Alrighty, thank you everybody for being here. Up next we have Alamos Gold, trading under the NYSE symbol AGI. On behalf of the company, we have John McCluskey, President and CEO.
Thank you very much, and thanks to the Ideas people for hosting us here today. We could have practically done this around my board table. It's a smaller crowd than we've typically been talking to, but it doesn't make the crowd any less important and it doesn't make the story any less interesting. Sometimes you have to go to the strangest little corners of New York to find interesting investors, and sometimes you have to come out to these conferences to hear new stories. Hopefully this is going to be a good one for you. I'm the founder of the company. I don't know how often you get to meet the founder of the company. I've been running, I've been operating the company since 2003, February 2003.
Two years prior to that, I was on the board and I was sort of working on trying to put something together for what was relatively, it was a little shell. You know, it was listed on the old Vancouver Stock Exchange before its demise, one of the last companies that ever listed there. It was brought on by myself and my first boss in the mining industry when I went to work for a mining company, just desperate for any job at the time. I didn't know I was going to work for maybe one of the great entrepreneurs in all of Canada. He started over the course of his career, he started something like four or five companies, all of which became big producers. One of them was taken out by Goldcorp, which was ultimately taken out by Newmont.
A big part of their asset base comes from the first company that I started with back in 1983. Anyway, in the mid-1990s, he and I started a little private company. We brought it public in 1996, just in time for a big crash in the commodity sector. The company basically ended up in a file cabinet with the listing kept alive. The Vancouver Stock Exchange disappeared altogether with hundreds and hundreds of listings along with it. This was one of the few companies that sort of gravitated over to the new TSX Venture Exchange. When we arrived there, the stock had a five-cent quote and a CAD 500,000 market cap, which would have been about $400,000, which was, as it would turn out, the amount of cash it had in the bank, $400,000 cash in the bank.
The market had, the gold price had basically fallen off a cliff and it had stayed there for years. It hit bottom in 1999. They called it Brown's bottom because the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain at the time was named Brown, and he dumped all of England's gold out, and that basically crashed the gold market and kept it down for years. By 2001, it looked like there had to be a turnaround coming. The market had been dead for years. It was also in the aftermath of that terrible stock scandal in Canada called Bre-X, which some of you might have seen the movie. That happened probably around, unfolded between sort of 1994 and 1996, and it all sort of blew up then. I mean, the market conditions could not have been worse.
That is generally when major mining companies sell good assets and sell them cheaply. That is indeed what was going on. There was an asset down in Mexico called Mulatos, and one of the big Canadian majors at the time was trying to flog it. There were not too many people who could mount a bid. Anyway, I showed up on the scene and I agreed to pay them CAD 10 million over 10 years, plus a royalty if they sold it to me. They did, they took the deal. I took on an obligation to pay them $450,000 by the end of January. I had to get off my butt and raise some money.
In a market that was not very inclined to give any money to a little junior company whose only asset was an option to purchase an asset and so on. I mean, it was about as lame-brained, high-risk, nutty scenarios you could ever imagine. I managed to raise the money despite that. Partly how I did it is I mortgaged my house to put a big portion of the down payment up, and that brought a lot of other money in alongside me. That is how we made the first payment and got the whole show underway. I did not become the CEO of the company until I finally put the whole thing together, which took until February 2003. You know, it is never all in one piece. There was another little company that had a part of it.
Anyway, I had to basically take them over and, you know, big rigmarole. Long story short, we got it. That little mine has gone on to produce a pretty tidy profit. It's made over $750 million in profit for us by now. It's produced over 3 million ounces of gold. Its most profitable year, when I started it, it only had six years of production. We started production in 2005 with the idea it'll go to 2011. Here we are in 2025, it's still producing strong. We can see producing out to about 2036 right now. Its most profitable year was last year. We made $240 million profit off that mine. In context, it sounds like, you didn't buy it that long.
It's hard to believe that something that you could buy for, what was it, that'd be about $7.5 million that it could have had that strong a payback. We paid back all, I built the mine itself for $75 million. I paid back all that capital and I paid back all the loans off in three years. Instead of going out of production in 2011, we just kept on finding more and more and more and more and more. Some of you might know a company called Royal Gold. They ended up with, they bought the royalty off of Placer Dome.
