Royal Gold, Inc. ($RGLD)

Hello, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to today's virtual non-deal road show. My name is Noel Alexander Young, virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in Chicago and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Royal Gold. Trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol RGLD. Presenting today is Alistair Baker, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development. The presentation will last approximately 25 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session for which you can participate in by using the chat box in the top right-hand corner of discrete. With that being said, I will now hand the floor over to Alistair.

Well, hi, everyone, and thanks, Noelle, for that introduction, and thank you for your attention today. It's been a very busy year for us Royal Gold over the past 12 months or even last 16 -- it's also been a very good time for the gold environment generally. So it's pretty timely to give you an update. So I'll start by making some comments about forward-looking statements. I will be making looking forward-looking statements during the course of this presentation. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. All of these risks and uncertainties are discussed in our most recent Form 10-K filing with the SEC. So during this presentation, I'm going to give you the investment thesis for Royal Gold. And we are a high-margin business. We generate consistent cash flows from precious metals. We're not a mining company. So that's an important distinction. And during the presentation, I will cover the key attributes of Royal Gold and our business model. First is, I'll talk about our gold exposure. Our focus is gold, precious metals, but gold is definitely the very the top focus. Second is we are a high-margin business that returns capital to shareholders. We've got a very long district doing both. We have a very diversified portfolio that provides consistency in our financial performance. Our model has limited operating risks. So our margins are steady and not necessarily impacted direct if inflation where the size and a small sector, so we can show growth. We can compete for large transactions, but we can show growth by doing small transactions. And finally, I'll talk about some of the optionality in our portfolio, which is really important when you think about our business because we have optionality within the portfolio that we don't have to spend money on to realize. So it's an important feature that you need to understand when you think about a company like Royal -- so -- in 2025, it is been a very busy few quarters for Royal Gold, and 2025 was really a transformational year for the company. We did a number of things, and probably the biggest was the acquisition of Sandstorm and Horizon 2 corporate acquisitions that closed simultaneously in late October. And with those transactions, we added a significant amount of growth and diversification to our portfolio. But we also did some other things during the year. We acquired gold streams on Kansanshi and [indiscernible] , which are assets that are very important, and we expect will be very important for Royal Gold in the future. At Kansanshi, this is a very large copper asset in Zambia operated by First Quantum we have immediate cash flow from that stream. We start receiving stream deliveries almost to be after closing that transaction in August. And then at Orins and Ecuador, this is an emerging Tier 1 copper molybdenum project. We have a nice gold stream and royalty on this asset, and this is something we expect will bring a lot of value to Root shareholders over the coming years. And we didn't just have acquisition success as well. We also had some very positive developments from within the portfolio and some optionality that surfaced and 2 good examples of those would be Mount Milligan. We saw an extension of the mine life there by Centerra, the operator. So that now is you're talking about 2045 is the current plan, but then potential to go beyond that by a number of years. And then finally, the next thing we saw that was a really big development for us was Barrick's exploration success of the Fourmile project in Nevada, the Cortez complex. So 2 very good examples of optionality within the portfolio that surfaced during the course of 2025. And if you take 2025, and you look at the acquisitions, the embedded optionality that we've seen surface. We've added a lot of scale, diversification, and growth to our business, but it's very important to note that we did not change our strategy to realize any of this. Now I'm going to talk in this first section, just about our goal to focus. And we are a company, we've been around for -- this will be our 45th year on the NASDAQ. So we've been around for a long time. We have a long record -- but what is unchanged about the company over that entire period is our strategy. It's been very consistent. We've always been focused on gold revenue on good assets in good jurisdictions. And our revenue, as you can see on this slide, has grown consistently, but the metal mix has not. It's been pretty consistent, very much a gold focus. We aim to provide gold exposure and a conservatively managed the vehicle. And our historic performance, as you see on this slide, shows our share price. We have been, over the long term, a good alternative for those who are looking to get conservative exposure to the gold price. -- you can see that we do offer good leverage to the gold price. We've got to look beta to the gold price of about 1.6%. On the right-hand side, you can see our share price performance. We've actually beaten the gold price. We've beaten the GDX Index, so the GDX was formed 2006 and we've also beaten the S&P 500. So history shows that we have been a good long-term investment in a very volatile commodity. Our business model is unique. It's high margin, and we have dividend growth as well. And on the margin point, our margin is very high and it's a very scalable business. We had an 82% EBITDA margin in 2025. Our cash G&A was about 4% of revenue and cash G&A is really what it costs us to run this business. Our costs are -- they're low and they're fixed. So we don't see cost inflation as being something that really impacts our margins. And the business model is very efficient. And if you look at us compared to any other company in any other sector, have very low headcount. We have 39 employees in our business. If you look at our -- the scale of our business, we're a $22.5 billion company, that's a pretty impressive ratio of value per employee. So compare us on a per employee basis than any company anywhere a challenge you to find someone who's got a more efficient business model that we do. Return of capital is a very important strategic objective for us at Royal Gold, and it's something that makes us unique when you think about other gold investments. We have paid a growing and sustainable dividend since 2000, and we've increased the dividend every year since 2001, and that's despite volatility in the gold price. In November last year, we raised our dividend for the 25th consecutive annual year of raises. We've now paid out over $1 billion of dividends to our shareholders. We're the only company in the GDX index that has paid an increase in dividend since X was formed in 2006, we're the only precious metals company in the S&P High-Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index, that sets us apart from all other press investments. We have a very diversified portfolio, and that's an important thing to consider when you're thinking about our business and one of the attributes that makes us unique. We have a global portfolio we're weighted towards lower risk and more mining-friendly jurisdictions, and our portfolio spans the various stages of mining project development. Our total portfolio is over 360 interests and assets. And we have over 80 assets that are producing revenue today. We have about 30 that are in the development stage. So that means there's a window to first production from those assets. We have a bunch of other, about 250 other earlier-stage assets, and those would be exploration or evaluation stage assets. And organic growth within the portfolio comes from development that comes from those assets that move through the exploration cycle into evaluation into development and then start producing revenue and because we have such a large number of earlier-stage assets, we expect there to be some additional organic growth from those assets over the next several years as operators try and take advantage of higher metal prices and get operations into production. Having a diversified portfolio is very important because it really does reduce single-asset risk and counterparty breast jurisdictional risk. And our commodity focus is gold, but we do have some diversification by having meaningful silver and copper. Now we do have the highest revenue percentage of all our large cap peers, but we do have some meaningful copper and silver