David Garofalo
Analyst · H.C
Well, good morning, everybody, and I'm delighted to be joined today by our CFO, Andrew Gubbels our Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Peter Behncke. We'll take you through our financial results and the results of our Royalty portfolio and an update on our Royalty portfolio over the course of the presentation today. But look, I thought I'd start today talking about the gold price, and it's been an auspicious start to the year with the gold price up about 14%, 15%. And if there's one word to describe the dynamic, it would be China. And we've seen a significant amount of buying both at the central bank level and also at the individual level in China. And really, that's a microcosm of what's happening globally in terms of currency relative to each other. The gold price has done well and every major currency in the world has achieved all-time nominal high, but still well off with the real all-time high for the gold price is back in the early 1980s. When you inflation adjust the peak gold price back in the last big inflation cycle in the late '70s and early '80s to 2024, the gold price is still a good 20%, 30% below the all-time highs. But I would argue that we're in an environment now where the gold price is poised to significantly outperform even those peaks on a real basis given the debt dynamic we're seeing globally with global debt-to-GDP still at an alarming 350% relative to only 100% in the last big inflation cycle in the 1970s, early 1980s. So there's very limited latitude for central banks to really increase interest rates dramatically to deal with what's really double-digit inflation that we're experiencing in the economy, not the 3% or 4% headline numbers that frankly are economic fiction. Those exclude all of the important things that we need like food, fuel and shelter. And as mortgage rates reset across the industrialized world, in particular in North America, we're going to see a dramatic increase in monthly mortgage payments and that is inflation. That eats away at the purchasing power of individuals, and that really will continue to drive capital into gold relative to other major currencies that are actually yielding negative on a real basis. Sovereign debt is eating away at your savings. So if you're buying U.S. treasuries, if you're buying Canadian treasuries, Euro, Japanese, you're not seeing your savings go up even with normal rates at relatively high rates with inflation eating way at the purchasing power of our currency, we're starting to see savings be meeting the way whereas Gold is a tremendous preserver capital in that type of environment. And gold is a barometer, and accurate barometer. It's an agnostic barometer of what's really happening in inflation on a real basis. And that's why Gold has been a one-way trade for over 50 years, whereas the U.S. dollar has seen a decline of 96% in it's purchasing power over that 50-year period since the U.S. government abandoned the gold center. We've seen the gold price go from $35 an ounce on a nominal basis to almost $2,400 an ounce today. Gold is the currency, you can't print. The U.S. dollar and every other major currency has seen prolific printing and the basement of the purchasing power of those fee currencies over a long period of time. But what we're not seeing is a massive response in the gold valuations on the equity side, particularly among the producer universe. The juniors have had very limited access to capital for a long period of time. They're still not seeing that incremental dollar, that marginal dollar of investment allocated from the general equity markets yet. There hasn't been a response. But even among the largest producers in the space, we've seen a muted response to the gold price. And in fact, if you look at the bellwether stocks, whether it's Newmont, whether it's Barrick, their valuations actually, their share prices are below where they were in the 1990s when the gold price was 1/10 of what it is today. And they're dealing with the overhang of cost inflation, which we're able to avoid in the Royalty model. We're completely insulated from that with the top line exposure that we have within our portfolio. But also this is an industry that's experienced decreasing reserves over a long period of time. And as a result, we've seen the cannibalization of companies in the producer universe. Barrick and Newmont, the largest producers in the space have really seen no increase in their production of reserves over the last 25 or 30 years, but they've seen a massive increase in their share count because they've had to absorb other companies to maintain a suboptimal production rate. So that is a microcosm of what's happening among the producers, among the equities in the space. We haven't seen that kind of leverage that investors are looking for in the equities because of the overhang of cost inflation, but also because of the industry continuing to shrink in terms of its reserve base, particularly given the lack of access to capital among the explorers, the juniors that really drive the exploration focus in the industry. And that lack of exploration success has led to a declining pie, shrinking pie in the producer universe. It's been a good start to the year for us. From a share price performance standpoint, we're up nearly 30%. So we have provided leverage to the gold price. You'll remember the gold price has gone up about 14%, 15% this year. We've gone up