Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Altius Minerals Q4 2022 and year-end 2022 financial results conference call and webcast. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Wednesday, March 8th, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 call. Our press release and annual filings, including the AIF, were released yesterday after the close and are available on our website. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access a replay along with the presentation slides on our website at altiusminerals.com. Just a note on that, because of a website issue today, normally you see it in the View Presentation button right beside the webcast registration. Today, you have to scroll down on that same page under Webcast and Presentations, and you'll see right under Presentations Q4 and Financial Results Conference Call. Brian Dalton, CEO, and Ben Lewis, CFO, are both our speakers on the call. There will be a Q&A afterwards.
There's a forward-looking statement on slide two that applies to everything we say, both in our formal remarks and during the Q&A session. With that, I'll turn over to Ben to take us through the numbers.
Thank you, Flora. Good morning, everyone. Annual royalty revenue for 2022 was CAD 103.5 million, or CAD 2.27 per share, up 23% over last year. Q4 royalty revenue of CAD 23.1 million or CAD 0.49 per share compares to CAD 23.5 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Attributable royalty revenue for 2022 represents an annual record for the corporation, mainly based upon higher realized commodity prices and the ramp-up of renewable royalty revenue. Our EBITDA margin of 82% is up from last year's 80%. Mineral Royalty's EBITDA margin was 87% for both years. Annual adjusted EBITDA of CAD 89.7 million or CAD 1.97 per share increased by 34% in relation to 2021.
While Q4's adjusted EBITDA of CAD 18 million compares to CAD 17.7 million last year. Annual adjusted operating cash flow of CAD 75.9 million or CAD 1.65 per share increased 54% from 2021. Q4 adjusted operating cash flow of CAD 19.2 million is 21% higher than the CAD 15.9 million generated in Q4 2021. These increases are largely reflective of the higher mineral royalties revenue. Net earnings for the year of CAD 39.5 million or CAD 0.82 per share compares to net earnings of CAD 38.3 million or CAD 0.97 per share in 2021. Net earnings during the fourth quarter were CAD 6.8 million or CAD 0.14 per share. Results for both the year and quarter were positively impacted by strong royalty revenue, partially offset by foreign exchange and fair value adjustments on dividends.
Sorry, on derivatives. Adjusted net earnings of CAD 0.10 per share for the quarter and CAD 0.74 per share for the full year followed a trend of revenue, partially offset by higher taxes. We continue to see revenue ramp up at ARR through its 50% owned GBR joint venture. ARR achieved the milestone of first positive cash flow and operating profitability during the year. GBR also added two new operating royalties late in 2022, and two more royalties from the TGE and Apex investments hit commercial operations in late 2022, with another one expected in the coming months. As a result, GBR expects to realize annual royalty revenue in the range of $11.5 million to $13.5 million in 2023, based on the current royalty holdings.
Brian will speak more on the strong progress ARR is making. I further encourage you to review its recently published annual filings and investor conference call remarks. Now to the balance sheet and capital allocation. We successfully deployed CAD 47.8 million during the year in new investments. This consisted of CAD 25.9 million to purchase an additional 866,000 shares in Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation, which is a pass-through vehicle for royalties and equity dividends from the IOC iron ore mine. We also funded CAD 3.9 million into Lithium Royalty Corp, including our direct royalty acquisitions under our 10% co-participation rates. In February, LRC has filed a preliminary prospectus indicating its intent to IPO. ARR funded its 50% into GBR of $ 43.9 million during the year, representing its portion of new renewable royalty investments.
ARR also completed an equity offering of CAD 38.4 million late in 2022, with Altius investing CAD 20.7 million to maintain its pro rata ownership, which stood at 58% after the equity financing. The board of directors approved an CAD 0.08 per share dividend that will be paid to shareholders of record on March 17th, with a payment date of March 31. The corporation paid cash dividends of CAD 13.1 million in 2022 to its common shareholders and issued 34,000 common shares under the corporation's dividend reinvestment plan during 2022. We purchased and canceled an additional 268,000 shares at a cost of CAD 4.8 million under our normal course issuer bid, which was renewed for another year on August 22nd and will continue until August 21st, 2023.
In addition, we repaid CAD 8 million in scheduled principal repayments on our term debt. Earlier in 2022, we completed a drawdown on our revolver of CAD 10 million to acquire investments. Our current liquidity consists of CAD 15 million in cash as of the end of Q4, and we have CAD 93 million in unused revolver room. ARR, at quarter end, held cash of $50 million. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian for his remarks.
Thank you, Ben. Thank you everyone for joining. Pleasure as always. Today we're putting a wrap on our 25th year of annual reporting as a public company. It was certainly a good one for Altius on multiple fronts, including achievement of the milestone of reaching $100 million in revenue. Royalties really do love inflation. Far more important than the revenue milestone this past year, however, are the unusual number of positive development signals that came in from across our diversified portfolio of long-term assets. Many of these add to our confidence in the embedded growth that will serve to base the next 25 years of Altius' development. There was a considerable shifting of the sand concerning some of the major macro trends that our portfolio has been aligned with during the past year.