as well in the portfolio. And geographically, you can see that our focus is very much North America, and that's where the biggest chunk of our value is in North American assets. On a net asset value basis, you can also see that we've got a pretty diversified, very well-diversified portfolio. And it's the most -- we believe it's the most diversified mining asset portfolio in the business. And 8 of the 10 top 10 assets in our portfolio are producing revenue. So these are assets that are actually contributing to the portfolio. There are expansion and extension projects underway at about 5 of these producing assets. So there's good growth at the top end of the portfolio. And as I said before, we have lots of earlier-stage things that should provide hopefully will provide some organic growth in the future. But near-term growth from within the assets of the portfolio that are producing revenue, we see a number of opportunities there as well. Our operators are best in class and we're very proud to have a number of operating counterparties who are some of the world's leading mining companies. These are companies -- they're large, they're well capitalized. They're experienced. We've recently added to our portfolio of counterparties by adding First Quantum Rio Tinto Glencore. These are some of the biggest and best names in the mining business, and they are additions to some of the other companies that we've been doing business with for many, many years. And when you think about the portfolio diversification, it really does, as I said, it reduces our exposure to single asset or operator or jurisdictional risks by having that diversification and it's an important point for the generalist investor who doesn't really want to spend that much time looking at the details of what's in our portfolio. You can invest in a mining company. They generally have a smaller portfolio is more concentrated and you really do need to understand the risks at each of the assets because if something happens along those assets, it can really impact the value of the company. Whereas you look at us, we've got a very diversified portfolio. hopefully, if there is a single asset risk, it's compensated somehow by some of the other assets in the portfolio are actually doing better than expected. So there's a smoothing and mitigation impact as a result of having a larger portfolio. Our business model has limited operating risk. And when I say that, you can look at the different ways to invest in precious metals, as you can see on the slide here, what we offer is gold exposure with risk mitigation. And there are many different ways you can invest in gold. But what we try to provide to our shareholders is exposure to gold the price itself, but also optionality to the assets where we have investments and a dividend. So, and we also reduced the downside risk of holding a diversified portfolio that doesn't have direct to operating capital costs. Now there are different ways to invest in gold and you can be very conservative and you can invest in the physical metal, you can buy an ounce of gold. But that ounce of gold will always be announced. You won't get upside aside for price appreciation, that ounce will always be what you bought. It's never going to pay you a dividend either, and it's probably going to cost you to hold it. You can be more -- if you want to be more risk tolerant, you can invest in mining companies or exploration companies. But with those, you're also getting direct exposure to operating and capital cost risk. And with those cost risks, you also get that inflation that could impact or erode margins. There's a perception amongst many investors that our model doesn't provide us good leverage to gold. But I think that's clearly discounted when you think about how we have done in a rising gold price environment. Our financial results definitely show the opposite. With that, we do have leverage to gold -- now our a unique feature of our business model is that our margins actually expand with a rising gold price. And when you look at a producer and Royal Gold, we have a very different cost structure our costs are low and fixed -- largely fixed. So our margins expand as the gold price rises. So every $10 increase to the gold price is a $10 increase to our margins. Whereas operator costs are often subject to inflation. So their margins may not expand as quickly. And in fact, they may actually contract depending on what's happening to some of their costs. And you can see that more clearly on this slide. Producers are exposed to inflation and input costs. So that could be labor, given consumables, other site costs or it could be energy. Energy is a big component of mining asset costs. And obviously, today, with the Warren and you've got this increase in energy prices. And that may actually very much impact margins from operating companies. Our G&A costs are pretty steady. We would pay salaries. We pay services, office rents. These are things that don't tend to move short-term versus. And so that means that our margins are pretty steady, whereas operators, they actually see margin compression as input costs rise faster than the gold price. Now we are -- in terms of size, we like to think that we're at the optimal size for our sector. And we are -- we'd like to think we're in a [indiscernible] position or we're large enough to compete for the largest transactions but we're also small enough to be able to show growth. And our sector is actually built on relatively small transactions. Occasionally, you see large transactions that come up. We did $1 billion stream transaction last year an that is a large transaction. But most transactions are smaller than about $300 million. In fact, the average transaction is just over $100 million in size. And so given our size and given our cash flow, we actually do sit in a very interesting position because we're large enough to be able to compete for the largest transactions. We have the cash flow. We have the access to low-cost capital. So we can compete against the largest peers, but we're also small enough to be able to show growth. And a small transaction can actually add meaningful value. So when you think about something like Kansanshi, $1 billion stream, or [indiscernible] , which is a $200 million investment. Both of those are main to Royal Gold. And both of them are -- because we sit in that interesting spot, we're able to compete and effectively win, large and smaller transactions. We're not aiming to be the biggest in our sector, but we do want to be the best and the highest value. And so that Goldilocks position, it really does provide a great platform for our strategy of continued growth in gold. I'm going to talk in this next section about a very important feature of our model, which is embedded growth and optionality and I'll start talking a little bit about capital allocation and how we think about successfully deploying capital. And our growth really does depend on being able to allocate capital to the right places at the right time. Our strategy with respect to capital allocation has been consistent since the beginning of the company. It's really -- firstly, we'll look to invest -- reinvest in our business and use non-dilutive ways to do that investment. Secondly, we're always looking at maintaining a strong balance sheet and access to liquidity for those opportunities that come up quickly. And then thirdly, we look at returning capital to shareholders. And this is something, as I said, is a key strategic objective for us. We have to be flexible with our approach to capital allocation because market conditions change all the time. But generally speaking, our framework is to target for those new investments, we target double-digit returns. That's where we see the biggest bang for our buck. And that's where our shareholders hopefully see that per share growth. If we can invest in and the best opportunities without diluting our shareholders, then we should be able to provide shareholders without per share growth. We also need to repay debt quickly. When we fund something we fund it using nondilutive sources of capital, what I'm referring to is using our revolving credit facility that's debt. We'd like to repay that quickly because what that does is it obviously produces debt service charges, but it also allows us to rebuild liquidity to be able to reinvest. But then we also want to make sure that we have capital set aside to continue increasing and growing our dividend, which, as I said, is definitely a key part of our business and our strategy. So how have we done over the past 25 years, and this is one of my favorite slides when I talk about roll of gold, it's really an illustration of exactly that point. We have, since 2000, it was a 25-year history of what we've done. We've seen significant revenue and cash flow growth from the company -- within the company. But there are 3 aspects of this growth that are very important to note. First is our G&A has not grown at the same rate as our revenue and capital growth. Our