Thank you. Thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen. Very interesting moment in the market for us to be here. This is my first visit to Stockholm. I've been in the gold mining industry for about 40 years now. I started straight out of school. I had actually studied history and English literature, so it didn't prepare me for much professionally other than maybe a schoolteacher. I came from a town in Canada called Vancouver, and one of the primary industries in that town was mining. It had a very vibrant stock exchange. It had a bit of a reputation. Obviously, whenever you're in the very high-risk end of things, it attracts a certain type of promoter. I was fortunate enough to fall in with some very top, how would you call them, top-rated mining engineers who were also very good entrepreneurs.
They were starting up a company at that time called Glamis Gold. It was a very small company when I joined it, maybe CND 5 million market cap. That company ultimately grew into a CND 7 billion company. I saw the, I was there for the first six years, and I watched it evolve to roughly CND 200 million in market cap as we brought the first two mines that that company had into production. I saw more or less how the whole thing worked. Of course, you know, being in my 20s and wanting to go out and conquer windmills, I decided to get involved with a small group and start to do some things more entrepreneurial. I was quite successful over the next six or seven years.
At one time, my former boss contacted me and he said, "Why don't we, why don't we start up something together?" It was a very typical kind of thing in Vancouver. New opportunities were opening up in the early 1990s in Mexico because they were changing their laws and they were inviting foreign investment into the country. He said, "We should start something, you know." We started a little private company called Alamos. We ran it publicly for a few years. We brought it public in 1996 with the idea of conducting mineral exploration in Mexico. We caught probably one of the biggest down drafts in this very highly cyclical business. From roughly 1996 until about really 2004, 2005, the whole gold sector was in a poor state. In fact, mining in general, there wasn't anything doing well. Copper wasn't doing well.
Zinc, nickel, it doesn't matter what you were in, everything was down. That was the era of dot-com. Everybody who had any speculative money at all, they were investing in this whole new sector with the birth of the internet and all these new businesses starting up, Amazon and so forth. I can remember seeing Google for the first time when you could barely search for anything on Google. That's exactly where we were. I didn't carry a cell phone. You know, not many people were carrying cell phones in 1998 and 1999. By 2001, after the sector had been really out of favor since 1996, I thought, you know, this has got to be a bottom. The gold price was something like CND 265 an ounce. I thought this was the time to look around for an opportunity. We had this little public shell.
Alamos at that point had gravitated onto what was called the Toronto Venture Exchange. The Vancouver Stock Exchange itself had disappeared. All the brokerage firms associated with it had more or less gone under. Here we were at the very bottom. I went to one of the major mining companies and talked to them about selling an asset to us that we managed to buy for CND 10 million, payable over 10 years plus a royalty. That company was Placer Dome. They'd spent roughly CND 50 million on that project. They'd defined about 2 million oz of gold, none of which you could recover profitably at a sub- CND 300 gold price. For them, it was like useless inventory. For us, it looked like an opportunity because if you believed that was the bottom and gold would effectively turn around and start to go up, you know, this was the time to be buying.
We entered into an option-to-purchase agreement. We signed that option on the 17th of November of 2001 with gold at around CND 265 an ounce. Nobody believing that that was a really good idea. I managed to find a few investors in Toronto at that time who are now household names in Canada. Principal among them was probably Eric Sprott, who ended up starting the Sprott Funds and those did exceedingly well in the years to come. Eric Sprott himself would become a billionaire. There were several other of the big banks that had fund managers there that just believed fundamentally that gold was going to turn around and companies like ours would probably benefit from some financing. We didn't need much to get started, but we did need money. Being able to raise money at that time was really our little secret sauce, if you will.
We had established a good enough track record over many years to be able to raise money under any circumstances. As it would turn out, we were able to raise the money we needed to get started. That was how this company got going. When I was a boy, you know, my father used to watch Westerns, all those American Westerns. There was one called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It was made in 1948. It's an old Humphrey Bogart movie. Little would I ever believe watching that movie and how it ends, it's one of those morality tales as most Westerns are, little would I believe that I would be the guy that ended up with a treasure. That's effectively what happened. We've mined nearly 4 million oz out of this little corner of the Sierra Madre, which essentially was where this movie was supposed to take place.