At one point when the gold price was down flat on its back in 2015, I went to the CEO of Royal Gold and I said, "I'll tell you what, lower your royalty from 5% to 2% and we'll leave it permanent." He said, "No, no, no, I'll just keep the 5% royalty." As it turned out, that royalty died away in 2019. Afterwards, we've had five of the most profitable years that mine's ever seen. That was the biggest mistake that guy ever made, to turn down that offer. On top of that, we just keep on finding more and more gold. As I said, you know, we've got reserves out to like 2036 right now. Something tells me before we ever get anywhere close to that, we'll have reserves out to 2045.
That's just the way that one will continue to go. If anybody ever saw the old movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you're looking at the guy who ended up with the treasure. That was a great old movie. If you haven't heard of it, any movie buff would know it. It was made in 1948. It was a Humphrey Bogart movie, one of the great morality play westerns, you know. Anyway, that's how we got our start off that asset. By now, we've got multiple assets. We've got three producing mines, two of which make up our Island Gold District. We've got another one called Young-Davidson. Those are in Ontario, Canada. We've got some mineral deposits, Quartz Mountain in Oregon, which we picked up a few years ago for $3 million. We just sold it last month for $21 million.
It was just too small for how we end up evolving. Of course, Mulatos in Mexico, which continues to produce for us. Differentiating factors, we've got tremendous growth. We're going to produce about 600,000 ounces of gold this year. Looking out to 2028, we're going to grow our production to about 900,000 ounces a year. Beyond that, through further expansion of our existing operations, we're going to go over 1 million ounces a year before the end of the decade. We're one of the lowest cost producers in the sector. About 90% of our net asset value is in Canada. Arguably, it's the company with probably the safest jurisdictional risk in the whole gold sector. 90% of our value in Canada and the remainder in Mexico. It's a great situation to be in. Frankly, it's not an accident.
I always looked at gold. If you're going to own a gold equity, it's got to be as a risk offset in your portfolio. You're trying to do something counter to what's going on in the rest of your investment portfolio. Is it much of a risk offset if it's in Mali or, you know, who knows where, you know, a high-risk jurisdiction where there's a threat of expropriation or higher taxation or royalties or all the crazy things that are going on in the resource industry around the world. I just knew intuitively that that would not be a good idea. I avoided Africa. I avoided most of Latin America.
I mean, we started in Mexico, but you know, Mexico being within the North American Free Trade Window, you know, inside with Canada and the United States, there is all kinds of investment protection that goes along with that. I felt very comfortable with Mexico. That is why we went in there in the first place. Long life reserves, low cost reserves, and tremendous growth. I think that is the key part of the story. We have been a great performer over the last few years. This is a chart going back to 2021. It compares Alamos with the S&P 500, with the gold price and so on. You can sort of see the GDX and GDXJ are essentially gold indices that cover my peer group and even companies that are not part of them, much bigger companies. You can see we have virtually just, we have outperformed everything.
But despite that outperformance, it'd be hard to argue that we're an expensive stock. I mean, first of all, if you're wondering whether we're a growth stock, look at the bar chart on the left and you'll see in terms of EBITDA growth, we've just been a juggernaut since 2014. But despite that, if you look at the bar chart on the right, what that does is it compares Alamos and its multiple with effectively every sector that you might invest in. And X Energy, which is very cheap right now, we still are trading at a very, very low multiple relative to the S&P 500 or technology stocks or real estate or financials or whatever you look at. You know, the gold stocks in general are still relatively conservatively valued. And that would explain why I think it's still a great investment case.
I mean, if you just don't even factor in the growth, which is a big part of our story, I think on a relative basis, this sector still remains quite cheap. I think a reason for that is, you know, the gold price has been on a tear. Who's missed that? Nobody. Why the commodity itself has been on such a tear? It's been driven by central bank buying. China, Russia, even countries like Poland and Vietnam. I mean, there's countries across the board have been buying gold. There's an article in the FT just this morning. Gold just eclipsed the euro as a component of central bank holdings. After the US dollar, it's gold now, not the euro. Who would have thought? They've been driving the gold price. They don't buy gold equities. Who buys gold equities?