revenue growth has far exceeded that G&A growth. And that is because we don't need to add people when we grow our business. We can add a new asset to the portfolio. There's a lot of work at the outset when we look at the transaction. But once we have that asset within the portfolio, it's a very simple monitoring of that asset. We don't need to add a new workforce or new people when we add new assets to the portfolio. Our business is very scalable. The second point is that our revenue growth is not dependent only on metal prices. We've seen a lot of good tailwind from the gold price over the past several years, but we've also been able to add volume to our business. And we've also seen organic growth from within the portfolio that helps us take advantage of that tailwind that the gold price is providing. So our revenue growth is not just dependent on the gold price. We're able to add volume and see growth from within the portfolio. And then finally, the other point -- the final point is that most of our growth has been financed internally without a significant rise in our share account. We did issue shares last year to complete the Sandstorm transaction in late October. We issued about 19 million shares, but that was the first time we've issued equity since 2012. And even with those new shares we issued, we still have the lowest share count in the GDX index. We want to avoid shareholder dilution. And if we can provide if we grow our business without diluting shareholders, that results in per share growth in the metrics that are important to us. Now when we think about returns, if we invest in the right assets, then we should be able to see returns to grow over time. And we intend -- when we make an investment in something, we're always aiming for digit IRRs. But we have to be patient for those double-digit IRRs to become visible to the marketplace. But when we look at a new transaction, any transaction, we always look at the exploration and the production upside because that's where that growth in return comes from. And sometimes it takes time for that growth to show up in the assets where we invest. When we do our due diligence on new opportunities, we always take a bottoms-up technical approach to asset reviews and in many cases, the Street who judges our transactions that they -- the analysts who look at transactions and write notes on what we do, they don't have access to the same information that we do. They haven't spent 4 or 5 months going through technical information and perform in a technical view on what potential could be. So the Street an ounce or Street estimates of announcements of new transactions on day 1, they're often pretty low. And sometimes it takes several years for the upside to become evident. And this graph -- these graphs on this slide really show that as time has passed, expected returns have increased as upside has become more visible to the marketplace, and that's as a result of production increases or mine life extensions or what have you, they're really driven by reserve growth and resource additions without us having to make further investments. And this next slide shows the same concept, but looking at it in a little bit different way. When we make our investments, in an asset. Obviously, we start to recover that at and interest that investment over time. And what we're hoping to do is see that we recover our investment, but the value ahead of us always continues to grow as the operators who operate these assets, continue to reinvest in those assets to extend mine life. And you can see in this graph that in several cases, we've actually recovered our initial investment. We're in the return harvesting stage, but there's a lot of additional value ahead of us. So those returns should continue to grow over time. And it's really as a result of this multiplier effect, as you can see on this little cartoon slide. The -- any extension to mine life has a double benefit to Royal Gold. The first is that an extension to production really does mean more revenue to us. So as mine life extends our interest are also extended. But what you get on top of that is exposure further exposure to the gold price is volatile. So that additional volatility over a longer period of time has a lot of value. We find that the operators of our assets like any mining asset, they're always looking to extend asset lives. They invest a lot of capital to build mines, and they want to see that a return on that capital. So any incremental opportunity they have to grow asset lives is something they'll take. And we piggyback on that and we get -- we got a closure to that growth without having to pay for it. The operators are paying for that growth. We are not. And it's that's where the optionality in our business comes from, and it's a very important feature of our business model and something that you really need to understand as a shareholder. And to bring that down from conceptual to actual, the slide shows some of the important catalysts that we see that some of the assets, some of the new assets that we expect to provide organic growth potential to us over the next several years. We have a very -- we have a significant organic growth pipeline. These are assets that are in the portfolio -- and we see catalysts from some assets coming into production almost on an annual basis over the next decade. And as we go through this, I'll briefly mentioned, we saw a brand-new production at Back River, they started commercial production in October. That's in Northern Canada. Platreef put first ore through the mill in the fourth quarter of last year. We have yet to see our first revenue from that asset. We're expecting it shortly. Robertson and the Cortez complex in Nevada, First Production is expected in 2027. And then we've got Potain, great Bear or LorenZa later this decade. And then after the turn of the decade, we've got the marrow project in Argentina. We've got Fourmile in the early 2030s. So this is all stuff that we don't need to pay any additional -- to get exposure to this growth. And this does not include other assets in the portfolio that are seeing -- they're producing that are seeing extensions or expansion. So the mine life extension -- it's not included in this graph, the comical production expansion is not included in this slide either. And we have 1 of the best organic growth profiles, we think, in the industry, which is reflected in our 5-year outlook published several weeks ago with our Investor Day at the end of March. Now I'll finish off the presentation just talking about where we are relative to our peers on a valuation basis. We have been performing very well, and it's been a great year for us. We've had a strong cash flow, good organic growth. We're executing on our strategic priorities. But I think the -- and the share price has done well. I mean there's no doubt our share price has done well. It's reflected the strong gold price and I think it's starting to reflect the recognition of our deeper and more growthy portfolio. But we're still lagging. If you look at us on a price to net asset value basis or a price to cash flow basis compares to our peers, we are still lagging. We're doing a lot to try and close this gap. And one of the first things that we did -- probably one of the most important things we did was issue longer-term guidance a few weeks ago. We had never done that before. We've never given a longer-term view of our portfolio. but we've done that now. And so that was an important part of our Investor Day, and it's really an important part of giving the Street confidence the same confidence we feel, but expressing that to the Street. So the Street understands our growth potential. We also did an investor -- in our Investor Day, we spent a lot of time talking about the specifics of our portfolio. So some of the assets where we see some of the growth the duration, improvements in our portfolio. We spent a lot of time talking to you, which really underpins that longer-term guidance. And we have been spending a lot of time with our disclosure and talking to investors going to conferences, try to market and make sure people understand the scale and growth potential of our portfolio as a whole. So we hope that this valuation gap will start to close as the Street understands the growth within the portfolio. So I think in summary, I'll turn it back to you in a moment, Noella for Q&A, but we have strengthened Royal Gold significantly over the past year. As I said, it's been a transformational year for us, 2025, when I say transformational years, that was the year of a lot growth for us. We've added scale, diversification, growth to the portfolio. We have a very strong balance sheet, significant cash flow -- we think our patient approach and our commitment to our long-term strategy, it should be rewarded by the market. And we think we're seeing green shoots in that respect with when we talk about valuation gap is starting to close. So with that, I will turn it back to you, Noella, and I'll be happy to start the Q&A session.