A lot of this has to do with the accelerating de-globalization that is in response to the war in Eastern Europe, which we are convinced will be particularly inflationary with respect to our broader industry. We'll get into this topic in more detail in our letter to shareholders that will be posted to our website later today. To summarize some of those growth signals we are seeing across the portfolio. In our base and battery metals portfolio, we're seeing strong growth potential emerging in the form of expansion and new build actions and intentions. Chapada continues to be evaluated for expansion and is now being supported by the discovery of the Sauva deposit on the property.
Significant maiden resource has recently been declared there, and the indicated grade is considerably higher than that currently being mined, providing clear positive implications for mine life extension and/or production rate growth. Lithium stands almost alone as a mine commodity that is experiencing incentivization conditions, and this is working to purpose. Our direct and indirect exposure to lithium through our past investments in and alongside Lithium Royalty Corporation are benefiting from the rapid construction advancements and increasing production level objectives of several royalty portfolio projects. We expect to receive first-ever lithium royalty revenue this year. LRC is currently marketing an IPO, and this has the potential to daylight significant value for our equity level holdings. Adventus' Curipamba project continued to knock down major hurdles during the past year.
These included project finance arrangements, technical-level environmental approval, and a government investment protection agreement completed in advance of a potential construction decision later this year. We continue to be very bullish about the prospects for the high purity component of the iron ore market, with the current lithium market perhaps acting as a bit of a harbinger for what we see ahead. In lithium, the writing was put on the wall several years back when massive amounts of new investment in transition to EV-based manufacturing was collectively committed by global automakers. This was done in the absence of knowing where the necessary raw input materials would come from, and the result has been strong incentivization pricing for lithium, and more recently, even direct level investments by automakers to secure various supplies.
Today, not tomorrow, large amounts of capital are being committed by global steelmakers to similarly transition their platforms to electric arc furnace-based steelmaking at the logical future expense of blast furnace-based production market share. An EAF relies exclusively on scrap steel and very high purity iron ore inputs to produce cleaner steel, meaning without associated coal inputs. The vast majority of the world's currently established iron ore supply and production base, which by the way is steadily deteriorating in average quality, has no utility in EAF steelmaking. No one really knows how the looming increase in high purity input demand will be met, explaining why we invoke the lithium market parallel. We feel this represents a very underappreciated story, but one that we're very excited by.
One of the very few global iron ore districts that can technically deliver increasing levels of this material and that has available infrastructure and that is not party to the war in Eastern Europe is Canada's Labrador Trough region. Here we hold royalty interests in several projects that include the producing IOC mines that are seeing resurgent reliability and growth-based investment, Champion Iron's Kami project, with updated feasibility results for DR grade production, a DR grade production plan expected later this year, as well as additional resource in earlier study stage projects. Our majority-owned Altius Renewable Royalties business experienced a pivotal year in 2022 as it hit several key milestones along its sector level adoption and growth trajectory.
It made a number of new investments in operating projects as well as development project platforms, while also seeing strong acceleration of its revenue profile and the achievement of first positive operating level cash flow. This growth is expected to continue to ramp up as a result of both maturing and progressing of the investments it has already made, as well as the rapidly expanding pipeline of new investment opportunities it is experiencing. Both equity and debt capital became considerably more expensive for the renewable sector over the past year. This is prompting builders of projects to look for alternative sources of capital. ARR is certainly feeling the benefits of this. Also of significance, and a gratifying relief to us, is the recognition that ARR's embedded revenue growth profiles is matching up nicely to not only replace, but to eclipse our quickly fading coal revenue.
It was anything but a boring year for boring old potash. 2022 was obviously a bigger than expected revenue year for us in this segment on the strength of the price surge in the immediate aftermath of the Ukraine War and its resulting supply shock. Prices have since corrected to below pre-war levels. We think that they have likely over-corrected based on what amounts to an absurdly short term, yet sentiment dominating demand destruction noise. There is, in actual fact, a serious structural supply deficit that has opened, and current prices only incentivize a limited part of the immediate and longer-term replacement and growth requirements. Global food production yields are intrinsically linked to the replenishment of essential nutrients in proportion to agricultural depletion.
This requirement was not met in 2022. It seems like it won't be in 2023 either, while global food stocks have fallen to historic lows. Fertilizer is not a discretionary investment over anything but very short time frames. In the past, periods of under-application have been naturally met with succeeding periods of higher application. To put this in proper context, the alternative amounts to a food availability shortfall that will disproportionately impact the world's most vulnerable regions. Our long-term royalty mines are incredibly well-positioned competitively to be the solution for the new supply that is required both today and for a great many tomorrows. Of particular potential relevance in this regard is that until at least until recently, the majority of medium-term new global supply requirements were expected to be met by Russia and Belarusian growth projects.