One's listed on the New York Stock Exchange like mine, Americans. And guess what? Americans haven't been buying gold stocks. They haven't been buying gold at all. They've been doing what they typically do. They've been chasing the technology sector and chasing the massive multiples because they're never going to go down unless you're a Tesla stockholder. Now maybe you realize they can go the other way. But you know, the reality is that the gold sector has sort of taken a backseat to virtually all those other sectors, particularly high tech. I think that's been just a phenomenon that we have to accept, but it's not permanent. I think that the turn is already happening now. I can tell it just by, I can tell that by the way our share register is changing.
All we ever had in terms of our top 10 profile was U.S. specialty investors. Guys that were running resource funds, you know, the Fidelity Resource Fund, the Franklin Templeton Resource Fund, and so on. Now about four or five of the companies in our top 10 are generalist investors that are coming from generalist funds. T. Rowe Price, for example, they have three of the big funds in T. Rowe Price that all own our stock now. That tells me that things are changing. The appeal of what is going on in the gold sector, driven in large part by the rising gold price, is starting to draw in more and more investors. In terms of our track record, you know, one of the key ways that companies grow, there are two ways that you can grow a company in the gold mining business.
One is you drill, drill, drill, drill, and you find reserves. The other way is through M&A. Our sector is famous for destroying value through M&A. The number of deals that were done, always at the top of the market, right? Gold price goes on a tear, it goes way up there, and suddenly every CEO loses their mind and they go out and they start making acquisitions. The gold price changes. There are massive write-downs. Generally, the CEO is fired and it all ends in tears. That has been the story for a long time of the gold sector, but not ours. I bought Mulatos when gold was under $300 an ounce. It is over $3,000 now. Along the way, we did not do a ton of other acquisitions. You know, we generated a massive amount of free cash.
I was sitting with over $400 million in cash on the balance sheet and no debt when the market went through a big correction. I was sitting there with all that cash ready to make acquisitions. I did. I acquired what you see in front of you there. I acquired an asset called Young-Davidson, which was in Ontario, Canada. I picked up something called Lynn Lake. I picked up something called Island Gold. I bought Young-Davidson for around $750 million. You can see the consensus value on it right now. You take what we are showing here is the amount of free cash flow it has generated plus what the market assigns, what the dozen analysts covering us assign as consensus value. On a combined basis, Young-Davidson is about $1.6 billion, I guess.
If you look at Lynn Lake, acquisition costs $35 million. The market assigns an $861 million valuation to it. We're just building that mine now. We spent a long time drilling off a big reserve and now we've got it fully permitted and we're building it. Similarly, Island Gold, through the two deposits that we bought to form that district, we've put in $1.3 billion. Market consensus value is $4.6 billion on it. We've actually created value with every M&A transaction that we've done. With each of those assets that we picked up, we effectively drilled those deposits very hard. In an industry that is depleting its resources, particularly at the best mines, the major mining companies like Newmont and Barrick and so forth, they're depleting their reserves at their best mines. That's just a reality.
That is why they are diversifying into copper and other commodities because they just cannot feed that machine. There is not a mother nature does not make enough big gold deposits to support that business that they are running. On our side, we have basically been growing our reserves every year going back to 2018. That is what we are showing on this slide. Net of depletion, it shows we have mined about 3.5 million ounces. We have basically grown our reserves and resource base from 9.7 million to 13.9 million ounces. We still continue to grow. Just in the last six years alone, we have added over 8 million ounces. The track record pretty much speaks for itself. Looking at it on per share metrics, you can see the same thing. I mean, this is what generally investors really care about.
You know, how are you doing on per share metrics? You can go issue all the stock you want and add more deposits and production and everything else. But are you diluting me or are you making me richer? I think about that question before I do a deal because I'm a big stockholder as well. I can point out to you on this slide on virtually every metric, gold production per share, mineral reserves per share, cash flow from operations and so on. We're basically making our shareholders better off year by year, both through acquisitions and through exploration. This is looking at our assets. The Island Gold District consists of an underground mine, the Island Gold Mine it's called. And it's one of the highest grade gold deposits in the world. It grades 11 grams per ton.