Thank you very much, Alistair, for the presentation. As you said, we'll start the Q&A. The first question is seems to be a few more players in the royalty/streaming space. How do you look at increased competition in the precious metal royalty sector.

So yes, competition has always been something we've had to deal with in our sector. I think I don't know if it's increased recently or stay consistent. It doesn't really matter. So we have a couple of competitors out there. We're all looking at the same kinds of things and we're all competing against each other. So we have to keep our pencils sharp, and that is something that we've always been able to do one of the things that we try to do to differentiate ourselves against our peers is think about we put ourselves in the shoes of our counterparty. And we think carefully about what our counterparties are looking for. And we're quite happy to be flexible and creative when it comes to offering our counterparties what they need to do what they're looking for. And so that's something that I think that we have shown. If you look at some of the transactions that we've done, we have been creative in terms of structure. We have been creative in terms of other aspects that they make us more appealing to a counterparty than perhaps 1 of our peers. It's not just about keeping your pencils sharp, although at the end of the day, most opportunities are won by putting the highest number forward. But there are other aspects to our business that we are -- we think about very carefully, and that is really how to be -- how to meet the needs of the counterparty to continue being able to win transactions. And we do see a lot of growth in the market ahead of us today. We are looking at a number of opportunities. And so hopefully, we'll be able to continue adding assets to the portfolio in such a way. We're mitigating the risks, but also getting exposure to that longer-term upside that I talked about.