It was actually filmed on the back lot of a studio in Los Angeles. This is an old historical district. Gold was found there by the Indians. The Indians would travel regularly down the Mulatos River into the Yaqui River, and the Yaqui River led to the coast. That's where they met up with a priest. The priest saw them with the gold trinkets around their necks. One thing led to the other. Gold was found in that district 350 years before. It was mined at a very small scale, a high-grade small scale. We came in with a whole new concept that turned out to be very, very successful. That's how we got started with Alamos Gold.
The day I took over the job of trying to pull something in and so forth, the market cap of the company was CND 400,000, which was equivalent to the amount of cash the company had in the treasury, CND 400,000, virtually nothing. Today, the company in U.S. dollar terms is trading at roughly a $15 billion market cap. I've been the only CEO of the company. What did we have in mind? First of all, we believed in gold. Fundamentally, we believed in gold. Not many people did. I can look back to the press from the time I started in the mining industry at the beginning of the 1980s. You would see gold characterized strictly as a commodity. They didn't want to talk about gold as being money anymore. It was a commodity. They decoupled gold from the U.S. dollar.
Clearly, the dollar was the money and the gold was the commodity. I think this was the first big lie they had to tell in order to get people to believe in paper money and not believe in the fundamentals that underlay it, which were, it was the gold, which was the actual money. You're bound to hear from a couple of other CEOs as they talk about their companies and we're producing gold. What fundamentally is it? Where does most of it go? A good deal of it goes into jewelry manufacturing. Most of that is owned by Asians who fundamentally see it as money. They're carrying their wealth around on their wrists and fingers and around their necks and so on. They see it as money and always have. Mankind has seen gold as money for what, more than 5,000 years.
Now we've been taught this story since Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold, ending the gold standard. We've been taught that gold is no longer money. Gold is now a commodity. I think we're starting to see a shift. Why we're seeing that shift is because the fundamental paper that has sort of underlined the whole system since the end of the Second World War and the Bretton Woods Treaty, the U.S. dollar, they're debasing that dollar. They're mishandling it. They're losing their hegemony in the world. We're moving into a bipolar world. I don't have time to go into this whole discussion given the brevity of my talk. I think you have the backdrop for one of the biggest bull markets in gold that we've ever seen. I've never seen CND 4,000 gold. We just crossed this threshold overnight. I don't think it's by any means backed off.
There's lots of analysis that you can read to back that up. I would encourage you to do that. I started this company with the idea of starting up a gold mining company. That's a crazy thing to do because it's a very competitive business. It's a very difficult one to break into. Gold is a very scarce commodity. At the time, there were 15 companies of real stature, including companies of a size that would be interested in the very kind of assets that I was interested in. How could I possibly go out and acquire something that they might be interested in when they had capital and personnel and everything else and I had nothing? I had a little shell company. I was working out of a home office with a cell phone by that time and a laptop computer. I managed to secure that option.
Then I managed to secure the financing. Between 2001- 2005, I created a mining company. I hired the whole team. I obtained all the permits, obtained all the financing. We were in production by July 2005. We've never looked back. For the first decade or so, we focused on our project at Mulatos between 2005- 2015. We grew production. We made incredible profits. We generated nearly CND 400 million in free cash flow, which was retained earnings. Right up to the time we did our first major M&A deal, it was actually a merger. Two companies of similar size decided to join together. I became the CEO of that merged company. That was in 2015. We doubled in size in 2015. We did two more subsequent acquisitions, again right along the bottom of the market while gold was around between CND 1,100 and CND 1 ,300 an ounce.
Three back-to-back acquisitions, all in Canada, all proved to be excellent acquisitions for the company. We've gone on now to build our production profile up to this 600,000 oz a year annual threshold. We have the wherewithal within this group of projects to boost our production to 900,000 oz as a next step. We'll take it ultimately, again, with the assets that we already own over this 900,000 oz to over 1 million oz of annualized production. All the while, we're going to see our costs go down, mostly because at each of these projects, we're going to be increasing the scale of the project. We'll benefit from the economies of scale.