We'll keep our bets on Saskatchewan, thank you. Our operators see the challenge too and are meeting it as an opportunity by investing to accelerate an alternative source of growth supply to the world from their best-in-class mines and resources. AngloGold Ashanti continues to advance exciting discoveries at the Silicon project in Nevada and recently provided increased and upgraded resource estimates for several deposits. It also noted that it decided to bypass the concept study stage for the Merlin deposit and to instead integrate it with its ongoing pre-feasibility study for the adjacent Silicon deposit. While a maiden resource for Merlin is still anxiously awaited, AGA did refer to it as the gem in the crown of the district. We love the promise and suspense of discovery. Before closing, allow us to dip our toes a bit into a debate that seems to be emerging in our industry.
Some of you will be aware that NPV-based models in mining have come under a fairly prominent attack lately for doing a poor job of approximating Tier One asset values. While we don't believe it's time to throw out the baby with the bath water, we are in the camp that says some of the input conventions used in typical industry NPV models tend to overvalue marginal to average type projects while significantly undervaluing those ever so rare, top-tier, long life, multi-cycle mining assets. We get into this in more detail in the letter to shareholders in case you want to explore the debate further.
We certainly hope that additional logic being applied by capital market participants might help to break the logjam for growth funding, as the reality of significant looming supply deficits from many critical metals and minerals continues to be met with a don't look up attitude. Otherwise, we expect that more of the world's potential replacement in growth mines will have to be funded and controlled, mainly out of desperation, by strategic interests such as car makers, steel makers, and even governments. If you think this sector suffers from inflationary inefficiencies today, imagine forward to that one. Either way, we continue to like our positioning. Thank you very much. Now we can open to questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question- and- answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one on your touch tone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment please for your first question. The first question comes from Craig Hutchison from TD. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, guys.
Hi, Craig.
Morning. Just a question on the lithium royalties. Obviously, Sigma is ramping up here the next quarter or so, and you've got a couple more coming online next year. Can you just give us a kind of maybe a broad sense, a range of potential revenues you expect from these three royalties that are kind of near to production at kind of current spot prices or some kind of long-term price, just so we can get a sense of what these could mean to Altius with respect to your co-participation rights and t hese assets?
There's actually a lot boiled into that question because ramp-ups obviously are uncertain, and timing can be whatever it is. If I think forward to, say, two years from now when we think these things would be successfully ramped up, now the next big uncertainty here is plug in your favorite lithium price over the next few years and long term. You know, generally speaking, these are pretty small royalty interests. They were co-participation in royalties.
The thing about the mines is that they've become progressively bigger. Each one of them has seen a significant escalation in planned production growth rates. I f I were to ballpark the next few years, if you were thinking about sort of current consensus long-term pricing, these things could deliver in the order of a few million dollars a year to us for sure.
Okay. Maybe just switching gears to Silicon. I know you guys, there's some, I guess, debate over the land issues and how the royalty extends onto some of the adjacent lands. Does the Merlin deposit itself, would that be fully covered by your royalty even if it sort of extends over to the adjacent lands?
We don't have that detailed sort of resource estimate that would pinpoint it more precisely. Just looking at the drilling patterns, we would think that the majority of the lands would be on the core part of the area of interest. But there's certainly some spill over onto lands that Anglo recently acquired from Core Mining. They had a target that they referred to as Seahorse, which now appears to simply be an extension of the Merlin land. I guess just to preempt any more questions on the difference of opinion that you referred to.
Under our agreement, there's a base area of interest provision and then a paragraph behind that basically, at least in our reading, suggests that the royalty area of interest expands to the extent that contiguous lands emanate outwards from that AOI. That has actually become a pretty substantial piece of geography right now. We've submitted a schedule of those expansion AOI lands to Anglo Gold under the agreement. you know, there's a requirement there for Anglo to support the registration of titles. This is an interest in land royalty that we hold. There is a difference of opinion as to how far that area of interest expansion provision goes. We're working with them and trying to come to a an amicable solution.
It's a very cordial discussion and relationship. We know we've got a long future together. In the event that we're not able to reach that amicable solution, our agreement provides for provides a dispute resolution mechanism in the form of international arbitration, based in British Columbia. That remains an option and a fairly straightforward way to sort things out as well. We're not gonna prejudge outcomes here, but we are, we are confident in our reading of the agreement and believe that the royalty does capture the full extent of this very exciting and very significant looking new discovery and district.
Perfect. Maybe just one last question from me. With respect to liquidity, any plans to upsize the RCF just in case there's some exciting opportunities that present themselves this year?
That's probably a better question for Ben, but I don't think there's anything imminent along those lines. I mean, we have pretty good relationships with all of our lenders. If something popped up quickly, I don't think there'd be a tremendous amount of problem with working with them and meeting whatever needs we might have.
Yeah.
Great, thanks. No concerns there.
Thanks. All right. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star one at this time. There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the conference back to Flora Wood for closing remarks.
Thank you, Michelle, and thank you, everybody, for dialing in. Craig, thanks for the questions. We'll talk to you soon on the Q1 call.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.