Next question, Pablo Viejo silver recovery is below the threshold for deliveries. Is this a temporary metallurgical issue or a structural impairment?

So it is -- I would characterize it as temporary, but it's not a -- I think it's more a medium term temporary. The silver recovery at Plover has been a it's been complicated. And if you rewind the clock a couple of years, what Barrick did, they did an expansion to the plant. It's a very complicated plant. The process is very complicated. And they've added a bunch of new components to the plants. And they are working on trying to get everything working together, and it hasn't quite happened yet. They've had recovery impacts in gold they've also had very heavy recovery impacts in silver. They have a number of strategies in place to deal with us to be able to get everything working together and improve gold as well as silver recoveries. But there are a number of things that they need to do. Some of them are constructed new pieces of equipment within plant -- there's also some other things that they need to do to optimize the ore feed into the plant. They do have plans to to address these issues are working through these plans now. But I think with the more recent tenor that Barrick issued several weeks ago, is become evident that the silver recovery is likely going to take a little bit longer than perhaps we were hoping a year ago is probably something that's going to take a handful of years, and we've -- I think we've been pretty clear to the market that it's probably going to be in the 2030 range before that silver recovery starts to rise to a level where we start seeing recovery of those deferred ounces that have been during this period of low recovery. So it is something that I would say is temporary, but not the near term, more medium temporary issue.

Next question is -- what were the internal discussions on starting 5-year guidance? Why now?

Well, I think we've talked about it for a number of years. And why now, I think, is really -- we finally got comfort with the idea of giving longer-term guidance. We do have -- we're a bit unique in our positioning against peers. We're the only U.S. domiciled company in our sector, all of our peers, our Canadian. The regulatory rules are a little bit different. And so we are a little bit more sensitive about giving longer-term production projections and estimates than our Canadian peers because it's just a different regulatory environment. I think what we saw though with 2025 was we did a lot to add to the portfolio. We added a lot of growth, added a lot of scale, and we didn't think the market had really absorbed at all. And so when we thought about how do we make sure people understand what the growth potential is. What does the future look like for gold. The only way to do it effectively is to put out longer-term guidance and show what we think that growth potential could be because we've grown our portfolio to the point where it's almost -- it's a really difficult thing for people to model. We have 360 assets in the portfolio. So modeling 360 assets is a tremendous task. I think the market was looking for us to simplify and really point them in a direction that would help get confidence that what we've added, it does add a lot of value to the portfolio. So it was really a way for us to to get people there faster to make sure they understand that there is a lot of growth within the company. And by putting numbers out there that talk about our 5-year outlook, hopefully, we've commenced the market not growth is -- we're very excited about it every confidence in it. And hopefully, the market will start to appreciate that growth. When we talk about our discount relative to our peers, I think 1 of the issues that we had was our peers all -- they all give longer-term guidance, and we were the only company that didn't. And so that was a bit of a disconnect. And I think -- if you're a generalist investor and you're looking at different alternatives, you may look at a company that gives longer-term guidance and have more confidence in their outlook than a company that doesn't. And as a result, that company will get a premium. And the company doesn't have a long-term guidance will not trade at that premium. So hopefully, we've closed -- we've given the tools to the market to help close that gap.