This is kind of the core of our story where we have a rising production profile going from 600,000 oz to 1 million oz, while our costs will be going from CND 1,400 an oz down to CND 1,100 an oz. Even if you don't believe in gold going any higher than it is, in fact, maybe you're looking at the gold price now and thinking it's going to retract. I don't believe that, but some do. At these margins, we are making phenomenal, phenomenal cash flows. I think this is one of the reasons why we've been one of the top performers in our sector. As this slide demonstrates, this goes back to December of 2021. We've gone up roughly 350%. We've outperformed virtually every other gold stock in our sector. We've outperformed the gold price itself. We've outperformed the S&P 500. We've virtually outperformed anything.
You can sort of see the list of charts at top, you know, the GDX and the GDXJ are indexes that essentially capture the gold space. So effectively, Alamos has just been on a tear for the last number of years. We're not about to back off anytime soon. We're still growing at a very rapid clip. This has been largely underpinned by production growth and by reserve and resource growth. We've been drilling aggressively. We've been working on a couple of very significant discoveries. It's just driven our growth from a reserve perspective in a dramatic fashion. I talk about outperforming all these things. What about value? Is there still any value left there?
If you compare the gold space to virtually any other sector, and this is sort of looking across a variety of sectors, technology, real estate, financials, industrials, and so on, you can see that they're still valued at anywhere from, you know, 11 x- 20x enterprise value to EBITDA. The gold space is still trading really at the low end. You know, we're trading at about a 9.6x multiple right now. That's still relatively cheap versus any other sector, which just shows you how far out of favor the commodity gold was and gold stocks themselves. If you were to look at a pie chart of all the available money that is available to fund managers to invest, there's this tiny, tiny little component. It's not even 4% of that spectrum that's actually invested in the gold space.
Most of the big institutions, and maybe some of you sitting here represent some of those institutions, you're investing a very, very small portion of your capital in this space. This is why the valuations have stayed so low for so long. We're going up in dramatic fashion, but we're still nowhere near capitalized at the same extent as the rest of the market. I still think there's a tremendous amount of growth available. Now, this slide is one we often refer to as our report card. One of the criticisms that you'll often hear against our industry is that they just destroy a lot of value, particularly every time they go to make an acquisition. They buy something, they overpay, and shareholders are left short. That has not been our case. We have created tremendous amounts of value.
We've created nearly CND 10 billion of value through an M&A strategy that, frankly, I think is second to none in our sector. Starting out with Mulatos, as you can see, we acquired it for CND 10 million, as I referenced earlier. That was CND 10 million Canadian, by the way. We still use it, but at the time, it was roughly like $7 million U.S. We've generated CND 790 million in cumulative free cash flow over the years that we've been running that mine. There is still a consensus net present value applied to that by a group. I think there's 13 analysts covering the company, and the average would be about CND 1.1 billion. The company is still in production. In fact, it generated CND 230 million in free cash flow just last year.
We're investing heavily right now in a big expansion program going from open pit mining to underground mining now in Mexico. You can see how a very small investment has gone to create tremendous value. Lynn Lake is a project that we're only starting to build now, but we acquired it a number of years ago for around CND 35 million. We've spent a considerable amount of money drilling it and permitting it. It's fully permitted now, and it's just about, it's just starting to go into construction. The market consensus NPV on it right now is CND 1.3 billion. That's against a total investment of the CND 35 million acquisition cost plus the development cost. We're into it for maybe CND 163 million cash, and the market's valuing it at CND 1.3 billion.
The most dramatic case is probably Island Gold, where we've put in a total of CND 1.3 billion, including the initial acquisition cost of CND 600 million. We subsequently acquired the project next to it. Now, consensus value on it is over CND 6 billion, and we've generated over CND 200 million in free cash flow. This is how you make money in any business. We see our business like any other business. You buy things cheaply. You invest in those things. We invested in capital. We expanded them. We invested in reserves. We drilled. What did we do? We found many more ounces. For example, at Island Gold, we started with 750,000 oz of reserves and maybe a million oz of resource. Today, it's over 6 million oz of reserves and maybe another million oz in resource or so. We've just taken it in dramatic fashion. We've grown the overall asset.