about 30%. And we still think there's a significant re-rate opportunity when you look at the relative valuations particularly given our growth profile, which I'll touch on a little bit -- in a bit more detail and Andrew and Peter will get into that in a bit more detail over the course of the presentation. But also, if you look at the quality of our portfolio, we have over 240 royalties, but we have royalties on 3 of the 5 biggest producing gold mines in North America. So we have a quality proposition. We have long reserve lives. We have a long profile of revenue growth right through the end of the decade, peer-leading revenue growth, which we think will continue to drive a rerate in our story and provide a strong relative performance relative to our peers, given the quality of our portfolio, the location of our portfolio with the vast majority of our royalties in the best jurisdictions in the world from a mineral potential standpoint, low political risk and low regulatory risk. And I have to say that revenue growth is no longer theoretical. We've been talking about that revenue growth since our inception 3 years ago. That's starting to happen now. We saw more than a doubling in our revenue in the first quarter of this year, driven by the acquisition of Borborema and Cosman late last year and getting the full -- first full year of benefit from those, and those are quality assets and quality jurisdictions, providing meaningful leverage to gold and copper prices, performance improvement in Canadian Malartic, where we have some exposure in royalties in the open pit, and we're starting to see a bit of a catch-up of some underperformance last year in the Barnat pit. But also we're starting to see underground production from Canadian [indiscernible], we have substantially more royalty coverage. than we have in the open pit. So that's going to be a big driver for growth for us going forward. So again, more than doubling our revenue in the first quarter and peer-leading growth right through the end of the decade where we're expecting, on a consensus basis, about 60% compounded annual growth right through the end of the decade, driven by -- principally by those big botch bracket operations that represent 3 of the 5 biggest producing gold mines in North America, but also Borborema Closeman provide us a meaningful source of revenue growth going forward as we just only recently folded those into the portfolio late last year. Q1 was an excellent start to the year with $4.2 million of total revenue when you include land agreement proceeds, royalty revenues, et cetera, essentially achieving about 40% of our full year guidance in the first quarter alone. So it puts us in an excellent position to achieve our revenue guidance -- total revenue guidance of between $10 million and $11.2 million for the full year. And that's really -- that is without the benefit of royalty revenue from the newly commissioned Cote mine, which started production on March 31 of this year and will represent a significant leg of royalty revenue growth in the second half of this year as they expect to achieve commercial production in the third quarter. Together with another 10% decrease in our operating costs, again, Andrew has done an exceptional job since he took over as CFO a little over a year ago and driving costs out of the system, that's our post-merger integration efforts. We absorbed 3 companies in 2021, and we continue to find efficiencies as we start to integrate all of those companies and rationalize all of the holding companies we have within the portfolio and really focus on the core of our business. So we continue to drive down our operating costs and our revenues continue to go up. That's the perfect formula for driving free cash flow for the first time in our history in Q1 of this year, and we continue to expect free cash flow generation going forward. That's a remarkable achievement for a company that's only been in existence for 3 years. So from a concept effectively on the back of a napkin and the cafe that Amir Ninan and I sat down to conceive of this company, we've gone from really a standing start where we had no revenue in our IPO to today, peer-leading revenue growth, free cash flow generation and the prospect of positive earnings going forward. And we have been busy on the strategic side as well. As I said, we acquired 2 cash flowing royalties last year in Borborema and Cosman and instrumental to that acquisition of the Borborema Royalty was a strategic partnership with TaurusTaurus, help fund that acquisition through a convertible debenture along with Queen's Road and other significant strategic shareholder in the company. And Taurus has a dedicated royalty fund, and they've chosen us over every royalty company in the world that they could have done work with to forge a strategic exclusive alliance on co-investing on new royalty opportunities going forward above $30 million in value. So that means we can look at bigger deals because we have a partner besides us that can co-invest in those royalty opportunities. And not only that, we can share in due diligence costs on major royalty opportunities and streaming opportunities as well. So it helps to continue to rationalize our operating cost as well as provide us a source of meaningful capital for investment and new opportunities going forward. So with that, I'd love to hand it over to Andrew to talk through our financial performance in a bit more detail.