Appreciate that response. Your next question is, you've expanded your copper exposure via recent deals. Is this a strategic pivot towards energy transition metals or simply opportunistic diversification. .

I would say it's just been opportunistic. We are not changing our strategy, as I said during the presentation, our strategy remains very much to be gold focused. We think about precious metals as being what we want to focus our energy on and the preference within precious metals is gold. Now silver or platinum ungroup metal opportunities come up. We will look at those absolutely. -- we don't look for copper. We're not out there proactively trying to grow in copper. But if good copper opportunities come our way, then we'll absolutely look at them. We had a very good opportunity with the the Cactus project in Arizona in late 2024, we were approached by a holder of a royalty on that project. They were looking to sell, they needed to raise capital. And so we looked at that because we like the projects is a very good project. It's in a great jurisdiction in Arizona right next to a town. So it's got all of the attributes that a lot of remote mines don't have. So -- that's a very positive thing. And then finally, the management team, we know the CEO of that company well. We've dealt with him. He's very incredible person. So that helped us look at that opportunity and say, this is too good to pass up. So we actually did execute on that, but we didn't go looking for it. So we'll think about things in that way. We're also precious focused, but we have to respond to certain things that come to us that are very good. Now that said, we're not going to look at things that are completely out of our comfort zone. We're not interested in things like some of the more esoteric battery metals. We just don't understand those markets very well. We don't understand the metallurgical processes, things like that. But we are very comfortable with precious metals the copper assets, we have a number of investments in copper assets where we take the gold by-product or the silver by-product. So we understand comfort quite well. We're happy to look at copper.

Thank you, Alistair. Next, -- what do you see as your biggest risk, gold price, mine life or competition for assets? .

That's good question. I don't know if I really thought about it in terms of ranking the risks. But I think the gold price absolutely has the biggest impact on our value. If the gold price. We will do well or do poorly our stock price based on the gold price. So we've seen the gold price do very well recently. And obviously, our stock price has done well also. So that is an important consideration. It's completely out of our control, though we cannot control it. What we can control is our portfolio we can make investments in longer duration assets. I don't see that as being a big risk for us. I think we have a nice long duration portfolio. We've got a number of assets that are coming on that will be multi-decade producers. We don't feel a real need to change the portfolio dynamic. I think we've got a very good portfolio. So I'd say that's a lower risk. But absolutely, the gold price is something that we will do well if the gold price does well and conversely, if the gold prices, if it doesn't do well, then that will impact our stock price. I think the line business though, I think we'll -- given the fact that we take top line revenue, we've got such big margins, I think given the gold price didn't fall. I mean our business is going to be necessarily unhealthy, but it does impact the value of our stock price for sure.

Your next question is -- your PE ratio is approximately 40 plus, significantly above the industry median, approximately 23%. What justifies this premium valuation today and what downside risks exist if growth under-delivers?

I think -- so price to earnings is an important metric, and I think many companies in many sectors are judged on price to earnings. We find in our business, price to cash flow is the metric that is more widely used from a valuation perspective. That would be the metric that we encourage you to look at when you're comparing us against our peers. We have a slide and we showed it during the presentation that shows that historical price to cash flow multiple over time. And you'll see that we are trading at the lower end of our peers when it comes to cash flow. We and our -- most of our institutional investors, they don't focus on earnings so much, and that's just a part of the gold mining or the gold sector. is more cash flow and net asset value would be the metrics that we are judged on. Most analysts use those metrics to set target prices. And most investors look at how trade on those metrics when they think about value.

Thank you for going into detail on that. Next, if you were asking. At this scale, does acquired royalty companies outright become more attractive than one-off streams or royalties for moving the needle audios.