There's only a handful of gold deposits anywhere in the world that are currently being mined at this scale that have grades anywhere close to that. It makes it a very profitable operation. We're capitalizing on that right now by investing a lot of capital into expanding it. When we acquired it, it was only producing about 90,000 ounces a year. We're currently operating at 150,000 ounces a year. Based on our Phase III Expansion, we're going to push that up to 300,000 ounces a year. The open pit operation there called Magino, which we just acquired last year, the company that had it sunk $1 billion into building Magino, but went broke doing it. We swooped in at the last second and acquired them just before they defaulted with the banks.
One of the reasons we were having so much trouble commissioning is it just had a lot of mistakes went into the actual construction of the mill. The mill itself, the guts of it are okay, but everything feeding into it was wrong. We saw that in our due diligence. We realized there was some repair work needed. Since we've taken it on, that's what we've been doing. We've teed it up to effectively produce at a rate of about 100,000 ounces a year now. The next step we're going to take is an expansion program that'll see that grow to something like 200,000 ounces a year. Our Young-Davidson operation is an underground mine up near Kirkland Lake, Ontario. When we acquired it, it was about half built, but it had tremendous potential.
It took us another, I guess it would be about $300 million to fully build it out. Since we finished it in 2020, it's been generating over $100 million a year in profit. In fact, last year it did $140 million in profit. It's just a tremendous asset for us. We've replaced all the ounces that we mine there. You know, we used the free cash flow that we generated from the operation to pay for its own expansion. By the time we completed it in 2020, we'd actually replaced all the reserves that we had mined to get it there. It turned out to be a great acquisition for us. Mulatos itself, and that one's very close to my heart. That's how we got started. Laid $10 million down and we've produced a tremendous amount of gold there.
Like I said, over 3 million ounces of gold. What's interesting is we're now just starting to transition from these open- pit, low- grade sort of heap leach operations to mining high- grade underground sulfides. We had tremendous success over the last few years delineating over 1 million ounces of gold. That's going to be the basis of our first underground mine there. Another key part of this is that the production that we're bringing on is going to be lower cost than the production that we enjoy today. In addition to the fact that we're actually growing our reserves, we're also lowering our costs. The new mine that we'll have in Northern Manitoba, Lynn Lake, that will be less than $1,000 all-in sustaining costs. The new production coming on at Mulatos, again, you know, we're going to see costs come down.
With the expansion of PDA, because we're going to be enjoying the economies of scale of a very high- grade mine, again, we're going to see costs come down. That is going to be a consistent theme in all our operations. There is a close-up view of the new shaft that we're sinking at Island Gold. The best way I could put this to somebody who typically doesn't invest in a gold stock is accessing the ore underground from a ramp system. It's a bit like taking the stairs. Sinking a shaft is like putting in an elevator. Instead of taking right now to get from the mine face where we're currently operating for those haul trucks to make their way to surface, it takes about an hour in a haul truck, and then an hour back down again.
Imagine replacing that with an elevator where you reduce that time from an hour down to about four minutes. That is essentially how we are going to be operating it in the future. You cannot sink a shaft for nothing. The shaft is going to go down 1,370 meters. What would that be in feet? I am going to say that is pretty darn close to 5,000 feet. That is pretty deep. You know, if you have ever been to Vancouver, I think of it that way. I am from Vancouver. That shaft will be deeper than the North Shore Mountains are high. That is an interesting way to scale it. Very high- grade. It was never seen to be what it is. We turned it into what it is by aggressively drilling it and showing that the reserve was much, much bigger.
On the back of those much bigger reserves, we justified the $750 million in capital it's taking to sink that shaft and build all the infrastructure that we're going to need in order to operate at a higher rate. This is sort of how it looks altogether. You can see where we are in 2025, about 600,000 ounces of production. Looking ahead to 2027, we always provide three-year guidance. You can see us growing to 700,000 ounces of gold a year. With the Island Gold mine coming on, you see us going to 900,000. Pardon me, our Lynn Lake gold project coming on, you see us going to 900,000 ounces a year. Further growth from Island Gold is going to take us over a million.
