldon, you want to give it a crack?