I wouldn't say -- no, I don't think that's the case necessarily. I mean, obviously, if you buy a corporate, another corporate, when you buy their portfolio, they can have a material impact. We saw that last year with Sandstorm. But we do -- we don't look at corporate transactions as the only way to grow. I mean obviously, we keep -- we keep an eye on our smaller competitors, and we're always looking at opportunities, but we find the best value is generally where we can look at an asset in detail and acquire an asset after doing a lot of due diligence. So Kansanshi is a good example. That was a large transaction has meaningful growth for oil and gold, but we were able to very much focus our efforts on that one asset. If you buy a portfolio, what you're doing is you're paying for everything. And sometimes a portfolio, you'll have a bunch of things that you really want, but then you may have some things that you don't really want, but you've got to pay for it all. You also have to pay a premium on top of that. So it's very difficult to make math work. I think we were able to make it work with Sandstorm. And it was as a result of very specific circumstance, but that was a very good transaction for us. The other thing that is something to keep in mind is -- you may have a strategy to go out and roll up and acquire more competitors or smaller companies in the sector. But the reality is you need management teams on the other side of those transactions to actually want to sell. And it doesn't often happen in our sector. Many of the companies in our sector are run by relatively young management teams. They haven't been around that long. They want to grow their businesses to a certain point and they're still on that journey, and they're not willing to sell. In the case of Sandstorm, actually had that company decided that they had taken the company as far as they could and it made more sense to vend their company into another entity and participate as part of that entity. And that's one of the reasons why the Sandstorm transaction was all are because the management team of Sandstorm wanted to have continued exposure to Royal Gold as part of a larger entity. So -- that dynamic is really important. You need to have a willing seller. You need to have the right value needs to be there as well. And so it's very difficult to see those things line up. But in the case of Sandstorm it did, but it doesn't often happen.

Thank you for breaking that down for us. Next to viewer comments. As probably the best dividend recorded and yearly increases in the space, is that more important to manage versus share buybacks?

So we -- the dividend is something that we started doing obviously, 2.5 decades ago, and we've got a very long record of doing it. And we want to continue raising our dividend because some of our shareholders, some of our generalist institutional investors really like the dividend because it shows discipline with respect to capital allocation. We have had such a long record of paying a dividend and it's part of what our investors expect. I think we'll continue with the dividend as a strategic priority. Share buybacks are a difference -- different question. We haven't had the opportunity, we think, on a sustained basis to buy back shares. It really does depend on value. And we've seen issues with our share price in the past as maybe we've had individual assets not perform particularly well or maybe there's been a market dislocation or what have you. But those -- those opportunities tend to be pretty short-lived. And we've also -- we haven't had the excess capital available to buy back shares during those periods. We do like to have and we do think the best way for us to deploy capital is to reinvest in our business and buy new assets that get -- if we buy things close to net asset value and then we get our trading multiple on top of that, we're creating value for shareholders. Whereas if you're buying back shares, it's a little bit of a different calculus. Now I would say that we're not against buying back shares. We just haven't had the right opportunities to present themselves to us. If we were -- were we rewind the clock and maybe go back 25 years, to the point where we started paying a dividend. Maybe if we consider share buybacks at that time as being the way to return capital to shareholders and maybe we'd have a different story today. But for the time being, we're going to continue with the dividend because it is such a long record. It's something that we're very proud of. A lot of our shareholders like it, and it's a pretty well recognized way to return capital to shareholders.

Thank you, Alistair. This next question is a 2-parter. The first part is -- do all your principal properties have 10 years of my life? And what development projects are you most excited about?