We have a very clear pathway to a million ounces of annualized production by the end of the decade. Already, this represents 24% growth in production by 2028 and an 8% reduction in costs. That is saying something because our industry is, again, under a lot of cost pressure. One of the key ways that we are doing this, there is a big advantage going from operating with trucks to operating with a shaft. Trucks run off of diesel. Diesel is expensive. Those trucks consume a lot of it to get up and down from that depth. What do we run that shaft off of? It runs off of the Ontario Power Grid, which is hydroelectric power, which is less than a quarter of the cost of diesel. It is greener.
We're not running trucks underground, which costs a lot in energy in terms of ventilation or to keep that air breathable. You have a greener operation, a safer operation, and a lower cost operation. It's just in every way beneficial. The only downside to it is you have to put up $750 million and sink that into building out the infrastructure. Once it's in place, that shaft will serve that mine for the next however long we can keep on finding reserves. Based on what we know today, we have about 18 years of reserves at that mine. They continue to grow. Our operations are fully funded. This is what our cash flow projections look like depending on your gold price assumption. This looks at $2,600 gold, $2,800 gold, and $3,000 gold. Currently, gold is roughly $3,300.
On that basis and on these cash flow projections going out to 2027, you can see we're effectively going to generate close to $600 million in cash flow from operations at a $3,000 gold price. It's a remarkable story in an industry that really doesn't have a lot of remarkable stories. There's a reason we've been outperforming our peer group as substantially as you saw in that first slide. This is it. We've got the growth. We've got the track record for executing on our business plans for quite a number of years. As I mentioned, you know, we've taken the company from effectively less than $1 million in value to today, I think our market cap is around $11 billion US. Not bad over a 20-year period. We've also generated profits all the way. We've paid a dividend since 2010, never missed it.
You know, I know Tesla is a great story, but it's never actually made any money. You know, that's a fact. It's just never made any money unless you call selling carbon credits making money. Alamos has made money. And we're going to make a lot more in the future as we continue to increase our production. That kind of concludes my remarks. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them for you.
Y eah, I think I have one. I've been bored and I hesitated to invest for so long. I'm, you know, just looking back, you know, it's like five years ago, whatever, you know, it's something. I'm a big value guy and more property and style and no dividend, all that good stuff. The thing is, gold was flat for a long, long, long time.
Then it picked up after the 2001 market, like a wartime and Gulf wartime too. It's never looked back. It's kept on going. Historically, pre-2001, growth was not that great. The question I have is, for the past 25 years, we don't need to look back. My question is, you know, $200-$300 range, it stayed for so many years. My one and only concern is, do you think we can sustain this price, at least $3,000-$2,000 range? Do you foresee the price is going to stabilize? I mean, going to stay here at the 2008 ?
I can hear where you're going. You're taking a while to get there, but
I can hear where you're going. I would put it this way. You know, I've watched the gold market for 40 years now. Would you believe things have changed? You know, things have changed. I'm not saying it's different this time. I haven't said gold is not a cyclical commodity. It is. It's a cyclical commodity. As long as I've been in it, it's had its up periods and its down periods. The longest down period I can ever recall was 1996 through 2004. That was a long downturn. It didn't start to perk up really until 2005, 2006. I thought I was doing incredibly well with gold at $600 an ounce, having, you know, acquired the asset at $270 an ounce and built it with a $400 gold price assumption. Now gold was $600 an ounce. Then I met Shane McGuire, who was head of the Texas Teachers' Pension Fund in Texas.
He had just published a book called Buy Gold Now. I looked at it and I said, "Buy Gold Now?" He said, "You think gold's doing well now? It's $600 an ounce." He said, "It's going a lot higher." By the way, in that book, and you can find it, he basically predicted the financial crisis. I read that book right after it was published. At the time I read it, which would have been the spring, maybe summer of 2006, I read it. I read it and I thought, "Oh my God, you know, everything's going to implode." I was sitting on roughly $60 million in debt at that point. I thought, "If things blow up and I'm sitting on $60 million in debt, I'm in trouble." $45 million of that debt was a convertible to venture.