When you add the Manitou project that we acquired next door to it, that's another 4 million oz that we added to it over and above that 6 million reserve ounce I referenced. We've taken a very intelligent approach to M&A. We tend to buy when things are cheap. If you looked at a gold chart, we were making all the acquisitions when the gold price had pulled from CND 1,900 back to between CND 1,100- CND 1,300 an ounce. We made three back-to-back acquisitions. Since then, gold prices have turned around since the end of 2017, and they've run from that CND 1,300 per ounce level up to CND 2,400 an ounce. Our timing has effectively been impeccable. This long-term track record of creating value, this is as dramatic a picture as I can give you.
If you look at the growing mineral reserve of the company, in 2015, before we began all these acquisitions, we had something in the neighborhood of 1.8 million oz in all categories between reserves and resources in our one Mulatos project. Through our acquisitions and all the drilling that we've done, we're now over 16 million oz of reserves alone, and that's a net of 3.5 million oz of depletion. That's the ounces we've mined over the course of that time. That's a 65% increase in mineral reserves. That's adding over 8 million oz in the last six years at a finding cost of CND 30 per oz. That's against the CND 2,400 per oz that gold is trading at right now. It's a tremendous track record, and it's one that is the envy of the industry, I'll say.
It's one thing to show it on the aggregate basis, but how does this look on per share metrics? What you can see is the three main measures that we look at: gold production, mineral reserves, and cash flow from operations. You can see on per share metrics in each of these, we have effectively added value. In the last five years, for example, gold production has gone from 427,000- 600,000 oz. In terms of gold per share, about 1 oz of production per share to 1.4 oz per share. In terms of gold reserves per share, from roughly 25 oz per share in 2020 to 38 oz per share and so on. What we're demonstrating here is that our M&A strategy is actually adding value based on every share that you own. This is our Island Gold project, and you can see where we were working.
This is where we're in the process of building a shaft. Right now, Island Gold is a ramp operation. We're mining down around 1,000 m of depth, but we've been discovering gold at an incredible pace at Island Gold. It's actually one of the highest grade gold mines in the world, running at around 11 g. It's a big story, and I could have made the whole presentation on Island Gold alone. Just to the south of us, another company was developing an open pit mining project called Manitou, where they delineated about 4 million oz. They'd fully permitted it. They built it. Just as they were finished building it, they ran out of money. Their banks were about to foreclose. We started to have a chat. Within a few weeks, we had acquired them. The synergies that you can develop by integrating these two projects are really quite exceptional.
It makes an interesting story in and of itself. Suffice to say, it's going to allow us to expand production here from its current rate. We currently produce about 150,000 oz a year at the underground mine, and we're producing roughly 100,000 oz a year at the open pit. The next stage of growth, as we integrate these two projects, will double production at the open pit and take underground production from this 150,000 oz a year level to roughly 400,000 oz a year. Our game plan is to essentially push this to around 550,000 oz a year and getting there by 2028. It has enough reserves underpinning it. Between the two projects, there's roughly 11.5 million oz of reserves and resources. That's enough production to sustain that operation for a very, very long time. That's looking at one particular mine.
Looking across our asset suite, we own Island Gold, Lynn Lake in Northern Manitoba, Young-Davidson, about five hours away from Island Gold in Ontario, and Mulatos in Mexico. You can see we've got a very steady growth profile that will ultimately take us over 1 million oz of gold as we bring on the Lynn Lake project into production and expand our Island Gold project upwards of 500,000 oz a year. It's a growth profile that very few companies in our industry have. It's fully financed by the cash flows that we're generating. Our upper assumption on this chart, the gold price is moving so fast, our upper assumption is CND 3,000 per oz. You can see at CND 3,000 per oz how our cash flow is growing from where we are in 2025, while we're still spending on capital and expanding things.
By the time that capital comes off and our production comes on with our costs in decline, you can see our cash flow growing to an excess of CND 500 million a year at CND 3,000 gold. The cumulative, the cash flow that the company is looking to generate, these are not numbers that are pie in the sky that maybe we're going to get there. These are real numbers grounded in conservative assumptions. That's more or less how we tie our story together. A growing diversified company, with effectively five mining operations. We have expanding margins as our costs go into decline and our production expands. We take a very conservative low-risk strategy. We fully fund all our own expansion. We're in safe jurisdictions. Virtually 90% of our value comes from Canada, 10% in Mexico. We have a sustainable business model.