So, I think most of our principal properties we have 5, 10 years of mine life. I think the only 1 that would be shorter based on what the operator has said, would be Adecol in Chile. And that's -- it's copper asset, relatively low grade. It does have higher costs than some of the other assets in our portfolio. And that is something that the mine life goes to 2032, if my memory serves correctly. So -- that is a shorter mine life. Everything else in the principal property list is not multi-decade life, but that is shorter. So I think, though, with a higher copper price, there's always a potential for that to increase and tech as the operator, they've talked about permits, work that needs to be done to extend that mine life. So I think over the next several years, what you often see that assets that have shorter mine lives is there's work going on behind the scenes by the orders to go through permitting, to go through the exploration, to go through other things that extend mine lives because for them, it's incremental return. If they can grow the mine lives, they've already paid for all the infrastructure and all the capital has been stuck in the assets. It's very -- it's obviously very accretive for them to extend mine lives. And hopefully, that will happen at Andacollo as well. But the remainder of the assets and Cortez is a multi-decade PD is multi-decade, not Milligan multi-decade Kansanshi multi-decade. So those would be -- those are the real drivers of the portfolio, and hopefully, Anacor will catch up to that as well over the next several years. I guess the second question was development projects. We have a number of very exciting development projects in the portfolio. I think a couple that I would mention would be Mara. In Argentina, Glencore is operating this asset -- this is the Agua Rica deposit, which has been unitized with the old Alumbrera mine. And what Lenacoreis doing is a reopening of Alumbrera to use the Alumbrera infrastructure to help process for from Agua Rica. And it's a fairly simple capital project. They have to build a conveyor from the Agro Rica deposit down to the Alumbera mill site and infrastructure, and they're in the process of going through all the regulatory approvals and so on. In Argentina they filed for the Riggiapplication in August last year. which provides tax stability and the comfort that you need for longer-term investments. And that's something that whenever should start producing to our account sometime in the early -- in 2031. And -- that will be a pretty significant producer for us, again, a multi-decade life from that asset. So we're very pleased and excited to see that. Another one I would call out would be for mile. I think this is -- as Barrick has said, it's probably one of the best gold deposits best gold discoveries in recent history and probably one of the best in the world ever. It's very grade, it's very large, and Barrick is talking about a 25-plus year mine life here with production of the 600,000 to 750,000 ounces a year is pretty preliminary at this point, but Barrick is continuing to do work to scope out the asset, one of the encouraging things is the continuing to do exploration. So the numbers that I just quoted, they're proline preliminary from Barrick, but they have scope to grow. And we're hoping that, that will grow over time as well. And this is -- I mean it's a fantastic location. It's in the Cortez complex in Nevada. So it's a place where you can find labor, a lot of people know what they're doing in Nevada when it comes to gold mining. So a very good place to find a workforce. It's obviously a supportive regulatory environment in Nevada for gold mining. It's part of the Cortez complex, which is an operation, so it's kind of a brownfield project next to a bunch of operating mines. So it's got a lot of things going for it. And we have a complete exposure complete coverage of that asset. We have 16% a effective gross royalty on that asset. So we're very excited to see what's happening in format, and we think it will add a lot of value to Royal Gold in the coming decades.

And we're coming up on your last 2 questions for today. The first 1 is a while back, people were thinking Bitcoin will replace gold. Is that theory completely due bunch now?

I don't know if it's been debunked. I think what has become clear though is that coin trades very differently from gold to bitcoin is a different asset class. I think all of these critical currencies are a different asset class in gold. Gold has a many 1000 year history and a human history, it's been around for a long time. It's been a store of value, and it's just got that longevity. And people understand what gold is. I think Bitcoin is a different kind of store of value, but it's -- if you look at the way bitcoin trades, it seems to trade more in line with tech -- it doesn't have same characteristics as gold as an asset class. It's a lot more volatile. We think people have during periods of time that they said, well, gold is no longer relevant. It's not an asset class you should invest in. But I think history would show a recent history would be spot on. The gold price and gold is still extremely relevant. It's probably one of the most liquid asset passes in the world, it's actually grown in value over the past not just the past several thousand years but in the past few years, has been that much more important. And you think about central banks in the way that they position their reserves and what's in their reserves Gold has become a much bigger part of a lot of central bank reserves recently. And it's really because it's got that store value aspect to it that is absolutely unique. You don't see a lot of bitcoin in Central Bank for time wherever you do see a lot of gold. So I think it's -- they're different asset passes. And I don't think gold has been replaced by Bitcoin.

And the last question is -- following a year of major consolidation, what does Royal Gold look like in 5 years, a disciplined cash flow machine or a growth-focused consolidator?

Well, I think we're both -- I don't have I wouldn't go up so far say that we're going to be a consolidator, but we will look at consolidation opportunities if they make sense, as I said earlier. But I think we are we like to think of ourselves as being a disciplined cash flow machine that also has lots of growth potential. So a bit of the best of both worlds. So our portfolio is large, producing revenue it produces that cash flow. We can return some of it to shareholders in the form of a dividend, but we can also reinvest in our business and create that growth. So I would say it will be, hopefully, both of those 2 things together. I won't promise that there's going to be further consolidation. But I think what we are always looking to is grow our portfolio and if we can do that in such a way that adds value, then we'll do that. And whether it's through consolidation of the sector or whether it's through single asset transactions, it really depends on the opportunity ahead of us. But certainly, growth is a big part of how we think about the future.

Well, thank you very much, Alistair, for all of your responses today, and thank you to everyone who submitted questions. If you did not get a chance of submit your questions, you can reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Renmark -- that concludes our presentation for today. But before we go, I will turn back the floor to Alistair for final remarks. .

Well, thanks again, everybody, for attending. I really appreciate the questions. Some very good questions in there. If there was anything that I didn't answer to your satisfaction of Renmark and they'll contact me directly, and we can resolve that. But -- thanks very much again, and very much looking forward to giving you an update next time we speak. So thanks a lot.

Thank you, Alistair. And once again, this was Royal Gold trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol RGLD -- thank you to everyone in Chicago and surrounding areas for joining us today. The playback for this non-deal roadshow will be available on our website 24 to 48 hours after this presentation under the VNDRLarpytab. Please stay tuned for other presentations in your area and see you next time.