At the first opportunity, which I think was the fall of that year to force the conversion of the debentures, we did so. We retired $45 million in debt. The balance was made up of equipment loans from Caterpillar Lease. The other part of it was a credit facility that Standard Bank of South Africa had given us for $15 million or something like that. I thought to myself, it was $64 million, we were a total of $64 million in debt. I had it all paid off by the third quarter of 2007. We all know when the shit hit the fan, it was 2008. Had I not read that book, I would have not had such strong conviction to get out of the way. I did not want to have any exposure to any bank or anybody at all.
Didn't want to have any debt. I've more or less played that debt-free approach all the way through. We were completely debt-free until we did that Argonaut deal. They had about $250 million in debt. In terms of net debt, I think we're still, what, $50 million cash, right? Khalid, we've got like $300 million cash and we've got the $250 million in debt we picked up on the transaction. We'll have that debt paid off in no time. By the way, $300 million debt next to $12 billion in equity is a pretty tiny exposure in terms of a debt to equity ratio. I do not like debt. I'm willing to use it. From time to time, you can use it very effectively. It's great leverage. I don't gamble using the bank's money. I just don't believe in that.
I think our gold market is being driven by a number of factors. We're going from a world where there was one dominant player, the United States, and dominant economy, dominant military, and so on. We're inevitably, whether you like it or not, it doesn't matter whether I like it or you like it, but we're changing into a multipolar world right now. There are big swaths of the world that do not like the fact that the U.S. dollar dominates everything, whether it's dominating the gold market or, you know, if Saudi Arabia wants to trade with China, they're transacting in U.S. dollars. They want to get away from that. They're determined to get away from it. They're doing so by buying gold. Central banks across all these countries are buying gold.
There was a point in time, not very long ago, six, seven years ago, China was sitting on $1.4 trillion in Treasury Bills, U.S. debt. It's half that now. It's $700 billion. What did they do? They sold their $700 billion, a billion dollars worth of treasury bills, and they bought gold. Their gold reserves are going like this, and their exposure to the U.S. dollar is going like that. That's happening across the board. It's not like the United States is not going to remain the dominant economy and the dominant military and the dominant everything for at least 50 more years, I think. It's obvious, but it's just not going to be the only one. Right now, it's so much bigger than everybody else. What's happening is the world economy is growing.
On a relative basis, it's starting to grow in relevance as it relates to the U.S. economy. These things all matter. The fact that the U.S. has accumulated such a huge amount of debt and the deficit continues to grow at an absolutely eye-watering pace, every 100 days it goes up another trillion dollars. I guarantee you do not know what a trillion is. I don't know what a trillion is. The best way I thought of, somebody asked me, if I asked you to wait a million seconds, how long would that be? The answer is 11 days. If I asked you to wait a billion seconds, how long would that be? Anyone want to guess? Billion seconds? It's 3,000 years. Say I asked you to wait a trillion seconds, how long am I asking you to wait? 31,000 years.
The difference between a million, a billion, a trillion, those sound like very, very similar words. The difference is astronomical. I remember, like I actually, somebody sent me this clip of Ronald Reagan running for the presidency in 1980, railing on, "We're $80 billion in debt." He was absolutely appalled at being $80 billion in debt. If the man was alive now, I mean, the deficit is, what is it? Does anybody know what that number is offhand? We were just looking at it this morning. The debts, yeah, it's over, no, it's more like three. It's $37 trillion. That's the debt. Annually, it was a, so in the first three months of 2025, it went up another trillion. By the end of April, you can go to ChatGPT. That's what we were doing.
We're asking ChatGPT all these questions because you lose track of these facts. And they're so significant. I mean, in the first, by the end of April 2025, the deficit went up $1 trillion. This is massive. And this is why the U.S. dollar is getting weaker and why gold is getting stronger and why I don't believe this gold market just ends like that. I think it's going to keep on going. You should have some exposure in your portfolio to gold stocks. Hope you think about ours. Thank you very much.