I think these are points that would appeal to an investor investing in any sector. You just happen to be able to also find it in the gold mining sector. Thank you very much for your time. I guess we're going to have a few questions, perhaps.
Thank you, John. I'm sure there will be a lot of questions here. Do we have anyone for anything? Raise your hand. There we have.
When analysts calculate now, do you know what average gold price they're using today?
In Canada, they're still very far behind the curve. I think they might be at about CND 2,800 per oz.
the S&P 500, you would be trading at about CND 2,000 per oz.
Say again?
Did you trade at about 95% of NAV today?
Most of the analysts have us between 0.9x- 1.1x. It just depends on the assumptions that they're using. We're trading right around 1x NAV.
Yes, sounds like upside if you use the current price.
The thing is, our NAV as a company has been growing at such a rapid rate that the analysts are always behind the curve on Alamos. That's been the same way for a decade.
Thank you.
We have one over there.
Yeah, do you sell all your gold?
He's talking to the mic.
Yeah. Do you sell all your gold in the spot market or for sale?
We sell all our gold in the spot market. When we acquired the Manitou Gold project, our neighbors had, they were having a great deal of trouble financing. They sold about 300,000 oz of gold forward at CND 1,850 an ounce or so. When we acquired them, we paid down half of those hedges. Right now, there's about 150,000 oz hedged that we acquired from when we took on Manitou Gold. The way I look at it is, you know, there's 150,000 oz hedged, but there's nearly 4 million oz we acquired probably at an acquisition cost of, would it be less than CND 10 an ounce? All those ounces are unhedged. We do have a small component of hedges that we'll deliver in 2026 and 2027.
Any more for any more? We have one.
Thank you for a great presentation. It seems like you had a fantastic result recovering the CND 470 million for the Turkish assets. Is your experience there, does that mean that you will now remain focused on the U.S. and Mexico, or are there any other jurisdictions that you would think about?
Turkey was an interesting lesson for us. In 2009, probably few geological teams in the world knew as much about the high sulfidation epithermal geology as our team did through the discoveries we were making at Mulatos. We wanted to be able to capitalize on that understanding of this geology. There were very few projects anywhere in the world. High sulfidation systems are hard to come by. You have a few of them at the top of the Andes. You have some of them around the Ring of Fire. You happen to have one in Turkey. It was owned by Teck. Teck was a seller. Back in 2009, they'd hit some financial difficulty. They were getting rid of all their non-core assets, selling all their gold assets effectively. We stepped in and bought this. The reason why we bought it is we understood the geology.
We thought we understood political risk in Turkey. In 2009 and 2010, it looked very optimistic. They were talking about getting closer to the European Union. They were trying to align their rules and regulations, their laws, and so forth to effectively conform. Everything changed after 2014. Turkey started to slide back the other way. We were already deep in. When we went into Turkey acquiring those assets from Teck, there was maybe a million ounces delineated. By this time, we'd found 3 million oz. We were pretty sure there was another 2 million oz to be found. We also had obtained all our permits. One thing led to the other. We started to develop those projects. Not long after that, Turkey more or less failed to renew our licenses, to put it politely. We took them to an international tribunal under the auspices of a bilateral investment treaty.
Let's say they had some difficulty at that tribunal. In the end, they thought maybe the better way to go would be to allow us to sell the assets. A Turkish buyer stepped forward, a fairly substantial Turkish company stepped forward. We negotiated a deal to sell them for CND 470 million. We had written the asset down to zero in 2001. We had invested a total of CND 245 million up to the point where we stopped. For us to turn around and sell them for CND 470 million was, put it this way, it was better than what we had, which was nothing. It was sort of an honorable way for us to withdraw from Turkey. I would not go back. I was not interested in restarting those projects. It's just not a jurisdiction we're ever going to succeed in.
We had realized by 2015, just looking at the world in general, the world was getting to be a much riskier place. We had already decided as a board to really double down and focus on Canada. Between 2015 - 2017, we made three fairly substantial acquisitions. That has been the underpinning for the tremendous growth that we've seen in the last 10 years.
With that, we need to thank you.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, yeah. It's been a pleasure.